Seth Godin

Seth Godin was born on July 10, 1960 in Mount Vernon, New York, the second of four children in a Jewish family. He grew up in Buffalo, earned a degree in computer science and philosophy from Tufts University in 1982, and took an MBA in marketing from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1984. He worked briefly as a brand manager at Spinnaker Software before striking out on his own.

In 1986 he founded Seth Godin Productions, a book-packaging company that produced and licensed business titles. He sold the company in the mid-1990s and launched Yoyodyne, an early online direct-marketing firm built around opt-in promotions. Yahoo! acquired Yoyodyne in 1998 and he served for a year as its vice president of direct marketing, where he refined the ideas that became his signature framework.

His 1999 book Permission Marketing argued that interrupting strangers with ads no longer worked and that brands had to earn the right to keep talking to people. He followed it with Unleashing the Ideavirus in 2000, distributed free as a PDF, and then Purple Cow in 2003, which urged businesses to build remarkable products rather than buy attention. Later titles include Tribes (2008), Linchpin (2010), and This Is Marketing (2018).

He launched the daily blog Seth's Blog in 2002 and has posted to it nearly every day since, making it one of the longest-running and most-read marketing blogs in the world. In 2005 he founded Squidoo, a user-generated content platform later folded into HubPages, and he runs the altMBA workshop. He was inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame in 2013.

The name Seth comes from the Hebrew Shet, meaning "appointed" or "placed," and belongs in the Book of Genesis to the third son of Adam and Eve, born after the death of Abel. It carries this biblical weight as a masculine given name across Jewish and Christian traditions.