Rand Fishkin built Moz into a company doing tens of millions a year - and came away convinced that wealth and success aren't the same thing, and that venture capital's billion-dollar-or-bust model can trap a good business in a plateau where it neither dies nor skyrockets. As a founder, he notes, he'd have done better financially as one of his own engineers.
With SparkToro he's doing the opposite: a two-person team leaning on agencies and contractors, an open-sourced funding structure friendly to both founders and investors, and profitability over hype. In a wide-ranging conversation he digs into when a company stops feeling like the one you wanted to build, the myth of glorifying overwork, and why love and health matter more than money.
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Hey everybody, welcome back to TuringFest. I'm Brian Corcoran, CEO. I think I probably haven't introduced myself before, So week four, I'm doing that. Yeah, we've reached the halfway point of our of our marathon, which is so we've done fifteen keynotes and interviews so far, we've seventeen more to go.
All of the ones that we've done so far, all available to watch on the platform. The other thing as well is if you've any feedback on how you're finding the experience so far, any improvements you think we could make, stuff you're enjoying, we always always love to hear it so you can tweet or if you want to email me I'm brianturingfest because this is a whole new format for everyone a lot of new things in twenty twenty Also a shout out to one of my colleagues.
Some of you will know Marcus Kernighan, our tireless behind the scenes doer of all things, our Swiss Army knife. So Marcus, diligent as ever, got a we got a Slack message from Marcus at, I don't know, like four am his time or something of a photograph of him in an emergency room in Canada where he lives.
So Marcus is getting his appendix out as we speak. Yeah. So that was that was not in the schedule. So if anybody wants to give Marcus some love, he's m kernahan at m kernahan on Twitter. So he's having a rough day. So anyhow, hopefully all all going well there And all going well here because we have one of, I've said before how much I like and respect our next guest and really enjoyed getting to know him and become friends with him over the last few years from
speaking at the conference and meeting at other conferences. I don't know if all of you have conference pals, but I have a whole bunch. And we see them more frequently than I see my non conference pals in normal years. So let's go and have a chat with them.
We've got Rand Fishkin from SparkToro here. So Rand, come on in. How you doing? Very well. Thanks, Brian. I appreciate you having me. Yeah. I appreciate you getting up at, this is eight AM your time in Seattle. And I know you're you're a bit of an insomniac.
You're not a morning guy. So you're you're going all out for us. Everybody appreciates it. So Only for you. Only for you. That's that's what they all say. So it's funny on on the on the stage in Turing Fest last year when I I said a few words before we got started about ethics and tech and the responsibility that tech has and the power that tech has.
And then we had Chris Messina, who you may know as the inventor of the hashtag, etcetera. And Chris is a very well known, well respected guy in the Valley. And he gave a great talk about the ethics of tech and how do we build the next generation of social media tools and how do we avoid the problems that we've created with the current incarnation.
You're building something new, at this stage, it's relatively new. What are you? Two, three years in? How how is SparkToro? Yeah. So we I left Moz almost two and a half years ago, and SparkToro started a few months later. The the actual product didn't launch though until April of this year, which is which is a pretty terrible time to launch a new new product.
But but, nonetheless, it's been it's been doing well. So we are I think I looked yesterday. We're in the four hundred ish customers and and around, thirty, forty thousand people who've who've signed up to use it. It's it's it's free to sign up, and use.
So we have a lot of folks who've done that. And so far, the feedback's been been great. It's it's very nice to go back to the building stage. I think I like the early stage. I love the the pace of Casey and I, my cofounder and I, working together, and the the small size of the company is much more compelling for me than a big company.
I think that's, you know, that's one of the reasons I turned down all the potential big tech jobs I might have taken postmods to go do this. Yeah it was interesting I mean I think a lot of us were fascinated to see what your next move would be.
Most of and the wider TuringFest community will know you from well at this stage people know you from Spartoro, from being online etc but Mozz is I guess where you cut your teeth. That was a pretty crazy journey and you stepped down from the board last month I think so is that that's you're still a shareholder so you're part of the journey I guess.
How yeah maybe just talk us through some of the beginning I mean like for people who haven't read Rand's book I even have it here somewhere but to be able to do that. It's a fascinating read. And it's a great you've written it as a guidebook, a handbook for founders.
And you've gone deep on some of the harder bits. Started off, you were the agency side, then you switched to building product. And the growth was pretty crazy in the early days, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. So Moz had kind of a a very steady but relatively high growth path.
So it was it was essentially doubling revenue year over year, every year after we launched the software. So, you know, o eight was double o seven, o nine was double o eight, ten. I think we doubled every year for seven years and and got to about thirty million in revenue.
And then the last, I guess it's been the last six years that growth rate has slowed, and Moz is somewhere in the fifty million dollar a year range, in terms of revenue. And I and I think, you know, the the frustrating part about that, right, Brian, Obviously, as as you know, and as most of the, you know, Turing Fest audience would know, if you are a privately held company and, you know, or you have alternative kinds of investment, what have you, that that's a great business.
Right? Moz is profitable to the tune of probably kicking off five or six million dollars in cash a year, maybe more than that if they wanted to. And, you know, fifty million in revenue, that that'd be a great business to own. But because it's Raised Venture Capital, it's sort of stuck in this frustrating plateau of, hey, can you just either die and go away or, you know, skyrocket your growth again and get up to sort of a hundred, hundred and fifty million in revenue and then maybe the
business can be either sold or go public or something like that. But as it stands today, it's it's just sort of this this stuck asset for its investors. And so many folks assume, right, that that I that Geraldine and I have have personal wealth from Mars, and that's obviously not the case.
You know, technically, we own, I don't know, seventeen percent of the company, and maybe that'll be worth something someday, but maybe it won't. Who knows? So it's a it's a very, very odd thing to realize that, you know, in terms of personal wealth, I would have done better as a software engineer at Moz than I did as, you know, CEO and founder sort of financially, which is a Yeah.
Yeah. Quite an quite an odd thing. Right? And that's just because of how salaries work and how stock is considered compensation, etc, etc. Yeah, no, it I think it's a really, it's an eye eye opening case for for founders to take a look at.
And I think you've done a great thing by sharing so much information about it, particularly the stuff that you mentioned in the book about the HubSpot offer early on and all those kind of things that I guess was a painful one to write.
But it's a good thing you did. I saw a really interesting thing the other day. Do you know Bear Metrics, Josh Pickford? Yeah. Yeah. I I know Josh well and and followed that story. Yeah. It's it's amazing. It's the counterpoint. Right? It's like, I think they got bought for seven seven million dollars or something like that.
Two and a half times, two point six times. More like four. Yeah. Oh, maybe Josh maybe Josh himself made about four. Yeah. I I but it's it's really interesting how they'd taken a they'd taken some venture, but a small amount. And the venture investors wrote it off at the exit, which is kind of amazing.
And he has now this he's set for life sort of thing, depending on what your financial goals are. And yeah, it's kind of the opposite story in a way. But it was great for him to get that. And I know that a lot of people in the Turing Fest audience, we've got a lot of people who are in companies of sort of ten to twenty or, you know, under fifty.
And there'll be a lot of founders thinking about how do they grow the company? And should they take this kind of investment or bootstrap or whatever? Are you you're not bootstrapping though, with SparkTour, right? Didn't you take some some angel investment? Yeah. That's right. We did.
We took so we raised one point three million, in what was that? June of twenty eighteen. So, near yeah. Two years ago. And that came from all from private investors like a lot of folks like yourself. Right? Folks who are involved in the startup and tech worlds.
A lot of folks who are involved in the in the marketing worlds. For many of our investors, SparkToro was their first ever private company investment. So they they had never put money into a company like it before. And we used a very unusual structure that we designed ourselves.
We actually open source the documents. So if you search for SparkToro funding, I'm personally hopeful that the structure we used can be useful for a lot of other folks. Know three or four other startups have raised money using the model and Tiny Seed Fund, which Geraldine and I put a little bit of money into also uses the SparkToro funding structure.
It's basically an LLC that can pay any year it's profitable, can pay dividends or can choose to reinvest in growth. And then if and when it ever sells, you know, investors get the greater of their percentage ownership or or their money back. So it's, you know, it's sort of set up in a way that is very, very friendly to investors and very friendly to founders, but it is not necessarily designed to minimize your tax load if you have a billion dollar exit.
That's sort of the only that's the only sacrifice in the funding model. And of course, you know, venture capital is is very obsessed with getting capital gains tax rate, at least here in the US with, you know, large billion dollar exits, which is why the the whole model is sort of optimized for, yeah, ninety five out of a hundred companies will fail, but, you know, the two or three that kinda make the whole fund, that's where we wanna pay the minimum tax amount.
And and that's why there's so many odd structures and things like stock options, which for anyone who's an employee or been an employee at a start up, you you know how risky and, usually low payout those are. So we have this alternative model. I I like it a lot.
I'm hopeful that a lot of other people can pick it up and try it out. Yeah, it, I remember when you open source those docs, they're fascinating. And again, I think it goes back to the sort of service that you're doing for entrepreneurial community, because we're all, know, certainly I remember when I started my last startup in twenty eleven-twelve and we thought about fundraising and you know all of the VC, the VCs got their message out better than the angels maybe and sort of shaped the way a lot of us thought about things.
And that's changing. It's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, actually. Because it does seem like there is a shift in, or maybe a new wave of entrepreneurs that you're probably at the forefront of, where these are companies that are still designed to generate revenue and generate profits, but they're maybe more driven by purpose than they are purely by capital concerns and profits.
How do you how do you think about that? How do you see that landscape shaping up? Yeah. I think so I don't believe there's a huge trade off between small or mid scale success in in building a a company and sort of small scale capitalism and being values driven and purpose driven.
I think that those things actually mesh together extremely well. That in fact, many, many great companies can be built by doing both simultaneously. And and that's a wonderful thing to lean into because it helps make your life make sense. Right? It helps you go to sleep at night and and wake up in the morning and feel great.
So I I see I see tons of companies having that opportunity. I think what doesn't mesh well, and you can, you know, you can see this in sort of the the press and media and coverage of of all these kinds of things is the those big billion dollar plus outcomes, the the Facebooks and Googles and Amazons and, you know, monopolies and duopolies.
Even big companies that, you know, the well, whatever, the WeWorks and Ubers. Right? There's there's just a lot of problematic stuff that happens at scale. And, very frankly, the regulatory and political and economic environment that we're in is such you know, I don't know how how much folks study this stuff, but generally speaking, like, in a in a big economy, what you want are lots and lots of tiny little players with distributed power each doing relatively well.
What you don't want is one or two big companies dominating the entire spectrum and everybody else sort of picking up the scraps. That that tends to lead to concentrated political power, that tends to lead to income inequality, it tends to lead to market inequalities and and sort of, you know, bad monopolistic practices and anti competitive behavior, all all that kind of stuff.
And so as a founder and as someone who might join a a company, I think you can decide for yourself, like, which ecosystem you wanna participate in. Do I wanna participate in the sort of small business ecosystem, or do I want to kind of, you know, put it all on red number seven at the casino and and go try to take the venture backed billion dollar outcome or bust route?
And my, you know, my sense is there's a lot more people who after ten or twenty years wake up to the idea that spinning that roulette wheel is not so great. And and I think that there's also a very very reassuring thing by looking at a company's balance sheet and their profit and loss every year and going, look at that.
You know, we're actually making some money. We're probably not gonna go out of business. We don't have to rely on raising our next round. And that means that we can also lean into doing things we believe in and not sacrificing our our principles for, you know, an additional couple of months of growth, not sacrificing long things that are good for the business long term because this year, we've gotta show a certain number to our investors in order to raise our next round.
There's a lot of that short term optimization that I think leads to sacrifice an an unhealthy behavior. I'm I'm sure most of you who are listening have seen exactly the same thing in your companies. Yeah, I agree with that. And, and I think there's a, there's a growing awareness, right, that there are, there are problems with sort of hyperscaling, like you mentioned, and going for the going for that, you know, the billion dollar moonshot.
And, you know, some people, I have friends who are in the process of going for that right now. And, you know, best of luck to them, I hope they make it. But it's not, it's not for everybody. And it's definitely Brian, do you think after they make it with?
Will they still be friends? There'll be speakers at Turing Fest for sure. Yeah, will they still be friends? It's a good experience. It's been like, as soon as as soon as your friends get like, you know, very rich, they sort of weirdly disappear from your life.
It's it's a little I don't know. It's a little unnerving. It gives me that, like, what wait. What hap what happened? I thought, no? Okay. And then your friends who are, like, still in the struggle, they they stick with you. Money does weird things to people.
Yeah. For sure. For sure. You I don't know. But you've perhaps you've perhaps got a wealthier circle of mates than I do, or or a more successful one, or or just, you know, not as nice of a scent. Yeah. That's my problem. Well, so I I do think I mean, there's definitely a sense that I have that, first off, I don't I no longer connect wealth and success.
I don't I don't think those two things are interlinked. And I think that we do society a disservice and all of ourselves a disservice by saying that like, Brian, I promise you, I know a few people who have tens and hundreds of millions of dollars.
I know, like, one or two people who who who might be at the even higher end of that spectrum. You are more successful than them. Good to hear. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's, guess it really does depend on what we measure and what we care about.
And, yeah, you know, it's part of why why we all the people at at TuringFest, why we do it is is because we believe in it. The on the on the company type and journey and and and objectives, When you when you started off in Mars, I guess you hadn't thought this all this stuff through. Right?
Because nobody thinks this stuff through when they're you were just straight out of university and starting up the company and, you know, even venture capital was probably a thing you hadn't heard of, etcetera, etcetera. I googled it the first time Michelle Goldberg from Ignition Partners emailed me and was like, hey, would you ever think about raising money?
I googled venture cap what is venture capital and started reading that. So oh, yeah. I was I was very naive. All all of those top hits on Google were written by venture capitalists as well, for sure. It's so true. Oh my god. They own they own the information ecosystem in tech the way Fox News owns it, you know, in the United States political spectrum.
It's just amazing. They certainly got the message early on that content is king. You took some capital relatively early on in the Mars journey, and then you went on this big journey where you built a pretty substantial sized company, and you're up to forty five, fifty million dollars in revenue.
How many people were in Mars by the time you you left? Right around two. Well, let's see. When I stepped down as CEO, I think it was around one seventy. And then Maz, you know, at the at the tail end of my journey, last four years that I was there, it sort of grew through acquisition, did some shrinking with with some layoffs, which I wrote about as well.
And, yeah, the I think today it's somewhere around two hundred, maybe two twenty five. They they bought stat analytics, which is up in Vancouver in Canada, and, and that added substantially to the team. That was, like, right at the end of my tenure.
Yeah. I don't think anybody, who was at Turing Fest in twenty sixteen will forget about those those layoffs. My god. You you were on stage the next morning. That was that was That's right. That's right. That was intense. I remember that very well.
That was so intense. God. I think yeah. I don't think I've ever had a more emotional day at a conference. Yeah. I I still can't believe you're able to do it. It was it was amazing. Spark Toro is just you and Casey still?
Is that or you've got a couple? Yeah. Yep. Yep. We we do use a lot of contractors and agencies, which I actually love. I I wrote a blog post recently that that you would seen that I did. Yeah. Encouraged folks to, like, hey.
If you're a small scale start up, if you're small business, new business, like, use agencies, use consultants, use contractors. It is fantastic. I there's, like, this myth. There's this weird myth in start up world that no one will care about your business as much as full time employees.
I have not found that to be true. Like, consultants care a tremendous amount. Agencies, you know, they know that their next paycheck is on the line. Like, they're they're working very hard for you. And we have had, yeah, extraordinary success. I think we've used seven consultants and agencies in the last two years sort of building the company.
You know, we use folks for design and UX. We use folks we did a big conversion rate optimization project this summer. We use the the team from Elevate last fall for helping us analyze our our beta cohort and figure out what we needed to do before we launched publicly and sort of, you know, what what product changes we needed to make.
Yeah. We have folks who we basically have a a a finance person whose contract and accounting, all that. So it it's been great. Yeah. It's it's interesting. I mean, there is exactly, as you say, that myth that, you know, you've got to build a team and invest in them and they'll invest in you and all those things.
And then particularly when you've got everybody playing for some equity outcome that, you know, how often we've seen that it doesn't materialise, etc. That was something I wanted to ask you about is equity versus profit sharing. Maybe we'll get to that in a moment.
But was in Moz, what was the tipping point in if number of people is a useful proxy for when you felt that it was going from the company? One point, was your dream company. You know, you were living the dream. You were building exactly what you wanted.
You had all this money in the bank to hire great people to build this, have this nice office to do this great work. And also, were completely defining the industry, Mars was basically created this whole sector. And then there's a tipping point somewhere on the journey where you're like, this is maybe not what I want.
This is not going where you know, is there what what what were the flat red flags for that? Or and is is headcount a a useful proxy? Let's see. It was I think headcount is definitely correlated. I don't know that it's necessarily causal.
I would I would like to think that it's possible to sort of keep building the company you wanna build, but beyond a certain amount. But right around, for me at least, right around five ish people, sixty, seventy five people was when it stopped being the type of culture that I felt most comfortable in and became more of a corporate structured, more formal, more process driven, lost a lot of the, what do I wanna call it, serendipitous connections and the free flowing ability to make rapid change,
you know, from from week to week and and have that work out well. I I think there was like a a point at which a lot of the teams at Maaz, lot of the people there started feeling like, hey. We need formalization. We can't have, you know, whatever.
Somewhat you know, Rand can't come in next week and have us change our priorities again. Like, they need to be set quarter to quarter. It needs to be, you know, laid out and mapped out. Casey and I, every week we're changing ****. Like, it's great. I love it.
I think, you know, I, the two of us get more done in a week than Maaz got done in three months. Yeah, there's a lot to be said for that fleet foot approach. I mean, that's startups advantage over the big boys they're trying to disrupt.
But the so on the so we're looking at headcount, and we're looking at all of the crud that comes with as companies expand, and they move from being startups to something else, and then maybe corporates later on, versus and Casey and a bunch of agencies and contractors.
Something that comes up again and again in the startup world and something you've talked about and written about extensively is culture. How does how does the culture get impacted by building that tight knit team versus having those contractors come in? What are the trade offs, I guess?
Yeah. I think definitely when I was younger, I I really wanted that I don't know what to call it. Like, the the culture of a full time team and, you know, sort of a a professional environment where I could build my, like, friend group and and the the people that I wanted to be around.
And as I got older, I I guess, you know, a few things happened. Right? One, I I came to the conclusion that that my work does not have to be my entire life. Right? But it could be. For some people, is, and and that's okay.
I'm not a hundred percent sure it's healthy. I I might recommend that they they look outside of that. But also, I, you know, I built friendships and relationships through your point, right, through conferences and events in a big way, all over the world and with tons of other people, and I don't need my work to be that.
But also, especially, you know, I think COVID has really taught us all that that work can be done, especially information economy work can be done remotely. Right? And that we don't all need to be in an office together. And if that's true, do we all need our paychecks to come from the same entity and organizations if we're working together?
Does it really make a huge difference if someone's a contractor or a consultant or an agency serving serving a company rather than a full time employee at that company? I don't I don't think it changes the dynamic all that much. Right? And and Casey and I have much more of a, hey.
You know, if we're putting in some weeks, we're putting in forty or fifty hours. Probably, there have been a few weeks where it's even been fifty five or sixty. But a lot of weeks, to be totally honest with you, Brian, thirty. Some there's probably weeks where it's twenty five, like, real hours that I'm putting in, but we get a ton done.
Right? We get we get what we need to, and and we we have a good balance of of work and life and other things. Right? And I I invest in lots of other projects too. And, yeah, it it works out fine. So I don't know.
I'm just thinking about how different this conversation would have been, back in, like, twenty fourteen or twenty twelve. Right. It's brutal. Yeah. I mean, you were working a lot of very different hours then. But also, even if you had been working thirty, thirty five hours, you wouldn't have been saying it probably at a conference.
Yeah. That's I I think there's, a weird thing where people are are proud. They wear as a badge of honor the number of hours that they work, and and in fact, it should be the opposite. Right? It should be Totally. Hey. I'm doing well, and I have time to do all these other things, and here's this fun show I watch, and here's this great meal I cooked, and here's these, you know, hobbies that I was able to invest in, and here's other stuff I was able to participate in in civic
society, and my business is going okay. Isn't that wonderful as opposed to I did nothing but work. I slept under my desk. Got you know? Yeah. Why do we worship that? Because because we make venture capitalists rich? Is that is that what we're doing?
No. I I I remember seeing I was in my friend's office in London a few years ago, a good few years ago, and she had a sleeping bag in her office beside her desk and I was like, what are you doing? But, anyhow, you know, a lot of people can probably relate to that.
We have a question in from one of our longtime delegates, Denise Droshaw, who's I think probably seen you speak a bunch of times actually and she talks about she agrees consultants and freelancers can be a great way to go instead of hiring staff but clients, potential investors worry about business resilience when you're a one or two person business.
So how do you build resilience as a freelancer? Or how do you convince your customers of resilience? Who, of the freelancers and consultants you're using, are they part of a network where they've got backups or are they just, you know, this is Bob and Bob does this thing?
Yeah. So I I will say I think there's there's two resilience concerns there, right? One of them is, and we've seen this a little bit at SparkToro, not not a ton, think thanks to the fact that I have a little bit of a reputation that that came from my previous career, but there's definitely that perspective of wait, SparkToro is just two people. Can I rely on the service?
Can I rely on the product to be there and the data? Will say SparkToro's uptime has been better than any company I've I've worked with or or at. So that's been kind of fantastic and huge credit to Casey on that. But there's definitely people, right, and enterprises in particular that worry about it.
Right? And they've they've sort of expressed that subtly and not so subtly. So I think you do you know, you have to deal with that perception. And I think that that just means a lot of the times you're you're serving more of an SMB or consumer audience or you're making your website and web experience feel as robust as possible even if you're only a small team.
I think the the second piece there is, Brian, that that you asked about was using the, consultants and agencies. And in my opinion, weirdly enough, I think that is higher resilience in many cases than full time employees. So let's say I have a full time employee who does finance and operations.
And if that person is, I don't know, sick, they're out of the office, they came down with COVID. They you know, whatever it is. I've I've basically lost that resource entirely. But if, you know, if my finance person who's who's with a consultancy is out, someone else from her team will fill in.
Right? The agency model gives you a lot of resilience because there's there's backup. If you're using, you know, one consultant for a project and you have to find a new consultant, that's not particularly challenging either. Right? There's lots of lots of bandwidth, lots of availability, lots of great people out there.
It's easy to replace that workload because you you already are used to outsourcing and contracting with it. You wanna you know, if you lose a full time employee because they go to another company or they, you know, retire or whatever it is, that that is a very fragile relationship.
And, you know, replacing a full time employee can be three months, four months, six months I've seen startups take to replace someone on their team. So in my opinion, it it actually goes the other way for me as a business owner relying on consultants and agencies.
But yes, there's definitely the perception, especially from enterprises about like, how big are you? How much can we rely on you? All that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That makes that makes sense. And it's it's an interesting way to think about it. Just for our audience, folks, if you have any questions to put to Rand, just send them in through the app and we'll see what we can get to.
A question for you about early teams, and it kind of goes against what we're talking about with consultants and freelancers, etcetera. Building an early team, what are the key roles? If you think back to your time at Mars, you're like, oh, I really wish, like, we hired person x after two years.
And if only we'd hired them after two months, it would have changed everything. Or, you know, what what what do you think about as the key roles early on? Yeah. It's it's an interesting one because my my SparkToro experience has been one where Casey and I constantly have the conversation of like, hey.
Who are we going to hire next? Or what role are we gonna hire next? And we keep filling those with agencies and consultants because well, for, you know, for a a vast variety of reasons, but but one of them is definitely the resilience piece and the ability to have better cost controls and get deeper expertise from a whole team of people rather than just one person.
In terms of Moz, I think, where I maybe over I think I overinvested in formality of a lot of structures. Right? Having a COO early on, having a, you know, a whole bunch of, like, office staff and then, like, a a whole team to, keep the office in shape.
And it was it was very odd. I was actually having a conversation with a friend of mine, Will Reynolds, whom whom you know and who's spoken at at Turing Fest. He and I were texting last week, two weeks ago, about, you know, building a a team of people to help with sort of I don't know what to call this exactly, like like your office management.
Right? Like in office management and whatever restocking coffee and and answering phones and all all that kind of stuff. And one of the things I mentioned to Will was that when we did that at Moz, suddenly everyone felt that that stuff was no longer their responsibility.
Right? So if you're a software engineer at Moz and, you know, oh, well, the the you know, team happy is what they were called at at at Moz. Like, oh, okay. Well, we hired someone on team happy. So now I don't have to when I go get coffee, I don't have to take my mug back to the sink and rinse it out.
Like, that's somebody else's job. And that there's little stuff like that. When we hired a tech ops team, there was suddenly, like, a bunch of engineers who were like, okay. I don't have to worry about server optimization and maintenance and management and, like, making sure that, you know, my stuff is is where that's tech ops job, and so it's off my plate.
So there is a real concern that that I've sort of developed over time of creating these these different obligations through hiring and the incentives that that the problematic incentives that creates or doesn't create. Obviously, you have to do this at some point, I think this is a place where a lot of founders don't have a lot of awareness and they don't think through all of those challenges.
I know this is not a direct answer to your question about, like, which person should I have hired or not hired. And I think that's just because that the answer to that question is every time it depends. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that.
And it's funny, you think back to those teams that you put together at Moz that you might not have on reflection or next time you've clearly gone a very different journey, A lot of that comes back to having a ton of cash in the bank from your VC investors.
Right? So Yes. It biases you to do so many strange things. Money biases you to do so many strange unnatural things, and and a concern for profitability, is a very disciplining, very focusing force, one that I like. Yeah. No. I mean, Turing Fest is bootstrapped.
I'm very, very conscious of profitability. Just on the just a final question on the on the the model that you're using to build a team or or not build a team at SparkToro. How far can you go with that? What's the when do you go, you know what, Casey?
We just need to hire another engineer or whatever. Yeah. I think so my right now, we're just about a little over breakeven in terms of revenue to costs structure. And my suspicion is this will last us probably probably to about maybe a million dollars a year in turnover is my guess, and then it will become somewhat untenable.
Right? We'll just find Casey and I will probably find that we are relatively overwhelmed and we need just more full time help on whatever projects, right, someone to help us with support and help us with marketing and help us with content and help us with engineering and making sure that Casey's not the only person on call for, you know, for product and that I'm not the only person on call for basically everything else, I think that will happen.
I I hope that will happen next year is my is my guess. Right? Assuming assuming there's somewhat of an economic recovery, you know, second half of next year, that's that's gonna be my guess. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That's that'll be interesting to to keep an eye on.
And I bet when you do make a hire, you'll probably write a blog post about it. So we'll we'll all we'll all hear about it. Final question for you. And it goes back to something you touched on earlier about success and Tringfest being more successful than some of your billionaire mates, which is nice to hear.
We could talk about that over whiskey sometime. How do you define success for yourself? And how do have financial goals? Do have lifestyle goals? Are you going to open a restaurant someday, etcetera? Been seeing all my pasta photos. I have. It's looking good. It's looking good.
I'm looking forward to you cooking for me sometime. All right. How do you think about the all all all, you know, success now, and how has it changed from how you thought about it five years ago? Yeah. I mean, so success five years ago was essentially being able to produce the outcome that I promised to my investors when they signed up right to to fund my business.
And SparkToro actually has that same structure. It's just that the promise is very different in terms of what success mean from a financial standpoint. For SparkToro, what's absolutely amazing is for the thirty five people who put in one point three million dollars collectively to the business in twenty eighteen, over the next ten years of SparkToro is a two million dollars a year business or a five million dollars a year business or a twenty million dollars a year business or a two hundred million dollars a year business,
they're happy at all those numbers. And if it sells for, you know, what Bearimetrics sold for, which was I was just looking at the blog post for four million dollars in cash. Right? If it's if SparkToro sells for four million, that's like right on the cusp of of where our investors will be, okay, made whole.
That works fine. And if it's ten or twenty or fifty or whatever, like, all those numbers are great. And Maz, no one's gonna be very happy if Maz sells for a hundred million dollars. Not a lot of people are gonna be very happy if it sells for one fifty.
You know, two hundred is where the investors start going, okay. Well, it wasn't the worst thing in the world. Right? But even even employees who own stock options are gonna be like, that was that was not great. So it's Yeah. It's a very different thing.
In terms of me personally and things that I think of as as success, I think the the thing that I need most I think the thing that people need most, whether they recognize it or not, is having love in your life. If you have great love in your life, romantic love from your partners, love from your friends, love from family, you you're doing so much better than most billionaires.
I promise you. You are. The it is a lonely, sad life for a lot of people who are wealthy, and they are very disconnected from society, and their love is so complicated by money. And the stories on TV don't even do it justice how how rough it is for most of those folks.
And look, I I'm not asking you to feel sorry for them. I'm just I'm saying take pride in the fact that, you know, you have a partner who loves you and supports you and who you love and support and have friends and have people in your your orbit and and family.
That's that's an awesome thing. I think the other thing in the United States at least is you do need enough money to be able to sort of survive our brutal capitalist health care system, which is which is very, very, very rough on folks who don't have, you know, sort of seventy five to a hundred thousand plus in income a year and good health insurance.
Yeah. America is a a pretty bad place to not be in the top twenty percent or so. Other countries, different story. Right? I I have friends and family in Italy, for example, who you could work at a coffee shop. You're fine. Like, life is good life is good. Right?
You're probably happier than a lot of those rich people. So I yeah. It's it's real different. It's not what people think it is. Yeah. Yeah. But you only you only get to discover that, like, along the journey. Right? So I think Well I think we've I mean, my hope is that you can you know, if you hear something like this enough times, right, if you hear it repeated, you're like, wait a minute.
Maybe that's what's really going on. And and then you can make better decisions about what to do with your professional life and your personal life and when to invest in, you know, cooking a nice meal with your with your spouse instead of whatever, doing those four hours of extra work on the weekend.
Yep. I I gotta say, man, I I I totally agree with you on on all of that. We've we've run a little bit long, but I think it was well worth it. We've got a of good chat there. And it all got a bit philosophical and even romantic.
At the end, you are a bit of an old romantic, to be fair. I am. Ran, thanks so much for joining us. And we'll, you know, we'll we'll get you back to Scotland as soon as all this crap is done. And we'll get to get you and Geraldine over and there'll be there'll be a lot of whiskey consumed.
I I can't wait. Until then, take it easy. Yeah. You too, Brian. Bye bye. Okay. So that that wraps up wraps up our chat with Rand and wraps up this week, week four of Turing Fest. We're back next week with, let me just remind myself, we've got a pretty great schedule next week.
Yeah, we have indeed. We've got Mark Logan, who a lot of you will know, who's been in the news in Scotland this summer. He's been doing some pretty tremendous work on behalf of the Scottish ecosystem. And we have Chris Savage, who is a pal of Rand's actually, someone Rand helped out quite a lot in the early days of Wistia.
We'll maybe hear a little bit about that from Chris. Tremendous entrepreneur, great product, great company. Wistia has been a partner at TuringFest for a long time, a lot of time for Chris and his team. And then we've also got John Cutler, who is one of the top product managers around and somebody who's going to be talking about North Star metrics and that framework.
So kind of a complimentary talk to Itamar's from last week. But thanks as always to our partners and in particular Amazon Development Centre Scotland, Current Health, Deliveroo and our buddies at Mailchimp. We're going to wrap it up there for this week. Please get in touch if you've any feedback or tips on how we could get all this, improve what we're doing and improve the format, etc.
It's all new to everybody. So, but thanks for being with us and we'll see you next week.
