By focusing on everything from effective marketing and leadership, to the spread of ideas and changing everything, Seth Godin has been able to motivate and inspire countless people around the world.
In the late 1990s, Godin co-founded Yoyodyne, a permission marketing company, a form of advertising that gives the audience the choice to opt-in to receive promotional messages. The technique revolutionised online advertising. In 1998, Godin sold Yoyodyne to the search engine Yahoo! for $29.6 million and became Yahoo!’s Vice President of direct marketing. Since then, he has founded a string of highly successful companies, including Squidoo. The company’s innovation was to allow users to create “lenses” dedicated to their favourite subjects, whether they be cars or coffee makers.
What Godin practises, he also teaches. He is the author of 21 best-sellers, which have been translated into 38 languages. His 1999 work Permission Marketing changed the way brands reach consumers by providing them with incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. His 2007 work Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us, meanwhile, explains how the internet eliminated barriers of language, geography and time to create new communities and new leaders gathered around causes. And his 2024 work This is Strategy: How to Make Better Plans teaches leaders how to make decisions that lead to long-term change. The work was named a Best Non-Fiction Book of 2024 by The Next Big Idea Book Club and was a National Bestseller in the United States.
Godin has a degree in computer science and philosophy from Tufts University, and an MBA from Stanford Business School. He is currently working as a coordinator of The Carbon Almanac, a collection of tools for people who are eager to learn more about climate change and take action.
