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…
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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…
Does size matter?
Does size matter? It is the age-old question — are you a more important person at your company if you have more people reporting into you? Most people, unfortunately, say yes. I’m going to assume the origins of this are political and military. The kingdom with more subjects takes over the smaller kingdom. The general has more stars on his lapel than the colonel. And it may be true for some of those same reasons in more traditional companies. If you have a large team or department, you have control over more of the business and potentially more of the opportunities. The CEO will want to hear from you, maybe even the Board. In smaller organizations, and in more contemporary organization…
PTJD
Post Traumatic Job Disorder. As we have been scaling up Return Path, we have been increasingly hiring senior people in from the outside. We believe in promoting from within and do it all the time, but sometimes you need an experienced leader who has operated at or ahead of the scale you’re at. Someone with deep functional expertise and a “been there, done that” playbook. When you get a hire like this right, it’s amazing how much that kind of person gets done, how quickly. One of the pitfalls of those hires, though, is cultural fit. Many of the larger organizations in the world don’t have the kind of supportive, employee-centric cultures that we have here, or that startups tend…
The 2×4
The 2×4 I took a Freshman Seminar in my first semester at Princeton in 1988 with a world-renowned professor of classical literature, Bob Hollander. My good friend and next-door neighbor Peggy was in the seminar with me. It was a small group — maybe a dozen of us — meeting for three hours each week for a roundtable with Professor Hollander, and then writing the occasional paper. Peggy and I both thought we were pretty smart. We had both been high school salutatorians from good private schools and had both gotten into Princeton, right? Then the first paper came due, and we were both a bit cavalier about it. We wrote them in full and delivered them on time, but…
How to Manage Your Career
I gave a presentation to a few hundred Return Path employees in January at an all-hands conference we did called “How to Manager Your Career.” The presentation has three sections — The Three Phases of a Career, How to Get Promoted, and How to Wow Your Manager. While it’s not as good without the voiceover and interactivity, I thought I’d post it here…see the presentation on Slideshare. As I said to my audience, if there’s one thing to take away from the topic, it’s this: Managing your career is up to one, and only one person – you. It doesn’t matter how great a corporate culture you have, or how supportive your manager is. You’re the only person who cares…