Earlier this month, I was 11 years at the company.
Time flies really fast, no doubt. And while personally I don’t feel it’s a big deal, a lot of people around me make me feel that it is. Others just ask me directly why am I staying at the same company for so long.
Since I find myself trying to answer this question more and more often, and since to me the answer is very simple and clear, I thought I should probably try and explain it in writing. Both for others and for myself.
The short answer is that I love the company, I believe in our mission and goals, and that I enjoy the day-to-day.
But what does it even mean?
You see I never really liked Financial markets, I learned to understand them and then to enjoy them only at Investing.com. I wasn’t fascinated by the financial markets for a very long time, but as I got to know them better, I’d start seeing patters. Seeing how the markets, or a trend makes people visit the site, search for something that leads to us or search within the site connected me to the markets, as my biggest passion since I was a little child was the web. Building something useful, then tracking and analyzing how people get things done on our sites and apps, and bring more of these people through SEO and other Marketing tactics.
For me, it has always been SEO and only then “the other Marketing tactics”. But since Google evolved during my years at Investing, my role evolved too. They say that your boss is one of the most important things at work, and my bosses and founders, always allowed me to evolve, grow, and be a significant part of what we do.
I really like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you know the one with the Wifi at the bottom? So the thing is that during my best periods at Investing.com, I was able to reach that Self-actualization feeling that Maslow was talking about. It’s not something you reach all the time at work, but I was there multiple times, and I keep reaching that point every time we do something really good, whether it’s the company as a whole, or one of my teams.
I do agree with many that doing the same thing for a very long time is very difficult, often frustrating, and that we as human beings we strive for change and new things all the time. We crave for something new.
Thankfully, this hasn’t been the case for me here. Not only that I changed my position a few times, the company has changed a lot too. Not only because we re-branded our domain or moved an office, but because today we are a much more mature company, with many new roles, abilities and different core values.
I’ve no idea if I’ll be at the company in 3, 5 or another 11 years. Things change way too fast in our online industry. But I do wish to keep having that Self-actualization feeling no matter where I am, and I wish the same to everyone I care about around me. Self-actualization at work is the 2nd best thing that can happen to anyone, right after being happy at home.
Starting a website from scratch means you’re debating whether to keep your office traffic data in GA or not, because it’s that significant. In 11 years we brought the our domain from zero to 20M unique users, 103M sessions on the web, 170M sessions together with our apps, and a total of 1.2B monthly pageviews. From 1 office with 6 employees to 5 active offices with over 300 employees. Investing.com is going to offer a few VERY interesting things in 2019 that I still can’t share, but the next 2 years are without a doubt going to be very, very interesting.