I had lunch with Thomas from our production engineering team today. During our chat, we talked about the future of the company’s organizational structure and plans to split into feature-focused teams after a big launch we have planned for 2013. Thomas noted that in his previous role with Amazon, teams were judged directly against metrics
We Can Do Better Than Bit.ly
By Of all the tools I use each day on the web, perhaps none frustrates me more than bit.ly. I like being able to track all the sharing I do across networks with a single URL shortener, but the site’s frustrating from numerous levels. Historic data and habit are most of what keeps me from moving
Understanding Stock Options at Startups (and at Moz)
By Last Friday, SEOmoz held our “allhands” meeting at the Big Picture theater. Out of ~98 Mozzers, 85 of us were in attendance (sadly 3 had to leave intermittently to deal with a misbehaving Riak database we’d just upgraded). We’ve grown a ton over the last 6 months (from ~50 in January) thanks in part to our
Greg – Congrats on the New Blog. Here’s Some Posts I’d Love to Read.
By Seattle has long been in need of good VC bloggers. What Mark Suster has done for LA, Brad Feld has done for Boulder, and Fred Wilson has done for NYC just through writing high quality blogs (nevermind all the other great stuff they do for those ecosystems) is remarkable and game-changing and we need it.
Time Recovery Hacks
By Startup life has intense time requirements. In the early phases, there’s a lot of nose-to-the-grindstone need, and if the company successfully scales, the internal and external demands on your time rise dramatically. With this blog, and my commitment to staying close to the everyday issues of the marketing industry, I’ve had to build up a
24 Things I Know Now That I Wish I Knew Then
By I really liked Rae Hoffman’s post from last month, Entrepreneurial Lessons: 48 Things I Know Now That I Wish I Knew Then. And, while I don’t agree with everything on her list (at least as it applies to the experiences I’ve had), I felt compelled to take up the format she’d presented and do something similar.
More Retweets Lead to More Twitter Followers, Right?
By Being a moderately analytical marketer, I should be pretty smart about assuming a correlation between two events that might not necessarily exist. And yet, for the past few years, I’ve foolishly done the opposite. Below is a chart of my Twitter follower growth from Followerwonk over the past 60 days: The spikes are probably days
Never Have the “What Would It Take to Keep You Here?” Conversation
By As a CEO, many of the scariest days I’ve faced have been those when a critical member of our team told us they were leaving the company. Your heart sinks. Your mind races. Your pulse pounds. Everything else fades into the background. On startup teams of 5-50 people, a team member lost is almost always
There is No Work/Life Balance
By I recently started getting some CEO coaching help from Jerry Colonna, at Brad & Amy‘s recommendation. The first session was introductory. The second one was revelatory. We talked about the Ireland trip (which Geraldine wrote about here). It was a really tough one, and it shook our marital relationship more than I thought was possible.
Some Thoughts on Firing Employees
By This past week, I read a terrific Quora thread on firing. The depth and breadth of answers shows the wide range of opinions and practices on the subject, and it made me think about the topic for this blog. Companies are rarely transparent about how and why they let people go, so hopefully we can