Dev Basu is founder and CEO of Powered by Search, the Toronto, Ontario B2B marketing agency he started in 2009 while still a business student. He is known as a speaker on software demand generation, SEO, and paid acquisition, and his agency now sells paid media, SEO, and AI search work to B2B companies.
A Co-op Placement at Microsoft
Basu chose the University of Toronto Scarborough for its management co-op program. A 2015 university profile says that during a placement in Microsoft's marketing department he saw that customers could not find information they were searching for on its website, and that the consultants hired to fix it could not.
That gave him the idea of learning SEO before it was mainstream. He began consulting for companies while studying full time, and his third-year marketing professor invited him to help rewrite the course's SEO section and to teach it as a teaching assistant.
Building Powered by Search
He launched Powered by Search in 2009, after three years in the field. "I saw it as a lifestyle business," he told the university, "doing the things I loved." He finished his BBA with his cohort in 2010 while working full time, and in early 2014 the agency merged with two other online service companies, doubling its size.
MicroConf's speaker page describes him as a keynote speaker whose agency has worked with startups like Rally and brands like Basecamp and VMware. Powered by Search now publishes its prices and includes answer engine optimization in its SEO plans.