The new CEO of Yoast – Marieke van de Rakt [2019 – 2021]

Marieke van de Rakt is the CEO of Yoast since 2019 and the founder of Yoast academy. She also loves to write about SEO, especially content SEO and site structure. She studied Sociology and Communication Sciences at the Radboud University in Nijmegen and worked as a researcher and teacher at multiple universities.

About Her – (CEO of Yoast)

Marieke van de Rakt Marieke van de Rakt is the CEO of Yoast and founder of Yoast academy. She also loves to write about SEO, especially content SEO and site structure. She studied Sociology and Communication Sciences at the Radboud University in Nijmegen and worked as a researcher and teacher at multiple universities.

Marieke van de Rakt’s says: I am the new CEO of Yoast! Wow. That’s so awesome. I am really proud to take the lead in this amazing company. For some time now, we have been running Yoast with a team of four partners. Besides myself, we have Omar Reiss, our CTO, an unbelievably smart visionary. Michiel Heijmans, our COO, is hands-on, a genuine people-person. And of course, we have Joost de Valk, genius and founder of Yoast. He will take the position of CPO now. We’ll remain a team of four. But we are reshuffling the cards. And I get to be queen!

Info about the Yoast Founder “Joost de Valk“.

Joost de Valk – Founder & Chief Product Officer – Yoast

I’m the founder and Chief Product Officer at Yoast. I spend most of my time at Yoast working on Yoast SEO and its addons. As Chief Product Officer I make sure the roadmap for all our products is managed.

He is an internet entrepreneur at heart. In the early days of his career, he worked in several companies, ranging from enterprise hosting to online marketing agencies. This allowed him to work with several large brands around the world. He founded CSS3.info – the biggest CSS3 resource on the web – in 2006 and sold it in 2009. In 2010, he founded Yoast, which focuses on software and training for website optimization. Team Yoast currently consists of more than 90 people. Yoast SEO, Yoast’s main software product, is currently active on around 9 million websites.

Private Life of Joost de Valk
I’m 39 years old and live with my wife Marieke in Wijchen, near Nijmegen, where Yoast also has its main offices. We have four kids: Tycho, Wende, Ravi & Borre, who are between 6 and 14 years old. Outside of work I enjoy reading, photography, and playing board games with my kids.

Marieke’s says:
Joost and Yoast are pronounced in exactly the same way.
He’s a great father. Joost and I (Marieke van de Rakt) have four children together aged 6 to 14. Joost is an assistant soccer coach. He helps with school projects and he’ll supervise school trips. He’s so very much involved. He’s pretty brilliant. I don’t know anybody who’s as smart as my husband. He really is amazingly intelligent. His brains are just amazing. This also means that he wins every board game we ever play. That’s pretty brilliant, but also pretty annoying.

Beside Yoast:

Besides Yoast, Marieke and I have invested in several companies. As a result, I also have several advisory roles for companies we have invested in. More about our investments can be found on the website of our investment vehicle Altha.

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