(This post also appeared on Bolster.com and builds on last week’s post where I introduced my new startup, Bolster)

Welcome to Bolster, the on-demand executive talent marketplace. We are creating a platform that is the new way to scale an executive team and board.

We believe that startups and scaleups are not average companies. Their rapid growth means their appetite for talent constantly outstrips their budget — and that they can’t spend months searching for it. Their dynamic industries dictate that they keep pace with bigger and better funded competitors. Their leadership teams — the people and the roles — are always changing. Their CEOs spend a ton of time hiring and coaching their leaders and shaping the complexion and direction of the team. They stress out about big expensive new executive hires when sometimes they just need to level-up an existing manager or “try before they buy.” Their Boards frequently jump in to help, but those efforts can be a little ad hoc and inefficient.

We believe that experienced executives working as consultants is the wave of the future. The number of career executives who work flexibly and on-demand for a living is skyrocketing in recent years. People are more often “between things” and are interested in plugging into shorter-term engagements while continuing to look for their next full-time role. People are retiring younger, yet wanting to keep contributing. And even fully-employed execs like to advise companies and serve on Boards. Whether these people are career consultants or are looking for a “side hustle” or just to pay something forward to a future generation of leaders, they all have two common problems: finding work is time consuming and they’re often not good at or don’t like doing it; and managing their back office, everything from insurance to legal to tax to marketing, is a drain on time that could otherwise be spent with clients or family.

We believe that a new kind of talent marketplace is needed to meet the unique and complex requirements of both audiences — the freelance, or flexible, seasoned executive, and the startup or scaleup CEO who thinks holistically about his or her leadership team and carefully tends them like a garden. We are building a platform to make instant, tailored, vetted matches between talent and companies without the randomness of a job board and without the theater, long lead times, and cost, of a full service agency 

Service marketplaces like ours work best when they help their stakeholders solve other meaningful, related problems.In this case, we believe that the need for back office services will help executive consultants focus on more important things. And we believe that CEOs need lightweight and dynamic support in thinking through the composition and skills required of their executive teams both today and 6-18 months in the future.

That is the essence of the business we are building. A business to quickly match awesome companies with awesome freelance executives and to help both sides be better at what they do. We are here to make it easier for you to:

• Bolster your executive team. For our Clients, our pledge to you is that we will quickly and cost-effectively fill the gaps in your leadership ranks (whether interim, fractional, advisory, board, or project-based) with trusted, curated talent, and that we will give you a platform to evaluate your overall leadership team and help you think through your future needs as your company evolves. Think of us as a shortcut to scaling your leadership team.
  
• Bolster your board. The best boards are the ones with multiple independent directors who come from diverse backgrounds with diverse points of view. We also pledge to our Clients that we will find great matches to help fill out their boardrooms as their strategic advisory needs change over time.
  
• Bolster your work. For our Members, our pledge to you is that we will find you the right kind of interesting clients and help you manage your back office so you can focus on your work (and all the other important things in your life!).
  
• Bolster your portfolio. For our Portfolio Partners, VC and PE board members, our pledge to you is that we will make it easier for you and your firm to both drive successful on-demand executive placements for your portfolio company CEOs, and to manage and expand your firm’s network of flexible executive talent. 

We are an experienced team of entrepreneurs and operators who have scaled multiple businesses throughout our careers. All of us worked together as part of the leadership team at Return Path, a leading email technology company that we scaled from 0 to $100mm in revenue and 500 employees in 12 locations around the world while winning numerous Employer of Choice awards. All of us have independent experience scaling other businesses, small and large, public and private. All of us have experience being on-demand executives as well — whether interim, fractional, advisory, project-based, or board roles, we know the landscape of both our members and our clients. 

We’ve all dealt with the stress of having product-market fit and market opportunities but not being able to capitalize on those opportunities because we were missing key talent. And we’ve tried everything from executive search firms (expensive, time-consuming, and slow), to leveling up people (will they be able to grow into the role?), to leaning in to our board (hit or miss, inefficient). Heck, we’ve been desperate enough to follow up on the “my cousin’s boyfriend has an uncle, and he might know someone” lead.

We believe there is a better way for startups and scaleups to find executive talent. Along the way, I published a book about scaling startups called Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business that has sold over 40,000 copies to CEOs around the world. And our whole team is working on a new book called Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Teams, which is coming out in early 2021. Our team has a maniacal focus on helping startup teams scale and flourish and on helping leaders develop into the best version of themselves. That’s what we’re all about. 
Plus, we have an amazing group of investors behind us who know how to grow businesses like ours and have incredible reach into the startup and scaleup world. More about that later. For now, we are excited to soft launch Bolster and begin unleashing the power of on-demand executive talent to our Clients. Thank you for being on this journey with us. If you’re interested in the somewhat unusual story of how the company was founded, it’s here.

Book Short:  Internet Fiction

It’s been a long time since I read Tom Evslin’s Hackoff.com, which Tom called a “blook” since he released it serially as a blog, then when it was all done, as a bound book.  Mariquita and I read it together and loved every minute of it.  One post I wrote about it at the time was entitled Like Fingernails on a Chalkboard.

The essence of that post was “I liked it, but the truth of the parts of the Internet bubble that I lived through were painful to read,” applies to two “new” works of Internet fiction that I just plowed through this week, as well.

Uncommon Stock

Eliot Pepper’s brand new startup thriller, Uncommon Stock, was a breezy and quick read that I enjoyed tremendously. It’s got just the right mix of reality and fantasy in it. For anyone in the tech startup world, it’s a must read. But it would be equally fun and enjoyable for anyone who likes a good juicy thriller.

Like my memory of Hackoff, the book has all kinds of startup details in it, like co-founder struggles and a great presentation of the angel investor vs. VC dilemma. But it also has a great crime/murder intrigue that is interrupted with the book’s untimely ending.  I eagerly await the second installment, promised for early 2015.

The Circle

While not quite as new, The Circle  has been on my list since it came out a few months back and since Brad’s enticing review of it noted that:

The Circle  was brilliant. I went back and read a little of the tech criticism and all I could think was things like “wow – hubris” or “that person could benefit from a little reflection on the word irony”… We’ve taken Peter Drucker’s famous quote “‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” to an absurd extreme in the tech business. We believe we’ve mastered operant conditioning through the use of visible metrics associated with actions individual users take. We’ve somehow elevated social media metrics to the same level as money in the context of self-worth.

So here’s the scoop on this book.  Picture Google, Twitter, Facebook, and a few other companies all rolled up into a single company.  Then picture everything that could go wrong with that company in terms of how it measures things, dominates information flow, and promotes social transparency in the name of a new world order.  This is Internet dystopia at its best – and it’s not more than a couple steps removed from where we are.  So fiction…but hardly science fiction.

The Circle  is a lot longer than Uncommon Stock and quite different, but both are enticing reads if you’re up for some internet fiction.

(This post also appeared on Bolster.com)

As we wrote in our Founding Manifesto, Bolster was started in part to create a new way for startup and scaleup CEOs to think about growing their leadership teams.

Why do CEOs need help with this?

CEOs of any company have too many things to do at all times. This is even more true at startups and scaleups, which by definition are more fast-paced, dynamic, CEO-driven, and thinly staffed. All those challenges point directly to the specific challenge CEOs have with their leadership team.

Think about the journey of a company from a founding team to 50 employees. My long time friend and former board member Greg Sands once compared the phenomenon

of companies growing out of the startup stage to cell development in small organisms. Amoeba or paramecia consist of one cell, and that cell has to do everything: eat, move, sense its surroundings, and respond accordingly. When the cell divides, the new cells still need to do everything – they’re just attached to other cells. As organisms grow more complex, individual cells need to specialize. And when things get really complex, you need a liver, a spleen, a stomach, and a pancreas. By and large, startups work the same way. In the early stages, you have to hire generalists who are both willing and able to take on dozens of tasks at once. Your developers will have to speak with potential customers; your accountants will have to give advice on product direction; and the born salesperson on your team will need to put the phone down a few hours a day and set up a new employee’s computer. That’s a really different team than when you need functional managers on top of engineering, sales, etc. — not to mention needing strategic leadership of those functions as the company grows from 50 to 100 to 250 to 500 employees.

That’s the journey that startup and scaleup CEOs are on. It’s less of a journey and more of a roller coaster ride. Jason is running HR today…but tomorrow, the job of “head of HR” will be different, and Jason might or might not be capable of it. Then your VP Finance Sally gets lured away by an even hotter and sexier new startup and leaves a sudden, gaping hole on your team. Then cracks start to show up with the job Jamie is doing as your marketing director and you lose confidence that your upcoming product launch is going to be a success. Every time one of these events happens – whether it’s an actual event, or just an “aha moment” for you as CEO, you add something to your plate. You add tasks to take over work yourself. You add the task of finding a new person. You add stress from having to deal with one more critical thing.

Leveling up a leadership team is probably the hardest part of the CEO’s job. 

Why don’t current solutions meet the CEO’s needs? Well, of course they do, sometimes. The problem is that the current solutions either aren’t tailored to the needs of startup or scaleup CEOs, or they’re ad hoc and inefficient. Executive search is slow and expensive, and it produces expensive full-time executives. And no matter how good an executive search firm is, I’ve never met a CEO who has a better than 50% success rate in hiring new leaders from the outside. Ever. Add all that up – expensive, slow, medium success rate, and perhaps most important for a startup CEO, leaving you with expensive full-time headcount in multiple areas of your company – that is not a recipe for startup success when you’re sweating your burn rate.

Frequently, the CEO just taps her network for execs or for on-demand executives like the ones Bolster places — that could be asking board members or friends or advisors for suggestions. Quite frankly, those suggestions stand a better chance of success than transactional executive search since the candidate referral source is usually somewhat of an insider. But those searches are really disorganized or one-off. When a CEO turns to their network for spot help, they often aren’t running a comprehensive process, creating a serious job spec, seeing a broad set of candidates for comparisons, and the like. 

Our job at Bolster is to make all of this easier and lighter weight. The rise of the gig economy means that startups no longer need to rely on the painful binary choice of “the person/opening I have today” and “the expensive full-time exec coming in from the outside.”The new way to scale an executive team is with a mix of interim executive talent to quickly fill gaps, fractional executive talent to provide strategic oversight and guidance to a team, part-time, functional mentors/coaches/advisors to advise a less experienced functional leader, project-based consultants to fill in specific holes, and yes, the occasional full-time outside hire, possibly via a search firm (or if your fractional CXO loves your company and joins full-time!). 

With Bolster, you have a network of all those types of talent, well curated and well profiled, available for near-instant matches and near-instant start dates – and a suite of tools and services designed to help you proactively identify your needs across all your functional areas so you’re never scrambling your way out of a tight spot.

What about the existing team? If you’re a leader inside a startup or scaleup, Bolster is ALSO created for you. The painful binary choice CEOs face that I wrote above is particularly painful for you if you’re no longer scaling quickly enough. Frequently, promising junior people are layered or shuttered aside because the CEO doesn’t have the time, or the functional expertise required, to coach or mentor the person to success. Bolster creates an easy mechanism for CEOs to help pinpoint the areas in which you need growth and development as well as an easy way to find either temporary leadership or a function-specific advisor/mentor/coach to help you grow with the role and with the company.

The best startup CEOs I know are the ones who are already using multiple types of on-demand talent at the same time to help their companies along that journey from single-cell to complex organisms. I believe three years from today, the frequent usage of this kind of talent will move from the realm of early adopters to mainstream. The ones who embrace it first will have a competitive advantage.

This is a topic we write about obsessively in Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams — in fact, it’s basically the whole point of the book! I’ll write some more specific posts here in the coming weeks that take some excerpts from the book, but Bolster is putting on three free and open webinars we’re calling our “Bolster-up Series” over the coming weeks that I want to share with everyone who reads StartupCEO.com.

In this series, I’ll be doing short interviews with CEOs who we work with at Bolster on the different aspects of scaling specific functions, how they diagnosed those problems, and how they leveraged on-demand executive talent to solve those problems. The three events are:

• 7/20 2:00-2:30pm EST: Signs your Finance function isn’t scaling and what to do about it with MediaWallah founder and CEO Nancy Marzouk.
• 8/12 2:00-2:30pm EST: Signs your Revenue function isn’t scaling and what to do about it with Ozcode CEO Shimon Hason.
• 9/15 2:00-2:30pm EST: Signs your Marketing function isn’t scaling and what to do about it with Drip CEO John Tedesco.

You can sign up for the first one on Finance by clicking here.

Senders No More

February marked the official end of Return Path being in the email sending business, even a little bit. Of course we still have corporate email servers, and we still have basic retention email marketing programs for our customers and prospects (with explicit permission of course!), but after a 9 1/2 year run, we no longer have direct consumer email-based relationships.

As we announced last fall, we recently divested all of our businesses other than our deliverability and whitelisting business — Postmaster Direct (list rental), Authentic Response/MyView.com (surveys), and ECOA (change of address). Those were great businesses, but they increasingly diverged over the years from each other and from our core deliverability business, so it made sense for them to belong to different companies in the end.

Besides diverging from each other, being a bulk sender of email had both advantages and disadvantages for us as a company. On the one hand, it was good for us to see firsthand what some of the issues are that impact our clients. We were, in fact, our own clients, one business unit to another. But on the other hand, being a bulk sender carried a real business risk of compromising our position as a trusted intermediary between senders and receivers. It was always a fine line to walk, and while we never got in trouble for it, we were always concerned — to the point where for a long time we didn’t allow our other business units to apply for our whitelist, Sender Score Certified, even at “arm’s length.” At least we weren’t an ESP!

But now that risk is gone. We are senders no more. Be sure to read our CTO’s description of what it was like to send a transactional privacy policy notification to 20mm addresses, most of which hadn’t been mailed in months or years.

I haven’t done a book review yet on this blog because I haven’t found a very relevant one. I will do more as I go here — I’ve actually read a few pretty useful business books lately — but there’s no better book to kick off a new category of postings here than the one I just finished: The MouseDriver Chronicles: The True-Life Adventures of Two First-Time Entrepreneurs.

The book details how two freshly-minted Wharton MBAs skipped the dot com and investment banking job offers to start a two-person company that produced the MouseDriver (a computer mouse shaped like a the head of a golf club) back in 1999-2000. It’s a great, quick read and really captures the spirit of much of what I’m trying to do with this blog, which is talk about first-time CEO issues, or company leadership/management issues in general.

Although it’s not about an internet business, the book also has an interesting side story, which is the powerful impact that email had on the MouseDriver business, with an email newsletter the entrepreneurs started that developed great readership and ultimately some viral marketing. Sort of like a blog, circa 1999.

Thanks to Stephanie Miller at Return Path for giving me the book!

More Useful Than I Thought

I’ve had a Twitter account for a couple years but only started using it in earnest in the last couple of weeks.  And while it is to some extent yet another distraction and flow of information, it’s proving to be much more useful than I thought.  Here are some nuggets from literally less than a week of heavy usage:

– Nice quick exchanges with three existing customers who I otherwise wouldn’t talk to

– Already have over 200 followers, at least 50% just in the last few days

– One set of direct messages, and we turned a skeptic into a free trial provided that the client work with us on an important but difficult case study we’ve been meaning to generate for a while

– One quick @reply later, and I turned someone asking about our services into a live sales call with a local sales team member in London and a positive public tweet back about us

– An exchange with a customer who left us for the competition (partially – he’s still on Sender Score Certified) and said something snarky about us on Twitter yielded a positive tweet and this comment: 

Thanks going out of your way to better understand your customers. That in and of itself means a lot.

– Serendipity – I was on the west coast, noted it, and a friend there pinged me to see if I had time to get together (I didn’t this trip, but that would have been a nice bonus)

– Set up my blog to notify of any new post via Twitter using twitterfeed.com…set up Facebook to pick up my tweets as status updates using the Facebook Twitter app.  The result is that my traffic is WAY up on the blog

I’m sold.  Now I just need to figure out how to be interesting and brief at the same time.

The Good, The Board, and The Ugly, Part III

To recap other postings in this series:  my original, Brad Feld’s, Fred Wilson’s first, Fred’s second, Tom Evslin’s, and my lighter-note follow-up.

So speaking of lighter-note takes on this topic, Lary Lazard, Tom Evslin’s fictional CEO who ran Hackoff.com, now has his own tips for effective board management.  You have to read them yourself here, but I think my favorite one is #3, which starts off:

Never number the pages of what you are presenting.  Lots of time can be used constructively figuring out what page everybody is on.

Enjoy.

Seth Responds

About an hour after I posted a not so flattering review of Seth Godin’s new book this morning, I got an email from Seth with a couple good points worth responding to here.

His main points (other than offering me a refund, which was nice) were that (a) the book itself was very clear about its content — on the book itself (back cover, inside flap, marketing copy), kind of like a ‘live album’ for a recording artist; and (b) if I thought the blog postings were worthwhile, why  did I still feel like there was a downward trend in his writing?

Ok, so these are fair points.  Let me try to clarify.  I am 99% sure that I bought the book off the Amazon.com email which said “if you enjoyed other books by Seth Godin, then here’s his latest,” which prompted my robotic one-click order without paying attention to the fine print.  That’s why I was disappointed when I got the book.  My bad, I guess, although that’s somehow an unsatisfying thought as a consumer — that I should have paid more attention to the fine print.  Live albums from musicians usually have that in the title so the marketing is clear, and they still sell a ton, probably even more so.

In re-reading my review, I actually think it’s balanced — I do say there are a bunch of circumstances where the book is a must-have — but my use of the word “sell-out” was a bit harsh given the attempts to present the book as a compendium.  But the downward trend in my mind is more than just this book.  I think a lot of Seth’s writings have been hitting the same notes for the last couple of years, while I’ve been hoping to hear his next Big Moo.

I didn’t take up Seth’s offer for a refund, as I fall somewhere between (a) and (c) in my definition of why this is a must-have.  And while I’m at it, maybe I should rethink my earlier point that this whole blog thing isn’t about conversations.

Social Computing:  An Amusing Anecdote About Who is Participating

We learned something about Wikipedia tonight.  Mariquita was reading an article on Castro on CNN.com entitled “Castro Blames Stress on Surgery” about his upcoming intestinal surgery.

[Quick detour — I’m sorry, Castro blames the surgery on stress?  Isn’t it good to be the king?   And he’s handing  the reins of government over to his oh-so-younger brother Raul, at the tender young age of 75?]

Anyway, we were debating over whether Castro took over the government of Cuba in 1957 or 1959, so of course we turned to Wikipedia.  Ok, so Mariquita was right, it was 1959.  But more important, we learned something interesting about Wikipedia and its users.

There were three banners above the entry for Casto that I’ve never seen before in Wikipedia.  They said:

This article documents a current event.  Information may change rapidly as the event progresses.

This article or section is currently being developed or reviewed.  Some statements may be disputed, incorrect, biased or otherwise objectionable.  Please read talk page discussion before making substantial changes.

The neutrality of this article is disputed.  Please see the discussion on the talk page.

That’s interesting of the editors, and it made me rush to read the entry on our fearless leader, George W. Bush.  It only had one entry, a bit different from that of Castro (who, at least in my opinion, history will treat as a far more horrendous character than Dubya):

Because of recent vandalism or other disruption, editing of this article by anonymous or newly registered users is disabled (see semi-protection policy). Such users may discuss changes, request unprotection, or create an account.

Well, there you go.

• WSJ.com – Heard on the Street
  Amazon, Microsoft, and Google on big marketing spend
  (tags: Marketing Media Technology)