Seth Besmertnik

Co-Founder and Board Member Conductor

Last Reviewed: September 26, 2026

Executive Summary

Seth Besmertnik is the co-founder of Conductor, the New York company that built an enterprise SEO platform and has recast itself around answer engine optimization (AEO), the work of making brands visible inside AI-generated answers. He ran Conductor as chief executive for roughly two decades, a stretch that took in an unusual round trip: a sale to WeWork in 2018 and, after WeWork’s failed IPO, a 2019 buyback in which he, the COO and an investor took the company back and turned about 250 employees into shareholders with founder-preferred stock. In September 2026 Conductor announced that Chief Product Officer Wei Zheng had been promoted to succeed him as CEO, and he moved to the board.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Conductor and served as its chief executive until September 2026; the company now lists him as a board member and “Former CEO and Co-Founder”.
• Led the December 2019 buyback of Conductor from WeWork, which had acquired it in March 2018, alongside COO Selina Eizik and investor Jason Finger.
• Structured that buyback so that about 250 employees received founder-preferred shares and a seat for their representative on the board, through Conductor Founders Inc.
• Led Conductor through a $150M funding round led by Bregal Sagemount, announced in November 2021.
• Oversaw the acquisitions of ContentKing, announced in February 2022, and Searchmetrics, announced in February 2023.

Professional Journey

Besmertnik has said he started his first company while still in college. Conductor’s own biography dates his work on enterprise search visibility to 2006, and for most of the time since then he was the company’s chief executive, building software to help large brands measure and improve how they appear in organic search.

The company’s ownership changed twice in under two years. WeWork acquired Conductor in March 2018. Conductor’s biography describes the deal as a merger meant to speed up growth. It did not last. After WeWork’s IPO attempt collapsed and Adam Neumann was ousted, WeWork weighed selling its subsidiaries, and in December 2019 Besmertnik, COO Selina Eizik and investor Jason Finger bought Conductor back on undisclosed terms. As TechCrunch reported at the time, the structure was the notable part. Employees received a new class of founder-preferred shares, which made about 250 of them “employee co-founders” able to appoint a representative to the board. By then Conductor served more than 400 enterprise customers.

Independence was followed by expansion. In November 2021 Conductor announced a $150 million round led by Bregal Sagemount, and Besmertnik tied the round to the buyback, saying the leadership team had wanted every employee rewarded when the company was bought back. Conductor then acquired ContentKing in a deal announced in February 2022, and Searchmetrics, announced in February 2023.

In his last years as CEO, the company moved from SEO toward what it calls AEO. It launched Conductor AI in 2025 and describes AEO as an evolution of SEO rather than a separate discipline. On 24 September 2026 Conductor announced that AEO would be the focus of its next chapter and that Wei Zheng, its Chief Product Officer for the previous five years, had been promoted to chief executive. In the announcement Besmertnik credited Zheng with a strategy, laid out four years earlier, of building a horizontal data platform to unite the signals behind AI visibility. He now serves on Conductor’s board.

Education

No record of his formal education was found in any first-party or dated press source.