Startup CEO (OnlyOnce – the book!), Part III – Pre-Order Now My book, Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, is now available for pre-order on Amazon in multiple formats (Print, Kindle), which is an exciting milestone in this project! The book is due out right after Labor Day, but Brad Feld tells me that the more pre-orders I have, the better. Please pardon the self-promotion, but click away if you’re interested! Here are a few quick thoughts about the book, though I’ll post more about it and the process at some point: I’ll be using the hashtag #startupceo more now to encourage discussion of topics related to startup CEOs – please join me! The book has…
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Return Path
Connecting the Dots
Connecting the Dots Although I still maintain that the three primary roles of a CEO are to set Strategy and communicate it, develop Talent, and ensure that the business has proper Resources to run (see post here), I am increasingly finding that I play a fourth role in the organization that’s probably somewhat important, which is Connecting the Dots. What do I mean by Connecting the Dots? I mean helping others network internally, or helping others connect their work to the work of others, or helping others connect their work to the mission of the company, or even to the outside world. Here are a few examples of how I’ve done this kind of work recently: – I joined an…
Firsts, Still
Firsts, Still After more than 13 years in the job, I run into “firsts” less and less often these days. But in the past week, I’ve had three of them. They’re incredibly different, and it’s awkward to write about them in the same post, but the “firsts” theme holds them together. One was incredibly tragic — one of our colleagues at Return Path died suddenly and unexpectedly. Even though we’ve lost two other employees in the last 18 months to cancer, there was something different about this one. While there’s no good way to die, the suddenness of Joel’s passing was a real shock to me and to the organization, and of course more importantly, to his wife. The second…
Return Path’s Newest Board Member: Jeff Epstein
Return Path’s Newest Board Member: Jeff Epstein I’ve written before about how much I love my Board. Well, I’m pleased to announce I have a new reason to love it – today, I’m officially welcoming Jeff Epstein to the Return Path Board of Directors. He is joining an all-star cast that includes Greg Sands, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Scott Weiss and Scott Petry. I first met Jeff back in 2000 when, as CFO of DoubleClick, he and DoubleClick CEO Kevin Ryan agreed to invest in Return Path as our first institutional investor, along with Flatiron Partners. He is one of the few people who have seen the company grow from its infancy to today. Jeff has been a formal advisor…
Articulating the Problem is the First Step Toward Solving It
Articulating the Problem is the First Step Toward Solving It A while back, we were having some specific challenges at Return Path that were *really* hard to diagnose. It was like peeling the proverbial onion. Every time we thought we had the answer to what was going on, we realized all we had was another symptom, not a root cause. We’re a pretty analytical bunch, so we kept looking for more and more data to give us answers. And we kept coming up with, well, not all that much, besides a lot of hand-wringing. It wasn’t until I went into a bit of a cave (e.g., took half a day’s quiet time to myself) and started writing things down for…
Book Short: Entrepreneurial Lessons
Book Short: Entrepreneurial Lessons The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from 42 Founders, by David Kidder, is the ultimate coffee table book for entrepreneurs and people who are interested in how they think about running their businesses. David is the author of the Intellectual Devotional series (here’s a link to one of the five or six books in the series), he’s a good friend of mine and a member of a CEO Forum that I’m in, and my major disclosure about this blog post is that I’m one of the 42 entrepreneurs David interviewed for and profiles in the book. The Startup Playbook is very different from my own book (in progress) on being a Startup CEO. Where…
Startup CEO (OnlyOnce- the book!), Part II – Crowdsourcing the Outline
Startup CEO (OnlyOnce- the book!), Part II – Crowdsourcing the Outline As I mentioned a few weeks ago here, I’m excited to be writing a book called Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Building and Running Your Company, to be published by Wiley & Sons next summer. Since many readers of OnlyOnce are my target audience for the book, I thought I’d post my current outline and ask for input and feedback on it. So here it is, still a bit of a work in progress. Please comment away and let me know what you think, what’s missing, what’s not interesting! 1 Part One: Vision and Strategy (Defining the Company) 1.1 Setting the Company’s Agenda 1.2 NIHITO! (or, “Nothing Interesting…
A New VC Ready to Go!
A New VC Ready to Go! One of the interesting things about being in business for 13 years (as of last week!) at Return Path is that we have been around longer than two of our Venture Capital funds. Fortunately for us, Fred led an investment in the company with his new fund, Union Square Ventures, even though his initial investment was via his first fund, Flatiron Partners. And even though Brad hasn’t invested out of his new fund, Foundry Group, he remains a really active member of our group as a Board Advisory through his Mobius Venture Capital investment. Although our third and largest VC shareholder, Sutter Hill Ventures, is very much still in business, our Board member Greg…
The Value of Paying Down Technical Debt
The Value of Paying Down Technical Debt Our Engineering team has a great term called Technical Debt, which is the accumulation of coding shortcuts and operational inefficiencies over the years in the name of getting product out the door faster that weighs on the company’s code base like debt weighs on a balance sheet. Like debt, it’s there, you can live with it, but it is a drag on the health of the technology organization and has hard servicing costs. It’s never fun to pay down technical debt, which takes time away from developing new products and new features and is not really appreciated by anyone outside the engineering organization. That last point is a mistake, and I can’t encourage…
Not Just About Us
Not Just About Us When we updated our values this year, we felt there were a couple critical business elements missing from this otherwise “how” series of statements. One thing missing was our clients and users! So we added this value to our list: Not Just About Us: We know we’re successful when our clients are successful and our users are happy. This may be one of the most straightforward statements of all our values, so this will be a short post. We serve lots of constituencies at Return Path. And we always talk about how we’re a “People First” organization and what that means. I suppose that inherently means we are a “Client Second” organization, though I’m not sure…
Book Short: The Challenger Sale
Book Short: The Challenger Sale I’ve written a couple times in the past about how we sell at Return Path. I’ve written about our principle sales methodology for the past decade, SPIN Selling, by Neil Rackham (and Major Account Strategy, also by Rackham, which is basically SPIN Selling for Account Managers), which focuses on a specific technique for solution selling by using questioning to get the prospective client to identify his or her own needs, as well as Jeffrey Gitomer’s two short books, the Little Red Book of Selling and Little Red Book of Sales Answers, which are long on sales questioning techniques. And I also wrote this post about another book called Why People Don’t Buy Things, by Kim Wallace…