Seth Godin

Seth W. Godin, also known by the pen name “F. X. Nine,” is an American author, marketing expert, entrepreneur, and former dot-com business executive. Born in 1960, he came of age before the commercial web and built much of his public work during the period when online marketing, direct marketing, and internet publishing were taking shape. His career has moved between books, startups, teaching, and media, with a steady focus on how ideas reach people.

Godin graduated from Williamsville East High School in Williamsville, New York, in 1978. He went on to Tufts University, where he earned a degree in computer science and philosophy, and later earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. That mix helps explain the range of his work: technical enough to understand the internet as a system, but also concerned with choice, behavior, and how people decide what matters.

After leaving Spinnaker in 1986, Godin used $20,000 of his own money to start Seth Godin Productions, a book packaging business he ran from a studio apartment in New York City. In 1995, he and Mark Hurst co-founded Yoyodyne, a permission marketing company named after the fictional Yoyodyne in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. Yoyodyne used contests, online games, and scavenger hunts to market companies to participating users. Flatiron Partners invested $4 million in the company in 1996, and in 1998 Godin sold Yoyodyne to Yahoo! for $29.6 million, becoming Yahoo’s vice president of direct marketing.

As an author, Godin has published a long list of business and marketing books. His selected works include Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers, Unleashing the Ideavirus, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, Free Prize Inside!, The Dip, Tribes, Linchpin, This Is Marketing, The Practice, and The Song of Significance. His books have received wide business attention: Free Prize Inside was named Forbes Business Book of the Year in 2004, The Dip became a New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Business Week bestseller, and Business Week later listed Linchpin among “20 of the best books by the most influential thinkers in business.”

Godin’s later ventures continued to center on participation and learning. He launched Squidoo in March 2006, and by July 2008 it was one of the 500 most visited sites in the world before being sold to HubPages in 2014. In 2015, he founded altMBA, a four-week online workshop, and he also runs the podcast Akimbo. He was included in Time’s 25 best blogs of 2009, entered the American Marketing Association’s Marketing Hall of Fame in 2018, and won the 2018 Jack Covert Award for Contribution to the Business Book Industry. His line, “How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?” fits the plain challenge running through much of his work: notice what is possible, then make something worth choosing.