Million Dollar Baby I had one of those aha moments today while looking over some insurance numbers with Rob Mattes, our CFO (and a gentleman and a scholar). I know it’s dangerous to think about dollars in the aggregate across years, but I’m pretty sure that by the end of this calendar year, we will have spent close to $1 million on insurance over the course of the 7 years we’ve been in business at Return Path. I think I gagged when I realized that. I mean, one million dollars? Really? How is that possible? And how many other ways would I have rather spent that million dollars? Well, it all adds up — we have coverage for, among other…
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Entrepreneurship
Memory Lane or Dark Alley?
Memory Lane or Dark Alley? We had an interesting meeting today. A small group of the old-timers at Return Path, including one of our founders who doesn’t work at the company any longer, convened a summit to brainstorm ways to reinvent our original, original business, Email Change of Address (ECOA). For those of you who don’t know what it is, ECOA is a very simple idea — that people who change email addresses need help updating their personal and business contacts, and also their most trusted commercial email newsletter relationships. It’s a free service for consumers, and a paid service for opt-in email marketers and publishers who use our service to reacquire their customers with renewed permission and a shiny…
Book Short: Which Runs Faster, You or Your Company?
Book Short: Which Runs Faster, You or Your Company? Leading at the Speed of Growth, by Katherine Catlin at the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership is a must read for any entrepreneur or CEO of a growth company. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read targeted to that audience – its content is great, its format is a page-turner, and it’s concise and to the point. The authors take you through three stages of a growth company’s lifestyle (Initial Growth, Rapid Growth, and Continuous Growth) and describe the “how to’s” of the transition into each stage: how you know it’s coming, how to behave in the new stage, how to leave the old stage behind. I didn’t realize…
Angel Investors, Part II
Angel Investors, Part II A while back, I posted about angel investors and strategic investors, and the puts and takes of taking money from them as you start your business. Tom Evslin has a great and much longer post today about finding and dealing with angel investors that’s worth a read if you’re giving any thought to this topic.
Like Fingernails on a Chalkboard
Like Fingernails on a Chalkboard Anyone who worked in the Internet in the early days probably remembers all-too-vividly how silly things got near the end. Even those who had nothing to do with the industry but who were alive at the time with an extra dollar or two to invest in the stock market probably has some conception of the massive roller coaster companies were on in those years. The memories/images/perceptions all come crashing down in the latest chapter of Tom Evslin’s blook hackoff.com in a manner that reminds me of the sound of fingernails racing down a chalkboard. You’ve heard it before, you can’t forget it, you squirm every time you hear it, but you can’t tear yourself away…
Counter Cliche: How Much Paranoia is Too Much Paranoia?, Part II
Counter Cliche: How Much Paranoia is Too Much Paranoia?, Part II After the original posting, one of my readers wrote in with the following question:I was one of the first employees at a pre-funding enterprise social networking company, after having consulted on doing their business plan for them (not coming up with it; mainly turning the CEO and CTO’s engineer-speak into English). After being asked to participate more fully in the marketing and biz dev aspects of the company, I quickly found myself stymied by the level of secrecy the CEO maintained. Now, I understand that you wouldn’t want important information getting out to competitors, but that can be handled by making that clear to team members. I found it…
Counter Cliche: How Much Paranoia is Too Much Paranoia?
Counter Cliche: How Much Paranoia is Too Much Paranoia? Fred’s VC cliche of the week this week, Opening the Kimono, is a good one. He talks about how much entrepreneurs should and should not disclose when talking to VCs and big partners — companies like Microsoft or Google, for example. In response to another of Fred’s weekly cliche postings back in April, I addressed the issue of opening the kimono with VCs in this posting entitled Promiscuity. But today’s topic is the opposite of promiscuity, it’s paranoia. I was talking with a friend a few months back who’s a friend and fellow CEO of a high profile, larger company in a similar space to Return Path. He was obsessing about…
Six Candles: You Can't Tell What The Living Room Looks Like From the Front Porch
Six Candles: You Can’t Tell What The Living Room Looks Like From the Front Porch Today, Return Path is six years old. I thought I’d celebrate the occasion by reflecting back on how different our business is now than we thought it would be at the beginning. When we started Return Path, we were sure Email Change of Address (ECOA) was going to be a $100mm business. It still may be someday, but it’s not now. If you had told me when we started the company that we’d execute on ECOA but also be market leaders in email delivery assurance (which didn’t exist at the time), email list management and list rental (a huge market by the time we started),…
Doing Well by Doing Good, Part II
Doing Well by Doing Good, Part II At Return Path, we feel strongly that companies can and should make the world a better place in several different ways. Certainly, many companies’ core businesses do that — just look at all the breakthroughs in medicine and social services over the years brought to market by private enterprises, including my friend Raj Vinnakota, who I wrote about in part I of this series last year. But many companies, including Return Path, aren’t inherently “save the world” in nature (although some people in online marketing would have you believe that we are!), and those companies can still make a difference in the world in a few ways: 1. Organize projects in the local…
CEO Diary: What Makes a Great Day?
CEO Diary: What Makes a Great Day? 5:30 a.m. – run (have to keep up with Brad) 8:45 a.m. – networking coffee with former main contact at large strategic partner; now CFO of another company in the industry 9:30 a.m. – work time/email/read newsletters, Wall St. Journal online, various RSS feeds 10:30 a.m. – internal meeting to discuss mothballing a product feature that’s hard to maintain and doesn’t generate much revenue 11:00 a.m. – internal meeting to clarify roles and responsibilities between account management and client technical operations 11:30 a.m. – brainstorm 2006 strategy with head of one of our lines of business 1:00 p.m. – great sales call on a Tier I prospect with new sales person; business almost…
Unfolding the Map
Unfolding the Map I heard two similar catchphrases last week, both from entrepreneurs I respect, that are diametrically opposed: 1. If you don’t have a map, you can’t get lost 2. If you don’t have a map, you can’t get where you’re going How to reconcile the two? I think the answer is stage of company. In the early days of a business, being too rigid on what you’re building and how you interact with your customer set can doom you. You have to be nimble! Spry! Not care exactly what your endgame is, as long as it’s good. As your business grows and you have a customer base to support and numbers to hit, having too much product development…