On leaving SEOmoz and being a (slow) serial entrepreneur

A Viennese immigrant physician in private practice in New York City, Dr. Stephanie Feilendorf was a groundbreaker in her field and mentor to a scrawny under-age teen who she hired to be a receptionist in her medical office. It was my first job. She protected me, mentored me and provided me with a much needed job at risk to herself and her practice. Dr. Feilendorf had a gift for expressing complex issues with bell-ringing clarity. “One eye laughing, one eye crying,” she said to me as she closed her pediatric practice door for the last time at the age of 88.

I’m not going to tell you that leaving ‘Moz is easy . . . or that I can’t wait to be on my way. If you’re an entrepreneur and a parent you know two things: if you do your job well, your children will grow as you give them wings to fly and when they fly, they will return to visit and it will give you great joy. And if you do the same with your company, it will go and never return. I went into this endeavor with my eyes open, I made decisions that would bring this day many years ago and didn’t waver. I never kidded myself that it would be the easiest of days.

And so goodbye, dear Company, dear friend that took so much and gave back even more. Indeed, it is always sad to say goodbye to a friend.

So, what’s next?

I have had a number of companies. And albeit I haven’t moved through them as quickly as many serial entrepreneurs, and SEOmoz is the largest and best known (by a country mile!) of any I’ve owned, and despite the fact that Rand’s Dad tells me I’m nuts to do this again, there will be at least one more company in my future. So now (drumroll), it’s time to clap hands and demand, “What’s next?”

My passion has always been around entrepreneurship, specifically technology startups. With time to pursue projects I mothballed some time ago, I am…

• Interviewing dozens of CEOs around the world to determine in what ways tech entrepreneurs differ from their industrial counterparts. Whether a book or a white paper is the result is yet to be seen.
• Engaging in a number of global women-in-entrepreneurship efforts as I am painfully aware that as hard as the road is for male entrepreneurs, their sisters and daughters have an even tougher row to hoe. I serve on boards of directors and advisors for companies in four continents and I’m looking forward to increasing my portfolio.
• I’m still accepting keynote and speaking engagements around the world
• I’m super excited to have become an Angel Investor on a broader level. Bringing SEOmoz to birth was a tough go. Thanks to Rand’s amazing success at SEOmoz, future investments will be a lot easier . I’m engaging in Angel investment groups from the Pacific Northwest to India and APAC, and I’m headed down to Silicon Valley to hob nob with VCs and learn more soon
• Through Angel and VC groups, and sometimes through personal references, I am reviewing a number of startup opportunities in need of leadership support to navigate their way to market. So I may find myself back in a C-suite soon.

I’ve always been a master connector. Now I’m asking others to connect me. Send me your brilliant startup ideas, news of meetups and tweetups, investment groups doing interesting things and more. The world is a wide and wonderful place. I can’t wait to explore it some more!

I think the broader conversation around Siri is more interesting than the technicalities of what it can accomplish today.

If you’ve ever seen the show, The West Wing, by Alan Sorkin, you’ll remember the character of Charlie.

When the character is first introduced to the president, Charlie finds the president’s reading glasses. As the show progresses, he kept the daily calendar, provided background information on people the president was meeting and took care of the president’s personal social obligations. Charlie would say something like, “You sent lilies to your sister; it’s her birthday.” He did not say, “It’s your sister’s birthday; you should send a gift. Do you want to send flowers? What kind does she like?” It was his job to know, get the job done in a timely manner, and report that the task was accomplished. The president had more important things to do.

During the SMX/eMetrics conference Stockholm in September, 2011, I enjoyed some time with the Mayor of Vaxholm, Per Mosseby(the political mayor, not the FourSquare mayor ). He’s a technologist with several successful startups to his name already. He noted that the future of mobile internet engagement will look a lot like Charlie.  We were amused to see Siri launched only a few weeks after our discussion.

Siri is the next stage of streamlining and integrating personal life management online – a more integrated version of the apps such as TripIt, the financial software from our banks, PageOnce, and even Yelp and UrbanSpoon. All these individual apps, and thousands more like them, are designed to bring us in-the-moment info when and where we need it. Siri is designed to aggregate functions to become a single streamlined connection between humans and the collective knowledge of our communities and networks on the web.

I believe that history will see Siri as the seminal application that marked the global move from desktop computing to mobile, integrated connections between daily life and the data/knowledge banks stored on the Internet. When internet access is available in a community, research and email communication is greatly enhanced. When high speed internet replaces dial up, people begin to make the Internet part of their daily lives, checking weather, traffic, and news before leaving for work and engaging again when they return home.

When Internet access becomes easily available to a significant portion of the population of a community, mobile computing integrates the web into the entire daily living experience. This integration is only partially accomplished via apps today.

From where I stand to day, it seems to me that Siri is the next phase of a smoother, more complete integration of the Internet into daily life.