Mail Fusion

For 8 or 9 years now, we haven’t received a single bill by U.S. mail.  We use PayTrust (originally PayMyBills.com) for “online” bill pay.  We have a P.O. Box somewhere in South Dakota that we’ve redirected all our bills to.  The bills get opened, scanned, we get an email, we enter in a payment amount and date.  No fuss, no muss.  PayTrust even figures out which bills can be electronically delivered and provides an easy interface to set that up directly into the PayTrust account as well.  I haven’t received a bill or written a check in years.  I think we pay something like $9/month for the service.

I just ran across a new service this week called Earth Class Mail (thanks to my colleague Alex Rubin for pointing this out) that does the same thing for ALL of your snail mail, with a twist.  You direct all your mail (presumably not magazines) to a P.O. Box, and they first scan in all the envelopes.  You see them and decide what to do with each item — forward to you, scan in and show you online or via pdf, recycle, shred, etc.  The cost seems to range from $10-60/month depending on volume.

Certainly a good idea, at least for people who travel a lot or people who have to pay for a P.O. Box anyway (not sure it’s for everyone), and another interesting service where email takes center stage as the mission critical delivery vehicle.

It’s Copyright Time

Brad must be off his game this year, so…time to update all those copyrights to say 2008.  Or as Brad gently suggested last year, make that field variable so you never have to worry about it again!  (Thanks to our CTO Andy Sautins for the reminder here.)

Bad Side Effect of Tropical Heat Waves?

I love David Kirkpatrick’s weekly column called Fast Forward.  In his most recent edition, he talks about the connection between technology and world peace, which is insightful.  But it also led me to click on a link in the first paragraph to Wikipedia and its great map and listing of ongoing global conflicts here. 

I’m not sure if anyone has ever done any research on this — I’m guessing the answer is yes — but what jumps off the page for me is that all of the ongoing global conflicts today are clustered around the equator.  I do know that crime in urban areas swells in the summer when it’s hot out and tempers flare. 

Not to be too glib, but is it possible that we just need a giant air conditioner around the middle of the planet (an environmentally kind one, of course)?

Great Exchange on Newspapers’ Future

Dave Morgan and Jeff Jarvis trade excellent thoughts here on the future of newspapers.  Read the posts in this order:

Jarvis:  Why newspapers aren’t making it in the new world (and what they can do about it)

Morgan:  What they can do about it (disaggregate their vertically integrated business models)

Jarvis:  Disaggregate even further!

The exchange is really thought-provoking about other forms of traditional media whose businesses are being turned upside down by the Internet.  Yellow Pages.  Music.  Movies.  The current Hollywood writers’ strike may actually be unsolvable with the Movie and TV industry’s current structure.

An Unusual Christmas Present?

Has anyone else noticed a precipitous drop in spam volumes this week?  Perhaps the Internet Axis of Evil is taking a few days off to sharpen their horns…or maybe they’re just giving the world an unusual Christmas present!

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 in their legal team called us up and in a near-hysterical tone of voice told us that he didn’t think the current contract with us was valid because — even though it had an authorized signature on it and had been signed off by their legal team — it wasn’t based on their standard form of vendor agreement. So we had to start over and draft an entirely new agreement if we wanted to get the new service included in the contract.

We had another long-term client who was putting us through the paces on a contract renewal. The company had grown large enough to now have a procurement department for the first time. The renewal, in the midst of a perfectly good working business relationship, took 9 MONTHS to wrap up, during which time the client was missing out on services that the business user deemed critical.

A prospect of ours was another similar company – once small, now large, now with a procurement department. This procurement department demanded the following terms from us as a vendor: an uncapped amount of services for a fixed fee; unlimited custom modifications at no cost; and unlimited liability. When we balked (mostly because we have a brain), the procurement person called back and said “Every vendor who works with us agrees to all of these terms, always. So thank you, I’ve decided this your services are no longer a strategic area of interest for us…and please don’t call the business contact ever again without going through me.” Right, I’m sure the electric company gives these guys unlimited power for a fixed fee.

Honestly. I’m not making this stuff up. I have a lot of respect for lawyers who protect their companies. And for procurement people who are trying to negotiate a good price. But when lawyers and procurement people run the show instead of taking their cues from the business people and adding value on the margin, it’s a sign that your company has a big, big problem.

Book Short:  a Corporate Team of Rivals

One of the many things I have come to love about the Christmas holiday every year is that I get to go running in Washington DC.  Running the Monuments is one of the best runs in America.  Today, at my mother-in-law’s suggestion, I stopped i8n at the Lincoln Memorial mid-run and read his second inaugural address again (along with the Gettysburg Address).  I had just last week finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals:  The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and while I wasn’t going to blog about it as it’s not a business book, it’s certainly a book about leadership from which any senior executive or CEO can derive lessons.

Derided by his political opponents as a “second-rate Illinois lawyer,” Lincoln, who arrived somewhat rapidly and unexpectedly on the national scene at a time of supreme crisis, obviously more than rose to the occasion and not only saved the nation and freed the slaves but also became one of the greatest political leaders of all time.  He clearly had his faults — probably at the top of the list not firing people soon enough like many of his incompetent Union Army generals — but the theme of the book is that he had as one of his greatest strengths the ability to co-opt most of his political rivals and get them to join his cabinet, effectively neutering them politically as well as showing a unity government to the people.

This stands in subtle but important contrast to George Washington, who filled his cabinet with men who were rivals to each other (Hamilton, Jefferson) but who never overtly challenged Washington himself.

Does that Team of Rivals concept — in either the Lincoln form or the Washington form — have a place in your business?  I’d say rarely in the Lincoln sense and more often in the Washington sense.

Lincoln, in order to be effective, didn’t have much of a choice.  Needing regional and philosophical representation on his cabinet at a time of national crisis, bringing Seward, Chase, and Bates on board was a smart move, however much a pain in the ass Chase ended up being.  There certainly could be times when corporate leadership calls for a representative executive team or even Board, for example in a massive merger with uncertain integration or in a scary turnaround.  But other than extreme circumstances like that, the Lincoln model is probably a recipe for weak, undermined leadership and heartache for the boss.

The Washington model is different and can be quite effective if managed closely.  One could argue that Washington didn’t manage the seething Hamilton and frothy Jefferson closely enough, but the reality is that the debates between the two of them in the founding days of our government, when well moderated by Washington, forged better national unity and just plain better results than had Washington had a cabinet made up of like-minded individuals.  As a CEO, I love hearing divergent opinion on my executive team.  That kind of discussion is challenging to manage — at least in our case we don’t have people at each other’s throats — but as long as you view your job as NOT to create compromises to appease all factions but instead to have the luxury of hearing multiple well articulated points of view as inputs to a decision you have to make, then you and your company end up with a far, far better result.

Holiday Cards c. 2007

Every year, I get a daily flood of business holiday cards on my desk in the second half of December. Some are nice and have notes from people with whom we do business – clients, vendors, partners, and the like. Some are kind of random, and it takes me a while to even figure out who they are from. Occasionally some even come in with no mark identifying from whence they came other than an illegible signature.

And every year, I receive one or two email cards instead of print & post cards, some apologetic about the medium. Until this year.

I think I’ve received about 10-15 cards by email this month. None with an apology. All with the same quality of art/creative as printed cards. It’s great! A good use of the email channel…much less cost…easier overhead for distribution…and of course better for the environment.

I wonder what made 2007 the tipping year for this.

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!

I hate just doing linkblogs, but Fred’s thoughts this morning on Facebook and privacy around the beacon issue are spot on. 

Two highlights I couldn’t agree with more:

When the internet knows who you are, what you do, who your friends are, and what they do, it goes from the random bar you wander into to your favorite pub where your friends congregate and the bartender knows your drink and pours it for you when you walk in the door

and

These privacy backlashes do some good though. They keep big companies like Google and Facebook sensitized to the issue. And so we hope that they ‘do no evil’ with this data they are collecting

Read the full post here.

The Facebook Fad

I’m sure someone will shoot me for saying this, but I don’t get Facebook.  I mean, I get it, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about.  I made similar comments before about Gmail (here, here), and people told me I was an idiot at the time.  Three years later, Gmail is certainly a popular webmail service, but it’s hardly changed the world. In fact, it’s a distant fourth behind Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL.  So I don’t feel so bad about not oohing and ahhing and slobbering all over the place about Facebook.

Facebook reminds me of AOL back in the day.  AOL was the most simple, elegant, general purpose entree for people who wanted to get online and weren’t sure how in the early days of online services, before the Internet came of age.  It was good at packaging up its content and putting everything “in a box.”  It was clean.  It was fun.  People bragged about being an AOL member and talked about their screen name like it was on their birth certificate or something.  And the company capitalized on all the goodwill by becoming a PR machine to perpetuate its membership growth.

Now Facebook — it’s the most simple, elegant, general purpose social networking site here in the early days of social networking.  It’s pretty good about packaging up its applications, and certainly opening up its APIs is a huge benefit that AOL didn’t figure out until it embraced the open web in 1999-2000.  It is pretty good about putting everything in a box for me as a member.  And like AOL, the company is turning into a PR juggernaut and hoping to use it to perpetuate its registration numbers.

But let’s look at the things that caused (IMO) AOL’s downfall (AOL as we knew it) and look at the parallels with Facebook.  AOL quickly became too cluttered.  It’s simple elegance was destroyed by too much stuff jammed into its clean interface.  It couldn’t keep up with best of breed content or even messaging systems inside its walled garden.  Spam crushed its email functionality.  It couldn’t maintain its “all things to all people” infrastructure on the back end.  Ultimately, the open web washed over it.  People who defected were simply having better experiences elsewhere.

The parallels aren’t exact, but there are certainly some strong ones.  Facebook is already too cluttered for me.  Why are people writing on my wall instead of emailing me — all that does is trigger an email from Facebook to me telling me to come generate another page view for them.  Why am I getting invitations to things on Facebook instead of through the much better eVite platform?  The various forms of messaging are disorganized and hard to find. 

Most important, for a social network, it turns out that I don’t actually want my entire universe of friends and contacts to be able to connect with each other through me.  Like George Costanza in Seinfeld, I apparently have a problem with my “worlds colliding.”  I already know of one couple who either hooked up or is heavily flirting by connecting through my Facebook profile, and it’s not one I’m proud to have spawned.  I think I let one of them “be my friend” by mistake in the first place.  And I am a compulsive social networker.  It’s hard to imagine that these principles scale unfettered to the whole universe.

The main thing Facebook has going for it in this comparison is that its open APIs will lead to best of breed development for the platform.  But who cares about Facebook as a platform?  Isn’t the open web (or Open Social) ultimately going to wash over it?  I get that there are cool apps being written for Facebook – but 100% of those applications will be on the open web as well.  It’s certainly possible that Facebook’s marrying of my “social network” with best of breed applications will make it stickier for longer than AOL…but let’s remember that AOL has clung to life as a proprietary service for quite a while on the stickiness of people’s email addresses.  And yet, it is a non-event now as a platform. 

It will be interesting to see how Facebook bobs and weaves over the coming years to avoid what I think of as its inevitable fate.  And yes, I know I’m not 18 and if I were, I’d like Facebook more and spend all day in it.  But that to me reinforces my point even more — this is the same crew who flocked to, and then quickly from, MySpace.  When will they get tired of Facebook, and what’s to prevent them moving onto the next fad?