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
Hacking the Character Litmus Test
By I had coffee with SEOmoz’s new recruiter, Sierra, recently. She’s amazing, and she has to be. The people who make up our team over the next 3 years will determine whether we can become a truly remarkable company, or just a mediocre one. In terms of which current Mozzers will impact that most intensely, Sierra’s
A Philosophy for Startup Success: Choose Short Men
By One of the not-so-surprising facts about online dating is that short men and tall women tend to do poorly in comparison to their peers. If you’re a woman using an online dating sites, you can vastly increase the odds of finding a mate who matches all your criteria AND has many of the intangible qualities
The Third Kind of Marriage
By Psychologist Kelly Flanagan wrote a paragraph I loved so much, I thought about framing it: The third kind of marriage is not perfect, not even close. But a decision has been made, and two people have decided to love each other to the limit, and to sacrifice the most important thing of all—themselves. In these