Two Ears, One Mouth Brace yourself for a post full of pithy quotes from others. I’m not sure how we missed this one when drafted our original values statements at Return Path years ago, because it’s always been central to the way we operate. We aren’t just the world’s biggest data-driven email intelligence company – we are a data-driven organization. So another one of our newly written Core Values is: Two Ears, One Mouth: We ask, listen, learn, and collect data. We engage in constructive debate to reach conclusions and move forward together. I’m not sure which of my colleagues first said this to me, but I’m going to give credit to Anita, our long-time head of sales (almost a…
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Return Path
Startup CEO (OnlyOnce- the book!)
Startup CEO (OnlyOnce – the book!) One of the things I’ve often thought over the years since starting Return Path in 1999 is that there’s no instruction manual anywhere for how to be a CEO. While big company CEOs are usually groomed for the job for years, startup CEOs aren’t…and they’re often young and relatively inexperienced in business in general. That became one of the driving forces behind the creation of my blog, OnlyOnce (because “you’re only a first time CEO once”) back in 2004. Now, over 700 blog posts later, I’m excited to announce that I’m writing a book based on this blog called Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Building and Running Your Company. The book is going…
Job 1
Job 1 The first “new” post in my series of posts about Return Path’s 14 Core Values is, fittingly, Job 1: We are all responsible for championing and extending our unique culture as a competitive advantage. The single most frequently asked question I have gotten internally over the last few years since we grew quickly from 100 employees to 350 has been some variant of “Are you worried about our ability to scale our culture as we hire in so many new people?” This value is the answer to that question, though the short answer is “no.” I am not solely responsible for our culture at Return Path. I’m not sure I ever was, even when we were small. Neither…
Exciting News for Return Path
Exciting News for Return Path If you’ll indulge me in a quick moment of company self-promotion, we are so excited at Return Path to announce that we have been included in Fortune Magazine’s annual list of the Best Places to Work — we are ranked #11 in the Medium Size Company category! Our official blog post/press release are here. This is really exciting and a testament to all 360+ of our talented team members at the company. When we talk about one of our core values as being Job 1 — a shared responsibility for championing and extending our unique culture as a competitive advantage — this is one of those examples of where the theory becomes reality! Of the many…
Think Global, Act Local
Think Global, Act Local At Return Path, we have always had a commitment to community service and helping make the world around us a better place. We ratcheted that up a lot in the last year, which is why we added the following statement in as one of our 14 Core Values: Think Global, Act Local. We commit our time and energy to support our local communities. 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…
Return Path Core Values, Part III
Return Path Core Values, Part III Last year, I wrote a series of 13 posts documenting and illustrating Return Path’s core values. This year, we just went through a comprehensive all-company process of updating our values. We didn’t change our values – you can’t do that! – but we did revise the way we present our values to ourselves and the world. It had been four years since we wrote the original values up, and the business has evolved in many ways. Quite frankly, the process of writing up all these blog posts for OnlyOnce last year was what led me to think it was time for a bit of a refresh. The result of the process was that we…
Email Intelligence and the new Return Path
Welcome to the new Return Path. For a tech company to grow and thrive in the 21st century it must be in a state of constant adaptation. We have been the global market leaders in email deliverability since my co-founder George Bilbrey coined that term back in 2002. In fact, back in 2008 we announced a major corporate reorganization, divesting ourselves of some legacy businesses in order to focus on deliverability as our core business. Since then Return Path has grown tremendously thanks to that focus, but we have grown to the point where it’s time for us to redefine ourselves once again. Now we’re launching a new chapter in the company’s history to meet evolving needs in our…
How Do You Eat an Elephant?
How Do You Eat an Elephant? Credit to my colleague Chuck Drake for this one…but How Do You Eat an Elephant? One Bite at a Time. The David Allen school of time management (post, book) talks about breaking your projects down into “Next Actions” so they don’t become overwhelming and can easily move forward one step at a time. I think the same is true of organizational projects – perhaps even more so. Any time we find ourselves swirling around a big initiative at Return Path, we are at our best when we ask ourselves some questions along these lines: How can we be scrappier about this? It it ok to be messy here…or at least not perfect? What is…
The Best Place to Work, Part 7: Create a Thankful Atmosphere
The Best Place to Work, Part 7: Create a Thankful Atmosphere My final installment of this long series on Creating the best place to work (no hierarchy intended by the order) is about Creating a thankful atmosphere. What does creating a thankful atmosphere get you? It gets you great work, in the form of people doing their all to get the job done. We humans – all of us, absolutely including CEOs – appreciate being recognized when they do good work. Honestly, I love what I do and would do it without any feedback, but nothing resonates with me more than a moment of thanks from someone on my exec team or my Board. Why should anyone else in the organization…
The Best Place to Work, Part 6: Let People Be People
The Best Place to Work, Part 6: Let People Be People Last week, in this continuing series on creating the best place to work, I talked about being a great enabler of people, meaning you do your best to let people do their best work. This week, I want to talk about Letting People Be People. I wrote about topic a bit this last year when I wrote my series on Return Path’s Core Values, in particular the post on our value People Work to Live, Not Live to Work . Work-life balance is critical. I’ve worked in a grind-it-out 100-hour/week environment as an analyst before. Quite frankly, it sucks. One week I actually filled in 121 on my hourly…
The Best Place to Work, Part 5: Be the ultimate enabler
Fifth in my series on creating the best place to work – Being the best enabler. As any management guru will tell you, as you have a larger and larger team, your job is much less about getting good work done than it is enabling others to get good work done. What does that mean? First, don’t be a bottleneck. You don’t have to be an Inbox-Zero nut (but feel free if you’d like), but you do need to make sure you don’t have people in the company chronically waiting on you before they can take their next actions on projects. Otherwise, you lose all the leverage you have in hiring a team. Don’t let approvals or requests pile up!…