Rand Fishkin wrote a book about starting Moz - how it went down and the lessons that he learned. It's called Lost and Founder. At Seer Interactive, we created a game show to review the book and discuss a few of Rand's key takeaways.

1. LOST & FOUNDER
S E E R B O O K R E V I E W

2. HOW IT’S GOING DOWN
• Break into teams
• 21 multiple choice questions
• Winners gets sweet prizes!

3. BEFORE WE BEGIN
1. What is Lost & Founder about?
2. What does Moz do?
3. What does Rand do?

4. 21 QUESTIONS
F O R S W E E T P R I Z E S

5. 1) Moz was founded in 2004 by Rand and ______
A. His Mom, Gillian
B. His wife, Geraldine
C. Rand only
D. His good friend, Cyrus

6. 2) At Moz, there are 6 core values represented by the
acronym “TAGFEE.”
What does the “T” in “TAGFEE” stand for?
A. Trust
B. Transparency
C. Technology
D. Tolerance

7. 3) Service based businesses have
this strength over product based
businesses
A. Little to no start-up capital
B. Greater control over scale, expenses, and profitability
C. If sold, services are often a better financial deal for a founder
D. 5 year average survival rates are better
E. All of the above

8. 4) At one point, like at Seer, Moz
offered SEO consulting services
A. True
B. False

9. 5) Moz’s “pivot” from mostly SEO
consulting to mostly SEO products
was successful because
A. Rand had built a name for himself on the speaking
circuit
B. Rand had built trust in the industry through
transparent blog posts
C. Moz received a $15 million dollar investment
D. Moz launched a groundbreaking SEO product

10. 6) You have an idea for a business.
It will be even more likely to succeed if the
market you target is served by existing solutions
that are some combination of:
A. Hated by their customers
B. Unwilling or unable to evolve with their customers
needs
C. Protected by competitive advantages you can
unravel
D. In their early stages and not yet dominant
E. All of the above

11. 7) Rand published no fewer than ____
blog posts before his posts achieved
consistent, broad readership
A. 20
B. 500
C. 1,000
D. 1,500

12. 8) Which of the below statements is
FALSE?
A. Moz has raised over $29 million from venture capital
firms
B. Nearly all of Moz’s revenue today comes from
software
C. The average Moz salary is over $100k
D. Moz considers itself a B2C company (sells products
directly to consumers vs. other businesses)

13. 9) Rand turned down a $25 million
offer from Hubspot’s founder to buy
Moz
A. True
B. False

14. 10) You decide to start a company.
The conventional wisdom that you should bolster your
weaknesses with great hires who can give you those
strength should contain this warning:
A. Lacking deep knowledge and understanding of an area
means you are less likely to have connections in that field
B. A founders weaknesses are often baked into the
company’s DNA – creating a kind of “debt” that needs to
be filled
C. A co-founder with that strength who leaves the company
creates huge risk
D. All of the above

15. 11) You decide to start a new bubble gum business,
but know nothing about making bubble gum.
Rand thinks you probably should:
A. Learn the process for making gum and do it yourself
B. Invest in the knowledge necessary to hire, retain, focus,
and manage great talent in the bubble gum field
C. Start the company with cofounders who already know
how to make bubble gum
D. Raise money and buy a struggling bubble gum factory

16. 12) According to the National Venture Capital
Association, what percent of US startups delivered an
“expected” return on investment?
A. 85%
B. 45%
C. 10%
D. 5%

17. 13) You’re a brand new start-up that not many
people know about, and you’ve just created the first
iteration of your product. You should probably:
A. Launch it, and gather customer feedback to make your
product better
B. Keep working on your product to make it truly impressive,
and then launch it – if you launch now, it will hurt your
company’s brand

18. 14) Research from McKinsey showed that more
gender-diverse companies outperformed their less
gender diverse peers by 15%, while more racially
diverse teams outperformed their peers by 35%
A. True
B. False

19. 15) In 2013, Rand and Will Critchlow from Distilled
swapped lives as CEOs. Rand described this event as
a “high-speed course in customer empathy.”
A. True
B. False

20. 16) After the CEO swap, Rand “questioned everything
that he knew about the web-marketing industry” –
and completely changed Moz’s product strategy
A. True
B. False

21. 17) Rand believes that what separates successful
teams from unsuccessful ones have this element
A. Clarity and shared understanding of goals
B. Unity around the specific work required and how each
person will contribute to it
C. Confidence in the people around them to contribute
equitably
D. Belief that if things go wrong, we have the ability to survive
it
E. A powerful sense of comradery and kinship
F. All of the above

22. 18) After studying over 1,000 internal teams, Google
concluded that _____ between team members was
the best, most consistent predictor of a team’s
success
A. Competition
B. Respect
C. Empathy
D. Trust

23. 19) You’re the CEO of Toyota.
Jim doesn’t follow your agreed upon process, but his
work sees a favorable outcome for Toyota.
Michelle follows your agreed upon process well, but
her efforts don’t see a favorable outcome for Toyota.
Unfortunately due to budget constraints, you need to
let one of them go.
Who does Rand think that you should let go of?
A. Jim
B. Michelle

24. 20) Salesforce’s average customer tenure is 120
months, more than 10 times that of Moz’s.
This means that Salesforce has to acquire ____
percent of its current customer base each year to
maintain the same amount of revenue.
A. 1%
B. 10%
C. 12%
D. 25%

25. 20) Which tactic does NOT work for growing a
software-subscription business?
A. Acquire more customers
B. Increase the subscription tenure of existing customers
C. Up-sell existing customers
D. Increase customer churn rate

26. 21) In 2016, Moz had 8 products (Moz Pro, Moz Local,
Followerwonk, etc.), and all 8 of them missed their revenue
targets.
This put Moz in a dire position, forcing the leadership team to
make drastic budget cuts and lay off 25% of their team.
What caused all 8 products to miss their revenue targets?
A. Selling 8 things to people visiting your site is tricky
B. It’s hard to structure engineering teams to support 8 products
C. Marketing can get overwhelmed with competing priorities
D. Operations teams like HR, Finance, legal, etc. struggled to keep
up with demands of multiple teams
E. All of they above

27. SPECIAL BONUS
QUESTION!
I T ’ S W O R T H 3 P O I N T S

28. Prior to the CEO swap in 2013, Wil outlined areas
where he’d like Rand’s help and/or perspective.
Which area below was NOT on Wil’s list.
A. Help mentor young leaders
B. Perspective on creating a version of TAGFEE for Seer
C. Help people feel like they can fail
D. Help with 3-4 side projects – Pinterest guide, revamping
reporting, etc.
E. Help improve the quality of Seer’s major analyses
F. Perspective on how to grow the Analytics team
G. SEO + PPC integration