Next One is the Big One, a.k.a. Nine is Fine Today, Return Path turns nine years old. What an exciting year we’ve had, too. As I mentioned a couple months back, we completely reorganized the company this year, marking a major transition and a new stage in the life of the business. We acquired our largest competitor, Habeas, consolidating our space and further establishing ourselves as the leader in email deliverability and whitelisting. We marched right past our 1,000th client milestone and now are well on our way to our 1,500th. Thanks again to our fantastic team and our great group of investors and Board members for another fun and exciting year. Nine is fine…and now the march to The…
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Return Path
If You’re Going to Do Something, Do It First Class
If You’re Going to Do Something, Do It First Class I have long made this statement, not just about business, but about life. Why bother doing something big if you’re not going to do it right? Don’t just write a senior thesis, get an A on it. Don’t invite the boss over for dinner and serve chicken nuggets. You get the idea. Our marketing team at Return Path totally nailed this last week with our IN conference on Reputation. They selected a venue, the American Museum of Natural History, that wasn’t just a standard issue hotel conference room. They sought out a killer keynote speaker, Seth Godin, instead of just having Return Path staff and clients talk. They…
No Separation Anxiety
No Separation Anxiety When we announced last week that we were selling our Email Change of Address (ECOA) business unit to our competitor Fresh Address as part of our corporate restructuring that allows us to focus exclusively on our flagship deliverability and whitelisting business, a bunch of people asked if me if that decision was emotional or difficult. As ECOA was Return Path’s initial business — you know, the one that was going to be $100 million in revenues within 5 years — shouldn’t I be sad to see it go? In the end, it wasn’t a difficult decision to sell the business. Times have changed. While it still works well as a product and generates profitable revenue,…
Charting A New Path: Focus is Our Friend
Charting A New Path: Focus is Our Friend When Return Path turned six years old a few years ago, I wrote a post on my personal blog (OnlyOnce) titled You Can’t Tell What the Living Room Looks Like from the Front Porch. The essence of the post is that flexibility is a key success factor in starting and growing a business, and sometimes the business turns out different than what you thought when you wrote that business plan. At the time, I was commenting on how different Return Path turned out – operating five businesses – than we did when we started the original ECOA business in 1999. Today, the message rings more true than ever. On the heels of…
Drawing the Line: Where We Come out
Drawing the Line: Where We Come out In the first post in this series, I laid out a dilemma we’ve had internally at Return Path in recent months: whether and how we accept clients who are in “grey” businesses like alcohol, pornography, and neutriceuticals, and whether that applies uniformly across all of our products (software vs. consulting vs. whitelist). In the second post, I reposted a summary of all the comments we received from readers. Now comes the fun part — the so what. We had a good series of conversations internally on this issue that included some very spirited debate. Here’s where we come out. First, we drew a distinction between three types of potentially “troublesome” clients: those whose…
Drawing the Line
Drawing the LineWe are having a bit of a debate at the moment internally around our Sender Score deliverability business about how to handle clients who are in businesses that are, shall we say, not exactly as pure as the driven snow. As a company that provides software and services to businesses without a vertical focus, we are often approached by all sorts of companies wanting our services where we don’t love what they do. Examples include: Gambling Tobacco Neutriceuticals Guns Adult content or products Our challenges are along three dimensions, each of which is a little different. But common threads run through all three dimensions. Dimension 1: Our deliverability technology platform. Our basic technology is used by mailers of…
No Recession at Return Path
No Recession at Return Path I know, I know. I shouldn’t jinx us. But we’re growing like mad at the moment, so much so that we have well almost 50 open positions now across all divisions of the company. If you want to come join one of the fastest growing, most innovative, and just plain coolest places to work in the industry, we’d love to talk to you. What’s driving the growth? All our operating units have open positions. Sender Score (deliverability/whitelisting) has the most openings and is growing explosively. But Authentic Response (market research) and Postmaster (lead generation) both have openings as well Geographic expansion. We have a bunch of openings in Europe as well as in the U.S. …
Closer to the Front Lines
Closer to the Front Lines When we started Return Path, we added a little clause to our employee handbook that entitled people to a sabbatical after 7 years of service (and then after every 5 incremental years). Six weeks off, 3/4 pay. Full pay if you do something “work related.” Sure, we thought. That’s an easy thing to give. We’ll never be 7 years old as a company. Now, 8 1/2 years later, of course, the first wave of people are reaching their sabbatical date. A couple have already gone (one trip around the world, one quality time with the kids). A couple others are pending. Four of us at the exec level are overdue to take ours, and we…
When Good Companies Go Bad
When Good Companies Go Bad This post could just as easily be entitled, “When Small Companies Go Big.” I know risk management is an important part of business, but I have run into several examples in the past few months where another company’s insanely aggressive staff roles — legal, procurement, and HR in particular — have driven me batty. We have a big financial services client who, after much wrangling with their legal time, signed a two year contract with us that was based on our standard form of agreement, though modified quite a bit to their specifications. A few months into the contract, we and our client wanted to add a new service into the agreement via a simple addendum. Someone…
Eight is NOT Enough!
Eight is NOT Enough! Today is the eighth anniversary of the founding of Return Path. No offense to Dick Van Patten or Grant Goodeve, but Eight is NOT Enough. We are just hitting our stride here! Congratulations to our incredibly hard working and dedicated employees, and thanks to our clients, partners, and investors for all their support these past 8 years. Eight may have been Great…but Nine will be Fine!
The Social Aspects of Running a Board
The Social Aspects of Running a Board I’ve posted about the the topic of Boards of Directors a couple of times before, here and here. We had one of our quarterly in-person Board meetings yesterday, which I always enjoy, and one of my directors pointed out that I never posted about the social aspects of running a Board. Since this is a critical component of the job, it is certainly worth mentioning. A high functioning Board isn’t materially different from any other high functioning team. The group needs to have a clear charter or set of responsibilities, clear lines of communication, and open dialog. And as with any team, making sure that the people on a Board know how to…