I’m Marieke van de Rakt.Together with my husband Joost, I invest in companies through our investment vehicle, Emilia Capital. From 2019 up until 2021, I was the CEO and co-owner of Yoast. In 2021, we decided to sell Yoast to Newfold Digital. This is my personal blog. On this blog, I write about my life as an entrepreneur, a CEO, and an investor.
Growing a company is mostly great fun. At the same time, it can be rather challenging. As the Yoast team grew very fast, we were forced to come up with different types of management structures. And, as a company grows, the culture of a company tends to change as well. One of my biggest challenges as a CEO was to make sure that our company culture remains as inviting and inspiring as it has always been.
In my work as a marketeer, both at Yoast and in my current role at Emilia, I am very much involved in how to tell a story and how to do the branding. In a previous lifetime, I obtained a PhD in social sciences. You can find my dissertation here and my other publications here.