seo
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Harshal Shah and the business of being believed
From a small Ahmedabad team to twenty years of Elsner Technologies, Harshal Shah keeps returning to the same question: how do you earn the next person’s trust?
Nikola Baldikov and the Business of Getting a Yes
A printed T-shirt shop pulled Nikola Baldikov toward marketing. Years later, the founder of SERPsGrowth is still working on the problem: giving people a reason to pay attention.
Andrew Raso and the trouble with being everyone’s friend
Andrew Raso built Online Marketing Gurus by finding common ground. Growing it across borders meant learning when a friendly conversation had to become a difficult one.
Nick Brown learned to chase growth. Then he chose the exit.
A zoologist became an online retailer, then built a Bristol agency for software companies. Nick Brown’s most revealing business decision may be the one that brought that agency to a close.
Krishna Yadav and the Trouble With First Impressions
The founder of Branding Marketing Agency has spent years helping small businesses present themselves online. His own account of learning to speak confidently with clients reveals how personal that work can become.
Ihor Volovoy and the first $100
A student’s website about lathes became an unlikely apprenticeship in digital marketing. For the Elit-Web co-founder, the questions have grown bigger - but the money still has to add up.
Dmytro Gerasymenko and the price of a search
He built Ahrefs by charging for a better map of the web. With Yep, the Ukrainian founder asked a more awkward question: who should get paid when we use it?
Eric Hochberger and the business hiding inside a blog
A celebrity-gossip site gave Eric Hochberger a practical education in the economics of the web. The Mediavine co-founder has spent the years since building tools that help independent publishers get paid.
David Mink and the Business He Learned Between Classes
Before he ran Avalaunch Media, David Mink was a law student answering mattress orders in empty classrooms. His career has been a long attempt to make marketing work better for the person paying for it.
Ryan Doser Bet on Systems Instead of Staff
In 2019, Ryan Doser left a media-company job for a cramped desk and his first client. Seven years later, he is still working alone - with an agency, a YouTube audience, and a growing library of systems built from the work itself.
Kevin Indig Learned Search by Building a Gaming Website. Now He Studies What Happens When Search Stops Sending Clicks.
A teenage tournament site set Kevin Indig on a path through Atlassian, G2 and Shopify. Today his Growth Memo asks a harder question: what does growth mean when an answer engine keeps the visit for itself?
Lily Ray and the Rhythm of a Changing Search Engine
A drummer who learned search the hard way now studies what happens when the rules change. In 2026, Lily Ray gave that work a second address: her own consultancy, Algorythmic.
Aleyda Solís and the Search for a Better Question
She began by asking how anyone would find the websites she built. Nearly two decades later, the founder of Orainti is still asking how discovery works - and teaching others to ask with her.
Guy Lalzary Built His Marketing Career One Search Box at a Time
From SEO assignments to the C-suite, Connecteam’s marketing chief has spent fifteen years turning discoverability into an operating discipline - and building a team for the workers software once forgot.
Christina Mautz Builds Marketing Around the Customer, Not the Fashion of the Moment
Across Yahoo, Amazon, Moz and a succession of Seattle startups, Christina Mautz has kept returning to one unfashionably durable idea: growth begins with understanding the customer.
Kam Khanna Has Spent 23 Years Making Agencies Look Good
Long before every agency called itself a growth partner, Kam Khanna was building the less glamorous machinery behind the promise: strategy, delivery and client trust.
William Craig Built WebFX by Learning to Stop Designing Websites
A $900 database started the journey. A $3 bank balance changed it. Three decades later, William Craig is still turning technical curiosity into a company built around measurable growth and a very deliberate hometown bet.
Greg Weston’s Practical Case for Marketing That Runs Like a Business
The Ontario fractional CMO has spent 25 years turning marketing from a collection of tactics into an operating system - one built around clients, numbers and the judgment to know what should never be automated.
Alex Halliday
He built his first traffic empire at 13, took a company public at 25, and now he is betting that the future of marketing is engineering, not copywriting.
Adrien Menard
He noticed that half the internet's pages were invisible to Google. Then he built a company to fix it - and now he is betting it can do the same for the AI agents rewriting how the world searches.
Thenuka Karunaratne
Thenuka Karunaratne is the CEO and co-founder of daydream, a San Francisco startup building an AI-native agency for organic search that pairs SEO agents with human growth experts. He started making money from affiliate websites in high school, bootstrapped a streaming-search business called Flixed through college using programmatic SEO, and in September 2023 launched daydream with co-founder Shravan Rajinikanth. The company raised a $15M Series A in April 2026 led by WndrCo, bringing total funding to roughly $21M.
Andrew Yan
Andrew Yan is the co-founder and CEO of AthenaHQ, a Y Combinator-backed San Francisco startup building tools to help brands get discovered inside AI answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. A former Google Search product manager who also worked at DeepMind, the US Army Lab and Vimeo, he finished a Columbia degree in computer science and math in three years. Before tech, he was a touring jazz saxophonist who played in the band that inspired the Oscar-winning film Whiplash.
Terry Lee
Terry Lee is a Bay Area technology executive who serves as CEO at Cube (cubehq.ai), an AI-powered digital marketing platform that helps businesses run and optimize campaigns across search, social, email, and web from one dashboard. A UC Berkeley graduate based in San Jose, California, he has spent his career across media and marketing ventures including Storyblender, Shin & Lee Corp., and Lachesis Media & News Co. before stepping into the marketing-AI space.
Jim Yu
Jim Yu is the founder and CEO of BrightEdge, the enterprise SEO and content performance platform he started at his kitchen table in 2007 after a stint leading product at Salesforce. Two decades in, his thesis hasn't changed - he's just renamed the battlefield. Search became AI search; rankings became citations; BrightEdge stayed the scoreboard.
Quinton Pham
Quinton Pham is a founder at Jasper, the enterprise AI content platform that has raised over $130 million and serves marketing teams at major brands worldwide. Based in Coffeyville, Kansas, Pham is part of the founding team of a company generating roughly $88M in annual revenue with 300 employees. Jasper's platform gives marketing teams AI-powered tools for content creation, brand voice management, multi-channel campaigns, and workflow automation - serving clients including Boeing, L'Oreal, Wayfair, Adidas, and Cox Automotive.
Marcel Santilli
Marcel Santilli is the CEO and Co-Founder of GrowthX AI, a San Francisco-based 'service-as-software' company that combines expert-led strategy with AI workflows to drive organic growth for B2B companies. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Santilli spent 15+ years as a CMO and marketing executive at companies including IBM, HP/HPE, HashiCorp, Scale AI, and Deepgram, helping scale a combined $1B+ in ARR across three unicorns. After spending over 1,000 hours encoding marketing workflows into AI at Deepgram, he co-founded GrowthX AI in September 2024 with CTO Daniel Lopes. The company reached $7M+ ARR profitably in under 12 months — using only its own methodology, zero paid ads — before raising a $12M Series A led by Madrona Ventures in May 2025.
Elizabeth Douglas
Elizabeth Douglas is the CEO of wikiHow, the world's leading how-to platform visited by more than 150 million people monthly across 230 countries. A Stanford-trained computer scientist and Stanford MBA, she joined wikiHow in 2009 as COO and rose to CEO, overseeing more than 1,500% growth in traffic. Under her leadership, wikiHow has become a trusted, judgment-free resource with 100,000+ guides in English and 300,000+ across 18+ languages, earning a reputation as one of the nicest places on the internet.
Maxx Lobo
Maxx Lobo is the Chief Executive Officer of Ask Media Group, the IAC-owned digital media and performance marketing company behind Ask.com and other properties reaching 245 million people monthly. A two-decade veteran of ad-tech, cloud infrastructure, and digital media, Lobo rose through the ranks as CTO and COO/President before taking the top role in 2025. Under his operational leadership, Ask Media Group tripled its EBITDA from $50 million to over $100 million in four years, cementing his reputation as one of the more quietly effective operators in the digital media landscape.
Nayaki Nayyar
Nayaki Nayyar is a technology executive with over 25 years of experience transforming enterprise software companies. As CEO of Siteimprove since March 2025, she is leading the company's pivot toward AI-powered content intelligence and digital accessibility. Her career spans CTO roles in oil and gas, senior leadership at SAP and BMC Software, President and CPO at Ivanti where she helped double revenue to over a billion dollars, and CEO at cybersecurity unicorn Securonix. She serves on the boards of Fortune 500 companies TD Synnex and Corteva Agriscience.
Suhail Abidi
Suhail Abidi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cube (cubehq.ai), an autonomous AI marketing platform serving multi-location brands like KFC and Taco Bell. A chemical engineer from IIT Kanpur who won the Stanford Reliance Dhirubhai MBA Fellowship - full ride, no internship - he spent his Stanford summer learning to code instead of collecting a consulting paycheck. Before Cube, he built Tinystep into a 600,000-user parenting network that Flipkart backed with $2M and BabyChakra eventually acquired. He is a serial entrepreneur with a consistent pattern: spot a real problem, learn whatever skill is missing, build the company.