Book Short: Entrepreneurs in Government Leadership and Innovation: Entrepreneurs in Government, edited by a professor I had at Princeton, Jim Doig, is an interesting series of mini-biographies of second- and third-tier government officials, mostly from the 1930s through the 1970s. The book’s thesis is that some of the most interesting movers and shakers in the public arena (not elected officials) have a lot of the same core skills as private sector entrepreneurs. The thesis is borne out by the book, and the examples are interesting, if for no other reason than they are about a series of highly influential people you’ve probably never heard of. The guy who ran the Port Authority of New York for 30 years. The guy…
Category
Entrepreneurship
Education and Entrepreneurship
Education and Entrepreneurship Fred posted his thoughts the other day that you don’t need a college degree to be a successful entrepreneur. He is clearly right in that one CAN be successful without it. Gates, Zuckerberg, Dell have proven that. I’ve always said that I didn’t think an MBA was a prerequisite for a successful business career. That’s easy for me to say, as I don’t have one despite many years of applying, deferring, cancelling, reapplying and general hand-wringing over whether or not to go in the mid-90s. An MBA is probably a positive on a resume for the most part (hard to argue it’s a negative), but it’s not a prerequisite. Every time I see “MBA preferred”…
New Email Blogger Extraordinaire
New Email Blogger Extraordinaire My good friend and co-founder George Bilbrey, Return Path’s President, is now blogging. His blog, Monkey Mind Labs, is aptly named in part after Return Path’s long-standing but little-known corporate mascot. His first few posts are up. My guess is that his blog will be a bit like mine in that it will cover topics about email marketing as well as entrepreneurship, but I can almost promise that George will be both wittier and more insightful than I. At least, that’s what he tells me. Take a look! Subscribe. Enjoy.
Challenge
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…
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…