In 2010, O’Brien relocated to Austin from Silicon Valley where he had launched a series of startups in local search, crowdsourcing, web-based accounting, payments, and social intelligence. In Texas, Paul advises startups in funding, marketing, business development, project management, and product management, and spends most of his time as the CMO of the Venture Capital firm MicroVentures.
Notably O'Brien is a seasoned marketer having directed Advertising Solutions for Yahoo! and later running online marketing for HP’s eCommerce business. From there he led the early growth of startups such as Outright.com (Acquired by GoDaddy) and Zvents (Acquired by eBay’s Stubhub). That work, a reflection of Paul’s impact in e-commerce, marketing, entrepreneurship, and search, in both B2B and B2C markets, overshadows Paul's technical expertise having consulted with various web properties, designing and developing web sites, online communities, e-commerce stores, and web services. Paul was featured in the book, Online Marketing Heroes, and continues to blog at seobrien.com.