Challenge I do a decent amount of fundraising for my high school and college, and we frequently employ “challenges” as a means of hitting our goal. For a fundraising campaign, that usually takes the form of finding a large donor to give matching gifts, or $X for everyone who gives more than $X, or $X for any new donor — something like that. We did a fun challenge program at Return Path this December that worked out pretty well for everyone, company and employees alike. We’ve been working the team pretty hard the last 4-5 months, and we wanted to give everyone some kind of fun noncash bonus as a thank you. We also had two major milestones that we…
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Entrepreneurship
Next One is the Big One, a.k.a. Nine is Fine
Next One is the Big One, a.k.a. Nine is Fine Today, Return Path turns nine years old. What an exciting year we’ve had, too. As I mentioned a couple months back, we completely reorganized the company this year, marking a major transition and a new stage in the life of the business. We acquired our largest competitor, Habeas, consolidating our space and further establishing ourselves as the leader in email deliverability and whitelisting. We marched right past our 1,000th client milestone and now are well on our way to our 1,500th. Thanks again to our fantastic team and our great group of investors and Board members for another fun and exciting year. Nine is fine…and now the march to The…
I Wonder if I Could Ever Work for a Big Company
I Wonder if I Could Ever Work for a Big Company And I mean a REALLY BIG one. At my high school reunion last weekend, my friend Jason, who I hadn’t seen in 10 years (and only once in the last 20), heard what I’m doing with my life, and said to me “I’m so glad for you. I couldn’t figure out if you were going to do big company or something entrepreneurial. I’m sure you would have done well either way, but isn’t what you’re doing more fun?” I think he’s right. It is more fun. Every time I have a meaningful interaction with a friend or client inside a huge company, I come away shaking my head…
No Separation Anxiety
No Separation Anxiety When we announced last week that we were selling our Email Change of Address (ECOA) business unit to our competitor Fresh Address as part of our corporate restructuring that allows us to focus exclusively on our flagship deliverability and whitelisting business, a bunch of people asked if me if that decision was emotional or difficult. As ECOA was Return Path’s initial business — you know, the one that was going to be $100 million in revenues within 5 years — shouldn’t I be sad to see it go? In the end, it wasn’t a difficult decision to sell the business. Times have changed. While it still works well as a product and generates profitable revenue,…
Managing in a Downturn
Managing in a Downturn I spoke at a NextNY event last night along with several others, including fellow entrepreneur David Kidder from Clickable and angel investor Roger Enhrenberg about this fine topic (Roger wrote a great post on it here) and thought I’d share a few of the key points made by all of us for anyone trying to figure out what to do tactically now that Sequoia has told us to be afraid, very afraid. Hope is Not a Strategy: Your business is not immune. It will do what everyone else’s will. Struggle to hit its numbers. Struggle to collect bills. Lose customers. There is no reason to hope you’ll be different. Get Into the Jet Stream: Develop your…
Entrepreneur’s Perspective on Non-Competes
Entrepreneur’s Perspective on Non-Competes (Note: I just found this post in the “drafts” folder and realize I never put it up! It was written months ago, although I just updated it a bit.) Bijan Sabet kicked off the discussion about non-competes by asserting that they are a barrier to innovation and that they are unenforceable in California anyway, so why bother? Fred continued the discussion and made some good assertions about the value of non-competes, summarizing his points as: Non-competes are very much in the interests of our portfolio companies. But the non-competes need to be tightly defined and the term of the non-compete needs to be paid for by the portfolio company if the employee was forced out of…
Book Short: Catchiest Title in a Long Time
Book Short: Catchiest Title in a Long Time You have to admit, a book called The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich has a pretty enticing title. The email geek in me thinks that if it were a subject line, it would have a good open rate. Anyway, the book, by Timothy Ferriss, is a breezy read that blends self help with entrepreneurship, has a lot of good resource lists in it, and is worth reading if you don’t take it too seriously. There are some good central points to the book. First, life has changed, and people don’t want to slave away until they’re 65 any more so they can do all the fun…
Curbing My Enthusiasm
Curbing My Enthusiasm For the first time since I started blogging over four years ago, I have recently run into several examples in a short period of time where I’d love to blog about something happening in the business, and I think it would make for a great blog posting, but I can’t do it. Why can’t I? Lots of different reasons: – Don’t want to telegraph strategy to the competition – Don’t want to compromise an employee (current or former) – Worried about downstream legal ramifications There are other reasons as well, but these are the main three. I love transparency as much as the next person (and more than most), but these scenarios have to trump transparency in…
Driving Out of the Bubble
Driving Out of the Bubble It’s easy for those of us who live in the Internet bubble to confuse the words “startup” and “entrepreneur” with the word “technology.” Every once in a while, I am struck by a fantastic entrepreneurial idea that’s low-tech or no-tech. In the last few weeks, I’ve learned of two of them — oddly, very similar ideas. They’re both going after the New York City black car limo market (all those car services that take business travelers to and from airports and meetings), which is a lucrative but kind of gritty business. I’ve used black car services for 16 years now, and while I’ve found one that’s pretty good, they all have massive customer service problems…
Do Business Books Suck for Entrepreneurs?
Do Business Books Suck for Entrepreneurs? Ben thinks they do. Some of his reasons are pretty good, but I’d challenge a few of them, or at least his finer points. My experience over the years is that while most business books are not geared toward entrepreneurs, a good entrepreneur will figure out how to milk them for what they’re worth quickly and apply key learnings to his or her company. The reality is that running a startup or high growth company is a multi-faceted and incredibly dynamic experience, and having a bunch of outside inputs in the form of business book examples and theories can be really helpful. Even bad ideas can spur good thinking.
You Have to Shoot to Score
You Have to Shoot to Score Fred’s recent post called From Messes to Successes left me thinking about the reasons why successful companies often have rough patches along the road to their ultimate success — the times Fred refers to when he says “they’re a mess.” First, his premise is right. Good companies are often a mess. Probably more than most outside Board members (even good VC ones) even realize! And while his explanation as to why this occurs, which is that the company focuses exclusively on the product to the exclusion of infrastructure, scaling, and planning issues, may be right some of the time, let me offer an alternative explanation. I always tell people internally that You Have to…