Book Short: Deep Dive on Customer Development I continue to be on a tear reading books about startups as I finish and get ready for the publication of Startup CEO (now available for pre-ordering at Amazon). This week’s selection was The Startup Owners Manual: A Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, by Steve Blank and Bon Dorf. This book is a significantly more detailed version of Blank’s first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which was a revolutionary book a few years ago that helped spawn the Lean Startup movement. And when I say significantly, I mean it! The Startup Owners Manual is 600 pages of really detailed how-to around the first two steps of Blank’s four steps,…
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Business
Book Short: Like a Prequel to My Book
Book Short: Like a Prequel to My Book How to Start a Business, by Jason Nazar, CEO of our client Docstoc, is a great and quick (and free) eBook that feels a lot like a prequel to my book Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business (original outline here). My book is about scaling a business once you’ve started it. Jason’s book is a really practical guide to starting it in the first place. The thing that’s particularly good about this book is that it’s as much a resource guide as it is a book. At the end of each of its 24 chapters (and within them as well), Jason adds a series of external links to…
Book Not-So-Short: Not Just for Women
Book Not-So-Short: Not Just for Women At the request of the women in our Professional Services team, I recently read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and while it may seem like dancing the meringue in a minefield for a male CEO to blog about it, I think it’s an important enough topic to give it a shot. So here goes. First, given the minefield potential, let me issue a few caveats up front. These are deep, ages old, complex, societal issues and behaviors we’re talking about here. There is no quick answer to anything. There is no universal answer to anything. Men don’t have the same perspective as women and can come across as…
Firsts, Still
Firsts, Still After more than 13 years in the job, I run into “firsts” less and less often these days. But in the past week, I’ve had three of them. They’re incredibly different, and it’s awkward to write about them in the same post, but the “firsts” theme holds them together. One was incredibly tragic — one of our colleagues at Return Path died suddenly and unexpectedly. Even though we’ve lost two other employees in the last 18 months to cancer, there was something different about this one. While there’s no good way to die, the suddenness of Joel’s passing was a real shock to me and to the organization, and of course more importantly, to his wife. The second…
The People Who Go to the Trainer the Most Are the Ones Who Were in the Best Shape to Begin With
The People Who Go the the Trainer the Most Are the Onese Who Were int eh Best Shape to Begin With Have you ever noticed this? That the people working out with trainers in the gym are usually in great shape? So why do they keep working with the trainer? So they maintain their awesome level of fitness, of course! The lesson for business is the same. Just because you have a strong suit doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore it and rest on your laurels (at least not for very long). This is true in good times, and in bad times. When things are going well, it can feel like it’s the right time to turn your focus…
The Nachos Don’t Have Enough Beef in Them
The Nachos Don’t Have Enough Beef in Them Short story, two powerful lessons. Story: I’m sitting at the bar of Sam Snead’s Tavern in Port St. Lucie, Florida, having dinner solo while I wait for my friend to arrive. I ask the bartender where he’s from, since he has a slight accent. Nice conversation about how life is rough in Belfast and thank goodness for the American dream. I ask him what to order for dinner and tell him a couple menu items I’m contemplating. He says, “I don’t know why they don’t listen to me. I keep telling them that all the people here say that the nachos aren’t good because they don’t have enough beef in them.” I…
Book Short: Plain Talk
Book Short: Plain Talk An HR rock star I met with recently told me that “You can say anything you want to your people, as long as it’s true,” which of course is great advice. Plain Talk: Lessons from a Business Maverick (book, kindle), by Ken Iverson, the long-time CEO of Nucor, pretty much embodies that. If you’re not familiar with Nucor, it’s a steel company – right, steel – and the most successful one of the last 50-75 years, at that. You may think an industrial company like this offers no lessons for you. If so, you are wrong. The reason Nucor has been so successful, if you believe their long time leader, is that they run the people…
Articulating the Problem is the First Step Toward Solving It
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…
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…