StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Joost de Valk

Partner, Emilia Capital · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderinvestorexecutiveengineer@jdevalk ↗LinkedIn ↗joost.blog ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗

He is the founder of Yoast and creator of the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, which was acquired by Newfold Digital in 2021. Through his investment firm Emilia Capital, he invests in and advises early-stage open-source, web technology, and digital marketing ventures.

22statements → 8claims → 4claims resolved → 50%fully supported → 4.05/5average certainty → 2.27/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources →

2 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 3 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 predictions · 3 assertions · 2 opinions · 8 insights · 3 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Joost argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Yoast reached one million active users as a free hobby plugin
“Is that the plugin became really big, so it had like a million users. WordPress was growing quite fast, and I suddenly had on this free plugin that I built as a hobby, a million users, and I was spending way too much time supporting it.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 2:35 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
50% certainty 3
83% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.3 / 5 directness 4.6 · coherence 4.5 · precision 3.9 · compression 3.7

redirected or did not address 2 of 34 assessed questions (6%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

246 words/min while actually speaking · 21.6 um and uh per 1k words · 26.7 false starts per 1k · 42.4% of pauses land inside a clause

English is their second language (first language: Dutch). These numbers measure fluency in English. They do not measure thought; the argument clarity score above is read from substance alone.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 7,676 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 5/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 5/10
setup questions received 50%

Everything Joost de Valk said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
De Valk: Tech founders should stop optimizing software for power users
“Companies tend to optimize for the power user. And I think that's the thing that you don't have to do. That's like the exact opposite of what you should be doing. And it's very hard to do that well. So if you're just a developer leading a company like that, th…”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 13:03 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Joost de Valk: Google made tracking non-CPC marketing channels impossible
“Measuring the success of SEO is hard, because Google has very, very, very success, successfully, and I'm going to get shit for this Google has very successfully made it impossible for people to track the effect of anything but CPC.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 35:05 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
De Valk: Over-allocating free features in open source risks project forks
“Putting too much in free early on is dangerous, because you can't really take it back. And ah, that, I think that's where open source slightly differs from SaaS, SAS, because in SaaS SAS, you can just take it back. And in open source, as soon as you've put it …”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 11:14 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Joost de Valk: Founders are stupid to use any CMS besides WordPress
“And honestly, WordPress is out there. So if you, if you're going to use another CMS, I think you're pretty stupid because every other CMS is going to cost you more money.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 26:04 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Joost de Valk: SEO cannot create demand, only capture existing search intent
“You can't really create demand with SEO. So that, I mean, that is the thing that, that is very counterintuitive to a lot of people, but SEO is very demand driven, just like AdWords is very demand driven. The demand has to be there. You can't create the demand.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 31:09 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
De Valk: Search engines will weight content authors more over next few years
“Search engines are bound to focus more on the author of the content than they have done for a while, because it's actually important for them to make sure that what's on that page is, is true and is good. So they want to make sure that they can actually trust …”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 41:41 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Open · timeframe Apr 2028
De Valk: 60% to 80% of software code will be AI-generated in 5 years
“60 to 80. I, the thing is, it allows you to focus on business logic a whole lot more.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 53:53 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
De Valk: Branding is the most underestimated element in open source
“So the biggest underestimated thing in all of open source is branding, like actually building a proper brand for your company and thinking about, Hey, how, how do we want people to look at us?”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 11:52 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
De Valk: Freemium startups build for scale they will never achieve
“A lot of those companies are also like, they're building for scale that they're never going to reach.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 19:59 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
De Valk: Google will double down on E-E-A-T to combat AI content
“This is going to create a wave of very, very bad content on the web, and how are we going to surface the really good content? And that's why I expect them to be doubling down on things like the EA team, the things which they've had, expertise, authority, trust…”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 46:18 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Yoast generated over $100K in its first month of monetization
“If I'm going to make a hundred K with this in the first year, then it's actually worth continuing doing this, and then I made more than a hundred K in the first month.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 0:02 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Joost de Valk: Website owners want technical SEO abstracted away entirely
“There's basically two sides SEO, right? You have the technical stuff and you have the content side of things, and the technical stuff is not something that anyone wants to think about.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 1:28 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Joost de Valk: Headcount is the only major cost in plugin businesses
“The funny thing about our sort of business is that you, the only cost that you really have is people.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 5:15 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
De Valk: Freemium open-source brings web-scale problems with small-company income
“So what you get quite quickly with these models is that you have web skill problems and small company income.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 8:43 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
De Valk: Yoast reached €15M annual revenue across 11M sites at peak
“I mean, at its peak, Yoast was a fifteen million euros a year revenue when we sold. That's not a whole lot of money compared to the eleven million sites that we were running on at that time.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 8:54 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
De Valk: WordPress powers over 40% of websites versus Shopify's 2-3%
“More than 40% of websites on the web are WordPress sites. And companies like Shopify, and I heard your podcast with Toby, which was awesome, but Shopify has like two, three percent of the market, if that.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 9:26 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Partly held up
De Valk: SEO investment increases during economic downturns
“SEO is probably going to be invested in more instead of less in a down market because people look at their AdWords bill and they go like, oh, maybe we should do something about that.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 18:48 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Joost de Valk: Series B companies should shift 10% of CPC budget to SEO
“So if you're already doing CPC, I take 10% of your CPC budget and allocate it to SEO.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 34:32 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Joost de Valk: Yoast never spent money on ads before its acquisition
“So that's one of the funny things when you start selling your company, people start asking for things like your cost of acquisition per customer, and we were like, we never spent any ads, so it, ah, how, how would you calculate this?”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 38:59 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Yoast reached one million active users as a free hobby plugin
“Is that the plugin became really big, so it had like a million users. WordPress was growing quite fast, and I suddenly had on this free plugin that I built as a hobby, a million users, and I was spending way too much time supporting it.”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 2:35 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Joost de Valk: Yoast powers 13M websites with ~120 employees
“In terms of, or any more, it's not, it's a hundred people, but if you look at, like, thirteen million websites having a 120 or so people is really not all that much people, right?”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 6:52 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
What-if
Joost de Valk: Had Yoast planned for acquisition, he would have hired less
“Had I known in the beginning that we'd be selling the company at some point, and how this all would go, I might have hired a bit less people”
Joost de Valk Apr 12, 2023 ▶ 6:09 Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · Apr 12, 2023 39m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more