Conductor Employees Buy Back Company in WeWork Spinout

In 2006, Seth Besmertnik and Jeremy Duboys founded LinkExperts, a company that helped enterprise businesses build deep links at a time when search engines struggled to fully crawl a site. In 2010, they divested the link-building business. Forty co-founders from the former LinkExperts team then launched Conductor, an SEO platform for enterprises. In March 2018, Conductor hit two major milestones. Their growth rate exceeded 40%, and they were acquired by WeWork. After 20 months as an independent subsidiary under WeWork, Conductor leadership bought the company back on behalf of employees, spinning out as an independent, employee-owned business.

In 2016, WeWork became a customer of Conductor. After the first year, WeWork saw 150% year-over-year increase in qualified traffic. WeWork saw an opportunity to help enterprise companies in tandem with Conductor, offering valuable digital services to its members. Though the companies are now fully independent, WeWork remains one of Conductor’s largest customers.

At Conductor, we have a big mission — transform marketing into a force for improving people’s lives. As an independent business, we have the agility to execute faster and dedicate all of our resources towards delivering on this mission.

The spin-out is great news for customers. With our new ownership model, we’re more motivated than ever to up-level every aspect of our customers’ experience. Conductor is still Conductor – same team, same product, same purpose. The only changes our customers should expect to see from our employee-owned company: faster innovation, some surprise new perks, and more ways we can drive value for their business. We’re all in.