Boiling the Frog

We boiled the frog recently at Return Path. 

What the heck does this mean?  There was an old story, I’ve since been told apocryphal, we told a lot back when I was a management consultant trying to work on change management projects.  It was basically that:

If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will leap right back out.  But if you put a frog in a pot of water on the stove and then heat it up to boiling, you’ll boil the frog because it never quite realized that it’s being cooked until its muscles and brain are slightly too cooked to jump out.

How have we boiled the frog?  Two ways recently.  First, we let a staffing problem sneak up on us.  We were short one person in a critical area (accounting and business operations), and we had decided to try to go without the extra person for a month or two for cost-savings reasons.  Then, another person in that group unexpectedly left.  Then, another person in that group got seriously sick and was out for several weeks.  The result?  We were down three people in an area very quickly, without a proper pipeline of candidates coming in the door for any of the open positions.  So for a period of time, we can’t get the things done out of that group we want to get done, despite the heroic efforts of the remaining people in the group.

Second, we have had an Exchange server problem that has been plaguing one of our three offices for six months now (no, the irony of an email company having internal email problems isn’t lost on us).  In retrospect, the first time we had a big problem with it, we should have dropped everything, brought in an outside consultant, and done a rapid-fire infrastructure upgrade/replacement.  But we were truly boiled here — we kept thinking we’d fixed the problem, the situation kept deteriorating slowly enough to the point where the productivity of this one office was seriously compromised for a few weeks.  Happily, I can report this weekend that our IT team is cuting over to our new environment — "the promised land," as they call it.

How do you stop yourself from getting boiled?  I think you have to:

1. Recognize when you’re in a pot of water.  What areas of your company are so mission critical that they’re always at risk?  Have you done everything you can do to eliminate single points of failure? 

2. Recognize when someone turns on the burner.  Do you know the early-warning signs for all of these areas?  Can you really live without an extra person or two in that department?  Is it ok if that server doesn’t work quite right?

3. Recognize when you care about the frog.  You can’t solve all problems, all of the time.  Figuring out which ones need to be solved urgently vs. eventually vs. never is one of the most important roles a decision-maker in a company can make.

Rejected by the Body

My most recent posting ("Sometimes, There Is No Lesson To Be Learned") about a strange hiring incident at Return Path has so far generated 5 comments — a whopper for my blog.  You can read them here if you want.  They’re a little bit all over the map, but they did remind me of something I frequently tell senior people who I am interviewing to join the company:

Hiring a new senior person into an organization is like doing an organ transplant.  Sometimes, the body just rejects the organ, but at least you find out pretty quickly.

At least we found out relative quickly with this one, although it was more like the organ rejecting the body!

Sometimes, There Is No Lesson To Be Learned

We had a very unusual employee situation this week at Return Path.  A brand new senior executive we brought in to the company to be our first ever head of HR and Organization Development resigned very abruptly after only a few weeks on the job, citing a complete change of heart about her career direction and moving on to a government position in economic and community development.  Unfortunately, the person gave no notice and provided no assistance with transition, and resigned by cell phone.  What a disappointment, especially coming from an HR professional!

After getting over my disbelief/irritation/rage (not easy, not a small amount), after communicating this difficult message to the company, and after sending a thoughtful-yet-cathartic note to the person, I sat down to think a little bit about how I could have prevented or at least spotted the situation in advance.

We interviewed the person thoroughly — 10 people internally conducted interviews, and I interviewed the person for almost four hours myself, conducting one of the most rigorous interviews I’ve ever conducted given how critical this position was to our organization at this time.  (The interview followed the Chronological In-Depth Structured interview format from Brad Smart’s book Topgrading — more on that in a future posting.)  I also checked five references on the person, all of which were sterling.  I had one outside person, an executive coach with whom I work, interview the person.  Everything checked out, and the person’s attitude and enthusiasm about the position couldn’t have been better.

My conclusion on the lesson learned here?  It’s “Sometimes, there is no lesson to be learned.”  There may be ancillary lessons around handling the situation once it became apparent, but I think the core lesson I’d hope to get out of this — that we could have done something different in the interview process or orientation or first few weeks to prevent or at least spot this ahead of time — appears to be nonexistent.  Hmmmph!

Sometimes It’s Worth Travelling 5,000 Miles for a 5 Minute Meeting

I re-learned this lesson shortly before the holidays.  We’re negotiating a big deal with a company out on the west coast, and we were at a tense and critical spot in the negotiations.  I knew that the only way to move the deal forward to a handshake and a term sheet was to meet face to face with the decision makers on the other side of the table, in person. 

So I got on a plane.  It wasn’t my first choice of activities, and although I was able to work a couple of other meetings into the trip, the trip was a long way to go for a really short meeting.  But it was 100% worthwhile, with a very specific mission accomplished.

As I mentioned in one of my earliest posts, it’s important to be "Present AND Accounted For" in business settings, and with everyone’s busy schedules and increasingly frenzied and multi-tasking office environments, it’s harder than ever to really get someone’s attention.  There’s just no substitute for looking someone in the eye and doing a real handshake, not a virtual one.

How to Negotiate a Term Sheet with a VC, Part IV

Brad is making  new postings easy this week.  Here’s another good one from the VC’s perspective on liquidation preference.

How to Negotiate a Term Sheet with a VC, Part III

Brad has kicked off his blogging year with a a good new post on VC valuations.  It’s along the lines of the ones he, Fred, and I have written over the past six months and has the wonderful line in it:

If you are negotiating a deal and an investor is digging his or her feet in on a provision that doesn’t affect the economics or control, they are probably blowing smoke, rather than elucidating substance.

Happy New Year!

Wait – A Closed Environment Isn’t the Be All End All?

Today’s announcement that AOL will be improving its web-based email access for members and opening a free version of the service for non-members in 2005 is a quiet cry of “uncle.”  What’s amazing isn’t the announcement so much as how long it took for AOL to get there.

What will this do to the email landscape?  Not much, in my view.  It’s too little, too late, to mean much of anything.

How to Negotiate a Term Sheet with a VC, Part II

The original posting (probably one of my top two or three in terms of comments and trackbacks) talked about HOW to negotiate a term sheet with a VC.  I just received a question from a reader today about WHEN to start looking for VC money.  The answer, of course, depends on your stage of business.

The general rule is that the best time to start looking for money is when you don’t need it — but not so early that a potential investor can watch your business closely for too long a period of time before the deal (since all startups have hiccups along the way). 

If you’re looking for seed capital, you may not have too many options in terms of timing, but best to do everything you can to keep bootstrapping things along with consulting or one-off projects.  Why?  At the proof-of-concept stage, the value of your company increases sharply with every new customer or new release, so best not to take capital too early as long as you can live without it.

If you’ve got a business going (say $1-3mm run rate), with a cash balance and a predictable burn rate, and you’ve never taken in institutional capital before, you should probably start talking to VCs 4-6 months before you run out of cash.  While you don’t want VCs to anchor a valuation in their mind too early, the reality is that it takes time to get these your first institutional deal done since it usually involves broader changes to corporate documents, and you definitely want to talk to several different firms, so a little more lead time is better.  This is especially true if your window of time interferes with August or the holiday season, when not much new business gets done at VCs unless you have a super hot deal.

If you’re looking for expansion capital and are near or at profitability, deals will probably take less time to get done, and valuations are likely to fluctuate less.  In these cases, I’d say less lead time is required, although if you’re in a volatile industry, you may need the capital sooner than you think!

But again, the best time to look for money is when you don’t need it.  Investors (even the nicest ones) aren’t afraid to "market price" a deal lower if they sense desperation or, more important, a lack of alternatives.  To that end, of every piece of advice in the original posting, the most important one, which affects timing, is #3 — get more than one VC interested in your deal!

The Gift of Insight

Jonathan Schwartz has a great post entitled “Every Customer Visit is a Lesson.” It’s so true…if you want to give yourself a gift this holiday season, give yourself the gift of insight and spend some time in the market with a few of your top customers or prospects.  I’ve always found that to be one of the most valuable ways to shape the business, both strategically and operationally.

One of the most vivid memories I have to illustrate this concept is a meeting that I had with Crate and Barrel, a prospect, in the very early days of Return Path, back in 2000 or 2001.  I went in with my colleague Sophie Miller, and with a number of product sales specialists from our reseller, DoubleClick, for an all-day session with C&B’s online marketing team.  We collectively were pitching everything, possibly including the kitchen sink — ad serving through DART, buying online media through the DoubleClick Network, using Abacus to expand the reach of their catalog, sending email through DARTMail, renting email lists through DoubleClick’s email list business, oh yes, and using Return Path’s ECOA service to keep their email database clean.

The meeting was a mess, and as far as I can tell, it didn’t really lead to any meaningful business, either for us or for DoubleClick.  I learned two things in this call the hard way, but both were incredibly valuable lessons that continue to shape our business today.

First, we created massive confusion by bringing multiple sales people in to each present a specific product to the customer, rather than sending in one senior, consultative sales person to present a holistic digital marketing solution.  Picture yourself as the head of e-commerce for a major retailer, expecting an insightful day with the leading vendor in the space…then walking into the meeting and seeing that vendor’s SEVEN different sales people introducing themselves to each other!  It was a mess.  Since then, we have tried hard (and I think DoubleClick has as well) to run with a single sales force organized around the customer, not organized around our own products.

Second, we discovered that the original version of our flagship ECOA product (which was still in beta at the time) had a couple of flaws in the business model that were probably going to make it a non-starter in the retail/catalog vertical.  We also learned, happily, that the client loved the concept, but there were some details in the original product that had to be fixed if we were ever going to get traction with key customers in that key segment.  We fixed these problems and were able to successfully re-launch ECOA later that year, but more important, we now stay much closer to our customers as we develop new products and features so we make sure concepts are more firmly market tested before they head into development.

There are many more examples of this Gift of Insight, which I’ll share in future posts.  Happy Holidays!

Holiday Card Anon

‘Tis the season of the business holiday card.  This is a nice enough tradition, but I received two cards this week that baffled me because I couldn’t tell who sent them to me.  Really, if you’re going to send out holiday cards, the only requirement is to make sure the recipients know that YOU sent them!  And not just by putting your name or company on the envelope (although that’s a help), as sometimes cards get opened and separated from their envelopes.  Include a business card inside the card, or make sure your name is printed on the card itself, or make sure your signature is legible, or at the very least make sure your company name is on the inside of the card.  Otherwise, all credit for the holiday greeting will just go straight to the North Pole!

Retaining good people has always been at the top of my list, even in the dark days.  But hiring and managing in an environment that’s once-stagnant-now-growing presents some real challenges.  Many of these aren’t unique to startups — it’s always tough to find A players — but there are three things I’ve observed that are uniquely tough about hiring in an entrepreneurial environment: