As the CEO of Sparktoro, author of “Lost and Founder”, and former CEO of Moz, Rand Fishkin talks about the economic and power structure that comes with financing a business, and discovering a solid understanding of yourself: what you like to do, what you don’t like to do, and how you want to (or don’t want to) contribute to the world in the long run. Every few weeks as part of The Heartbeat, I ask one question to a founder, CEO, or business owner I respect about their biggest leadership lesson learned. This week, I interview Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SparkToro, Author of “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World”, and Former CEO of Moz. CLAIRE: Hi everyone, I’m Claire Lew and I’m the CEO of Know Your Team and today, I’m thrilled to have with me, Rand Fishkin who is the former founder of Moz, this amazing SEO software company that’s been around for 17-some years and Rand now runs SparkToro, his new startup and recently, published a book called ‘Lost and Founder’ about his trials and tribulations as an entrepreneur. Rand is someone who I definitely looks up to as a leader, someone who’s always honest and very open with the world and I’m excited to have you here today, to ask you this one question about leadership. RAND: Yeah, Claire. It’s my pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. CLAIRE: You bet. Okay, Rand. This is the question that I’ve been asking leaders who I admire and it’s, “What’s one thing you wish you would have learned earlier as a leader?” RAND: I think one of the biggest things that I failed to understand, it’s two things. I think one of them is the economic and power structure that comes with financing of different kinds for a business. Initially, I raised some debt with Moz and then, some venture capital and then a whole lot more venture capital and I could carry it for some extraordinary, truly wonderful people, some of the best people in that field. I don’t think I have a good understanding of just how that structure works and who it’s empowering, and who is helping, and how they contributes to the world. I think the second thing is and I think this is probably true for a lot of people who like me, started a business in their early 20s, which is that I don’t think I had a strong understanding — a solid understanding — of myself and what I love and what I like to do and how I want to contribute to the world and how I really didn’t. The mash up of those two things created a lot of the strife and stress and when those things were most aligned or when I was most ignorant of them and paying no attention to them — things went very well. That’s a challenge I think that a lot of founders, especially over the last 20 years or so, as venture capitalist had been put forward as not just the best, but almost the only way to build a company in the tech world. Either you are raising or you want to raise or you’re trying to do something that you think will interest investors so that you can raise and the number of companies and entreprene