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…
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Business
The Phoenix Project
The Phoenix Project: a novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford is a logical intellectual successor and regularly quotes Eli Goldratt’s seminal work The Goal and its good but less known sequel It’s Not Luck. The more business books I read, the more I appreciate the novel or fable format. Most business books are a bit boring and way too long to make a single point. The Phoenix Project is a novel, though unlike Goldratt’s books (and even Lencioni’s), it takes it easy on the cheesy and personal side stories. It just uses storytelling techniques to make its points and give color and examples for more memorable learning. If your…
The Difference Between Culture and Values
The Difference Between Culture and Values This topic has been bugging me for a while, so I am going to use the writing of this post as a means of working through it. We have a great set of core values here at Return Path. And we also have a great corporate culture, as evidenced by our winning multiple employer of choice awards, including being Fortune Magazine’s #2 best medium-sized workplace in America. But the two things are different, and they’re often confused. I hear statements all the time, both here and at other companies, like “you can’t do that — it’s not part of our culture,” “I like working there, because the culture is so great,” and “I hope…
Book Short: Blink Part II
Book Short: Blink Part II Years ago I wrote a post about Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book, Blink (post, buy). While my post has lots of specifics in it for entrepreneurs, for VCs, and for marketers, my quick summary was this: Where The Tipping Point theorizes about how humans relate to each other and how fads start and flourish in our society, Blink theorizes about how humans make decisions and about the interplay between the subconscious, learned expertise, and real-time inputs. But Gladwell does more than theorize — he has plenty of real world examples which seem quite plausible, and he peppers the book with evidence from some (though hardly a complete coverage of relevant) scientific and quasi-scientific studies. I recently…
Corporate Sniglets
Corporate Sniglets This might be showing my age, but those who may have watched Not Necessarily the News in the 80s might remember the Sniglets segment that Rich Hall pioneered which spawned a series of short, fun books. Sniglets are words which are not in the dictionary, but which should be. I can remember a couple of examples from years ago that make the point — aquadexterity is the ability to operate bathtub dials with one’s feet; cheedle is the orange residue left on one’s fingers after eating a bag of Cheetos. As is the case with many companies, we have made up some of our own words over the years at Return Path – think of them as Corporate…
Option Grants over Time
Option Grants Over Time Several people have asked me over the years how we think about subsequent option grants (e.g., not the employee’s initial grant when hired), so I thought I would just share my standard answer here. We give the following kinds of grants other than new employee grants: promotion grants – employees get the incremental grant between their existing grant and what someone being hired into the new position would get performance grants – once a year we give the top 10-15% of performers a grant that is equal to approximately 25% of their initial grant (so if they are a consistent superstar, they get twice as many options over the four years) refresh grants – we only…
ReturnShip Program
ReturnShip Program Today is a very exciting day for Return Path as we launch a new program we have been cooking for more than a year called the ReturnShip program. (Sometimes the name of our company comes in handy.) Return Path has always had a significant commitment to building a strong and diverse organization as well as supporting and encouraging women to pursue careers in technical environments. To this end, I’m very excited to share progress on our ReturnShip program: after a small pilot last year, our inaugural group of six female returnees will join Return Path in a variety of roles across the company as of today. The ReturnShip is designed for women who have been out of the…
How to Ask For a Raise
How to Ask For a Raise I’m guessing this topic will get some good play, both internally at Return Path and externally. It’s an important topic for many reasons, although one of the best ones I can think of is that most people aren’t comfortable asking for raises (especially women and more introverted people, according to lots of research as well as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In). My whole point in writing this is to make compensation part of normal conversations between a manager and a team member. This requires the manager making it comfortable (without negative stigma), and the employee approaching it maturely. My guess is that the two most common ways most people ask for raises when they bother…
35 at 15
This was a big week for Return Path. First we announced a $35mm financing led by an exceptional private equity firm that I’d never heard of before the middle of the fundraising process a few months ago. We are happy to have them join our very strong board and syndicate and even happier to have additional investment capital to accelerate our growth, especially in newer businesses for us like Email Fraud Protection and our overall data and analytic capabilities. But in some ways even more important, or at least more sentimentally important news this week is that tomorrow, December 6, marks the 15th anniversary of Return Path’s founding. A decade and a half with probably over 800 employees in total over…
Book Short: Continuing to make “sustainability” a mainstream business topic
Book Short: Continuing to make “sustainability” a mainstream business topic The Big Pivot: Radically Practical Strategies for a Hotter, Scarcer, and More Open World, by my friend Andrew Winston, is a great book. It just got awarded one of the Top 10 business books of 2014 by Strategy+Business, which is a great honor. Andrew builds nicely on his first book, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage (post, book link) (and second book, which I didn’t review, Green Recovery), as I said in my review of Green to Gold, to bring: the theoretical and scientific to the practical and treat sustainability as the corporate world must treat it in order…
Sources of Urgency
Sources of Urgency Sometimes I wish we were in the hardware business. Why? It’s not the margins, that’s for sure. It’s because hardware businesses usually have externally-imposed deadlines that create urgency in an organization around deliverables. If you are making a chip that Dell is putting in all of its boxes, and your contract with Dell stipulates that the chip will be ready for testing on X Date and for shipping on Y Date, you darn well better hit the deadline. If you are making software that gets installed or pre-loaded on all Samsung TVs, same thing. Maybe it’s not the hardware business per se, but you certainly don’t see this kind of mentality in SaaS businesses very often, either…