As I often note on this blog, I’m a rookie CEO who’s gotten very lucky. Much of the time, I wish I had more experience in other corporate and startup environments, so I’d better know what works and what doesn’t. I rely on other team members and a lot of outside advice for that, and
Keeping Amazing People on the Team
By Many of my posts on this blog are intended to be broad in scope and provide an opinion, data or experience about startup/marketing paths. This one might not fit that pattern as well. Rather than describing my thoughts or collected advice from experience on startup talent retention, I’m going to instead channel feedback from our
Why Cash Bonuses Make No Sense in Startups
By It’s tough competing for candidates with the likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. In the past 6 months, we’ve lost bids for half a dozen or so engineers to these companies, and more than a few mentioned the additional cash bonuses as one of the reasons they were motivated to choose these companies over
My Favorite Board Meetings
By When we first raised an investment round in 2007, SEOmoz’s board of directors (consisting of Michelle Goldberg from Ignition, Gillian & myself from Moz, Kelly Smith from Curious Office and Sarah Bird as secretary/counsel) would meet nearly every month. Over time, that became every 2-3 months and now it’s quarterly. Unlike some CEOs, I’ve (almost)
One Bad, “Policy Change” Email Can Kill Company Culture
By We’ve all received a work email that made us cringe – the ones that sound formal and threatening or vaguely like a punishment for something we’re pretty sure someone else did. They often have titles like “New Travel Policy” or “Changes to Benefits Package” or even “Office Happiness Update.” These subject lines sounds innocent enough,
How We Cheat at Conferences (and why you should, too)
By Every year for the last 7, we’ve held a customer event in Seattle during the summer (and only been rained on 3, maybe 4 of those years). It started small – I was the only speaker, we had ~100 attendees and the total budget was <$5K. This year, Mozcon had 28 speakers, 800+ in attendance,
Domain Bias: Why Branding & Search Marketing Cannot Be Separated
By Let’s say you’re visiting Phoenix, AZ for the first time. You head to Google and type in a search query for “best restaurants Phoenix,” and start a process like this: Signals like the snippet and position are important, but you’re biasing your clicks based on the brandname of the domain and the perceived trustworthiness of
The Big Picture Conversation
By I feel like a broken record. Lately, I’ve been sitting down with founder friends of mine and having a discussion about how their business is going. Inevitably, I get a sense that even those with a lot of tactical successes or growth seem to be missing a larger purpose. Inevitably, we end up in a
Belief in the Mythical, “10X” Hire Hurts Your Team
By There’s a long-running meme in the tech & startup ecosystems that goes something like this: The top 10% in any given professional field are the only ones good enough to work at a startup. And even among these, the 90th-99th percentile only contribute 1/10th as much as the amazing, top-tier 1%. A great team can
Events Can Be Both Wonderful & Dangerous Places to Launch
By This week at Mozcon brought some big launches of new products and projects – the Google Algorithm weather forecast project, Mozcast, the new job board on Inbound.org, this blog, Rich Baxter’s OSE for Excel, and more. Over the years, I’ve done several big product announcements tied to events and plenty independent of them. Weirdly, in