I’ve been lucky to IPO with two incredible companies – Square, a global payments company in November of 2015 and in May of 2019, Uber. There’s basically no guidelines for how to manage your IPO as an SEO because it’s so uncommon. Last year (in the age of tech unicorns) there were but 480 IPOs in all of 2020, the highest ever recorded. That’s a mere 83 more IPOs than in 2000, which is the 2nd biggest year for IPOs in the last ~2 decades. It’s probable that some, but not many of those companies even had SEO teams so my guess is there’s only a handful of us who…
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Back to Uber
My experience at Uber When people asked me what it was like working at Uber, I often shirked. If we were close enough, my honest response was, “Kind of like the stories. More misogyny, less sexual harassment than I thought.” If we weren’t, I’d shrug it off casually and change topics. The truth is, when I left, I never thought Uber would take the steps necessary to really turn the ship. Some of the most toxic people I’d ever met were the highest performers. There was truly a prevalence of “brilliant jerks”. I remember often going in to meetings asking how long I’ve worked, where the “real” SEO lead was…
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Notes from Google’s Webmaster Conference Mountain View: Product Summit 2019
So this happened…I had the privilege to attend the Google Webmaster Conference Mountain View: Product Summit on November 2, 2019. First off I want to say a huge THANK YOU to the Google team for allowing me to go. Secondly, I wanted to make sure I captured any nuggets that might be valuable for the SEO community in the spirit of learning. What is the Google Webmaster Conference Product Summit anyway? The Google Webmaster Conference Product summits are, “a series of Webmaster Conferences being held around the world to help website creators understand how to optimize their sites for Search.” Their goals are simple: facilitate dialogue between the webmaster /…
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SEO Is Not a Black Box
“Oh I know, SEO is such a black box”. Almost every cross-functional partner I’ve ever worked with There, I said it. I remember the first time someone told me SEO is a black box. At the time I think I agreed with them. So many levers and so much unpredictability – how could you possibly account for them all? And it seems like we weren’t alone – over 97 million results return when you do a Google search for “SEO black box“: But the more companies I’ve seen, especially companies of the same flavor (whether that’s media companies or large, brand-first, fast-growing and international tech companies) you realize that most…
