I’ve written a few times over the years about our Sabbatical policy at Return Path, including this post and this post about my experience as CEO when one of my direct reports was on his sabbatical, and this post about my own sabbatical.

People ask me this all the time, so I thought I’d write the policy out here.  This is the language in our employee handbook about them:

You have big dreams. We know. This is your chance to cross something off your life list. Whether it’s climbing Mt. Everest, learning Russian or taking your kids across the country in a Winnebago, we believe in rewarding longevity at Return Path and know that a good long break will leave you refreshed and energized!  As such, you are eligible for a sabbatical after your first seven (7) years of employment; then again after every five (5) years incremental employment. The sabbatical provides you with up to six (6) weeks of consecutive time off provided you have that time off approved by your manager at least two months prior to the start of your sabbatical.

You will be requested to sign an Agreement before your sabbatical: if you do not return to work after your sabbatical or if you leave employment within twelve (12) months of returning to work, you will be required to reimburse all amounts received while on sabbatical.  If a holiday occurs on any of of the days of absence, you will not receive holiday pay in addition to your sabbatical pay.  During your sabbatical, your benefits will continue and you will be responsible for making payments for the employee portion of insurance costs if applicable. The period you are on leave will be counted as employment for the purposes of determining your applicable level of benefits.  If you are eligible and have not taken your sabbatical and your employment with Return Path ends (for any reason), you will not be paid out for sabbatical time not taken.

I also wrote an email recently to someone internally that is worth reprinting here, which is How to Prepare for Your Sabbatical, which is aimed at both the person taking the sabbatical, and the person’s manager:

As the employee:

–          Prepare your team

• Make sure their goals and metrics for your time out are super clear
• Make sure they know who to go to for what
• Set their expectations of management coverage (see below). 
• Remember that your manager has a day job so you should look to see how your team members can take over some of the responsibilities.
• Give them stretch goals while you’re out

–          Prepare your individual contributor work

• Hand off all loose ends with extra details. 
• Make introductions via email if your manager/team member  is going to have to work with external parties
• Can be to your team, to your manager, to someone else

–          Prepare your manager

• Brief your manager thoroughly on everything going on with your team, its work, your individual contributor work
• Good topics to cover with your manager:Discuss specifics of team and 1:1 check-ins and agree on a plan for coverage.
  • What are the big initiatives that you’ll need coverage on
  • Which team members would you like the manager to spend a little extra time with?  Are there any work you would like the manager to help a particular EE with?

–          Prepare yourself

• Plan any personal travel early so you get good rates!
• Figure out how to keep your work and personal communications separate – your email (autoresponder, routing, disabling from your smartphone), your voicemail if you use Google Voice or Simulscribe, etc.
• Block out two full days immediately when you return to catch up on email and catch up with your manager and team

As the manager:

–          Prepare your team

• Make sure the rest of your team knows your time will be compromised while you’re covering
• Figure out what kind of coverage you need (either internal or external) while you’re covering

–          Rearrange your calendar/travel

• Add new team meetings or 1:1s as it makes sense.  You don’t have to do exactly what your employee did, but some portions of it will make sense to pick up
• If your employee works in another office with members of his/her team, you might want to plan some travel there to cover in person
• It’s ok to cut back on some other things a bit while you’re covering – just remember to undo everything when the employee’s sabbatical is over

–          While you’re in charge

• Surprise your employee with how much you were able to keep things running in his/her absence!
• Learn as much as you can by doing bits and pieces of his/her job.  This is a great opportunity of the employee to get some value from a fresh perspective.

–          Prepare for your employee’s return

• Keep a running tab of everything that goes on at the company, critical industry news (if appropriate), and with your employee’s function or team and prepare a well-organized briefing document so your employee can hit the ground running when he/she returns
• Block out an hour or two each of the employee’s first two days back to review your briefing document

My main takeaway from this post?  I am overdue my second sabbatical, and it’s time to start thinking about that!

How Deliverability is Like SEO and SEM for Email

I admit this is an imperfect analogy, and I’m sure many of my colleagues in the email industry are going to blanch at a comparison to search, but the reality is that email deliverability is still not well understood — and search engines are.  I hope that I can make a comparison here that will help you better understand what it really means to work on deliverability – they same way you understand what it means to work on search.

But before we get to that, let’s start with the language around deliverability which is still muddled.  I’d like to encourage everyone in the email industry to rally around more precise meanings.  Specifically I’d like propose that we start to use the term “inbox placement rate” or IPR, for short.  I think this better explains what marketers mean when they say “delivered” – because anywhere other than the inbox is not going to generate the kind of response that marketers need.  The problem with the term “delivered” is that it is usually used to mean “didn’t bounce.”  While that is a good metric to track, it does not tell you where the email lands.  Inbox placement rate, by contrast, is pretty straightforward: how much of the email you sent landed in the inbox of our customers and prospects?

Now let’s come back to how achieving a high inbox placement rate is like search.  If you run a web site, you certainly understand what SEO and SEM are, you care deeply about both, and you spend money on both to get them right.  Whether “organic” or “paid,” you want your site to show up as high as possible on the page at Google, Yahoo, Bing, whatever.  Both SEO and SEM drive success in your business, though in different ways.

The inbox is different and a far more fragmented place than search engines, but if you run an email program, you need to worry both about your “organic” inbox placement and your “paid” inbox placement.  If you are prone to loving acronyms you could call them OIP and PIP.

What’s the difference between the two?

With organic inbox placement, you are using technology and analytics to manage your email reputation, the underpinning of deliverability.  You are testing, tracking, and monitoring your outbound email.  Seeing where it lands – in the inbox, in the junk mail folder, or nowhere?  You are doing all this to optimize your inbox placement rate (IPR) — just as you work to optimize your page rank on search engines.  One of the ways you do this is by monitoring your email reputation (Sender Score) as a proxy for how likely you are to have your email filtered or blocked.  The more you manage all of these factors, the greater likelihood you will be placed in inboxes everywhere.

With paid inbox placement, you first have to qualify by having a strong email reputation.  Then you use payment to ensure inbox placement, and frequently other benefits like functioning images and links or access to rich media.  With this paid model, there’s no guarantee to inbox placement (don’t let anyone tell you otherwise), just like there’s no guarantee that you’ll be in the #1 position via paid search if someone outbids you.  But by paying, you are radically increasing the odds of inbox placement as well as adding other benefits.  There is one critical difference from search here, which is that you need good organic inbox placement in order to gain access to PIP.  You can’t just pay to play.

Like SEO, some organic deliverability work can and must be done in-house, but frequently it’s better to outsource to companies like Return Path to save costs and time, and to gain specific expertise.  Like SEM, paid deliverability inherently means you are working with third parties like our Return Path Certification program. 

As I said, it’s an imperfect analogy, but hopefully can help you better understand the strategies and services that are available to help you make the most of every email you send.

Protecting the Inbox

We only have one out of our 13 core values at Return Path that’s closely related to the content of our business. But as with the other values, it says a lot about who we are and how we approach the work that we do. That value is:

We believe inboxes should only contain messages that are relevant, trusted, and safe

We occupy a pretty unique space in the email universe – we serve senders and receiving networks, but aren’t directly in the mail stream and therefore don’t directly touch end users.  So much of our business, from our Certification or whitelisting business, to our new Domain Assurance anti-spoofing/anti-phishing business, revolves around building trust in our company that this core value is critical to our survival. If we ran afoul of this core value — and it comes up all the time — we’d be dead in the water.

Here’s how it comes up:  because our Certification program is the closest thing on the Internet to guaranteed universal email delivery, every spammer and grey mailer in the world wants to be on it. We don’t just SELL access to our whitelist. Even once a prospect has been converted to an under-contract client, they have to APPLY for Certification.

It’s not easy to GET Certified. You have to be a really, really good mailer. Not just a real entity. Not just a big spender. You have to send mail that is safe and secure and wanted by end users. We have a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods we can use to determine this, and the requirements for Certified status and therefore Inbox placement are carefully negotiated and regularly reviewed with our ISP partners. Once a client is Certified, it’s not easy to STAY Certified because we are monitoring all of those same standards in real time, 24×7. Clients who go out of bounds get immediately suspended from the program until they are back in bounds. Clients who go out of bounds enough, we just terminate from the program for good.

By the way, just because we won’t certify a particular client isn’t an indictment that they are a spammer. It just means that their email programs still need to be subject to all the state of the art filtering and security measures that our ISPs have in their arsenal.  And most of the time, it doesn’t mean that we won’t work with them to improve the quality of their mail programs so their messages are relevant, trusted, and safe.

But at the end of the day, we’d rather not take money from questionable clients than compromise the quality of our Certification program. That’s a hard decision to make sometimes.  I’ve had to call large clients who are poor mailers and fire them more than once, and I’ve had to take angry phone calls and threatened legal action from clients or prospects many times over the years.  But for us, respect for end users and inbox security are deeply baked into the culture.  It’s why we developed the Domain Assurance product and launched it earlier this year.  And that’s why it’s one of our core values.

My name is Matt Blumberg. I am a technology entrepreneur and business builder based in New York City who just (in 2020) started a new company called Bolster.

Bolster is an on-demand executive talent marketplace that helps accelerate companies’ growth by connecting them with experienced, highly vetted executives for interim, fractional, advisory, project-based or board roles. Bolster also provides on-demand executives with software and services to help them manage their careers as independent consultants and provides startup and scaleup CEOs with software and content to help them assess, benchmark and diversify their leadership teams and boards.  We are creating a new way to scale executive teams and boards.

Before that, I started a company called Return Path, which we sold in 2019.   We created a business that was the global market leader in email intelligence, analyzing more data about email than anyone else in the world and producing applications that solve real business problems for end users, commercial senders, and mailbox providers.  In the end, we served over 4,000 clients with about 450 employees and 12 offices in 7 countries.  We also built a wonderful company with a signature People First Culture that won a number of awards over the years, including Fortune Magazine’s #2 best mid-sized place to work in 2012.

Early in my career, I ran marketing and online services for MovieFone/777-FILM (www.moviefone.com), now a division of AOL. Before that — I was in venture capital at General Atlantic Partners (www.gapartners.com), and before that, a consultant at Mercer Management Consulting (www.mercermc.com). And I went to Princeton before that.

Based on this blog, I wrote a book called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, which was published by Wiley in 2013 and updated in 2020.

I have been married for over 20 years to Mariquita, who is, as I tell her all the time, one of the all-time great wives. We have three great kids, Casey, Wilson, and Elyse.

I have lots of other hobbies and interests, like coaching my kids’ baseball and softball teams; traveling and seeing different corners of the world; reading all sorts of books, particularly about business, American Presidential history, art & architecture, natural sciences (for laymen!), and anything funny; cooking and wishing I lived in a place where I could grill and eat outdoors year-round; playing golf; lumbering my way through the very occasional marathon, eating cheap Mexican food; introducing my kids to classic movies; and playing around with new technology.

IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS BLOG IS ALL ABOUT, read my first two postings: You’re Only a First Time CEO Once, and Oh, and About That Picture, as well as my updated post when I relaunched the blog with its new name, StartupCEO.com.

Book Short:  Worth Buying Free

The cynic in me wanted to start this book review of  Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson, by complaining that I had to pay for the book.  But it ended up being good enough that I won’t do that (plus, the author said there are free digital versions available — though the Kindle edition still costs money).  At any rate, a bunch of reviews I read about the book panned it when compared to Anderson’s prior book, The Long Tail (post, link to book).

I won’t get into the details of the book, though you’ll get an idea from the paragraph below, but Anderson has a few gems worth quoting:

• Any topic that can divide critics into two opposite camps — “totally wrong” and “so obvious” — has got to be a good one
• Free makes Paid more profitable
• Younger players have more time than money…older players have more money than time
• Doing things we like without pay often makes us happier than the work we do for a salary
• It’s true that each generation takes for granted some things their parents valued, but that doesn’t mean that generation values everything less
  

While Free is s probably not quite as good as The Long Tail, it does a good job of organizing and classifying and explaining the power of different economic models that involve a free component, and I found it very thought provoking about our own business at Return Path.

We already do a couple forms of Free — we practice the “third party” model, by giving things away to ISPs but selling them to mailers; and we practice Freemium by providing Senderscore.org and Feedback Loops for free in order to attract paying customers to our testing and monitoring application and whitelist.  But could we do others?  Maybe.  They may not be revolutionary, but they’re smart marketing.

As some of the reviewers write, the book isn’t the be-all-end-all of marketing, it overreaches at times, and it is more applicable to some businesses than others, but Free was definitely worth paying for.

Why Publishing Will Never Be the Same, Part I

As you may know, we published a book earlier this year at Return Path called Sign Me Up! Sales are going quite well, in case you’re wondering, and we also launched the book’s official web site, where you can subscribe to our “email best practices” newsletter.

The process of publishing the book was fascinating and convinced me that publishing will never be the same.  Even in two parts, this will be a long post, so apologies in advance. Front to back, the process went something like this:

– We wrote the content and selected and prepared the graphics

– We hired iUniverse to publish the book for a rough total cost of $1,500

– iUniverse provided copy editing, layout, and cover design services

– Within 8 weeks, iUniverse put the book on Amazon.com and BN.com for us (in addition to their site) and properly indexed it for search, and poof — we were in business

– Any time someone places an order on any of those three sites, iUniverse prints a copy on demand, binds it, and ships it off. No fuss, no muss, no inventory, but a slightly higher unit cost than you’d get from a traditional publisher who mass prints. We receive approximately 20% of the revenue from the book sale, and iUniverse receives 80%.  I’m not sure what cut they give Amazon, but it’s hard to imagine it’s more than 10-20% of the gross

Other than the writing part (not to be minimized), how easy is that?  So of course, that made me think about the poor, poor publishing industry. It seems to me that, like many other industries, technology is revolutionizing publishing.  Here’s how:

– Publishers handle printing and inventory.  iUniverse and its competitors can do it for you in a significantly more economic way.  Print on Demand will soon be de rigeur.

– Publishers handle marketing and distribution.  iUniverse gets you on Amazon.com and BN.com for free.  Amazon.com and BN.com now represent something like 12% of all book sales (cobbled together stats from iMedia Connection saying the annual online book sale run rate is now about $3 billion and the Association of American Publishers saying that the total size of the industry is $24 billion).  Google and Overture take credit cards and about 5 minutes to drive people to buy your book online.  Buzz and viral and email marketing techniques are easy and cheap.

– Publishers pay you.  Ok, this is compelling, but they only pay you (especially advances) if you’re really, really good, or a recognized author or expert. iUniverse pays as well, just in a pay-for-performance model.  Bonus points for setting yourself up as an affiliate on Amazon and BN to make even more money on the sale.  iUniverse actually pays a higher royalty (20% vs. 7.5-15% in the traditional model), so you’re probably always a fixed amount “behind” in the self-publish model, but you don’t have an agent to pay.

Unless you are dying to be accepted into literary or academic circles that require Someone & Sons to annoint you…why bother with a traditional publisher? As long as you have the up-front money and the belief that you’ll sell enough books to cover your expenses and then some, do it yourself.

In Part II, I will talk about how iUniverse pitches a “traditional publishing model” and why it only reinforces the point that the traditional model doesn’t make a lot of sense any more in many cases.

In Search of Automated Relevance

A bunch of us had a free form meeting last week that started out as an Email Summit focused on protocols and ended up, as Brad put it, with us rolling around in the mud of a much broader and amorphous Messaging Summit.  The participants (and some of their posts on the subject) in addition to me were Fred Wilson (pre, post), Brad Feld,  Phil Hollows, Tom Evslin (pre, post), and Jeff Pulver (pre, post).  And the discussion to some extent was inspired by and commented on Saul Hansell’s article in the New York Times about “Inbox 2.0” and how Yahoo, Google, and others are trying to make email a more relevant application in today’s world; and Chad Lorenz’s article in Slate called “The Death of Email” (this must be the 923rd article with that headline in the last 36 months) which talks about how email is transitioning to a key part of the online communications mix instead of the epicenter of online communications.

Ok, phew, that’s all the background. 

With everyone else’s commentary on this subject already logged, most of which I agree with, I’ll add a different $0.02.  The buzzword of the day in email marketing is “relevance.”  So why can’t anyone figure out how to make an email client, or any messaging platform for that matter, that starts with that as the premise, even for 1:1 communications?  I think about messaging relevance from two perspectives:  the content, and the channel.

Content.  In terms of the content of a message, I think of relevance as the combination of Relationship and Context.  The relationship is all about my connection to you.  Are you a friend, a friend of a friend, or someone I don’t know that’s trying to burrow your way onto my agenda for the day?  Are you a business that I know and trust, are you a carefully screened and targeted offer coming from an affiliate of a business I trust, or are you a spammer? 

But as important as the relationship is to the relevance of your message to me, the context is equally important.  Let’s take Brad as an example.  I know him in two distinct contexts:  as one of my venture investors, and as an occasional running partner.  A message from Brad (a trusted relationship) means very different things to me depending on its context.  One might be much more relevant than the other at any moment in my life.

Channel.  The channel through which I send or receive a message has an increasing amount to do with relevance as well.  As with content, I think of channel relevance as the combination of two things –  device, and technology.  For me, the device is limited to three things, two with heavy overlap.  The first is a fixed phone line – work or home (I still think cell service in this country leaves a lot to be desired).  The second is a mobile device, which could mean voice but could also mean data.  The third is a computer, whether desktop or laptop.  In terms of technology, the list is growing by the day.  Voice call, email, IM, Skype, text message, social network messaging, and on and on.

So what  do I mean about channel relevance?  Sometimes, I want to send a message by email from my smartphone.  Sometimes I want to send a text message.  Sometimes I want to make a phone call or just leave a voicemail.  Sometimes I even want to blog or Twitter.  I have yet to desire to send a message in Facebook, but I do sometimes via LinkedIn, so I’m sure I’ll get there.  Same goes for the receiving side.  Sometimes I want to read an email on my handheld.  Sometimes a text message does the job, etc.  Which channel and device I am interested in depends to some extent on the content of the message, per above, but sometimes it depends on what I’m doing and where I am.

So what?  Starting to feel complex?  It should be.  It is.  We all adjusted nicely when we added email to our lives 10 years ago.  It added some communication overhead, but it took the place of some long form paper letters and some phone calls as well.  Now that we seem to be adding new messaging channels every couple weeks, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get the relevance right.  Overlaying Content (Relationship and Context) with Channel (Device and Technology) creates a matrix that’s very difficult to navigate.

How do we get to a better place?  Technology has to step in and save the day here.  One of the big conclusions from our meeting was that no users care about or even know about the protocol – they just care about the client they interact with.  Where’s the ultra flexible client that allows me to combine all these different channels, on different devices?  Not a one-size-fits-all unified messaging service, but something that I can direct as I see fit?  There are glimmers of hope out there – Gmail integrating IM and email…Simulscribe letting me read my voicemail as an email…Twitter allowing me to input via email, SMS, or web…even good old eFax emailing me a fax – but these just deal with two or three cells in an n-dimensional matrix.

As our CTO Andy Sautins says, software can do anything if it’s designed thoughtfully and if you have enough talent and time to write and test it.  So I believe this “messaging client panacea” could exist if someone put his or her mind to it.  One of the big questions I have about this software is whether or not relevance can be automated, to borrow a phrase from Stephanie Miller, our head of consulting.  Sure, there is a ton of data to mine – but is there ever enough?  Can a piece of software figure out on its own that I want to get a message from Brad about “running” (whatever channel it comes in on) as a text message on my smartphone if we’re talking about running together the next day, but otherwise as an RSS feed in the same folder as the posts from his running blog, but a voicemail from Brad about “running the company” (again, regardless of how he sends it) as an email automatically sorted to the top of my inbox?  Or do I have to undertake an unmanageable amount of preference setting to get the software to behave the way I want it to behave?  And oh by the way, should Brad have any say over how I receive the message, or do I have all the control?  And does the latter question depend on whether Brad is a person or a company?

What does this mean for marketers?  That’s the $64,000 question.  I’m not sure if truly Automated Relevance is even an option today, but marketers can do their best to optimize all four components of my relevance equation:  content via relationship and context, and channel via device and technology.  A cocktail of permission, deep behavioral analysis, segmentation, smart targeting, and a simple but robust preference center probably gets you close enough.  Better software that works across channels with built-in analytics – and a properly sized and whip smart marketing team – should get you the rest of the way there.  But technology and practices are both a ways off from truly automated relevance today.

I hope this hasn’t been too much rolling around in the mud for you.  All thoughts and comments (into my fancy new commenting system, Intense Debate) are welcome!

Welcome to the new StartupCEO.com!

I started writing this blog in May of 2004 with an objective of writing about the experience of being a first-time entrepreneur — a startup CEO — inspired by a blog post written by my friend, long-time Board member and mentor Fred Wilson entitled “You’re only a first time CEO once.”  The blog and the receptivity I got along the way from fellow startup CEOs encouraged me to write a book called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, which was originally published in 2013 and then again as a second edition last year in 2020.

Today I am relaunching the blog as StartupCEO.com both to reflect that relevance of that brand as the book continues to get good traction in the startup ecosystem, and to reflect the fact that I’m now on my second startup as CEO, so “Only Once” doesn’t seem so fitting any more.

The web site has a very minimalist design – and I realize many of you read posts on either RSS or email — those will still operate the same as they have been (no new RSS feed).

As I approach the first anniversary of starting our new company, Bolster, where we help startup CEOs scale their teams, themselves, and their boards, I am recommitting to this blog and will try to post at least once a week.  Because there is a lot of overlap between this blog and Bolster’s blog (which I’d encourage you to subscribe to here either by email or RSS), posts will occasionally show up on both blogs, or I’ll put digests of Bolster blog posts here.  

But the Bolster blog will be broader and will also have many additional authors besides me, while this blog will remain distinct about some of the experiences I’m having as a startup CEO.

I love having independent directors on my Board.  They are a great third leg of the stool alongside a CEO/Founder and VCs.  They provide the same kind of pattern matching and outside point of view as VCs — but from a completely different perspective, that of an operator or industry expert.  The good ones are CEOs or CXOs who aren’t afraid to challenge you.  Equally important, they’re not afraid to challenge your VCs.  At Return Path, I always had 2 or 3 independent directors at any given time to balance out VCs, and some have become great long term friends like Scott Petry, Jeff Epstein, and Scott Weiss.  At Bolster, we’re already having a great experience with our first independent, Cristina Miller, and we’re about to add a second independent.  And I’ve served as an independent director multiple times.

So as you can imagine, I was shocked by one of the headlines coming out of the Board Benchmark study we ran at Bolster across 250+ clients (detailed blog post with a bunch of charts and graphs) that only ⅓ of companies in the study have any independent directors.  Even larger companies at the Series C and D levels only have independent directors 60% and 67% of the time.  What a missed opportunity for so many companies.

Less surprising, though still sobering, were the numbers on diversity that came out of the study.  79% of the directors in the sample are white.  86% are men.  43% of boards are completely racially homogenous (most all-white) while 80% are mostly racially homogeneous (meaning only one diverse member); 56% are gender homogenous (most all men), while 87% are mostly gender homogenous (only one female).  For an industry that is spending a lot of time talking about diversity in leadership teams and on boards, that’s disappointing.

Here’s the linkage of the two topics:  The solution to the board diversity problem lies in having more independent directors, since management and VC board seats are often both “fixed” and non-diverse.  Independent seats are the easiest to fill with diverse candidates.  Conveniently, more independent directors also leads to higher quality boards.  

In partnership with some DEI experts, our study also includes some suggested actionable tips for CEOs and board leaders, which I encourage you to read. There are really three simple (IMO) steps to having more diverse boards, and there is some good news in the Bolster study around these points:

1. Add independent director seats.  50% of the companies in the survey either have or expect to have an independent board seat open within 12 months.  That’s a good start, but honestly, I can’t imagine running any board without at least 1-2 independent directors (up to 3-4 for larger companies), starting on Day 1.  Given that only ⅓ of companies in the sample have any independent board members at all, the 50% number feels quite low.
   
2. Open the recruiting funnel to include first-time directors.  Historically, companies have mainly targeted current or former CEOs or people who have board experience to be independent directors.  That is a recipe to perpetuate having mostly white male board members.  But Bolster has done a few dozen board searches so far, and 66% of those clients have expressed a willingness to take on first-time directors, as long as they are “board ready,” which we define as having been on any kind of board, not just a corporate board; having reported to a founder or CEO and had regular interaction with and presentations to a board; or having significant experience as a formal or informal advisor.  Once you widen the funnel to include all candidates who meet those criteria, you can very easily have a diverse slate of highly qualified candidates.  Bolster is a great source of these candidates (this is a real focal point for our business), but there are plenty of other online or search firm sources as well.
   
3. Have the courage to limit the number of management/investor board members.  Whether or not you can add independent board members may be a function of how many seats you have to play with in your corporate charter.  Of course, you can add seats indefinitely, but there’s no reason to have a 7-person board for your Series A company.  My rule of thumbs on this are simple:  (a) Only one founder member of the management team on the Board – more than that is a waste of a valuable board slot; and (b) VCs should always be less than 50% of your board members, so as new ones roll on, old ones should roll off – or add a VC and an independent at the same time.  Both of these take serious effort and courage, both are worth it, and both probably merit a longer blog post someday.

The Board Benchmark study also had a wealth of information about compensation for independent directors — cash vs. stock, what kind of stock, how much stock, vesting and acceleration provisions. 

Here’s a Slideshare of the full survey results, in case this and/or the Bolster blog link isn’t detailed enough for you:

If you’re interested in learning more, the survey is free to take and all the granular results (including comp benchmarks) are available to benchmark against your company if you take it. Just email me if you’re interested at [email protected].

Marketers have blinders on when it comes to some aspects of data. We‘re so focused on using it to build relationships and businesses, that we don’t pay enough attention to data’s inherent risks. Those risks are real, though. Our brands are constantly under attack, and even trivial oversights in data handling can leave us—and our customers—unacceptably vulnerable. We need to better understand the risks. We need to know more.

If marketers don’t develop industrywide expertise in all aspects of data use, if we can’t demonstrate that we can be trusted stewards of information, we risk losing our rights to use it. The DMA is taking the lead to make sure that we, as an industry, gain the knowledge we need: It’s Institute for Data Governance and Certification  is a badly needed program that can make a real difference.

The Institute is a three-day intensive for marketers to learn how to protect their customers and their brands while using the power of data to connect with consumers—and ultimately to grow. The first course begins on July 18^th in New York, with more scheduled across the country over the next year.

As many of you know, I chair the DMA’s board, so I’m not a neutral third party when I urge you to attend the Institute and get certified in marketing data governance. But if I’m biased it’s because I’m a passionate industry advocate and I believe that marketers should lead the global effort to champion intelligent, responsible data use. Before we can start, we all need to know what that means.

Please click here to learn more about how you can register for the DMA’s Institute for Data Governance and Certification.

(This is the seventh and final post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Other posts in order are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.)

I’ll start the final post in this series by sharing the overview and retrospective deck that we created my last day and the two days after.  Governor Polis is going to share this with the National Governors Association in case other states are interested in our model or learnings. This pdf, which you’re welcome to download or just view in SlideShare, is a good overview of what we did and where things stood as of Saturday, March 28, noting that by the time you’re reading this post, half of it may be obsolete! 

I am normally a small government guy.  But not when this kind of thing hits. This whole thing calls for consistent national government response to the disease – potentially even global government coordination at a level we’ve never seen before (let alone the level that’s fashionable these days).  I’m not sure I’d want a Chinese style lockdown (although that may prove to have been effective), but South Korea’s pattern of learning from SARS and MERS, bulking way up on labs, reagents, epidemiologists, ventilators, etc., and then passing legislation that allows for deeply intrusive tracking in case of a public health emergency like this seems to be the way to go.  

Certainly, leaving responses up to individual states, counties, and cities is a problem.  It’s inefficient and on average ineffective, although I think our group made some extraordinary progress on a few fronts.  But the scale of the effort in an individual state of 6mm people with the associated resources just pales in comparison to what a strong federal response would be.  Of course…the federal government has to actually believe in the need for a rapid and comprehensive response and have the wherewithal to pull it off for that to work.

As for our federal government’s economic responses, that’s a different story.  At some point, the government literally won’t be able to afford to fill in the economic holes left behind by the virus (you could argue that we can’t even afford the $2T we’ve already ponied up since we are terrible at saving money when times are good and run huge deficits even then).  I’m not sure what will happen then.  

But government aside, I hope the response across the country and the world is enough to take the edge off this disease long enough for supply chains and healthcare systems to be able to properly respond.  I hope that people who have the means will continue to support local businesses and individual/freelance service providers like housekeepers, gardeners, music teachers, tutors, and coaches through this stretch, even if those people aren’t able to provide those services.  And I hope all the people who are on the ground working the problem – from frontline healthcare workers to my new friends in the Colorado state government and on the volunteer side – get the recognition they deserve for the extraordinary efforts they are undertaking to drive solutions and get everyone through this.

Special thanks to Governor Polis and his staff for the opportunity to do this work, to Brad for roping me into it and then letting me rope him into leading the private sector side, and to Kacey, Kyle, and Sarah, my new friends, for making it all work and for continuing the work after I left.