Articulating the Problem is the First Step Toward Solving It A while back, we were having some specific challenges at Return Path that were *really* hard to diagnose. It was like peeling the proverbial onion. Every time we thought we had the answer to what was going on, we realized all we had was another symptom, not a root cause. We’re a pretty analytical bunch, so we kept looking for more and more data to give us answers. And we kept coming up with, well, not all that much, besides a lot of hand-wringing. It wasn’t until I went into a bit of a cave (e.g., took half a day’s quiet time to myself) and started writing things down for…
Category
Business
A New VC Ready to Go!
A New VC Ready to Go! One of the interesting things about being in business for 13 years (as of last week!) at Return Path is that we have been around longer than two of our Venture Capital funds. Fortunately for us, Fred led an investment in the company with his new fund, Union Square Ventures, even though his initial investment was via his first fund, Flatiron Partners. And even though Brad hasn’t invested out of his new fund, Foundry Group, he remains a really active member of our group as a Board Advisory through his Mobius Venture Capital investment. Although our third and largest VC shareholder, Sutter Hill Ventures, is very much still in business, our Board member Greg…
Book Short: Culture is King
Book Short: Culture is King Tony Hsieh’s story, Delivering Happiness (book, Kindle), is more than just the story of his life or the story of Zappos. It’s a great window into the soul of a very successful company and one that in many ways has become a model for great culture and a great customer service model. It’s a relatively quick and breezy read, and it contains a handful of legendary anecdotes from Zappos’ history to demonstrate those two things — culture and customer service — in action. As Hsieh himself says in the book, you can’t copy this stuff and believe it will work in your company’s environment as it does in Zappos’. You have to come up with…
The Value of Paying Down Technical Debt
The Value of Paying Down Technical Debt Our Engineering team has a great term called Technical Debt, which is the accumulation of coding shortcuts and operational inefficiencies over the years in the name of getting product out the door faster that weighs on the company’s code base like debt weighs on a balance sheet. Like debt, it’s there, you can live with it, but it is a drag on the health of the technology organization and has hard servicing costs. It’s never fun to pay down technical debt, which takes time away from developing new products and new features and is not really appreciated by anyone outside the engineering organization. That last point is a mistake, and I can’t encourage…
Not Just About Us
Not Just About Us When we updated our values this year, we felt there were a couple critical business elements missing from this otherwise “how” series of statements. One thing missing was our clients and users! So we added this value to our list: Not Just About Us: We know we’re successful when our clients are successful and our users are happy. This may be one of the most straightforward statements of all our values, so this will be a short post. We serve lots of constituencies at Return Path. And we always talk about how we’re a “People First” organization and what that means. I suppose that inherently means we are a “Client Second” organization, though I’m not sure…
Two Ears, One Mouth
Two Ears, One Mouth Brace yourself for a post full of pithy quotes from others. I’m not sure how we missed this one when drafted our original values statements at Return Path years ago, because it’s always been central to the way we operate. We aren’t just the world’s biggest data-driven email intelligence company – we are a data-driven organization. So another one of our newly written Core Values is: Two Ears, One Mouth: We ask, listen, learn, and collect data. We engage in constructive debate to reach conclusions and move forward together. I’m not sure which of my colleagues first said this to me, but I’m going to give credit to Anita, our long-time head of sales (almost a…
Job 1
Job 1 The first “new” post in my series of posts about Return Path’s 14 Core Values is, fittingly, Job 1: We are all responsible for championing and extending our unique culture as a competitive advantage. The single most frequently asked question I have gotten internally over the last few years since we grew quickly from 100 employees to 350 has been some variant of “Are you worried about our ability to scale our culture as we hire in so many new people?” This value is the answer to that question, though the short answer is “no.” I am not solely responsible for our culture at Return Path. I’m not sure I ever was, even when we were small. Neither…
Think Global, Act Local
Think Global, Act Local At Return Path, we have always had a commitment to community service and helping make the world around us a better place. We ratcheted that up a lot in the last year, which is why we added the following statement in as one of our 14 Core Values: Think Global, Act Local. We commit our time and energy to support our local communities. We feel strongly that companies can and should make the world a better place in several different ways. Certainly, many companies’ core businesses do that — just look at all the breakthroughs in medicine and social services over the years brought to market by private enterprises, including my friend Raj Vinnakota, who…
Return Path Core Values, Part III
Return Path Core Values, Part III Last year, I wrote a series of 13 posts documenting and illustrating Return Path’s core values. This year, we just went through a comprehensive all-company process of updating our values. We didn’t change our values – you can’t do that! – but we did revise the way we present our values to ourselves and the world. It had been four years since we wrote the original values up, and the business has evolved in many ways. Quite frankly, the process of writing up all these blog posts for OnlyOnce last year was what led me to think it was time for a bit of a refresh. The result of the process was that we…
Email Intelligence and the new Return Path
Welcome to the new Return Path. For a tech company to grow and thrive in the 21st century it must be in a state of constant adaptation. We have been the global market leaders in email deliverability since my co-founder George Bilbrey coined that term back in 2002. In fact, back in 2008 we announced a major corporate reorganization, divesting ourselves of some legacy businesses in order to focus on deliverability as our core business. Since then Return Path has grown tremendously thanks to that focus, but we have grown to the point where it’s time for us to redefine ourselves once again. Now we’re launching a new chapter in the company’s history to meet evolving needs in our…
Hiring vs. Promoting – and a Must-Read Blog
Hiring vs. Promoting – and a Must-Read Blog I have to admit that I have a bit of blog envy when it comes to Fred and Brad. We all started blogging roughly at the same time over 8 years ago (Brad and I the same day, Fred a few month before), and both have hugely large audiences compared to mine. I don’t care all that much — mostly I blog for me and for my company, not for any other reason. But one of the things I admire about both their blogs, particularly Fred, is the size of their *active* audiences. (Both of them tell me not to worry about it when it comes up in conversation — as they…