Category: Race & Identity

I’m OK being the first black anything. I’m an innovator, by my nature I like going into things others likely haven’t done. So when it comes to race…I’ve actually never needed to “see black people” in the role to feel like it was possible for me. (However in my years as a hockey goalie, Grant Fuhr and Pokey Reddick were 2 of my heroes.)

I spoke at Searchlove last week and as we got closer to the conference I asked if I could get 2 tickets for a few folks whom were underrepresented in our industry and they instantly said sure.

Cursing at work

Swearing at work, or even worse on stage, is unprofessional is a widely held belief — to which I say and have continued to say “Fuck that, I’mma be me.”

I’ve been saying that for 15+ years of speaking, my motivation was always: “I’mma be me and I’m going to put the pressure on myself to add enough value that I’ll be invited back in spite of some people being put off.”

I can’t present nearly as well, if my internal dialogue is constantly being filtered to be professional. That is also me being inauthentic to myself and I’m not good at that.

So it was a shock to me when a young black man (whom I invited to come) came up to me and had some feedback about my presentation. But first…

The curse of being a young black man who “can make it”

Here’s a little thing about being black and “articulate / smart / etc” when you are young… A lot of well meaning people will tell you “you’ve got a shot, keep being like XYZ, and you can really make it.”

Heck, my mother used to say “Be more Grant Hill and less Allen Iverson.”

So this week when I was on stage letting it rip, as I do, one of the young men from Hopeworks was in the crowd. Hopeworks is an organization that Seer peeps have poured a lot of time (and money) into over the years to help young folks get exposure to careers in digital.

“I’ve never seen anything like you did Wil”

There it was.

One of the young men said that to me. He had been told his whole life as a smart, articulate black man who grew up in Camden NJ (at one point the most dangerous city in the US), that saying “swear words” and other “urban slang” would keep him from getting opportunities in the professional world much less opportunities to present his passions on stages.

Being authentic to myself was inspirational to him

I don’t like to think of myself as inspirational to anyone because it is presumptuous. Saying “I inspire people” is just not how I get down.

As I left the conference, I reminded him 2x to hit me up and set up a time for me to walk him through the presentations and answer any questions he may have had from the various presenters (he has set that meeting up!) and in exchange he’ll teach me more about tik tok — as he’s gone viral 10+ times and knows a ton more than I do 🙂 (He reminded me that I had met him 2 years earlier at a mentoring session). Here’s his message!

Re: Diversity I’m not the “make a statement CEO”

When I say I am comfortable with Seer’s slow progress on diversity, what I mean is that I’m in the field doing real shit with young black and brown people, I make mentorship / volunteering a priority and I allow all Seer people to do this work at any time of the day they want. Fuck a statement, I gotta look at myself in the mirror and ask…am I doing all I can.

Whether I’m running through neighborhoods impacted by gun violence like Frankford “yelling miles up guns down, don’t shoot protect the youth” with other people or using my heft as a speaker to get a few people invited to a conference to expose them to digital. I’m putting my time in — in a TON of places right now and I’m proud of the work I’m putting in.

Shout outs

This young man’s experience was only possible due to a lot of other people and they should also get their flowers.

Lauren “buck nasty” Boyd

Thank you for putting in the work with Hopeworks day in and day out — when I reached out looking for impressive underrepresented young people, there you were you knew exactly who to reach out to and yeah he’s impressive AF, you’ve been at this for YEARS and thank you for mentoring with Hopeworks young people for years, you put in extra work before, during, and after work to help so many of their youth impress people in interviews.

Lynsey Jones

Lyns, it’s impossible to find a photo of us together because you are always in the background making things run. When I had a request of you to help me get more young underrepresented folks in the room, you were all about it. You inspired me to start thinking…how can I use my heft as a speaker to try to leverage that heft to get more opportunities to get young people coming up into rooms like these, lets see what I come up with. Come back to Philly next year and lets do something BIGGER together.

Rand Fishkin & Will Critchlow & Shawn Collins

You all in your own ways ran organizations that allowed me to “be me” when I presented. That gave me confidence to bring my authentic self to the stage year after year after year. You put me in a position for this to happen, just maybe if I had gotten enough “You should tone it downs” over the years this wouldn’t have happened.

Brad Aronson

I wouldn’t have even known who Hopeworks was if it wasn’t for you. Thank you for always finding ways to put good into the world. If ya’ll want a copy of the book I got a few to give out (kindle only).

Probably. Mom taught me to make sure it was their loss, not mine.

I think it’s extremely difficult to prove someone didn’t hire you because of your race, gender. You just know it happens (the data proves it) but due to a slew of reasons that might not even be known to the hiring manager (biases), it’s hard to say, I wasn’t hired because I was black. One company I tried so hard to get into is run someone who isn’t racist one bit, but after 2–3 attempts, they never hired me. More on that below.

I never expected fairness

Today I was talking about company diversity with a friend and it hit me that maybe the reason why I never really harped on “fewer opportunities for POC” was that my mom drilled in my head day after day that I was never going to get a 50/50 shot, so I wonder if hearing that every day for 10 years (it felt like every day), my normal is “of course I have to be outstanding to get a fair shake” “If I am as good as my white counterpart, I’m pretty much never going to get a 50/50 shake.”

My mom taught me that complaining about racism is like wishing it would stop raining. Go get an umbrella boy and get outside. I guess my umbrella was striving for excellence, protection against the “elements”.

I realized that to get a 50/50 shake I was going to have to be better than my “opponent” and so much better that it was obvious and noticeable, not on the margins.

Know your worth down to the nickel, or be stuck in “do they like me” hell.

If you don’t know your ROI to your company, then you are stuck making your pitch for advancement / hiring on, schmoozing with the boss for late night drinks, tenure, or other things. I moved fast in my career because I chose a job where it was easy to have the receipts, every day. If I know I am directly contributing to the metrics that help my manger get their promotions, bonuses, etc, then “liking me” hopefully takes a back seat. If you promote that person you like, but they can’t contribute to your career progression like I do, that is a bad idea.

Enter digital marketing — I never was confused about my impact

Maybe that is why I loved SEO when I started in August of 1999… At the end of the day, I outranked you or I didn’t, either we were winning (page 1) or losing (page 2 of 15,000,000). I didn’t get to complain to AltaVisa, I had to be BETTER than others, white or black, and if I was better it was undeniable that I knew what I was doing. It also meant that when I got my butt kicked, I had NO ONE to blame. Someone out there was smarter, testing more, doing more than I was, and I could change that.

That competitive spirit sticks with me to this day, so if you are black, brown, woman, whatever, find a job where “do people like me” can be trumped easily by “damn look at those results”. I might have had bosses who didn’t “like me” but my results in those early days was “undeniable”, so they kept me, supported me, etc.

Seer, should have been built inside someone elses company

After knocking on doors to try to get jobs and never getting an interview over 18 months, I started Seer at the age of 26-ish. Which is the other side of what my mom beat into my head…you won’t know if you didn’t get picked because you were black, but you can make them rue the day they didn’t give you a shot.

I guess that is another blessing as I see it, the company I built at Seer I would have gladly built inside someone else’s company, I couldn’t get a job though.

I NEVER wanted to start a business, and its why I don’t run this one anymore. I’d say 80% of the companies I tried to get a job at before starting Seer don’t exist and didn’t have GREAT exists, one actually asked me to buy them 7 years ago, two went on to be HUGE. One of the companies former CEOs has been a mentor of mine for like 7 years, he spends hours and hours every week working with black & brown youth in our city (and has done so since the early days), so his company didn’t overlook me b/c I was black, it could have been 100 other reasons, but not my race. Either way, worked out for him…and me (and we joke about this all the time).

I can not say I was overlooked because of my race at any of the 20–30 companies I tried to get into before starting Seer, how would I prove it?

But overlooking hiring me in 2001–2003, for whatever reason, it cost a whole lot of companies some headaches 🙂

If you feel like you’ve been overlooked for a job because of your race, gender, etc, I’ll give you the advice my mom gave me, get so good at your job, that they rue the day they didn’t pick you!

As I prepare to help Philly launch the NorthStar conference (a digital conference for black and brown people). I can’t help but wonder, both of my boys are black, are they both welcomed? Heck what about Vietnamese people in our city, are they included? I was conflicted.

That leads me to deeper questions on diversity, which I’ve always struggled with.

I think diverse teams make better products / outcomes. I can thank Leslie Miley for opening my eyes to that on this podcast.

What happens when one type of diversity is worn publicly (skin color) and many others are not (like class or gender)…could you imagine someone saying, we don’t have enough “Sexual Orientation” diversity, to their CEO/HR/ETC, its like how the fuck do you know? I had a friend who was challenged on gay/trans diversity in their company, to which she was like…ummm “how do you know” to the person who challenged her.

This leads me to…

… Is my lighter son able to claim his blackness? If someone wants a “diverse speaker lineup”, would they skip over him if he doesn’t go around wearing his blackness on his sleeve? My other son wears his on his face.

My wife recently ran a conference where some of the feedback she got was that they always have white men keynote (or something to that effect), but the keynote was actually bi-racial, he even mentioned it. But once he got on stage a certain minority of voices painted him as a white guy, so when he mentioned that he was biracial, it never registered b/c they were so amp’ed up on “another white guy” talking about diversity topics.

Honestly, if you’ve ever tried to put on a conference that had an ethnically diverse speaker lineup, would only one of my sons have met your criteria? If so, you don’t count people who are part black but don’t pass your skin color test unless they come out with a raised fist or something? Do the only people who count wear this on their sleeve or on their skin?

As a lot of well meaning folks push for diversity, I can’t help but wonder, what happens to biracial people? I’ve seen biracial people at Seer who look like one ethnicity claim both races, claim multiple races, and claim one of their two. That is their right 100%, it’s their truth.

That’s a huge problem with this push to diversify our workforces…if companies publish diversity numbers, does my lighter skinned son count 1/4th as much as my darker skinned son? Who gets to make that call?

Is it like, who’s more likely to get pulled over and shot by a cop? Is that the way we determine who’s black enough to count?

This is the complexity we must respect… Then with transgender, if we allow people to say, hey I identify as gender A, even though I was born as gender B, can we allow people who look white to say I identify as black now ? Or vice versa? How’d that work out for Rachel Dolezal?

Why not?

This shit is complex, I believe in diversity, just want to add more thoughts to a complicated effort. Let me clear this up for all you well meaning do gooders out there, I’m THANKFUL that you are pushing for inclusivity, just keep in mind that this shit is complex and in including one group, are you making judgements about another minority group / forcing them into buckets?

Maybe the first answer is to not have a number, but without that we don’t have accountability.

I’m at a loss, but I want to be part of the solution, I know that.

So while I’m working at one of our standing desks at our new office in the East Village section of San Diego, a homeless guy comes in peeking in our office (in SD we’re in a first floor retail space, that is all windows w/ no tint yet) in an “up and coming area”. Having this much homelessness around us and being on the first floor where the only thing separating us from “these people” is a piece of glass is a major distraction at times, and a potential safety issue.

Watching someone take a pee on your window while you are on a conference call with a client sucks, but its a reminder that that person has to pee in front of people every day, being in this space creates instant connections with people who are “out there” it is a reminder that we have a responsibility to do something about this, at some point its hard to ignore when you see 3,5,10 homeless people a day peeking in…we’re not up on the 3rd or 4th floor with security in the lobby. We’re on the front lines.

We have to be aware of our surroundings here.

We’re not off in an office park somewhere. Its bumpy and I want to do everything I can to make sure my team is safe, a part of me is thankful that we can’t ignore the tough life that so many people are struggling with, if you have a tough conference call, that suddenly doesn’t compare to not having a place to pee in private, right?

I’ve seen people having sex (I’m 99% sure they are homeless, but can’t be 100%), regularly at their favorite spot behind the parking garage, from our office in Philly to the ground to see all the “details” of what goes on. Our Philly neighborhhod has finally “flipped” since we located there 15 years ago, but it was similar there in our early days.

When I think “why grow” that’s a big part of it, we can do more good when we grow. So full speed ahead, if not us, who?

I’m reminded of this quote:

I’m so thankful that I don’t have to work only to maximize “shareholder value” or “please the investors”, I get to maximize our impact by building a team of people who believe we need to be a part of building up our neighborhoods, which is more than just financial.

I’m not saying Seer or Seer’s people know squat about how to help, but we can not ignore what we see, because every day throughout the day and when we leave we’re confronted with what we see, and we can choose as a company, but also as individuals to ignore it or be a part of learning, listening, and acting. We just don’t want to be the people who some in and help “flip” a neighborhood while the people get displaced.

Here is a great organization in our neighborhood doing great work to educate us on how as we grow, we can have a respectful & meaningful impact on our neighborhood, check their instagram.

Note: Literally while writing this a girl went by let her beautiful pit bull drop a BIG fucking shit right in front of me, I grabbed a bag and ran out and gave it to her. That’s an example of the kind of thing that happens when you are on the front lines. (Shout out to adam melson, for giving me the courage to approach people when shit like that happens and saying hey, here’s a way to clean up).

“You can trust me, I’m not like the other black people who ask you for your Airbnb, I have a nanny.”

Sucks to read it, but I said it, well not in so many words. I coded it, I’m “different”, judge me if you want, sometimes you gotta use all the ammo you got.

Thank God I’ve never considered myself “a success”…it makes the slap of discrimination sting less, which you’ll get a feel for below.

The company I founded … we’ve been awarded awards from:
Inc 5000 fastest growing company, Inner City 100, Philly 100 all multiple years, so I made it, right?? Not so fast.

I speak at conferences globally, Brazil, Scotland, London, Peru, Dublin, Turkey, in the last year. So I Made it, right? Not so fast.

My company is profitable, pretty damn profitable. I’m not on this list, but I’m doing OK, so I made it, right?. Not. So. Fast.

In spite of all that “success” I still had someone see my photo and choose NOT to share their home with me on Airbnb. Now maybe, just maaaaybe the dude made a mistake, but this is the cognitive load of being black. Code, don’t code, hoodie up when its cold, or keep it down so you aren’t threatening, there’s a lot of mental back and forth, even for a guy like me who lives in a city and is insulated from a lot of this crap.

My wife and I are looking for a long term Airbnb, I found an option available, it was declined. After hearing about airbnbwhileblack my radar has been up to declines on the Airbnb platform since I use them more and more.

Recently I submitted a request for dates that were available. I got back, a simple…SORRY. That’s it, at this point most of you would move on, but I gotta stop and think, hmmmm, you said you had availability…why not now? And why has this happened 2x in the same day?

But wait, I got all the reviews, see I’m Good!! Don’t even get me started on getting pulled over, which I have been a few times (every time I deserved it, and every time I was treated fairly to very well all by white cops).

FAIL!!! I had received 2 rejections that day for people who had availability, we’re still holding out for the first one to see when he takes his listing down, as of right now, Airbnb is investigating and my attempt to bait one guy failed.

So to see if this guy was discriminating or not, my wife, 24 hours later hit him up, originally asking for 2 weeks, but then asked for an extension well past my dates, which he approved (its the same chick, this guy really was slipping).

I don’t blame the guy for rejecting, hey its probably his bias, we all have bias, but that doesn’t mean I gotta like it. This guy could have slipped and made a mistake, but I gotta wonder, hmmm is there a reason there? Maybe, maybe not, but tonight I gotta go to bed thinking…hmmm, if I was white I would have been approved by this one, and maybe the 4–5 other rejections I’ve gotten on the platform. I go to bed reminded that a lovely white woman (my wife), who has half the reviews I have, who doesn’t directly pay for our vacation rentals & who doesn’t have to code her emails to get by racial filters, got picked over me… the one people so many people call “successful”. Hmmmmm….Chris Rock said it best.

Note: Shout out to Airbnb, your team was on the scene SUPER fast and have been amazing.

Seer is constantly hiring, and in particularly at this time we had a REALLY sizable need. We were getting close to turning down business, our PPC team was already putting prospects on a 8–12 week start time. Our inability to hire fast was hurting our growth!

Note: I live in complete fear of hurting our reputation by closing deals and “back filling” talent. So I’ve told the team, we have to turn away business if it means we’re going to risk reputation & referral sources by taking on something and hiring unvetted peeps.

One of our recruiters kept an eye on my internal praise, shout outs, etc and indexed some of my perceived highest performers based on my feedback.

Then, during a particularly intense time of hiring, I think she got sick of me dismissing people based on their resumes alone.

I operate on a move fast and break things mentality, so I am making judgments about people & companies in seconds of viewing a resume (or about us page). For resumes, before I even read a word, I’m looking at the design, I might dismiss it based on the design alone.

She had a hypothesis, that sometimes by running fast that I might miss out on top performers because I’m judging people too fast and don’t invest the time to take that coffee or first interview, and she was right.

So like any data driven marketer, she ran a test. She brought me another set of resumes. This time with made up names on them, but I didn’t know that.

As I went through each of them, she asked me to rate them on 3 criteria on a scale of 1–5, based on if I’d move them to the next round of interviews.

Nope, Nope, Yup. I threw our 2’s — 5’s — 1’s with lightning speed. Done.

When I finished my work in 5 minutes, she told me the actual names of the people. 2 of them were people I had been praising internally left and right, week in and week out, month in and month out. I wouldn’t have even hired them based on their resume alone. Today I rely on these people to take us to new heights.

How could someone who I’m praising as critical to Seer’s future not have gotten an interview if I was in charge?

Bias.

Fast moving, heck slow moving peeps, there’s value in looking at your high performers’ resumes when they first applied. Are you getting it right? What are you getting wrong. The later is where you start to find your bias, where are you over-weighting / under-weighting factors? That will make you better at hiring.

Other things I’ve seen to expose bias…taking names off of resumes and see a year later who you would have / would not have hired…look back at the past year. Find your bias.

Great marketers are constantly seeking to better understand how their individual life experiences / thought patterns are getting in the way to them doing the most good for the most people.

We challenge ourselves by looking at our wage gap, why? Because we know we have bias, and if we don’t put some data and checks to that bias we’re not doing the most good for the most people.

Have you already overlooked that next great hire that can take you to the next level b/c you are moving so fast? That next great hire might just be in that stack of NOs from the past, put a recruiter on that, they have more time than you and just might take a coffee with that next great hire, you would have missed.

Update 3/7/2018 — we’re going to update this annually, so scroll to the bottom to see our newest #’s.

Saying you are data driven is the new thing, but I find more and more that people don’t want data, because it’s a proof point. If the data has a chance of telling you your idea sucks, do you want it? NOPE.

Data makes you accountable, and many of us only want data that fits our world view. Public data makes you VERY accountable. So regardless of how my numbers on pay equity ended up, I decided I was going to share this post.

I had this exact same fear about pay equity at Seer. I had ZERO idea where we would land. How can I go into the world telling clients to be “data driven” if the FEAR of pulling data on my own company was keeping me from doing the same things I ask of them?

Here’s How It Started…

This article came out saying that Comcast threatened to sue the city of Philadelphia over our attempt to stop employers from asking people their previous salary. Sounds like a good idea to me, since we know that asking people what they made before impacts what they get. It also continues to widen the pay gap because if someone starts off being paid less, then you asking this can perpetuate keeping them low.

I was pissed that this got such push back, and as another Philly founder, Chris Cera, and I talked about how this was bullshit and we should do something…I got a lump in my throat.

Those in glass houses…

I was pissed that the Chamber and Comcast would sue to fight against the law, but had NO idea where my own company landed. So I asked Emily, our People Ops champion who leads our salary transparency initiative, to check our data. I hoped and prayed it would come back with something I could be proud of, but had no idea.

So I prepped, what would I say to my company if the pay equity numbers were shit? This is my outline:

Be Honest: Tell the team what the numbers are, tell them what you think about them, and share with the team what you are going to do about it.

Be Consistent: So who cares what the number is this time, if the number is good or bad, make sure its purposeful. Swallow that pill, tell the team, and then commit to posting the numbers at a regular interval internally to let people know we aren’t running from this issue.

Be Open / Get Support: Start asking companies, who are hitting pay equity (or desire to get there) how they manage offers, offer negotiations (get rid of them), raises, etc. There are little gems in their work that might lead you to start making an impact.

Note: 4 years ago I wrote this and I believe that laid a groundwork and expectation for our people ops team that I didn’t want us asking salaries, not because of the gender impact, but maybe that example is what has lead us to being in an acceptable range.

Forgive yourself: These things are NOT done intentionally, you didn’t wake up one day and say I want to pay women less for the same work. There’s bias, there’s issues that impact peoples’ pay and how they perceive pay well before they got to your company. You didn’t start the ball in motion, but looking at the data is the first step, and you owe your conscious to know that the buck stops with you!

Celebrate: Celebrate? What if my numbers suck. You should still celebrate, why? Because now you know, you’ve shared it, and that makes you start the process. To be honest, at least your team may say…my company cares enough to look into this, and let us know where things land. Obviously if your company isn’t big enough these numbers don’t mean much, but check anyway, can’t hurt. It leads you to be purposeful.

Create a goal: Only you can know given your population what is a range you can sleep with — 3%, 5%, 10%, 15%? Anything is a better start if you are better than the national average. Knowing is better than not knowing.

The Data:

More recent statistics show in 2014 that women’s median pay has increased to 79 cents, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.[50]

Luckily, I found that men at Seer only make 1% (a number I can live with, this number is obviously in a state of flux) more than women as of “Equal Pay Day” on average, and women make more than men in some of our higher experienced roles (where we had large enough sample sizes). We now can start the process of using the thoughts above to be purposeful so we never accidentally slip into a place and not even know it, or not even be in the position to stop and question ourselves. I do think that this approach to ending offer letter negotiations that I wrote about 4 years ago helps pave a path. I hope we continue to stick with that as a company (I don’t do the hiring much anymore).

God knows, the federal government ain’t gonna do it. Comcast, I know you are working hard on your image, I love having you in this city, let’s try to fix this. It would be a great first step to have your support.

2017: Seer men, on average, make 1% more than women
2018: Seer women, on average, make 2% more than men

Extra: Thank God for Execs & Friends Like This

We’ve gone on a journey of more and more salary transparency as a company, and once you do it makes it easier to do things like this. If you want to know how we did it and how you can start to do it too, here’s a post. Emily is a DAMN PIONEER in HR, love having her with me on this push. It’s a lot of work to be transparent, it’s easy to keep shit to yourself so no one knows and no one can hold you accountable.

I was also mega proud of this guy Sayf Sharif for writing that piece linked above, gave me more courage to write this.

Sheryl Sandberg you continue to be the foundation for much of my inspiration on how I can try to be a great supportive husband to my wife as we both have challenging careers, which leads me to being a more empathetic manager. Keep pushing us.

Lastly THANK YOU Chris Cera, for bringing this to my attention. I would never have thought of looking if we didn’t have that conversation.

I Struggled to Write This

It would be easy to flash our numbers at the top and say look at us, and how great we are, that wasn’t why I wrote this. I want this post to be about the fear of my numbers being shit, even though I would never want that to have happened, the fear of transparency and other people knowing our numbers were shit, how as companies and executives, if we’re going to be public about our beliefs and transparent, we have to push for it even in times where we aren’t happy with what we’ve built. That is why I intentionally buried our #’s and instead shared the journey.