** Correction appended**
Ten years ago this month, Mike Mothner '03 began his search engine marketing company, Wpromote, in his Dartmouth dorm room. Over the next decade, Wpromote's office space multiplied many times, growing from 2,000 square feet to 12,000 square feet on its 10th anniversary.
"How are we going to fill this space?" Mike Block '04, Wpromote's vice president of client services, asked each time Mothner decided to relocate to a larger office. "Every single time we moved, it seemed like we were biting off much more than we could chew."
Despite Block's skepticism, Wpromote, which works to increase search engine presence and online advertising revenue for business giants ranging from Ford to BMW to Universal Music, continued to flourish.
The company's physical expansion reflected its economic growth, which has gained recognition from Inc. Magazine, TopSEOs.com and the Los Angeles Business Journal. The company grew by 3,807 percent between 2003 and 2009 and Mothner was named one of Inc. Magazine's "Top 30 CEOs Under 30 to Watch" in 2007, according to Wpromote's website.
Mothner currently serves as one of 12 members on Google's Search Engine Marketing Council, established as a way for Google to receive feedback from within the online industry. Mothner said he has stressed to the council the need for Google to focus on transparency and be "more open" with their data.
Mothner's idea for his company, currently based in El Segundo, Calif., originally arose from a recurring question posed by clients for whom he designed websites while he was a student at the College.
"I realized when I was done with the website, people asked, How do I get into the search engine?'" Mothner explained. "There was a need for a service that automates this process."
The proliferation of search engines made it difficult for companies to ensure they would appear in these search engines and get noticed, Mothner said.
Mothner found his niche confronting that issue when in 2001 he wrote software precisely aimed at easing the process by which companies submit information to search engines. The software formed the foundation for Wpromote's services, he said.
Mothner's leadership influences both the local and global community, according to Susan Franceschini, the executive director of ThinkLA, an organization that promotes collaboration among local marketing, media and advertising industries.
"Wpromote assisted us in getting a $10,000 grant for our [Multicultural Advertising Training] internship program in advertising," Franceschini said.
Multicultural Advertising Training is a program meant to recruit high-achieving minority college students and find internships for them, thereby creating more diversity in the advertising industry, according to ThinkLA's website.
Block, who has been Mothner's friend since childhood, attributes Mothner's success to his confidence and fierce independence, which he said are immediately evident in both his personal and professional lives.
"[Mothner] is always the type of person who could walk into any room and be the smartest guy there not only in terms of knowledge but the way he conducts himself," Block said. "He's not particularly concerned with the way he's perceived. Because of that attitude, he's perceived very fondly."
Mothner's coworkers admire his attitude and dedication, Block said.
"[Mothner] cares about the company culture as much as he does about the bottom line," he said. "The low turnover rate is because of the culture he has cultivated." Anderson Schoenrock '01 said that Mothner inspired him to pursue an entrepreneurial path. Schoenrock and Mothner cofounded ScanDigital, which digitizes physical photos, in 2007.
Schoenrock, who previously worked for Lehman Brothers, had started his own small investment bank but was inspired by Mothner's work at Wpromote and decided to leave the financial world, he said. "[Mothner] helped push me in that direction," Schoenrock said.
Mothner said his decision to devote his career to Wpromote set him apart from many other Dartmouth students who entered corporate recruiting.
"The concept of going down the entrepreneurial road was something that was very foreign to people," he said. "If you wanted to go into business, you'd get a job in one of the 10 to 15 firms that recruit at Dartmouth."
Although Mothner was initially lured into corporate recruiting and proceeded to the final round of interviews for Goldman Sachs, he turned down the opportunity because he knew that Wpromote merged his interests in both computing and business, he said.
