playing the ukulele. Fun? Check.
Taking up multiple floors of an older building a few blocks from Pike Place Market, where the single-pane windows rattle in a spring wind, the Mozplex is typical of a fast-growing technology startup. Dogs run free through the open-plan space that feels a little tight. (Another contingent of Mozzers works in an office a block away. The company intends to move to a larger space in the neighborhood that can accommodate everyone later this year or early in 2014, Schmidt says.) Offices and meeting rooms have names like the Hall of Justice, the Bat Cave, and Spider Skull Island, which is where I met Fishkin. There is food and drink. A regular beer night. Ping pong. A life-size cardboard cutout of Fishkin—who could have been played by Matthew Broderick if the movie version of this company had come out a decade ago—appears in a new spot each day.
While most companies list their top executives on the Web site, Moz has pretty much the entire team listed in alphabetical order by first name. The CEO is not on top or otherwise distinguished from the rest of the team. In fact, he’s not even listed as the CEO. Fishkin is listed as “The Wizard of Moz.” Others hold positions including Architect of Anarchy, Post Modern Cowboy, Head of Team Happiness, and Code Wookie, along with more familiar software job titles.
The company has gone into great detail about each tenet of TAGFEE as part of its prolific production of content on all aspects of its business and the practices of marketing online. This story focuses mainly on the most unconventional tenet: transparency.
It starts from the top. Fishkin is highly personal and open with the Moz community. On February 6, 2007, he proposed to his now wife, Geraldine DeRuiter—a successful travel blogger—and posted about it that night on a company blog. More recently, he introduced a blog post by noting, among other things, the state of his personal finances: “no debt and $26,961.98 in the bank as of tonight”.
That bit about the debt is not trivial. Fishkin and Muessig went deep into credit card debt in the mid-2000s as they built the business, which in its earliest incarnation, was her traditional marketing company, founded in 1981. It’s a story Fishkin tells often. Less well known is the formative impact this experience had on the culture of the company. They were struggling to service some $450,000 of debt and accumulated interest with consulting income of $10,000 to $20,000 a month or less, he says.
“The logical thing to do is declare bankruptcy, but we couldn’t do that, because we never told my Dad … that we had any debt,” Fishkin says.
The eldest of three, Fishkin says he feared that if the company was not a success, its failure and the secrets around its finances might have threatened the stability of his family.
“I think that’s what inspires you to have values,” Fishkin says. “That’s the kind of thing where you say ‘never again.’ From now on, I don’t care how dirty the laundry is, we’re going to be transparent about it.”
For some Moz employees the TAGFEE culture is more than just a way of doing business.
Fishkin remembers the first time he realized employees were taking this aspect of their work home with them. It was about four years ago. An employee told him about disciplining her daughter: “[She] was thinking to herself, ‘No I shouldn’t give her feedback in this way. It’s not TAGFEE. Right, like I need to be transparent with her about why we’re doing it, and I need to be empathetic and recognize what her motivations were.’ We’re talking about a three-year-old at the time.”
“It’s a kind of thing that almost brings you to tears,” Fishkin says. “I think it’s even more exciting than building a company, is building a culture that you believe in and that you think is positive, and extending that out from the corporate world, and the world of your professional life to people’s personal lives, and then to hear stories about how it benefits them and their families and kids. It’s super-cool.”
And scary?
“There’s a big feeling of responsibility, right? I deal with pressure pretty well, but I feel an incredible burden to represent those values and to honor them and to make sure that we never slip up, which we do and we will. And then of course, I have lots of natural but non-valuable feelings of guilt.”
Operations chief Bird says the corporate culture would not exist without buy-in from employees at all levels. The people who come to work for the company do so in part because they’re already predisposed to living and working this way. “I think that they want to have something more meaningful than just a paycheck,” she says.
It Takes Effort
While many businesses work hard to hide their dirty laundry and publicly project a PR-sanitized version of themselves, Fishkin is by no means the first executive to embrace more transparency. (Remember the 2007 Wired cover that used clear acetate to depict Jenna Fischer from The Office with and without clothes?) But Fishkin has done it in ways few others have, including his tumultuous efforts to raise a second round of venture capital, which my colleague Curt Woodward documented in 2011. Fishkin says now that it’s his posts about failing to raise venture money that inspire people more than the one about his success, which included such sought-after but rarely disclosed details as the pre-money valuation for the round ($75 million, equal to 4.1 times revenue at the time of the deal).
Maintaining a culture that embraces that transparency—that enables people to see the ups and downs—takes lots of effort, particularly as the company adds employees at a torrid pace (albeit one that’s slowing this year), expands to new offices in Portland, and takes on more outside investment. It’s significant that the lead investor on the $18 million Series B last year—much of which was spent on acquisitions and hiring in the last 12 months—was the Foundry Group (managing director Brad Feld joined the Moz board) and Ignition Partners.
Fishkin says the company treated the fundraising process
