The following is a guest post written by my dad, Bob Blumberg, long-time tech entrepreneur and now startup advisor and board member (yes, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree).

To create a successful and sustainable, growing and profitable business, the leadership of the company must have both strategic and tactical understanding and capability.

For this purpose let us define “strategic” as having the understanding of the customer, his problem, need, or desire, a knowledge of his own industry, its past, present, and likely future, how developments in other industries can be applied to his own, and how to envision the product or service that will succeed.

In contrast, “tactical” is the understanding of how to get things done, how to accomplish the strategic goals.  It is composed of the knowledge of how to organize and structure, who and how many to hire or assign, how to market and sell, how to best the competition, how to produce and sell it profitably.

More often than not, these two mind- and skill- sets do not reside in the same person.  If that is true, it is critical that the CEO recognize it, and hire or promote a COO with the complement to his own ability.  If the CEO is strategic, his tactical counterpart could be COO or a VP of Sales, Manufacturing, Finance or HR, that he is willing to listen to.  Similarly, if the CEO is tactical, his strategic counterpart should be COO or a VP of Marketing, Engineering , or Product Marketing/Management.

In either case, the strategic leader should have deep background and significant experience in the industry, in competitors, his own company, or both over the course of his career.  The tactical leader can be more of a professional manager, with a broader range of experience, able to bring knowledge of different ways of getting things done.

Obviously, mutual respect between the two is essential.  Industry probably has many examples of this.  One that comes to mind is Facebook, where Mark Zuckerberg as a strategic CEO relied heavily on Sheryl Sandberg as his COO.  Although it is certainly possible to find both qualities in a CEO, it may be rare, and the successful CEO will realize where his talents are and are not, and hire or promote accordingly.

When my dad sent this to me, I responded with the following: Here’s a follow up question that I’d like to include in the post – at what size company do you think this kicks in? In Startup CXO, I wrote that for really early startups of 10-15 people, when a CEO says they need a COO, it can be a crutch because they just don’t know how or don’t care to do basic management work, what you’d define as tactical work. It’s often not fun for creative entrepreneurs. But maybe that’s not right, maybe it’s just the case that some people aren’t cut out to do that kind of work, and that’s ok. Dad’s response:

I think someone has to be looking at both from the start.  The complement to the CEO doesn’t have to have the title of COO, but needs to be on the team in some senior position, and have the respect of the CEO for his/her complementary skillset.

(This is the second post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Introductory post is here.)

Tuesday, March 17, Day 1

• Extended stay hotel does not have a gym.  Hopefully there is one at work
• Walking into office for the first time.  We are in a government building in a random town just south of Denver that houses the State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC) and the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.  These are the teams who are on point for emergency response in Colorado when there is any kind of fire, flood, cyberattack, or other emergency
• 
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• MAJOR Imposter Syndrome – I don’t know anything about anything
• 7:45 meeting with Stan
• 8:15 department briefing
• Met two deputies – Kacey Wulff and Kyle Brown.  Both seem awesome. On loan from governor’s health care office and insurance department
• Team “get to know you” was 4 minutes long.  So different than calm normal 
• Emergency Operations Center in Department of Public Health
• Small open room with over 100 people in it and everyone freaking out about not following best practices – no social distancing
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• Leader giving remote guidelines
• Lots of “Sorry, who are you and why are you here?”
• Local ops leader Mike Willis excellent – calm, inspirational, critical messages around teamwork, self-management, check ego at the door (turns out he is a retired Brigadier General)
• HHS call – maxxed at 300 participants, people not getting through, leader had to ask people to volunteer to get off the line (oops)
• Lunch and snacks in mass quantities here – it’s not quite Google, but this part does feel very startup.  I wonder if the Emergency Ops Center does this all the time or just in a crisis. Guessing crisis only but still super nice.  Also guessing I will gain weight this week between this and all gyms in the state being closed down
• Lots of new people and acronyms
• Multiple agencies at multiple layers of government require a lot of coordination and leadership that’s not always there, but everyone was incredibly clear, effective, low ego.  A lot of overlap
• Got my official badge – fancy
• Jared calls – just spoke to Pence, his guy is going to call you – tell him what we need…”uh, ok, now all I have to do is figure out what we need!”
• Fog of War – this room is healthy and bustling and a little disconnected from what’s going on, no freak out
• Kacey and call from Lisa about Seattle being on “Critical Care” because they don’t have enough supplies, meaning they are prepared to let the sickest people die – oh shit, we can’t let that happen here (or is it too late?)
• Got oriented, sort of
• Slight orientation to broader command structure and team
• My charter and structure are a little fuzzy, guess that’s why I’m here to figure that out
• Late night working back at hotel.  Thinking I will become a power user of UberEats this week

Wednesday, March 18, Day 2

• Gym at work is closed along with all gyms everywhere.  Looks like a lot of hotel floor exercises are in order
• Ideas and efforts and volunteers coming in like mad and random from the private sector – no one to corral, some are good, some are duplicative, all are well intentioned.  Lots of “solve the problem 5 ways”
• Shelter in place?  Every day saves thousands of lives in the model – credibility with governor
• State-level work is so inefficient for global and national problems, but Trump said “every man for himself” basically when it comes to states
• Not feeling productive
• Productivity is in the eye of the beholder.  Kacey totally calmed me down. Said I am adding value in ways I don’t think about (not sure if she was just being nice!):
  • Connection to Governor really useful for crisis team
  • Basic management and leadership stuff good
  • Asking dumb questions
  • Out of the box thinking
  • Liaison to industry and understanding that ecosystem
  • Arms and legs
  • People used to working in teams on things – different expectations in general
• Ok, so maybe I am helping
• Colleague tells me about Drizly, the UberEats equivalent for alcohol delivery. Good discovery.

Thursday, March 19, Day 3

• Weird – my back feels better than it has in months.  Maybe it’s the pilates, but still, seems weird.  I wonder if the higher altitude helps. If so, we will be moving to Nepal. Have to remember to mention that to family later
• Governor Policy meeting 9 am – “Cuomo is killing it” – words matter – “shelter in place” and “extreme social distancing” debate
• “The models are wrong – so let’s average them”
• We need 10,000 ventilators. We have 700.  Uh oh.
• Raised issues around test types and team capacity…Gov expanded scope to include app and still pushing hard on test scaling.  Gov asked for proposal for expanded scope and staff by 4:30. Guess that’s the day today!
• Recruited Brad to lead Private Sector side of the IRT’s work. Important to have a great counterpart on that side. Glad he agreed to do it, even though he’s already vice chair of another state task force on Economic Recovery
• Senior Ops leader interrupts someone during daily briefing – quietly says to the whole room “not vetted, not integrated, not helpful” – incredible.  In the moment, in public which normally you don’t want to do but had no choice in this circumstance – 6 words gave actionable and gentle feedback. Great example of quiet leadership
• Private sector inbound – well intentioned and innovative but overwhelming and hard to figure out how to fit in with public sector (e.g., financing to spin up distributed manufacturing)
• Team huddled and created proposal for new name, structure, staffing, charter, rationale, etc.
• Present to senior EOC staff for vetting, feedback
• Feels like I’m adding value finally – plan creation and “bring stakeholders along for the ride” presentation/vetting AND getting the team to stop being hair on fire and focus on thinking and planning and staffing
• Present to Gov – “brilliant” – then after, Kyle says “I’ve worked for multiple governors and senators, and this is the first time I’ve heard something called brilliant” (not sure it was brilliant)
• Now to operationalize it, stand up a team, replace myself so I can get home once this is marching in the right direction at the right speed
• Transferable skills (leadership, comms, strategy, planning) – not just missing context here but missing triple context – healthcare, public sector, CO
• Day 3.  Feels like longer
• Still, feels like adding value now.  Whew.  
• Dinner with a Return Path friend who came down to my hotel’s breakfast room, picked up takeout on the way, and sat 6 feet apart. 

Stay tuned for more tomorrow…

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 was that I came face to face with a judge in the state of Delaware for the first time around some litigation we’re in the middle of now.  While I can’t comment on this for obvious reasons, you never think when you decide to incorporate in Delaware that a trip to a courthouse in Wilmington is in your future.

The third, which can only be described as bittersweet, is that we had our first long-time employee retire!  Now THAT’S something you never think about when you run a startup.  But Sophie Miller Audette, one of our first 20 employees going back to 2000 and the sixth longest tenured person at the company today, has decided to retire and move on to other adventures in her already rich life.  A quick search on my blog reveals that I’ve blogged about Sophie three times since I started OnlyOnce 9 years ago (as of next week).  The first time was in 2004 when I quoted her memorable line, “In my next life, I want to come back as a client.”  The second and third times were in 2005 and were about the company’s commitment to helping to find a cure for Multiple Sclerosis, which Sophie was diagnosed with almost 10 years ago now.  Sophie has been an inspiration to many of us for a long time, and while we’ll miss her day-to-day, she’ll always be part of the Return Path family.  Picture of her, me, and Anita at her “retirement dinner” earlier this week below.

I always say that one of the best parts about being in this job for this long is that there are always new challenges and new opportunities to learn and grow.  The last couple weeks, full of firsts, proved the point!

• A VC: Scars From The Last Bubble
  Fred has a good posting on some of the downsides of having managed through the bubble bursting. I wrote about this (a little bit) last year in Ratcheting Up is Hard to Do (/2005/01/ratcheting_up_i.html), but Fred’s posti
  (tags: Entrepreneur VC Management)

• Feld Thoughts
  Brad has a good posting today about entrepreneur accountability — along the lines of my “Forecast Early and Often” theme. — /2005/11/notsocounter_cl.html
  (tags: VC Entrepreneur)

In From the Perimeter

I’m at the Direct Marketing Association’s annual massive trade show (DMA*05) in Atlanta.  While there are lots of things to potentially blog about, I think the most interesting one is the simplest.  When I started attending the DMA’s shows six years ago, the only interactive marketeing companies who exhibited were email vendors and the occasional sweepstakes company — and any interactive marketing company who did bother to show up was relegated to a small booth space in a corner of the trade show floor, away from the real action.  A friend of mine once told me it was easy for him to hit all the email guys at DMA — just walk around the perimeter of the room.

It’s 2005, and oh how things have changed.  The DMA put the “Interactive Marketing Pavilion” center stage this year, literally in the middle of the floor.  Besides Return Path, loads of other interactive marketing companies (and not just the email and sweeps guys!) have prime real estate at the show.  Within eyeshot of our booth are fellow email companies SilverPop, StrongMail, WhatCounts, Accucast, and ExactTarget, as well as analytics companies like Omniture, online ad companies like Blue Lithium, Kanoodle, and Advertising.com, lead gen companies like Cool Savings, and even a search firm or two.

The move is more than symbolic and more than just the fact that online marketing vendors have been around long enough to bid on better booth locations (although no doubt both of those things are true).  It’s representative of the way mainstream marketers now conduct business — increasingly online and increasingly multi-channel.  Online is another important part of the mix, not the stepchild.

Online marketing firms are now in from the perimeter, and we are happy to be here!

Beyond CAN-SPAM:  The Nightmare Continues

Turn back the clock to the end of 2003.  A bunch of states had recently passed their own anti-spam bills, and California had just passed the then-notorious SB186.  Commercial emailers were freaking out because compliance with a patchwork of state laws for email is nearly impossible given the nature of email and given the differences between the laws.  The reult of the freakout was an expedited, and decent, though far from perfect, federal law called CAN-SPAM which, among other things, preempted most of the individual state laws under the interstate commerce clause.  Most of us noted that the federal government had never worked so swiftly in recent memory.

Now it’s mid-2005, and a new cycle of state email legislation craziness is underway, this time with Michigan and Utah in the lead.  Once again, the legislation is well-intentioned but incredibly impractical.  I haven’t heard an appropriate amount of kicking and screaming about this yet, so let me give it a shot.

The laws themselves are billed as “Child Protection Acts.”  They ban email advertising (and also other electronic forms of advertising, like IM, phone, fax) to minors for things like guns, liquor, gambling, porn, tobacco, and — one of the kickers — “anything else deemed to be harmful to minors or unlawful for minors to purchase.”  The bans are in place even if the child has requested the advertising.  The proposed solution is an email address registry of chidren’s email addresses which would act as a suppression list for mailers, is run by a third party, and costs a $7 CPM per suppression run, per state, based on the size of the input file, not the size of the matches.

Let me start running down the problems here:

1. The laws won’t work comprehensively, as people have to proactively register their addresses with state registries.

2. The laws won’t do squat to prevent international or fraudulent advertisers from hitting children with their ads.

3. People with multi-purpose “family” email addresses will have to make a black-and-white decision about being on the registry.

4. Compliance will be a nightmare.  Since emailers usually don’t have a state tied to an email address, they will have to suppress their entire file against each state’s registry.

5. Charging based on the size of the input file as opposed to the number of matches is ridiculous.  It punishes mailers with large files and is completely divorced from the “value” of the service.

6. The costs are outrageous when you add them up.  A $7 CPM seems low, but multiply it by 12 months (and some people think compliance means more than monthly suppression runs) and now multiply it by at least 2 states — with another 10 or so considering similar legislation, and all of a sudden, a mailer could be paying as much as $1 per name ON THEIR FILE per year.

7. The laws are too vague and potentially too broad.  A law that prevents advertising of anything else deemed to be harmful to minors or unlawful for minors to purchase has some weird and possibly unintended definition consequences.  One example:  apparently, in Michigan, it is illegal to sell cars to minors (odd for a state that includes Detroit and licenses drivers at age 16) — so automobile advertising is a “banned category.”  Another example:  Amazon sells DVDs that are Rated R — does that mean linking to Amazon is now problematic?

8. Anyone can sue — not just state AGs, so look out for a zillion nuisance lawsuits like the old Utah “no popup” law of 2003.

9. The laws may be unconstitutional for any number of reasons, and they may also be in conflict with CAN-SPAM’s supersede clause.

The kicker?  The laws are billed as “Child Protection Laws” — so who the heck is going to stick out their neck and sue the states to force the legality issue?  I’m all for protecting our children…and for eliminating spam for that matter, but I’m sick of governments passing laws with this level of unintended consequences.  Someone ought to make a law about that!

Email Marketing 101

We just published a book!  Sign me Up! A marketer’s guide to creating email newsletters that build relationships and boost sales is now available on Amazon.com.  The book is authored by me and my Return Path colleagues Mike Mayor, Tami Forman, and Stephanie Miller.  What’s it about?

– At its core, the book is a very practical how-to guide.  Any company — large or small — can have a great email newsletter program.  They’re easy, they’re cheap, and when done well, they’re incredibly effective.

– This book helps you navigate the basics of how to get there, covering everything from building a great list, to content and design, to making sure the emails reach your customers’ inboxes and don’t get blocked or filtered.

– Our central philosophy about email marketing, which permeates the advice in the book, is covered in my earlier New Media Deal posting (which is reproduced in part in the book’s Preface) — that customers will sign up for your email marketing in droves if you provide them a proper value exchange for the ability to mail them.

– I’d encourage you to buy the book anyway, but in case you need an extra incentive, we are also donating 10% of book sales to Accelerated Cure, a research organization dedicated to finding a cure for Multiple Sclerosis, in honor of our friend and colleague Sophie Miller.

More postings to come about the process of writing, publishing, and marketing a book in 2005 — boy was the experience we had different than it would have been 10 years ago.

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.

OnlyOnce is 8 years old this week, which is hard to believe. So it is fitting that I got halfway through a new post this morning, then a little alarm bell went off in my head that I had written something similar before.  The topic is around moderation versus extremes.  I first wrote about this topic in 2005 in a post called Shifting Gears but I have thought about it more recently in a different way. 

Instead of phrasing this as a struggle between “Meden Agan,” which is Greek for “everything in moderation,” and “Gor oder gornischt,” which is Yiddish for “all or nothing,” I’d like to focus here on the value of occasionally going to an extreme. And that value is around learning. Let me give three examples:

-We were having a buy vs. build conversation at work a few months back as we were considering an acquisition. Some people in the room had an emotional bias towards buy; others toward build. So we framed the debate this way:  “Would you acquire the company for $1 instead of building the technology?” (Yes!) “Would you buy it for $10mm?” (No!) Taking the conversation to the extremes allowed us to focus on a rational answer as opposed to an emotional one — where is the price where buy and build are in equilibrium?

– With my colleague Andrea, I completed a 5-day juice fast a few weeks back. It was good and interesting on a bunch of levels. But I came away with two really interesting learnings that I only got from being extreme for a few days:  I like fruits and veggies (and veggie juices) a lot and don’t consume enough of them; and I sleep MUCH better at night on a relatively empty stomach

– Last year, I overhauled my “operating system” at work to stop interviewing all candidates for all jobs and stop doing 90-day 1:1 meetings with all new employees as well. I wrote about this in Retail, No Longer. What finally convinced me to do it was something one of my colleagues said to me, which was “Will you be able to keep these activities up when we have 500 employees?” (No) “So what is the difference if you stop now and save time vs. stopping in 6 months?” Thinking about the extreme got me to realize the full spectrum

It may not be great to live at the extremes, but I find extremes to be great places to learn and develop a good sense of what normal or moderate or real is.

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 to be published by Wiley & Sons and is due out next summer.  The book won’t just be a compendium of blog posts, but it will build on a number of the themes and topics I’ve written about over the years and also fill in lots of other topics where I haven’t.

The catalyst for writing this book was Brad Feld.  Brad has been a friend, mentor, investor, and Board member for over a decade.  We’ve had many great times, meals, and conversations together over the years, not the least of which was staggering across the finish line together at the New York City Marathon in 2005.  Brad started writing books a few years ago, and I’ve been peripherally involved with them, first with Do More Faster:  TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup (I contributed one of the chapters) and then with Venture Deals:  Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist (I wrote all the “Entrepreneur Perspective” sidebars).

Those are great books, and they’ve been incredibly well received by the global entrepreneurial community.  But then Brad got the bug, and now he’s in the middle of writing FOUR new books with Wiley that will all come out over the next year.  They are:

• Startup Communities:  Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
• Startup Life:  Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur
• Startup Metrics:  Making Sense of the Numbers in Your Startup
• Startup Boards:  Reinventing the Board of Directors to Better Support the Entrepreneur

These four books, plus the two earlier ones, plus Startup CEO, are all part of the Startup Revolution series.  While I’ll continue to do most of my blogging and posting here on OnlyOnce, I’d also encourage you to check out the Startup Revolution site and sign up to be a member of that community.  I’ll be doing some things on that site as well in connection with Startup CEO, and it’s a more concentrated place to post and comment on all things Startup.  In addition, we’ll be putting a bunch of add-ons to the book on that site closer to publication time.

I hope Startup CEO becomes a standard for all new CEOs.  I don’t think I have all the answers, but at least others can benefit by learning from my 13 years of successes and mistakes!  Now all I have to do is go write the darned thing.