I’ve talked to a lot of founders about their startup experiences and one of the more consistent topics we eventually get to is that, somewhere around 80-100 people, the team dynamics get really hard. So hard, in fact, that many founders opt to leave their companies at around this size and bring in more “professional”
Why I Never Want to Have a “For-Profit” Business
By Making money is an excellent side-effect of successful businesses. But, it’s a terrible core purpose. Last week, Fred Wilson wrote one of my favorite posts in a while on Short-Term Thinking vs. Long-Term Thinking. Here’s an excerpt: …Sure Samsung is making a killing on handset sales right now. So is Apple. That goes to their
The Expectation of 100%
By It’s 4:36am. I’ve been awake for an hour, stumbling through email and catching up on reading. G and I flew back from London two nights ago, and although I slept great last night, I crashed at 10pm tonight and only managed 6 hours before the jetlag kicked in. Casey, who runs the inbound engineering team
The Long, Painful Journey to Better Self-Awareness
By Erica and I are sitting on a small bus with 8 other fellow Mozcationers, in transit from Cape Town to a kloof on the Northeastern side of the Cedarburg Mountains. It’s 90°+ outside, and the air conditioning in the bus can’t keep up. It’s a little too uncomfortable to read, and while the scenery is
What Do Correlation Metrics Really Tell Us About Search Rankings?
By I’m excited to see the marketing field getting more interested in correlation data and metrics around SEO. There’s a lot of folks citing data from SearchMetrics’ UK Study, from Mark Collier’s Open Algorithm project, and from Moz’s own ranking factors and follow-up reports. (Searchmetrics’ study at left, OpenAlgorithm at right) The trouble is how this
What Company Culture IS and IS NOT
By Frustrated. Disturbed. Disappointed. That’s how I feel after reading a recent article that appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek called “Job Applicants’ Cultural Fit Can Trump Qualifications.” I don’t typically like to rant against stuff on the web, but I’m worried this is a case where the popularity of the piece (note the thousand upvotes, 600+ comments,
Why “Optimization” is a Terrible Way to Think About SEO
By Sometimes we make assumptions that lead us in the wrong direction. I’ve made plenty, and I’ll continue to make them for as long as I’m alive. And sometimes, we’re inadvertently responsible for wrong assumptions made by others. When that’s the case (and we notice it), there’s an obligation to correct the misunderstanding. I recently encountered
Startups Cannot Afford to Have Indispensable Employees (and not for the reason you think)
By “Become indispenable to your employer.” That’s the advice I see from job training and professional coaches all the time. And I can empathize with why it exists. Many employers are not supporters of their teams, and treat human resources as, well, resources that just happen to be human. That fleshy cognition thus imbues them with
The Most Followed Twitter Users with “SEO” in Their Bio
By I was playing around on Followerwonk tonight (man that tool is awesome) and was puzzled by the bio search results for “SEO.” Have a look: Danny Sullivan’s Twitter profile certainly makes sense, but the ones above him are curious. I’ve never heard of any of these folks (which certainly could be my fault for being
The Uncomfortable Balance
By Every CEO, founder, manager, and probably most all of us at some point in our professional lives have asked these two questions: Am I pushing the people on my team too hard? Am I not pushing the people on my team hard enough? These two nag at me all the time. There are days when