Meet Yoast’s new leadership team!

Today, we proudly present Yoast’s new leadership team. The past year has been quite the year at Yoast. Big things happened at our beloved company. As the icing on the cake, we’d now like to introduce our new leaders to you. Say hi to Chaya, Marieke, Inge, Irene, Herre, Taco and me: the new leadership team that lives and breathes ‘SEO for everyone’!

The road to a new leadership team

Times are changing. After our tremendous growth over the past years, we joined Newfold Digital in August 2021. Not too long after that, in November 2021, I (Thijs de Valk) picked up my new role as CEO after Marieke decided to step back from this position. In March 2022, Joost announced that he will transition to an advisory position within the company. Moreover, my good friend and former CTO Omar recently decided to pursue other dreams after 8 years of full dedication to Yoast.

Omar has always been an essential part of Yoast and helped shape our products into what they are today. He is responsible for getting our development team up and running. Omar started out at Yoast in 2014 with lots of ambition, a bold spirit and countless ideas on how to make improvements. And he definitely lived up to everything. Omar is an incredibly creative thinker, a strategist, and a believer in Yoast and our products. The entire Yoast family wishes him all the best!

With all these changes the need for a new leadership team grew. That’s why we’re extremely happy to present an awesome new leadership team – with some familiar and fresh faces – that will guide Yoast through these new and exciting times!

The new Yoast leaders

First, the familiar faces: I will remain to be at the helm of Yoast, leading the company into this new era. But I won’t be alone. Chaya, as chief operating officer (COO), will keep overseeing the day-to-day operations. She focuses on running smooth and optimized business processes to get Yoast to the next level and help everyone here move forward. Marieke will be the head of strategy, focusing on the path we should take, in our products and as a company. She will make sure we keep growing and flourishing in Yoast-style.

But there are also a lot of new faces on our leadership team! We’d like you to meet Irene, our new head of research and development (R&D). At Yoast, she’s grown from a linguist to an engineering manager to the leadership position where she’s now. She’s highly dedicated to keep on delivering people great experiences with our products and building a more diverse development team. She will work closely with Herre, our new head of technology. With our talented technical teams, he’ll strive for technical excellence and providing users with the best and most stable software in the industry.

And, Taco, a very familiar face at Yoast and in the WordPress community is taking up the role of head of relations. He knows our communities, customers, and partners like no other. He loves to nurture and improve the relationships with all people we interact with. And last, but definitely not least, Inge, our new head of marketing is deeply driven to keep Yoast growing, bring across our values, and build marketing teams that work together seamlessly.

Want to get to know our leaders a bit better? Check out our leadership team page.

The road ahead

So what does this leadership change mean? Of course, our mission “SEO for everyone” won’t change. We’re still dedicated to offering each and everyone equal chances in the search results with our software and educational material. We’re still dedicated to making SEO accessible and easy for everyone, wherever or whoever you are.

I am 100% confident that this talented leadership team will not only keep our company on course but will also help Yoast and our team of Yoasters thrive in every way possible!