#MyMomentum | Rand Fishkin: What I Learned from Founding a Multi-Million Dollar Tech Company as a Non-Technical Entrepreneur

This article was posted as part of the MyMomentum series on Looksharp. If you have a career path story you want to share, tweet it at as using the hashtag #MyMomentum.

Andrew Maguire, CEO here at Looksharp, interviews Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz.com.

History:

In 2004, Rand started a blog on SEO—his journey, what he was learning, etc. The idea was to make the practices of SEO more transparent and accessible.

Highlights:

Andrew: As a non-technical founder, how do you find that that impacted how you needed to build your team and run your company?

Rand: Your startup will inherit the strengths and weaknesses of the founder, particularly if it’s a founder CEO. A lot of my strengths, for better or worse, were around marketing, so Moz has always had really good community, really good marketing, good brands etc, But we’ve struggled a lot on the technical side for a long time.

If you can, I would urge you to ask “these are strengths that my company needs to succeed—are they the strengths that I have?” If not, how can I change our model, how can I shift our company to lean on the strengths that I really have? If you have that co-founder, you can make that person part of that strengths bucket.