Rand was the CEO of Moz from 2007-2014. He started working at SparkToro in February, 2019.

I first became involved with the World Wide Web in 1993, while still in high school. After playing with MS Frontpage and building websites in the late ’90’s, I moved into consulting on the usability side of the equation, assisting local Seattle-area banks, law firms, doctors and small businesses with their domains. It wasn’t until 2002 that I got involved in the field of search marketing.

The major forums of the SEO world were my training ground, and after months of lurking, I started posting my questions, responses and experiences. In 2004, the scope and size of my material outgrew the forums and I began posting reports, data, and tools on a website that eventually became Moz.

From 2007-2013, I was Moz’s CEO, but have moved into a new position as an individual contributor, while our longtime COO, Sarah Bird, takes the CEO reigns

via his about page

He writes about how he’d have approached his work differently at What I’d Change, Keep the Same, & Don’t Yet Know

Businesses

Moz:

Rand was the CEO of Moz from 2007-2014.

Rand stepped down as CEO of Moz in 2013. 2 years later, he wrote about the experience at My Complicated Relationship with No Longer Being CEO.

In early 2018, he stepped away from Operations and into an Advisory Role.

Here are some of my favourite posts about how the business has evolved:

Misadventures in VC Funding: The $24 Million Moz Almost Raised

SparkToro

Rand started working at SparkToro in February, 2019. He wrote about it at My Last Day at Moz. My First Day at SparkToro.

SparkToro launched in April, 2020.

Favourite articles:

Personal

Mental Health

Rand wrote about his experiences with depression in the 2014 post.A Long, Ugly Year of Depression That’s Finally Fading. In this interview, he compares it to a reverse flywheel

Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

Rand released his first book, Lost and Founder, in 2018. The book contains 18 chapters, each taking a commonly-held bit of startup wisdom and exposing the reality of who that works for and what happens when it doesn’t.

Buy From Amazon

Check out the announcement post at I Wrote a Weird Kind of Business Book.

Rand Fishkin