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    Video Of Matt Cutts Talking About The Early Days At Google

    Miss hearing from Google's Matt Cutts? Here is a 34 minute video of him giving a talk at UNC Chapel Hill the other week.

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    Google’s Matt Cutts, who is currently on leave, gave a talk a couple weeks ago at UNC Chapel Hill. The topic was the early days at working at Google and Matt provided some key takeaways for those who attended.

    The takeaways for the attendees were:

    • Be creative when in a tough spot
    • Be proactive and ask your boss to work on something that interests you
    • Question your assumptions
    • Set yourself apart from the crowd
    • Have fun and make sure to capture those moments with pictures and videos
    • Work on something that you think matters

    Here is the video of the 34 minute talk, followed by the slides:

    He did spend a few minutes talking about the webmaster and SEO community, as well as the legal issues he had to deal with while at Google.

    As a bonus, he shared the poll table (aka conference room table) the search quality team used early on to discuss updates:

    google-search-quality-pingpong-table


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    About the Author

    Barry Schwartz
    Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

    In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

    Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.