Rand Fishkin talks with Jason Barnard about the Lost and Founder.

Rand Fishkin, the Cofounder and CEO of SparkToro and Snackbar Studio, and author of "Lost and Founder, reflects on how his public association still heavily favors his past with Moz over his current ventures like SparkToro, highlighting how deeply embedded digital narratives are and how hard they are to shift.

Rand shares with Jason Barnard the realities of startups, venture capital, and the misleading myths of Silicon Valley. Rand explained the harsh truth behind venture funding—most startups fail, only a tiny few succeed, and the pressure for hypergrowth damages sustainable businesses.

He emphasized the need for entrepreneurs to abandon the outdated “minimum viable product” mindset and instead build “exceptional viable products”—like his approach with SparkToro and SnackBar.

They wrapped up by discussing the importance of aligning your business model with the life you actually want. Jason Barnard and Rand Fishkin agreed that resisting external pressure for rapid scaling brings lower stress and greater fulfillment.

What you’ll learn from Rand Fishkin

00:00 Rand Fishkin and Jason Barnard

02:13 Where Does the Knowledge Panel of Rand Fishkin Focus More, According to Jason Barnard?

02:30 What Information Does Google Learn About Show About Rand Fishkin as Stated by Jason Barnard?

03:11 Why Has Rand Fishkin Not Yet Explored or Used the Google Learn About Feature?

03:34 What is One of the Big Frustrations of Rand Fishkin in His Efforts to Change His Brand Identity?

04:00 What Can Kalicube® Do to Change the Problem of Shifting Your Brand Identity?

04:09 Why Did the Problem With Boowa (The Blue Dog) Weigh so Heavily on Jason Barnard in Brand Identity?

04:58 How Much Has the Startup Landscape Changed Since 2018, According to Rand Fishkin?

05:35 Why Has the Reputation of Tech Companies and Entrepreneurs Declined?

06:15 Why Did Many People Inside the Industry Despise Lost and Founder When It Was Published in 2018?

07:05 What Are the Terrible, Ugly Parts of the Venture Capital System From the Book Lost and Founder?

08:00 How Does the Venture Capital Funding Model Work?

08:30 Why Does the Venture Capital Model Expect Most Startups to Fail?

09:54 Why Don’t People Talk About What Happens Inside Venture-Backed Businesses?

10:35 Why is Being in the Position of a Company Like Moz, Making Enough but Not Big Money, so Hard?

11:45 Where Does the Cupcake Theory Come From?

11:55 What is the Exceptional Viable Product Concept?

12:28 What is the Minimal Viable Product Concept?

13:36 Why Did the Lean Startup Approach Work In the Early Days of Tech but No Longer Work Today?

14:35 How Did Rand Fishkin Apply the Cupcake Model in Building Sparktoro and Snackbar?

15:00 What Did Gia and Claire From Forget the Funnel Find During Their Product Test for Sparktoro?

16:09 Why Was Rebuilding the Product Less Difficult During the Private Beta Testing Phase?

17:02 Why is the Expectation for Products in Software, Technology, and Other Fields So Much Higher Today?

17:42 What is the Common Founder Mentality in Building Products?

18:26 Why Do You Need Investor Patience and Independence When Building a Product?

19: 26 Why Do Cupcake Ventures Expect a Lifecycle Return of 10 to 15 Years From Their Investments?

20:37 How Do You Resist the Pressure From Investors Who Are Not Very Patient?

21:28 How Does Cultural Pressure From the Industry Affect Startup Founders and Their Success?

22:21 How Does Pressure Affect the Confidence and Decision-Making of Founders in Their Role?

23:22 Why is it Important to Avoid Pressure From External Parties or Culture When Building a Business?

24:05 Why is it Important for Founders to Reject Business Strategies That Do Not Fit How They Work Best?

25:16 Why Do Some Founders Avoid Scaling Fast Even if it Means Leaving Money on the Table?

This episode was recorded live on video June 17th 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl1F0DOa8WI

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:Rand Fishkin

Transcript from Rand Fishkin with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Lost and Founder

[00:00:00] Rand Fishkin: The venture capital environment creates a path that is successful for extraordinarily small numbers of people and far fewer than most tech entrepreneurs and people who join tech startups and are recruited and work in that field understand and believe. And the complexities of that environment, the competing demands and the incentive structure is much more complicated than what's traditionally been presented to entrepreneurs and founders. And I am trying to open that Pandora's box and take out all the ugly secrets and show the whole ecosystem for what it is, which is not all terrible and bad. There are good parts of it, and I think some parts are worth keeping.

[00:00:56] Rand Fishkin: Which is why I'm still an entrepreneur and a founder and someone who raises money. Not from venture capitalists anymore, I still believe in parts of that world and I still love parts of that job but I think we can optimize away from the parts that are terrible and ugly and have poor incentives. 

[00:01:15] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives, and gets them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy?

[00:01:38] Narrator: A legacy we're proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. 

[00:01:44] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy. I'm here with a quick hello and we're good to go. Welcome to the show, Rand Fishkin. 

[00:01:56] Rand Fishkin: Howdy, Jason. Good to be here again. 

[00:01:58] Jason Barnard: It's lovely to have you back. So this is going to be a shorter episode than usual. We're going to be talking about startups and being the boss of a startup and investors and moving fast and breaking things and how difficult it is and is it more difficult today than it was before? All of that in a moment.

[00:02:13] Jason Barnard: But before that, my thing is Brand SERP and I always have to show people's Knowledge Panels. Yours what's absolutely delightful. Got all the facts straight, pretty much. It's unfortunately focusing more on Moz than it does on SparkToro, but I don't think that's a huge problem for you.

[00:02:30] Jason Barnard: But then I also looked at Google Learn About, which I really like because it's an educational kind of platform where you ask a question. It gives you context on the left, it gives you an interview right in the middle. It explains who you are. Gives some of the topics about you, key facts about Rand Fishkin with links through to what is an entrepreneur, which seems a bit weird as an idea, but there you go.

[00:02:51] Jason Barnard: And this is their experiment in America that we don't get in Europe right now, but I've been playing around with it a lot. And for me, this is where search and research is going in contexts and education and I actually quite like it. I enjoy it. Have you been playing around with that, with that at all, or not at all?

[00:03:11] Rand Fishkin: I have not been playing with that particular iteration. I know lots of folks who enjoy fooling around with that kind of thing. What are the large language models saying about their brand and I have done some research into that work. In particular, I was super interested, Jason, as I'm sure you were into, how does a large language model decide which things to place in there?

[00:03:34] Rand Fishkin: So in my case, one of the big frustrations is because I have 20 years of people saying, Rand Fishkin is associated with Moz and Search Engine Optimization. It's going to take a long time and a lot of web content to change that to what it is today, which is SparkToro and Audience Research and Snack Bar Studio and Indie video games.

[00:03:56] Rand Fishkin: That's going to take a long time. 

[00:04:00] Jason Barnard: What we do at Kalicube® is change the focus without actually necessarily having to drown it. It's improving the importance of the existing information. I had the problem with Boowa, or the Blue Dog, and we can talk about that later, is that has immense weight because it was so successful in the noughties, because it's in IMD, because I made records, because there's so much edutainment and entertainment information out there, it weighed very heavily and I found that I didn't need to outweigh it. I needed to outsmart it. To change Google's perception and start saying, Jason Barnard, an entrepreneur and digital marketer, rather than just burnouts a cartoon blue dog.

[00:04:39] Jason Barnard: But today we're talking about Fastlane. Sorry, we're talking about Lost and Founder because I can see the word founder twice on the screen. You wrote that back in 2018 talking about the challenges of Silicon Valley mythology about startups. How much has changed since then? 

[00:04:58] Rand Fishkin: Here's the strange thing about Lost and Founder is that I think today it feels more relevant and more prescient than it did at the time it was published. So I think, when I published Lost and Founder, there was still a golden era of venture capital startup funding and that ecosystem existing. And today especially, you know, post New American administration, funding has dried up and gone to hell.

[00:05:35] Rand Fishkin: I think that the perception of tech companies, and especially of tech entrepreneurs as heroes of American capitalism and these remarkable people in the world, that reputation has gone to hell.