Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin is the co-founder of Moz — the SEO software company he built into a $50 million business — and is currently CEO of SparkToro, an audience-research tool. He is known for a deliberately transparent, contrarian voice in an industry that often trades in secrets, and for walking away from the traditional 'venture-backed unicorn' playbook.

What Rand Fishkin is known for

At Moz, Fishkin was the public face of the Whiteboard Friday video series for over a decade — a format widely copied but rarely matched. He also created Domain Authority, a link-based scoring metric that quickly became an informal industry benchmark and is still cited in agency pitches today.

His memoir Lost and Founder (Portfolio, 2018) is one of the more honest accounts of what building a software company actually looks like — including the parts most founders leave out.

SparkToro and the second act

After stepping away from Moz, Fishkin co-founded SparkToro, a tool designed to surface where a given audience already spends time online — which podcasts they listen to, which accounts they follow, which sites they read. The company is funded through a hybrid model (equity + revenue-based financing) that Fishkin has documented publicly, making it a case study in itself.

Why marketers still follow him

Fishkin is one of the few founders who continues to publish original research alongside opinion — SparkToro regularly releases zero-click search studies and social media referral data that get widely cited in the industry.