We run a massive employee survey every year or so called The Loop, which is powered by Culture Amp. We are big fans of Culture Amp, as they provide not only a great survey tool but benchmarks of relevant peer companies so our results can be placed in external context as well as internal context. The survey is anonymous and only really rolled up to large employee groups (big teams, departments, offices, etc.), and we take the results very seriously. Every year we run it, we create an Organization Development Plan out of the results that steers a lot of the work of our Leadership team and People team for the coming year. I just read every single comment that…
Category
Entrepreneurship
You Don’t Know How to Drive a Car Because You Know How to Read a Map
I was having breakfast with the CEO of another SaaS company the other day, as I often do to network. He was telling me about his experience working with his company’s new Private Equity owner. There are always a mix of pros and cons that come with any particular shareholder, Board member, or owners, of course. In his case, my fellow CEO was bemoaning the 29-year old associate who acted like a know-it-all in every Board meeting. Lots of CEOs have been there. There’s a lot of value you can get from an associate or VP-level person at an investor who is the Master of the Spreadsheet and who has access to a lot of data about your company. And there is…
No One Will Ever Thank You for Keeping Prices Low
I was in a Board meeting last week (not Return Path’s), when one of my fellow directors came out with this gem: “No one will ever thank us for keeping our prices low.” When I first heard this, as is the case with most great quotes, I was drawn to its wit and simplicity. But then I started thinking – is it true? My mind first went to retail. Having a reputation as being a low-cost provider can be in and of itself effective marketing – if that reputation is strong enough and your selection is wide enough, at least in retail-oriented industries, customers may consistently buy from you even if you’re not ALWAYS the low-cost provider. Wal-Mart and Amazon…
Knowing When to Ask for Help in Your Startup
I had a great networking meeting yesterday along with Tami Forman, the CEO of our non-profit affiliate Path Forward, and Joanne Wilson, my board co-chair. It was a meeting that Joanne set up that the three of us had been talking about for over a year. Joanne made a great comment as we were debriefing in the elevator after the meeting that is the foundation of this post. Tami and I shaped her comment into this metaphor: Finding wood to help start a fire is different from pouring gasoline on a fire As an entrepreneur, you need to constantly be asking for help and networking. Those meetings will shape your business in ways that you can never predict. They’ll shape…
How Venture Capital Firms Work, for Entrepreneurs and Startups
A couple of months ago, I was doing an internal lunch & learn for senior managers, and the topic came up as to “how do our VC firms work?” In the spirit of deeply understanding our customers’ businesses in order to better serve them, I thought the same would be true of our investors and Board members – that educating our team on the inner workings and economics of our investors would lead to greater empathy of one of our other key stakeholders. So with no small amount of help from my long-time investor and director Brad Feld and his colleague Jason Mendelson, whose book Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist I contributed to in a very…
Agile Everywhere, Part II
Over the years, I’ve written a lot about the Agile methodology on this blog. For those of you who are regular readers, you may remember a post I wrote about our Agile Everywhere initiative— where all Return Path teams were tasked with implementing agile practices. A little over a year later, I want to update you on our agile journey–where we are now and how we got there. My colleague Cathy Hawley (our head of People) will write a more detailed series of guest posts for those of you who want to get more details of our transformation process. Before we started our Agile Everywhere initiative, only our product and engineering teams were using agile. The rest of the organization…
The Value and Limitations of Pattern Recognition
My father-in-law, who is a doctor by training but now a health care executive, was recently talking about an unusual medical condition that someone in the family was fighting. He had a wonderful expression he said docs use from time to time: When you hear hoof beats, it’s probably horses. But you never know when it might be a zebra. With experience (and presumably some mental wiring) comes the ability to recognize patterns. It’s one of those things that doesn’t happen, no matter how smart you are, without the passage of time and seeing different scenarios play out in the wild. It’s one of the big things that I’ve found that VC investors as Board members, and independent directors, bring…
Why You Won’t See Us Trash Talk Our Competition
We’ve been in business at Return Path for almost 18 years now. We’ve seen a number of competitors come and go across a bunch of different related businesses that we’ve been in. One of the things I’ve noticed and never quite understood is that many of our competitors expend a lot of time and energy publicly trash talking us in the market. Sometimes this takes the form of calling us or our products out by name in a presentation at a conference; other times it takes the form of a blog post; other times it’s just in sales calls. It’s weird. You don’t see that all that often in other industries, even when people take aim at market leaders. During…
Being a CEO is Like Playing a Game of Hearts
Hearts was one of my favorite card games in college. I remember staying up deep into the night regularly with my roommates playing it. I recently taught our kids how to play and have been playing with them more regularly of late…and I was reminded how much I enjoy the game. No metaphor or simile is perfect, and this one isn’t either, but it occurred to me the other night that being a CEO is a little bit like playing a game of Hearts. First and foremost, you have to play the hand that you’re dealt. No matter how proactive you want to be about running your own agenda, things happen around you — with your people, your customers, your…
A Two Week Vacation is More Than Twice As Good As a One Week Vacation
I’ve said this for years, but as I sit on the train commuting into work after a week off relaxing with my family for my Dad’s 75th birthday (or as he prefers to call it, the 46th anniversary of his 29th birthday), I feel particularly inclined to write it up! I love my job, so I almost never mind going to work. But I also love being on vacation and traveling with my family and try to do as much of it as I can. Years ago before we had kids and became tethered to school and sports schedules, we used to take at least one full two week vacation, completely unplugged, at least once a year. I miss that!…
Reboot – Back to Basics
As I mentioned in last week’s post, I’m rebooting my work self this year, and this quarter in particular. One of the things I am doing is getting back to basics on a few fronts. Over the holiday break, as I was contemplating a reboot, I emailed a handful of people with whom I’ve worked closely over the years, but for the most part people with whom I no longer work day in day out, to ask them a few questions. The questions were fairly backward looking: 1. When I was at my best, what were my personal habits or routines that stand out in your mind? 2. When I was at my best, what were my work behaviors or routines…