(This is going to be an interesting week. I expect in a couple days, a group of friends and former Return Path colleagues and I are going to officially start a new company once initial funding closes. I will write about that down the road, but first, this message brought to you by COVID-19.) I just returned from spending an intense two weeks in Denver. On March 15, my long-time friend and Board member Brad Feld called me with an interesting idea. His friend, Colorado Governor Jared Polis (who I’d met a briefly couple times over the years), had an idea of starting and rapidly scaling up a task force in the state government and wanted to tap a private…
Category
Current Affairs
Grit
I was honored this week to be in a small group “fireside chat” with Angela Duckworth, author of the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, and to meet her and ask a question. I want to hit on one theme here from the book and dialog, but I’ll start by sharing a 2×2 matrix (remember, I’m an ex-consultant, I think in frameworks) that we’ve used at home with our kids periodically. For the most part, we use it to talk to them about why they should work harder on math homework, but it’s had other use cases as well. Hopefully it makes sense on the face of it… …but essentially the framework teaches that if you are talented…
Democracy in Action
I went to our local high school gym last night to vote for a smallish ($12mm) school bond issue as well as another proposition I didn’t quite understand about paying for fire alarms in the schools. As is always the case in New York, I was somewhere between amused and appalled that the voting machines are pre-war vintage (possibly Civil, definitely WWI). But this election was a new experience for me. When I finished voting, I ran into a friend of ours who is on the school board, and he suggested I stick around because the polls were closing, and I’d get to hear the results. This picture is how the results were tabulated. A woman with a whiteboard yelled…
A Great American Experience
A Great American Experience President Obama signed into law today a bill called the JOBS Act. I haven’t read the full text of the law, but based on abstracts, my opinion of the JOBS Act is that it’s great for the startup community, but even greater for growth companies. I am less familiar with the Crowdsourcing components of the bill, but certainly that will make it easier for pure startups to attract micro capital. The Sarbanes-Oxley reforms that make it easier and less costly to go through an IPO and be a public company will really enable growth companies like Return Path and many others in the Internet industry to go public a little earlier and with less difficulty. Tapping…
Book Short: Fixing America
Book Short: Fixing America I usually only blog about business books, but since I occasionally comment on politics, I thought I would also post on That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum (book, Kindle), which I just finished. There is much that is good about America. And yet, there is much that is broken and in need of serious repair. I wrote about some thought on fixing our political system last year in The Beginnings of a Roadmap to Fix America’s Badly Broken Political System?, but fixing our political system can only do so much. Tom Friedman, with whom I usually…
Taking Stock
Taking Stock Every year around this time, I take a few minutes to reflect on how the business is doing, on my goals and development plans, and on what I want to accomplish in the coming year. Although most of that work is focused on how to move the business forward, I also make sure to take stock of my own career trajectory. I always ask myself three questions when I do this: Am I having fun at work? Am I learning and growing as a professional? Is my work financially rewarding enough, either in the short term or in the long term? Of course, I always shoot for 3 YES responses. Then I know my career is on track. …
Transparency Rules
Transparency Rules I think each and every one of our 13 core values at Return Path is important to our culture and to our success. And I generally don’t rank them. But if I did, People First is a leading contender to be at the top of the list. The other leading contender would be this last one in the series: We believe in being transparent and direct The big Inc. Magazine story about us last year talked a lot about our commitment to transparency and some of the challenges that come with being transparent and direct with people. I’d like to highlight here some of the benefits of being transparent, and the benefits of being direct (sometimes those two things…
9/11’s 10th
9/11’s 10th I wasn’t yet writing this blog on 9/11 (no one was writing blogs yet), and if I had had one, I’m not sure what I would have written. The neighborhood immediately surrounding the World Trade Center had been my home for more than seven years before the twin towers fell, and it continued to be my home for more than seven years after they fell. That same neighborhood was Return Path‘s home for its first 18 months or so, across two different offices. Like all Americans, the attack felt personal. Like all New Yorkers, it was in our face. But it hit home in a different way for those of us who lived and worked in Lower Manhattan….
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition Once I stripped out the spam and the person:person emails from my inbox this morning, here were the five subject lines I was left with: Wall Street Journal: Osama Bin Laden is Dead [eCommerce company]: Final Hours to Shop Our Private Sale! Wall Street Journal: Bin Laden Was Killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan Official Says [Travel site]: Last minute deals from NYC and more! Wall Street Journal: Osama Bin Laden Buried at Sea Return Path (yes, my own company): Why Whitelisting is Important to Your Email Marketing Mix The cynic in me says “wow, nice timing on the email marketing.” I am guessing the attention and click-through on anything other than today’s big news will be greatly diminished. But the…
BookShort: Vive La Difference
Book Short: Vive La Difference Brain Sex, by Anne Moir and David Jessell, was a fascinating read that I finished recently. I will caveat this post up front that the book was published in 1989, so one thing I’m not sure of is whether there’s been more recent research that contradicts any of the book’s conclusions. I will also caveat that this is a complex topic with many different schools of thought based on varying research, and this book short should serve as a starting point for a dialog, not an end point. That said, the book was a very interesting read about how our brains develop (a lot happens in utero), and about how men’s and women’s brains are…
The Beginnings of a Roadmap to Fix America’s Badly Broken Political System?
The Beginnings of a Roadmap to Fix America’s Badly Broken Political System? UPDATE: This week’s Economist (March 17) has a great special report on the future of the state that you can download here, entitled”Taming Leviathan: The state almost everywhere is big, inefficient and broke. It needn’t be,” which has many rich examples, from California to China, and espouses a bunch of these ideas. I usually try to keep politics away from this blog, but sometimes I can’t help myself. I’m so disgusted with the dysfunction in Washington (and Albany…and Sacramento…and…) these days, that I’ve spent more spare cycles than usual thinking about the symptoms, their root causes, and potential solutions. A typical entrepreneur’s approach, I guess. So here’s my…