Size of Pie, a.k.a. What Type of Entrepreneur Are You? Mmmm…pie. A post that Fred had up a few weeks ago about an M&A Case study involving WhatCounts, a company in the email space that I’ve known and had a lot of respect for for years, got me thinking about two different topics. The first is thinking about types of entrepreneurs. I’ve always said there were two types: serial entrepreneurs who are great at starting companies but less great at scaling them, and entrepreneurs who are often part of a group of founders but who go on to continue to run the business for the long-haul. CEO David Geller’s quote that gets to the heart of this in Fred’s post…
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Business
Connecting with Other CEOs
Connecting with Other CEOs CEOs get introduced to each other regularly. Sometimes it’s through VCs or other investors, sometimes it’s through other CEOs, sometimes it’s because the two companies are already partners. I try hard to meet personally or at least on the phone with other CEOs every time I get a chance, sometimes because there’s business to be done between Return Path and the other company; but always because I come away from every interaction I have with another CEO with some learnings to apply to myself and the company. I have noticed two unrelated things over the years about my interactions with other CEOs who are in our industry, and therefore with whom I spend time more than…
Guest Post: Staying Innovative as Your Business Grows (Part One)
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve recently started writing a column for The Magill Report, the new venture by Ken Magill, previously of Direct magazine and even more previously DMNews. I share the column with my colleagues Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey and we cover how to approach the business of email marketing, thoughts on the future of email and other digital technologies, and more general articles on company-building in the online industry – all from the perspective of an entrepreneur. Below is a re-post of George’s column from this week, which I think my OnlyOnce readers will enjoy. Guest Post: Staying Innovative as Your Business Grows (Part One) By George Bilbrey As part of The Magill Report’s…
The Art of the Post-Mortem
The Art of the Post-Mortem It has a bunch of names — the After-Action Review, the Critical Incident Review, the plain old Post-Mortem — but whatever you call it, it’s an absolute management best practice to follow when something has gone wrong. We just came out of one relating to last fall’s well document phishing attack, and boy was it productive and cathartic. In this case, our general takeaway was that our response went reasonably well, but we could have been more prepared or done more up front to prevent it from happening in the first place. We derived some fantastic learnings from the Post-Mortem, and true to our culture, it was full of finger-pointing at oneself, not at others,…
Come Fly With Me
Come Fly With Me I do a lot of travel for work. That means I spend a lot of time on planes, some of which is “wasted” – or at least time that can’t be productive for work in the traditional sense of being connected, or in a lot of cases, of even reading. One thing I’ve always appreciated in my career but have grown even more attached to of late is traveling with colleagues. Any time I have an opportunity to do so, I jump on it. First, I find that I get solid work time in with a colleague in transit. A check-in meeting that isn’t rushed with a hard stop, interrupted by the phone or visitors, and…
The Three Functions of a Management Team
The Three Functions of a Management Team After my quarterly Return Path exec team offsite last week, my team and I were rehashing the day’s conversation over dinner. Was it a good day or a bad day? An upper or a downer? We concluded that the day was as it should have been – a good mix of what I will now articulate as the three main functions of a management team. Here they are with some color: Create an environment for success: Do people like to come to work every day? When they get there, do they know what they’re supposed to do, and how it connects to the company’s mission? Are people learning and growing? Are you building…
Book Short: Calm in a Crisis, Explained
Book Short: Calm in a Crisis, Explained Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales, is not a business book. Even though the author says a few times “this can be applied to business, too,” the application is left 100% up to the reader. But that’s my only criticism of the book, and it’s not a big one at that. Deep Survival is an unexpected and somewhat odd way to think about how to lead an organization, but it’s very powerful, and incredibly well written. The author essentially has made a career, or at least a hobby, of studying major accidents and delineating the qualities that separate those who survive from those who don’t. Most of his…
What a View, Part III
What a View, Part III We are in the middle of our not-quite-annual senior team 360 review process this week at Return Path. It’s particularly grueling for me and Angela, our SVP of People, to sit in, facilitate, and participate in 15 of them in such a short period of time, but boy is it worth it! I’ve written about this process before — here are two of the main posts (overall process, process for my review in particular, and a later year’s update on a process change and unintended consequences of that process change). I’ve also posted my development plans publicly, which I’ll do next month when I finalize it. This year, I’ve noticed two consistent themes in my…
5 Ways to Spot Trends That Will Make You (and Your Business) More Successful
5 Ways to Spot Trends That Will Make You (and Your Business) More Successful I’ve recently started writing a column for The Magill Report, the new venture by Ken Magill, previously of Direct magazine and even more previously DMNews. Ken has been covering email for a long time and is one of the smartest journalists I know in this space. My column, which I share with my colleagues Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey, covers how to approach the business of email marketing, thoughts on the future of email and other digital technologies, and more general articles on company-building in the online industry – all from the perspective of an entrepreneur. Below is a re-post of this week’s version, which I…
Macroeconomics for Startups
Macroeconomics for Startups I’m not an economist. I don’t play one on TV. In fact, I only took one Econ class at Princeton (taught by Ben Bernanke, no less), and I barely passed it. In any case, while I’m not an economist, I do read The Economist, religiously at that, and I’ve been reading so much about macroeconomic policies and news the past 18 months that I feel like I finally have a decent rudimentary grip on the subject. But still, the subject doesn’t always translate as well to the average entrepreneur as microeconomics does – most business people have good intuitive understandings of supply, demand, and pricing. But who knows what monetary policy is and why they should care?…
Book Short: Beyond 10,000 Hours
Book Short: Beyond 10,000 Hours In Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell (post, buy), we are taught, among other things, that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something, as well as a dash of luck and timing, as opposed to huge amounts of innate and unique talent. In Talent is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin, this theory comes to life, with a very clear differentiating point – it’s not just logging the 10,000 hours, it’s HOW the hours are spent. Colvin’s main point is that the hours need to be spent in what he calls “deliberate practice.” The elements of deliberate practice are best explained with his example of Jerry Rice, although you can…