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Return Path

Why I Love Our New Product

Why I Love Our New Product   Return Path officially announced a new product today called Domain Assurance, which I blogged a little bit about here.  It’s a very exciting product that will help reduce and ultimately eliminate phishing emails – spam’s even more evil cousin that leads to identity theft, malware, further propagation of spam through botnets, and all sorts of other goodies.  The product is in beta now with a bunch of top ISPs and brands. Those are a lot of reasons to love our new product.  But for me, there’s more. For starters, this is the first new product (entirely new product, not just a feature or extension) that we’ve launched in years.  While we’ve made some…

Getting Good Inc., Part II

Getting Good Inc., Part II It was a nice honor to be noted as one of America’s fastest growing companies as an Inc. 500 company two years in a row in 2006 and 2007 (one of them here), but it is an even nicer honor to be noted as one of the Top 20 small/medium sized businesses to work for in America by Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine.  In addition to the award, we were featured in this month’s issue of Inc. with a specific article about transparency, and important element of our corporate culture, on p72 and online here. Why a nicer honor?  Simply put, because we pride ourselves on being a great place to work — and we…

Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B

Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth, by David Thomson (book, Kindle) sounds more formulaic than it is. It’s not a bad book, but you have to dig a little bit for the non-obvious nuggets (yes, I get that growing your company to $1B in sales requires having a great value proposition in a high growth market!). The author looked for commonalities among the 387 American companies that have gone public since 1980 with less than $1B in revenues when they went public and had more than $1B in revenue (and were still in existence) at the time of the book’s writing in 2005. Thompson classifies the blueprint into…

New People Electrify the Organization

New People Electrify the Organization   We had a good year in 2009, but it was tough.  Whose wasn’t?  Sales were harder to come by, more existing customers left or asked for price relief than usual, and bills were hard to collect.  Worse than that, internally a lot of people were in a funk all year.  Someone on our team started calling it “corporate ennui.”  Even though our business was strong overall and we didn’t do any layoffs or salary cuts, I think people had a hard time looking around them, seeing friends and relatives losing their jobs en masse, and feeling happy and secure.  And as a company, we were doing well and growing the top line, but we…

From Founder/Builder to Manager/Leader

From Founder/Builder to Manager/Leader After I spoke at the Startup2Startup event last month, one of the people who sat with me at dinner emailed me and asked: I was curious–how did you make the transition from CEO of a startup to manager of a medium-sized business? I’m great at just doing the work myself and interacting with clients, and it’s easy for me to delegate tasks, but it’s hard to have the vision and ability to develop my two employees into greater capacity… I’d be interested in reading a blog post on what helped you make that transition from founder/builder to manager/leader It feels like the answer to this question is about a mile long, but I thought I’d at…

Learning How to Stop

Learning How to Stop This is my last post about thoughts I had coming out of the NYC Lean Startup Meetup that I spoke at a couple weeks ago.  Being lean, the discussion went at this event, means not doing extraneous things.  While it’s true for startups that it’s important to make great decisions about what to do up front, it’s also true — especially as companies get larger and more important older — that organizations and individuals have to be vigilant about stopping activities that become extraneous over time. This is HARD.  Once things — product features, business processes, reports, ways of communicating or thinking about things — get ingrained in an organization, there’s never a natural impetus to…

Pivot, Don’t Jump!

Pivot, Don’t Jump! I spoke last night at the NYC Lean Startup Meetup, which was fun.  I will write a couple other posts based on the experience over the next week or so.  The Meetup is all about creating “lean startups,” not just meaning lean as in cheap and lightweight, but meaning smart at doing product development from the perspective of finding the quickest path to product-market fit.  No wasted cycles of innovation.  Something we are spending a lot of time on right now at Return Path, actually. My topic was “The Pivot,” by which the group meant How do you change your product idea/formation quickly and nimbly when you discover that your prior conception of “product-market fit” is off? …

A Perfect Ten

A Perfect Ten Return Path turns 10 years old today.  We are in the midst of a fun week of internal celebrations, combined with our holiday parties in each office as well as year-end all-hands meetings.  I thought I would share some of my reflections on being 10 in the blog as I’ve shared them with our team. What being 10 means to me – and what’s enabled us to make it this long: It means we’ve beaten the odds.  Two major global economic meltdowns.  The fact that 90% of new small businesses fail before they get to this point.  Probably a higher percentage of venture backed startups fail before they get to 10 as well We’ve gotten here because…

Powerpointless

Powerpointless We tried an experiment last week at a Return Path Board meeting — and not just a regular Board meeting, but our once-a-year, full-day (~9 hour) annual planning session attended in person by all Board members, observers, and executives.  First, a little background. We have been driving two important trends over the years at our Board meetings: 1. Focusing on the future, not the past.  In the early years of the business, our Board meetings were probably 75% “looking backwards” and 25% “looking forwards.”  They were reporting meetings — reports which were largely in the hands of Board members before the meetings anyway.  They were dull as all get out.  This past meeting was probably 10% “looking backwards” and…

If this madness all ended tomorrow, I would do…almost nothing

If this madness all ended tomorrow, I would do…almost nothing (This post originally appeared on FindYourNerve on October 21) I don’t know what you call the last 12 months of global macroeconomic meltdown.  I’ve taken to calling it the Great Repression.  In part because it’s somewhere in between a Recession and a Depression, in part because it’s certainly repressed the wants and needs of startups and growth companies the world over.  And it makes for good cocktail party chatter. Someone asked me a question the other day, which started off with “Now that the recession is over…”  I can’t even remember the end of the question.  I got lost in the framing of it, mostly because I’m not convinced it’s…