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…
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Entrepreneurship
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…
Counter Cliche: It's Fun at the Top
Counter Cliche: It’s Fun at the Top! Fred’s VC cliche this week is a good one — that CEOs have the weight of the company on their shoulders, otherwise known as "it’s lonely at the top." He’s right in a lot of ways, and his two suggestions for dealing with it are good. To those, I’d add a third suggestion, which is to create a peer group of other CEOs that gets together periodically to talk, share ideas, and blow off steam. It doesn’t need to be something formal like YPO or YEO — just have a quarterly dinner roundtable with a handful of other local CEOs you know and respect, whether from your industry or not. But the counter…
Counter Cliche: Win The Peace
Counter Cliche: Win The Peace Fred’s VC cliche of the week this week is a good one, Hope for the Best and Prepare for the Worst. It’s certainly true, as he says, for startups going through a financing, and in many other instances. I may regret mixing business and politics here, but since Fred has done that before (with the same caveat), I’ll give it a shot as well. As important as it is to prepare for the worst, entrepreneurs and politicians alike need to make sure they’re also planning to win the peace — in other words, planning for a successful outcome. How much happier would we be as a country at war right now if our administration had…
Highs and Lows
Highs and Lows I was reminded recently of one of my favorite entrepreneur sayings. What drives me nuts isn’t the inevitable presence of highs and lows of running a new company, it’s when they happen at the same time. It’s one thing to get used to the roller coaster ride of running a startup. That’s part of the fun and the challenge of it all. There are great moments when everything’s working beautifully. Your strategy is proving to be spot-on. Your team is executing brilliantly. Your biggest client renews and gives you a testimonial. Then there are the dark moments of despair. You’re running out of cash. The new product release is behind schedule. A competitor steals a top client. …
Counter Cliche: Sleeves, or Shoes?
Counter Cliche: Sleeves, or Shoes? Fred’s VC Cliche of the Week this week is about "rolling up your sleeves." It’s a good one about how investors need to really understand a business inside and out in order to be effective board members – that they have to believe that they work for the CEO as much as the other way around. One of my very first posts on this blog over a year ago talked about the fact that as a CEO, you have to remember that you don’t just work for your board, but you also work for your customers and your employees. It’s the same principle. My counter cliche this week is that Sometimes You Have to Walk…
Counter Cliche: The VC Pass
Fred’s VC Cliche of the Week this week is called "the pass," which is the euphemism that VCs have adopted when they decide not to invest in a particular company or entrepreneur. Fred’s VC wisdom comes down to this: 1 – Say no quickly to the things you know you aren’t going to do 2 – Don’t take an opportunity into diligence unless you are willing to spend enough time to truly undersand it, and if you don’t invest, make sure you are willing to spend time explaining why. It won’t make it any easier on the entrepreneur who is trying to find someone to invest in his business that you are passing, but they might learn something from the…