Sweet Sixteen (Sixteen Candles?)
Today marks Return Path’s 16th anniversary. I am incredibly proud of so many things we have accomplished here and am brimming with optimism about the road ahead. While we are still a bit of an awkward teenager as a company continuing to scale, 16 is much less of an awkward teen year than 13, both metaphorically and actually. Hey – we are going to head off for college in two short years!
In honor of 16 Candles, one of my favorite movies that came out when I was a teenager, I thought I’d mark this occasion by drawing the more obvious comparisons between us and some of the main characters from the movie. My apologies to those who may have missed this movie along the way.
Why we are like Samantha (Molly Ringwald): No, no one borrowed our underpants. But we can’t believe that people forgot our birthday either.
Why we are like Farmer Ted / The Geek (Anthony Michael Hall): Meet my co-founder, George Bilbrey. I mean that with love.
Why we are like Jake (Michael Schoeffling): Meet my other co-founder, Jack Sinclair. The shy, good looking one.
Why we are like Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe): We have only been in our newest business, Consumer Insight, for five minutes, but we already have a whole bunch of dates.
Why we are like Grandpa Fred (Max Showalter): We’ve been around long enough to know the ways of the world, not to mention all the good wisecracks in the book.
There you have it. Year 17, here we come!