Buying Back Your Own Left Leg There has been much written about the spectacular sale of Pixar to Disney for $7.4 billion this week. The fact that Steve Jobs is now Disney’s largest individual shareholder is amazing news on many levels. Fred has a great posting on this today from the investor perspective. Another angle that I find interesting about this transaction is that it reminds me to some extent of Yahoo’s purchase of Overture a couple years back. Yahoo OWNED the search business. For years. Invented it. Synonymous with it. Then they let others lap them they became more of a diversified online media company, and voila! Others focused, innovated, and created a massive business in paid search. Yahoo…
Category
Leadership
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…
Wanted! Comp Benchmark Participants, Part II
Wanted! Comp Benchmark Participants, Part II So far, the responses to my earlier posting on organizing a comp benchmarking project are going well. We still don’t have as many as I’d hoped, but it’s only been a couple of days. However, I did receive a comment and link that led to an email exchange with Mike DiPierro, who pointed me to another collaborate effort that’s worth looking at on the web. Although it may not be quite as customized as the one I’m hoping we can build, this group does an annual report for private company comp, one in IT and the other in Life Sciences. You can see more about it here if you’re interested in participating in their…
Wanted! Comp Benchmark Participants
Wanted! Comp Benchmark Participants Return Path is looking to benchmark our compensation structure with those of peer companies. We would like to organize a project where an independent consultant gathers and compiles the data from a group of 10-20 companies and shares the aggregated results with individual benchmarks back with participants (the data will be anonymous on a per-company basis). The data we’d need from participating companies (for all positions) is: Title and summary of the job description; Base Salary; Bonus; and Location. The criteria for "peer company" is one that is comparable in size (50-250 people), geography (not rural, at least some in NY/Chicago/SF/LA), and industry (anything tech/Internet/services). We will act as the project manager. Participating companies will mainly…
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…
Not-so-Counter Cliche: Forecast Early and Often
Not-so-Counter Cliche: Forecast Early and Often There’s no "counter" in this week’s counter cliche, although this is a cross-post to two of Fred’s recent postings. In his VC Cliche of the Week, he talks about the need for early-stage companies to forecast often, and he was nice enough to cite Return Path as his case study. I thought I’d give some color on this from our perspective here. Forecasting is a pain, so we adopted the model of as 12-month rolling forecast with quarterly reforecasts (and correspondingly quarterly incentive comp structures) out of necessity. For early stage companies in emerging industries, there are simply too many moving parts in the business to provide enough visibility to produce an accurate 12-month…
Book Short: Underdog Victorious
Book Short: Underdog Victorious The Underdog Advantage, by David Morey and Scott Miller, was a worthwhile read, though not a great book. It was a little shallow, and although I enjoyed its case studies (who doesn’t love hearing about Ben & Jerry’s, Southwest, JetBlue, Starbucks?), I didn’t feel like the authors did enough to tie the details of the success of the case study companies back to the points they made in the book. That said, the book had some great reminders in it for companies of all sizes and stages. The main point was that successful companies always think of themselves as the underdog, the insurgent, and never get complacent. They run themselves like a political campaign, needing to…
Counter Cliche: Head Lemming
Counter Cliche: Head Lemming Fred’s VC Cliche of the Week last week was that leadership is figuring out where everyone is going and then getting in front of them and saying “follow me.” While it’s certainly true that juming out in front of a well-organized, rapidly moving parade and becoming the grand marshal (or maybe the baton twirly person) is one path to successful leadership, CEOs do have to be careful about selecting the right parade to jump in front of for two reasons. First, just because lots of people are going in a specific direction doesn’t mean it’s right. There’s nothing good about ending up as the Head Lemming. It just means you go over the cliff before the…
Counter Cliche: Failure Is Not an Orphan
Counter Cliche: Failure Is Not an Orphan I haven’t written one of these for a while, but this week, Fred’s VC Cliche of the Week, Success Has a Thousand Fathers, definitely merits an entrepreneurial point of view. Fred’s main point is right — it’s very easy when something goes right, whether a company/venture deal or even something inside the company like a good quarter or a big new client win, for lots of people to take credit, many of whom don’t deserve it. But what separates A companies from B and C companies is the ability to recognize and process failures as well as successes. Failure is not orphan. It usually has as many real fathers as success. Although it’s…