In my adult life, I haven’t done what I’ve heard so many people describe as “enduring” their lives/jobs/family/friends/situation. To me, the days seem to have very little monotony and an abundance of opportunities to be challenged, to learn, to help others, and to be filled with joy.

Some of that, undoubtedly, is the incredibly lucky situation I’ve come to be in since dropping out of college, digging a struggling consulting business into and then out of debt, and being made CEO of an exciting startup. And a lot of it, assuredly, is the presence of amazing people in my life – the 130 coworkers whose company I like a weird amount given how much time we all get together, and my wife Geraldine (whose blog is basically a testament to these last 3 paragraphs).

But some of it, too, is outlook and perception. It’s how I reflect on what goes on around me in the times when others might experience tedium or frustration or anger. I do get stressed, and I do feel those negative emotions, but if other people’s descriptions are any guide, for me, they’re dulled, like a shrill scream that’s almost too far away to hear.

I watched the video below a few days ago and have been reflecting on it since in the 30 minutes of my walking commute to or from work. It does a wonderful job of capturing one of my favorite lessons of life: “The only thing that’s capital ‘T’ true is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see (the world).“

There’s a principle in psychology called Fundamental Attribution Error. We see the behaviors of others through a lens that doesn’t recognize situational motivation (that driver honked at me because she’s a butt), yet ascribe situational modifiers to explain a massive amount of our own behavior (I honked because I’m in a terrible rush and I worried that other driver wouldn’t see me and I had a really rough day). That capital “T” truth says we don’t have to be blinded by this principle, and can choose how we perceive the world around us.

To quote a famous Englishman: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

Perhaps our perceptions about the monotonous, frustrating, angering parts of our days aren’t always the ones we want to have, and perhaps, with a little effort, we can change them.

The post It Just Depends What You Want to Consider appeared first on Rand's Blog.

That skepticisim has often been built up over years or decades of being let down. People joined companies that claimed to keep culture sacred and found that they did anything but. They heard about core values that were more important than raw performance or the bottom line, only to see those values trampled upon when reviews or company strategy butted up against them.

The following story happened last week at Moz. And it’s one of the best examples I’ve got of just how fragile your values can be.

A couple weeks ago, Sarah Bird, our COO, sent out invitations to an optional morning discussion of the Netflix Culture Slide Deck (which is worth a look if you haven’t seen it). I didn’t attend (mostly because it was scheduled at 8:30am, which is still R.E.M. sleeping hours for me), but heard good things about it. Zach, who joined our technical writing corps in March, was also part of the discussion.

Sarah noticed that during a particular discussion about slide 34 on “hard work” vs. “good work,” Zach seemed to express some hesitation. He wondered whether we, at Moz, were good about valuing the quality of effort put in over the appearance of hard work. Sarah expressed her feelings that Moz is not a place where being in the office until 10pm is valued, but that, in fact, lots of people work from home regularly, and if you’re meeting your (usually self-established) deadlines, there’s no requirement to have facetime.

_{(slide 34 from the Netflix Culture Deck)}

Zach was skeptical.

He later popped his head into Sarah’s office to ask if she could schedule a few minutes to chat. She told him she had time just then, and asked what was on his mind. I’ll replay the conversation from there as best I understand it (though keep in mind this won’t be a perfect recitation):

 Zach: Remember how we talked about hours in the office or seeing people staying late not mattering at Moz?

Sarah: Yeah.

Zach: And we also talked about how important it is for everyone in the company, at any level, to have the courage to call out others for not acting TAGFEE.

Sarah: Of course.

Zach: Well, several weeks ago, I was working at my desk when you walked over and asked if anyone had seen Kenny. It was ~4pm and I said that he’d just left for the day. You had a dissapointed look on your face and as you turned around, you said “Well, he’s not going to get very far.” That really stuck with me, and seemed to suggest that hours in the office are important and leaving early isn’t acceptable, even though I’m pretty sure Kenny’s on schedule with all his work.

Sarah: Oh shit.

Zach:…

Sarah: I had Kenny’s keys in my hand! That’s what I meant when I said he wasn’t going to get very far. He couldn’t get far because he didn’t have his keys!

Zach and Sarah had a great laugh about this. In fact, everyone I’ve told the story to has thoroughly enjoyed the hilarity of the miscommunication. As Sarah noted when she first told me, you couldn’t write a better script for an office sitcom episode.

But it reveals deeper issues – those of trust, responsibility, courage, and the skepticism toward values I mentioned above. There can be little doubt that in this situation, Zach was brave, and acted admirably. He could have, more easily and with less risk, stayed quiet about the issue and never uncovered the misunderstanding. However, if he’d felt totally comfortable from day one about Moz embracing TAGFEE, he would have asked Sarah about Kenny’s inability to go very far when she was first looking for him, or later during the Netflix discussion. His reticience is totally understandable – he was cautious and private about his concerns so he wouldn’t make Sarah look bad in front of the group (in the event that she really had been talking about Kenny’s future career opportunities).

This incident made me wonder – how many misunderstandings like this have there been over the years? How many were ever cleared up? How many people have heard a similarly innocent comment from a senior person at the company and questioned whether we truly believe in our values?

It’s unlikely the answer is zero.

One of the hardest truths I’ve learned about culture, values, and building a company is that the founders/execs must assume that their every step is being scrutinized, and that the 100 times you did the right thing don’t build up any immunity to criticism or doubt for the 1 time you appeared hypocritical, or in violation of your stated culture. I know that the bigger we get, the harder it will be to keep our values sacred. The only solution seems to be encouraging dialogue, having multiple lines of communication, and making sure that everyone in the organization feels like they have people to talk to if non-TAGFEE behavior is taking place (or appears to be).

Time will tell whether these solutions are enough. In the meantime, I hope everyone at Moz does what Zach did, and bravely talks it out. With luck, we’ll get more funny stories and less uncertainty about values out of the process.

p.s. While the Netflix deck is really interesting, we have some substantive disagreement around parts of it. I might write about those in a future blog post.

The post Well, He’s Not Going to Get Very Far appeared first on Rand's Blog.

It’s weird. When we look at the structure of a company, it’s easy to see that what’s needed are a lot of high quality individual contributors to teams and a small number of high quality people wranglers to manage them. And yet, somehow, our corporate culture and the world of “business” has created the expectation that unless you manage people, your influence, salary, benefits, title, and self-worth won’t increase.

I’m calling BS.

In the past, I’ve written about the importance of having multiple tracks for progress – ICs and people wranglers – but we’ve been spending a lot more time bouncing ideas around at Moz lately, and are soon to be implementing a new title/team structure that finally puts this into practice. I’m excited for that.

I worry today when an individual contributor is great at their job and expresses an interest in people management. I worry that some significant portion of that expressed desire doesn’t come from a true passion for the responsibilities of people managing, but instead exists because they want to level up their career and/or influence and believe this to be the only path.

I made this diagram to help illustrate the differences between the two types of roles:

_{(larger version)}

Individual contributors have responsibility for themselves and their work. As they get more senior on an IC track, their influence becomes more wide-ranging. A good example of this at Moz is someone like Dr. Pete, who recognizes strategic imperatives at the company and pitches in. He assists engineering and big data with reviews, assists marketing with tactical advice and strategic input, publishes incredibly high quality blog posts and guides, and even designs entire projects from the ground up and executes on their creation. His influence is company-wide, cross-team, and as senior as they come. He lets his influence define his role, rather than the other way around.

On the flip side, great people wranglers are responsible for their team’s happiness, cohesion, empowerment, reviews, mentoring, and more. The more senior they get, the less “in-the-trenches” they should be. Many times, they touch on strategy only to help define the strategic problems. These are then passed to ICs who help define scope, research possible answers, and execute on their implementation. A good example of this at Moz is Samantha Britney. She was an IC for a long time, but has moved into people wrangling and today helps several ICs on the product team feel empowered about their work, get the tools/resources/help they need to do it well, and provides the mentoring/1:1s/reviews/HR functions a good people wrangler should. She’s almost never in the gritty details of her reports, but always there to help them drive their projects forward.

Basically, if you love getting stuff done and doing a great job at it, you should be an IC. If you love empowering others, and helping them grow and succeed (and you’re great at it), you should be a people wrangler.

There’s some nuance to all of this IC (Individual Contributor) vs. PW (People Wrangler) stuff:

• As ICs get more senior, they tend to have more overlap with some PW responsibilities. The reverse is true for PWs – as they get more senior, they get to do less and less of the real work.
• Senior ICs also have more flexibility with their roles – they can often do that work from anywhere, and, thanks to the recognition that work receives, see more conference/event invitations come their way. Senior PWs are the opposite – their time is more critical in the office, so travel is harder, and they’re usually more behind-the-scenes (CEOs being a notable exception to that rule).
• If you have lots of ICs and only a few PWs, you may find challenges with reporting and management. But, if you have lots of PWs and not many ICs, you encounter the horrifying “too many chefs, not enough kitchen staff” problem (and it usually means your culture and organization have gotten seriously messed up)
• Great ICs are sometimes promoted to PWs and turn out to be mediocre or worse at that role. This sucks horribly. Not only have you lost an excellent contributor to the company, you’ve put in place bad management, which creates a massively more viral spread of problems. On the flip side, if an IC is underperforming in their role, the impact is not nearly so problematic.
• Compensation is tricky. In my ideal world (and in the salary ranges we’re building across the tracks at Moz), the levels are roughly equivalent for both PWs and ICs. Assuming you had 7 levels on each track, level 3 ICs would make what level 3 PWs do. The highest level ICs should be able to make what the C-suite earns.

Much of this seems intuitive when I share it with folks (internally and externally). The biggest question I’ve gotten  relates to a single concept – the ownership of strategy and tactics. A fellow Mozzer and I were disagreeing about this just the other day. This person expressed that historically at Moz, some of the teams have had both strategy and tactics owned by the people wranglers. ICs didn’t define what they do, how they do it, how to measure, and the process for execution, they took orders.

It’s true that this can work and has worked. But I disagreed with my colleague that it works as well as if we give ICs greater ownership over the what, when, where, and how, and have PWs own only the who and the why. Granted, more junior managers will have greater overlap with ICs and more senior ICs might even take over the who and why (as noted above). But I believe strongly that long term, we have to go this route. People’s happiness depends on it.

When Daniel Pink asked “What Makes Us Happy at Work?” the answers were clear (and are backed up by lots of other researchers and less-formal investigators of the topic):

1. Autonomy – the desire to direct our own lives.

2. Mastery— the urge to get better and better at something that matters.

3. Purpose — the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

If ICs don’t control their own work lives and have the ability to attain mastery, we’re going to lose the good ones to companies where they have those opportunities. We will retain only the PWs, and probably not for long.

Weirdly enough, I’m kind of an IC-style CEO (perhaps that’s not all that weird). I’m a high level IC, so I have more overlap with PW responsibilities, but my reports all own their teams, jobs, and details. I’m probably most directly involved in product and marketing, and with both of those, I often tell Mozzers working on those teams to treat me as a resource and a tool. You tell me to blog about something and I’ll do it. You ask me to reply to a customer and I’m on it. You need to chat about how a project fits in with the broader goals and how that might change how you do it, let’s get together. I love feeling like I report to Moz’s employees – not the other way around. I think it will always be that way.

p.s. I really liked this blog post from Phil Scarr describing his experience moving from a people wrangler to an IC and why he loves it. I was really proud of Carin, who people-wrangled our big data team, and has just moved to a senior IC role on the product team – way to go!

p.p.s. If I’m way off track (or way on track) with this stuff and you’ve experienced it before, I’d LOVE to hear from you in the comments. I can use all the help I can get – as I constantly remind my team, I’m a first-time CEO

The post If Management is the Only Way Up, We’re All F’d appeared first on Rand's Blog.

Many folks ask me “what kept you going all those years?” Undoubtedly, there were a number of factors, but I strongly believe that the sense that progress was being made, even when the rewards of that progress were so intangible and non-financial, was a heavy contributor. Dan Ariely, who wrote Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality – both of which I enjoyed, did a TEDx talk last year that was just posted this week on the topic of work and meaning:

His experiments are fascinating and his lessons should seem obvious. But sadly, these lessons aren’t obvious enough to those of us in the business world.

I know I’ve failed to recognize and praise effort. I know other Mozzers have failed on this, too. I know I’ve cancelled projects halfway through, or worse, looked at a finished product and said “I’m sorry, we can’t use this.” In fact, the first version of Fresh Web Explorer went just like that. It was supposed to launch last December. It took until March. In my opinion, we did the right thing to wait – it’s an incredible product, and worthy of being launched and already a huge hit with our early adopters, but I know there was pain and heartache when we had to push it last year. I had a 1:1 with one of the engineers behind it, who noted that the process was insanely frustrating, despite the eventual positive outcome.

This is an area I need to keep working on. I think the regret I feel over the past will help to enforce that, but I hope that those of you reading this can apply the lessons without having to experience the mistakes firsthand.

p.s. If you watch the video, you’ll also find out why you need to add eggs, water, and oil to cake mix

The post We’ll Work for Peanuts. But We Won’t Work Without Meaning. appeared first on Rand's Blog.

From the NYTimes’ interview with Louis:

Does it matter that what you’ve achieved, with your online special and your tour can’t be replicated by other performers who don’t have the visibility or fan base that you do?

Why do you think those people don’t have the same resources that I have, the same visibility or relationship? What’s different between me and them?

You have the platform. You have the level of recognition.

So why do I have the platform and the recognition?

At this point you’ve put in the time.

There you go. There’s no way around that. There’s people that say: “It’s not fair. You have all that stuff.” I wasn’t born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by “new at it,” I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that’s in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

I think, even more so than the entertainment world, the technology and entrepreneurship movement has attracted this thinking that 4 or 5 years of passionate work will result in success, money, recognition, and the ability for one’s product/company to change the world. This isn’t suprising. After all, the press and attention focuses on the outliers – the few twenty-somethings (or thirty-somethings) who’ve managed these remarkable successes.

The problem is that we forget (myself included sometimes) that these are outliers.

There’s a slide series I like to use in a number of my decks about the time & effort it takes to achieve results through blogging (using G’s site as an example):

Even in an emerging field like technology/blogging, it takes years to get momentum and start the flywheel turning. I began my accidental career in this world 12 years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s another 12 before there’s a hint of the traction Louis’ talking about. It’s far more likely that level never gets close. Which is fine, because I love the journey, and I’m already luckier than I deserve to be.

p.s. I love that Mack put this on her wall

The post So Why Do I Have the Platform & the Recognition? appeared first on Rand's Blog.

On Google+, 50,296 have me in their circles.

On Twitter, 89,866 follow me.

I have 55.9% of the numerical encirclers/followers on G+ that I do on Twitter. Yet here are the stats from the sharing of that last blog post via bit.ly’s tracking:

And here’s the data from my Google Analytics account:

Google+ is not quite reaching, nor exceeding Twitter’s traffic, and the avg. visit duration is actually worse, but it’s certainly getting a much higher click-through-rate (CTR) per follower/encircler.

Is this pattern an outlier?

Looking through my last few shares, the answer is yes. I share (nearly) every post published on this blog to my Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Twitter should be slightly overrepresented because I usually share 2-3X there, vs. only once on Google+ or Facebook. Here’s a pretty average breakdown of what my bit.ly stats look like (full data here):

But, traffic isn’t the only reason to be on Google+. The other benefits – markup in Google’s search results that help bias clicks, rel=author that may (today or in the future) help rankings (and already help CTR), social proof for logged-in Google users, benefits in the Google Local/Maps results, etc. – are already pretty damn compelling. And if all that isn’t enough, Google’s doing everything in their considerable power to get people signed up and engaged with G+.

Below is a photo I took in downtown Sydney of a Google booth signing people and small businesses up to use their service. When I tweeted it, I discovered (via replies) it’s not an anomaly, but is happening in many cities around the world.

Google’s not going to let G+ be anything but a success. As a marketer, Ive got the feeling we’ll be talking in the next year or two about G+ rivaling the influence of Twitter for web marketing campaigns of every kind. It’s hard, at this point, to argue against being an adopter of the service.

p.s. I suspect many would make the argument that right now, G+ is primarily/most heavily used by technologists & marketers. I agree. So was Twitter in its early days. The outsized benefits of being an early adopter of that network are pretty clear, so I’m challenged to understand how one could reasonably use that logic to argue against making Google+ part of your marketing mix.

The post Is Google+ Approaching Twitter’s Marketing Value? appeared first on Rand's Blog.

Bill Hunt and Rand Fishkin will give away their best tips for advanced marketers, and take questions from the audience. 60 minutes

Well, crap.

For the last 6 years of my career, I’ve been pretty good at stuff like this. I usually know a few in-the-trenches tactics, tools, and workarounds that very few others have heard about, and I’ve tried experimenting with them enough to answer hard questions on the specifics. But if I’m being honest, that kind of knowledge is fading. Compared to someone like Bill Hunt, who’s still actively consulting on hyper-advanced keyword segmentation and getting Google to re-crawl huge XML sitemap files and all the rest, I’m starting to be out my depth.

And that’s probably OK. In fact, Moz’s investors, employees, shareholders, and customers would all benefit much more if I focused on more strategic demands and delegated that “in-the-trenches” stuff. But here I was, scheduled to give up a bunch of tips to marketers who probably had more recent, more relevant, more in-depth experience with a lot of this stuff than I do.

Hence, I sat down at breakfast this morning and wrote out some tips that I thought, perhaps, would resonate. Here they are:

#1 – Never forget you’re building a brand.

Online marketers sometimes forget that every interaction with their company is creating a perception. Every time your domain name shows up in search results, every time you share on social media, every word you publish on your website, every ad that shows up on the web, every conversation at a conference with someone from your company, every infographic/video/tool you make available affects that brand perception.

If 90% of these interactions are telling a cogent, cohesive, compelling story, you’re probably doing well (so long as the 10% aren’t actively countering that story). But if there’s no narrative or if different teams controlling these experiences aren’t on the same page, you’re almost certainly losing opportunity and losing

And if your brand/company/site doesn’t have an amazing story to tell? Go get one before you expose an audience to a disjointed jumble that’s hurting more than it helps.

 #2 – Understand your acquisition and retention funnel in a hyper-measurable way

It’s not just about multi-channel attribution so you know what paths are leading folks to your site and to a conversion (although that stuff is really important, too). It’s about knowing what attributes and what channels predict a good customer, and which channels have an influence on those who might later be customers. At Moz, for example, social media almost never converts someone directly to a free trial of our software. But, an average visitor taking a free trial has been to our site 7 times! And, on average, 2.5 of those visits are from social channels (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc). Even more importantly, those who visit organically and are part of our community (social followers, subscribed to our blog, getting the Moz Top 10 emails, etc) tend to have a much longer customer lifetime value (CLTV) than those who come exclusively or primarily via non-organic channels.

#3 – Don’t rely exclusively on ROI you can quantify

Invest in the power of serendipity. Go to conferences and events that are hard to measure. Start engaging in social media in ways that may not result direclty in visits. My recommendation is to put ~30% of your time, money, energy, people, and effort into serendipitous opportunities that are hard (or even impossible) to measure. The ROI can, occassionally, be astounding.

#4 – Improving rankings may be less effective than improving listings.

For example, I bet that we get a smaller number of visits ranking #2 for this query than the folks ranking #3 and #4. Doh!

Titles, URLs, snippets, desriptions, and all that cool markup that Google’s added (from rel=author to Google+ data to extra links and more vertical pixel space) are biasing clicks. I’d rather have the best possible listing and rank #5 than rank #2 and have a crummy listing. Over time, that better listing will likely earn me all the signals I need to outrank other folks anyway.

#5 – Link building is a lot like dating. If you make links/sex the primary focus, it doesn’t work. Those have to be side effects of a great experience and a great match.

’nuff said.

#6 – Crappy content often outperforms amazing content when the publisher/brand/site has a powerful community.

Community is one of the most ignored/under-appreciated channels of an inbound marketing strategy, yet it makes every other channel – social, search, email, content, viral, etc. – more effective.

#7 – The people you hire will have a huge impact on your success. Seek out those who are already doing great work in their spare/for themselves/for fun.

This applies to developers/engineers, to sales people, to content creators, and to marketers equally. People who enjoy what they do and would do it regardless of a paycheck are the ones you should be hiring and paying. They will not only outperform their “in-it-just-for-the-money” peers, they’ll also be happier and more fun to work with.

#8 – Content marketing isn’t just about attracting customers. It’s about attracting and appealing to anyone who might influence a potential customers.

That includes the usual suspects – bloggers, journalists, social media influencers, etc – and it also includes direct customer influencers like managers, CxOs, consultants, advisors, board members, family members, etc.

Don’t just create content for your current customers, or even just for your potential customers. Create content that appeals to these influencers and your content marketing efforts will be far more successful.

#9 – Build your own private network of like-minded colleagues over an email group.

Many venture capital investors have email lists of their CEOs and/or execs who bounce ideas and recommendations off one another on an almost-daily basis. This is powerful stuff. External folks have perspective, experience, and suggestions that I could never get another way.

You can do this easily. Start with the Help Me Help You Dinner. Then turn those people into an email group and a support network. You’ll be amazed.

#10 – Ask 10 colleagues to impartially grade your website’s design & UX on a scale from 0 to 10. If you have below an average of 7, invest in re-building the UX, architecture, and the design.

Where 0 = animated background gif websites of the late ’90′s and 10 = winning top-tier design awards and being featured in every design gallery on the web.

Inbound channels are all about conversion rate – converting the highest percent of visitors into people who will share, email their friends, link to your content, embed something, tell someone, sign up for your webinar/email list/free trial/whatever. When design/UX are less than ideal, your conversion rate on every one of these falls. When design/UX is exceptional, it rises disproportionately.

#11 – Build an inbound engineering/development team.

This can be one person or ten, but the focus should be all about serving marketing needs on the site – fixing SEO issues, optimizing pages for conversions, creating unique content platforms, modifying the CMS to make publishing easier, adding the ability to have guest posts, testing the social sharing buttons, integrating web analytics with the CRM so you can better track your funnel, and the hundreds of other marketing-centric requests that go to engineering teams every day.

I wrote more about this here, but it’s so important that I need to re-iterate every chance I get

——————————–

I don’t know whether these tips resonated with the audience. They were probably more high-level, strategic, and outside the scope of “advanced SEO” than what they expected, but I think this is where I can add value nowadays, and, fingers-crossed, that’s good enough.

The post 11 Tips I Gave to Marketers this Morning appeared first on Rand's Blog.

_{(via Ana Teresa on Flickr)}

In the past year, as Moz has grown from ~60 people to ~120, we’ve been feeling some of that same pain. A dramatic portion of the time spent by executives, managers, and myself tending to the company goes toward adjusting team dynamics, fiddling with processes, soothing egos, coaching individuals on how to work well with each other, and investing in all the human infrastructure and support necessary to make 120 people function more like a small, nimble machine.

The craft itself – the creation of that new business model and new product to solve a big, painful problem,  is a smaller and smaller portion of the time and energy pie chart (at least, for managers/execs/founders). In some ways, that’s a sad, frustrating thing. And in other ways, it’s a healthy, normal part of  scaling.

Why? Because getting bigger and working cohesively toward common goals comes into conflict with so much of human nature.

Human nature dictates that we:

• Form tribes to build identity and camraderie – yet in a scaling startup, this causes untenable, painful, progress-stopping inter-team rivalries.
• Invent a common enemy upon which we can heap blame and against which we can fight – sadly, inside the tribes that naturally form, there’s often a tendency to create that common enemy internally (it could be marketing vs. engineering or testing vs. production or sales vs. execs, or any number of others).
• Minimize the positives and focus on the negatives – that could be feedback from customers, internal critiques, manager reviews, product imperfections, or weaknesses in process. It’s so easy to forget that we somehow beat the formidable odds against building something that worked, something that attracted customers, something that scaled, and a company where hundreds of people really do want to work.
• Resist change at all costs – yet in a scaling startup, change is the only constant, and processes, procedures, formats, teams, and everything else has to change to be successful.
• Act emotionally, yet believe our decisions to be driven solely by logic - we tell ourselves we act rationally, but can easily prove that irrational biases rule our minds. This wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous if we could recognize these biases, but in another failing of human nature, we cannot – we cling to the notion that our decisions, unlike the rest of our species, are uniquely logical.
• Lose empathy as our numbers grow – tragically, when we need empathy the most (as an organization gets bigger and there are more people to consider and more complexities between them), our nature is to rescind it. It’s easy to empathize with a small group you see everyday, but much harder to extend that empathy to everyone in a larger group (especially those you may not know well).
• Create rules and process to prevent against repeats of singular abuses – the old adage of one bad apple ruining the whole bunch becomes more and more likely the larger a startup grows. Process can be wonderful, but sometimes we create a process just to ward against some bad behavior from a former employeee and, by doing so, ruin the company a little more for everyone. Use process to free and enable, not to punish and restrict.
• Irrationally romanticize the past – “Remember how things used to be? It was so much better three years ago when I first started here and…” -everyone at any organization, ever. But I remember three years ago. It sucked compared to today. Our ability to delight customers paled in comparison. Our ability to attract talent was in the toilet. Fear about our budget and our bottom line was a daily occurrence. 2013 is superior in so many ways and I know it, but even still find myself fondly remembering (or, rather, misremembering) back in 2010 when (in my human-addled mind) it all seemed so much easier.

I’ve witnessed the early stages (and sometimes the advanced stages) of all of these. It’s hard to watch and even hard to combat, but combat it we must (and at Moz, I think we’ve done a pretty terrific job most of the time).

My advice to startups that are reaching scale is to prepare for this pattern. We all have to go through this if we want to become bigger, more world-changing companies. Managers, executives, and founders probably need help, training, mentorship, and outside coaches (a lot of Mozzers have done this, including me). Process is an ugly word at a tiny startup, but it’s a beautiful, life-changing, progress-enabling word as you grow (so long as it’s done for the right reasons).

My advice to those who work in organizations that are scaling or have reached scale in these larger numbers is:

A) Be mindful that your nature and that of those around you makes these irrationalities and biases the default way of thinking.

B) Don’t let it stop you from doing what’s right, what fits with your values, and what moves the needle for the organization – use the knowledge of these elements to compensate mentally, emotionally, and with process.

C) Remind those around you that you’re all suffering from the same human condition, but that awareness and active resistance can win the day.

I don’t know how the next few years will go, but I do know we’ll have a bigger team, and more of the challenges from the list above. I hope that by staying mindful, and by compensating personally and as a team, we can remain the kind of place I love going into every day.

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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 bottom line and then onto their balance sheet. And apparently Google isn’t making any money in mobile. Today.

But when I think about who is developing the strongest franchise in mobile, it is obviously Google. They have gmail on so many phones. They have google maps on so many phones. They are getting the majority of searches on mobile phones. And that doesn’t even begin to address Android itself. It is the dominant mobile operating system around the world. Just think about all the data they are getting from this enormous mobile footprint they have assembled…

…my feeling is that Google is playing the long game in mobile while Apple is missing the cloud piece and Samsung is just a hardware player at this point. And the stock market understands that.

Then Fred showed a chart comparing the delta in Apple vs. Google’s stock price over the last year:

Apple as a whole may be worth more, but Google’s trendline, particularly the past 6 months, is far more favorable. Fred’s assertion is that this stems from investors’ sophisticated understanding that Google controls so much of the data, software, and ecosystem around computing. Google’s mission isn’t to make as much money as possible, certainly not in the short term anyway. Google is aiming for total domination of their (ever-expanding) areas of focus. Revenue and profits are merely a helpful side-effect of these efforts.

Later in the week, courtesy of Dan Ariely, I watched this video about Hancock Bank’s remarkable $1.4Billion growth following Hurricane Katrina (it’s worth watching all the way through, but if you don’t have 6 full minutes, start at the 3:44 mark).

Unfortunately, the video doesn’t enable embedding, so you’ll have to watch it on Vimeo.

The mission of making money isn’t just boring and stale. It’s hard to get excited about. It’s hard to get behind. It’s hard to build a fan-base around. It’s hard to hire for. It’s hard to scale. And it’s hard to stick with something through the muck of despair and failure that inevitably occur if you’re not pursuing something bigger than yourselves – bigger than money.

I don’t mean to suggest that those who relentlessly pursue wealth at the cost of all else don’t occassionally succeed. But I would argue that most businesses that have changed the world in the technology age have been pursuing a mission beyond the financial.

I sent this email around to the Moz team last week:

Dharmesh made something pretty special with that culture deck. I think it does a beautiful job of encapsulating the feeling that many folks working on a mission outside of the financial have.

It’s not that I never want to have a profitable business (in fact, from 2008-2012, Moz was profitable). Rather, I never want to have a business or work at a company that exists for the sake of profits.

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Casey, who runs the inbound engineering team at Moz, and I had an interesting conversation before I left (note: this is from jetlagged, 4am memory, so hopefully I’m capturing the spirit if not the right words):

Casey: Why are you out of the office so much?

Me: Same reasons as always – lots of brand building and making connections, some direct marketing value, some serendipity

Casey: You know, when you’re in a meeting, things get done faster and more efficiently. There’s less discussion and more action.

Me: I know. I’m sorry. But in some ways, that’s how it has to be. The company’s getting bigger. I can’t be in all the meetings and we need to find ways to scale that don’t require my presence or input. And we’ve been doing pretty well so far.

The funny part is, I’ve actually been in Seattle much more this year than in years past (spent 20/78 days so far in 2013 on the road). I’ve been intentionally limiting my travel schedule to do more Moz stuff at home. But Casey’s right. I’m trying to get out of the weeds and out of the tactical day-to-day decisions and focus on other stuff. It’s pretty different from 3-4 years ago when a few of us would get in a room, hammer out a plan, and then go do it (though, if we’re being honest, the past had plenty of inefficiencies, too).

But even when I’m home, I’m out of the office a lot. My biggest responsibility and largest time consumer these days is 1:1s. I sit down with a ton of Mozzers (there’s 120 of us now) and try to get a sense for their happiness, their job responsibilities, where (and whether) they feel like they’re making a positive contribution. Then I take a lot of that data and bring it back to the company level – working on team structures, policies, processes, and hiring that will help.

The days are filled with context switching that, on reflection, even I find crazy. Yesterday’s a good example:

• Get up at 7am (thanks to jetlag) and plow through email, then do lots of sharing & interaction catch-up on Twitter. Feel guilty (as usual) for not being able to get a blog post up in so long.
• Walk to the office at 9:35am and arrive barely in time for my first marketing stand-up (a 15-minute block where folks on the team give a brief shout-out to the projects they’re working on). I’m trying to spend more personal time with our marketing team due to some internal changes & challenges. That will probably continue for a couple months and then I’ll back out and maybe dive in with another group. Last year it was a lot of time with the Mozscape team, and early this year it was with the Fresh Web Explorer team.
• Run over to Cafe Ladro for a coffee with a potential candidate.
• Dash to lunch with Joanna at Lola to chat about marketing projects.
• 1:1 with Adam, our head of product, that’s cut short by my tardiness.
• Call with a VC firm that wants to invest, but we’re not looking to raise a round and I say as much. It’s interesting to hear the things that matter to them, and good to maintain these sorts of relationships. Who knows what the future will bring (though I have my fingers crossed we won’t need to raise another round).
• 1:1 with Jon, a new addition to our product team who’s taking over some long neglected projects (like the poor Mozbar). We have an awesome chat, and he tells me that his first few weeks here have been amazing. I’m thrilled, but tell him that we have to stay vigilant. Moz isn’t going to be a great company to work for if we start letting little things slide, so I want him to tell me (or Samantha – his manager) if he’s seeing anything here that feels broken or needs help. That gets onto a chat about his last company, where disciplined use of agile methodology saw a great return in speed of deployment on engineering & product teams. Later, I’ll bring that feedback to Anthony (our CTO) who’s working on process across engineering (to be honest, he’s done a remarkable job and shit is shipping, but it’s good to stay on our toes).
• Meet with Marissa, a longtime friend whom I’ve been trying to get on our team for forever. She’s remarkably talented and experienced, but her background (primarily in the non-profit sector) is tough to match up with existing open roles. I’m hopeful we’ll find something, though. That reminds me, I need to email Emmi, one of our recruiters, who also met with Marissa (be right back).
• Meet with a former Mozzer whom we somehow missed exit interviewing. We chat for a bit about the positive and negative experiences she had here. Some of it’s tough to hear, but I want to know all the feelings and experiences people have here – it’s the only way to improve.
• Chat with the eteam for an hour about the big issues facing us. We’ve overhired against budget, and way overspent on contractors in order to help us launch a big project that’s due for end of April. Thankfully, we’ve got a nice balance sheet, but we need to slow down adding new people to the team until we see how Spring goes from a revenue growth perspective. We also have a few team issues to talk through and I try to bring my experiences with internal and external folks to everyone for consideration and discussion.
• We end slightly late, but it works out. Geraldine’s driven down to the office so we can attend a dinner in honor of the team that launched Fresh Web Explorer. It was a really hard project – probably worthy of its own blog post – but long story short, the first version was tested and planned for release in December, and feature creep + lots of technical challenges pushed it back many times. Seeing the adoption and value it’s providing to our subscribers, though, it was all worth it.
• We get home at 8:30pm and are both exhausted. We head to our computers, finish answering the most important emails, and then hit the hay. Tomorrow (now today), I have an equally demanding, context-switching day and a public speaking event in the evening. I’m pretty sure there’ll be some bags under my eyes for that one.

I don’t share this to complain or to seek sympathy. I love my job. LOVE. I feel like I must be among the 0.001% of the luckiest people on this planet. So many people who work in technology and marketing don’t get to control their own destiny or make the impact they want, but I think I have that opportunity.

This job is hard. It’s hard because it requires so much discipline, care, time, emotional energy, and the ability to jump way down into the details and way back up into the big vision/long view. It’s hard because there’s so much knowledge I need to have to be effective and uncovering it can be time-consuming and sometimes scary. It’s hard because the obligations and pressure, both internal and external, are so high. It’s hard because I fuck up a lot, and it’s my first time doing this, and every day this team is the largest team I’ve ever run, and every month it’s the most revenue and costs I’ve ever had in a budget, and every 6 months it feels like an entirely new set of responsbilities and challenges.

I think a lot of what I feel right now is something I talked about with Hillari, who manages team happy, a few weeks back. I’ll try to illustrate:

Hillari worries about pleasing 100% of the people 100% of the time. And she’s in charge of events, meals, office equipment, seating charts, and a thousand other things that are designed to make Moz a comfortable, wonderful work environment. But sometimes, someone isn’t going to be happy. They wanted to sit by a window and one wasn’t available. They wanted the gluten-free soy snack and we ran out. They thought the beverage selection at the venue for the last all-hands was too limited. All of this is natural, normal, and OK. But poor Hillari sweats every detail. That’s part of what makes her so incredible at her job, but it also means a lot of undeserved emotional strife.

So, as Hillari and I were talking, I referenced Amy & Brad’s book, Startup Life:

…we reserve one day a month, for a special dinner we call “Life Dinner.”

On the first day of every month, we go out to a dinner. It’s not “date night” (we have plenty of those). Instead, it’s a spcial celebration of being alive. It’s a chance to reflect on the past month and talk about what’s coming up in the next month, an opportunity to give each other a “non-Hallmark-promoted-holiday” gift, which we manage to do most months…

… We have been doing this for 12 years. We miss one or two a year. That’s okay as it’s part of our fail 12.5 percent of the time rule (Brad gets to blow it one out of eight times).

I love Brad & Amy’s intelligent setting of expectations. A built-in, expected rate of failure is so damn smart, and so essential, too. Imagine the guilt of missing a life dinner with your romantic partner. It could be overwhelming and the catalyst for huge fights and a lot of pain. Unless… you’ve got a built-in failure rate. I shared that with Hillari, and we talked about the difference between striving for 100% and expecting 100%, and why the former’s so valuable and the latter so harmful.

I don’t know whether it helped Hillari to have that concept, but it’s something I believe in, and something I’m working to internalize. And even though I know it’s OK to mess up now and again, even though I’m coaching other people about how it’s OK to target 90% instead of 100, I still feel this great weight on my shoulders to get everything right.

I need to step back, take a deep breath, acknowledge that even though the job is hard, the company is in a good place, and hitting 90% is pretty good.

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