Rand Fishkin
Biography
Rand Fishkin is the cofounder and CEO of SparkToro and the co-founder of Moz, where he was known for his “Whiteboard Fridays”, the “most famous video series in SEO”. Rand’s first writing was on the SEOmoz blog, which he grew to become the world’s most popular community and content resource for search marketers.
Over 7 years as CEO, Rand grew Moz from 7 employees to 134, revenues from $800K to $29.3mm, and traffic from 1 to 30mm annual visitors. He raised two rounds of funding, led three acquisitions, and a rebrand. Rand stepped down as CEO in February of 2014 during a rough bout with depression and left the company 4 years later. He remains chairman of Moz’s board. Rand is also the co-founder of Inbound.org, a site to dedicated to sharing articles about marketing from across the web, alongside Dharmesh Shah. The site was sold (for no profit) to Hubspot in 2014.
In 2018, Rand founded SparkToro and published Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World. Rand previously co-contributed to two books: Art of SEO, and Inbound Marketing & SEO. Today Rand is a frequent keynote speaker at marketing conferences around the world, averaging ~100 days on the road each year and 30-40 speaking appearances.
He’s been profiled in the Seattle Times, featured in Puget Sound Business Journal’s 40 Under 40, named to BusinessWeek’s 30 Under 30, written about in Newsweek, The Next Web, the Inc 500, and hundreds of other publications. He is, however, most proud of his prominent appearances in his wife Geraldine DeRuiter’s first book, All Over the Place.