This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write in 12 years as Return Path’s CEO. I hope it never has an equal.

One of our long-time employees, J.D. Falk, passed away last night after a year-long struggle with cancer. J.D., which most people don’t know was short for Jesse David, was only 37 years old. Although I cannot claim to be a close friend of J.D.’s, I have known him fairly well in the industry going back about eight years, and he has been a trusted member of our team here for the last four+ years.

J.D. did great work for us at Return Path, but my admiration for him goes beyond that. I admire him first for his willingness to work for the common good as much as, or even more than, his own good. J.D.’s tireless pro-bono work with anti-abuse non-profits MAAWG, CAUCE, and the IETF complemented the work he did here for a salary. And although he had a very positive and enduring impact on us at Return Path in terms of how we run our business and think about the delicate balance between email senders and receivers, he had an even bigger, broader impact through his standards work, papers, and tireless work on event programming and committee chairmanship. He did all that work not for money, not for thanks, but because it was, he felt, the right thing to do.

I also admire J.D. tremendously for his extremely principled, but thoughtfully considered, approach to life. His principles around internet users are well known and very “Cluetrain.” And yet, in a world increasingly filled with people whose opinions are intransigent, he was always open-minded and willing to engage in productive dialog with people who had different points of view than his own, sometimes changing his own thoughts and actions as a result of those conversations. That quality is all-too-rare in today’s society.

J.D.’s wife Hope told me a great story that sums up the fiber of J.D.’s being earlier this week. Just last weekend, from his hospital bed, J.D. realized that he and Hope had concert tickets they would be unable to use because of his illness, so he wanted to give them to friends. However, the tickets were only in electronic form on J.D.’s work laptop. Hope said, “J.D., just give me your password, and I’ll go home and print them out so we can give them away.” His response? “I can’t give you my password – that’s against company policy, but bring the laptop here to the hospital, and I can log in myself and forward you the tickets.”

Today is a sad day for me and for all 300 of us at Return Path as we lose a friend and colleague for the first time in our company’s history. And of course today is a sad day for the anti-abuse community that J.D. has been such an integral part of for his entire career. But more than that, today is a sad day for the internet and for the billions of humans that use it – sadder in some ways because they don’t even know that one of the people integrally involved in keeping it safe for them has left us.

I will post again as soon as I can with details of the memorial service for J.D. as well as details of where to make some kind of donation or contribution in his honor. I will post again as soon as I can with details of the memorial service for J.D. as well as details of where to make some kind of donation or contribution in his honor. In the meantime, I encourage J.D.’s many friends and colleagues around the world to post their memories to this memorial site.

Management by Chameleon

When I first became a manager, back in the MovieFone days, I had the good fortune to have an extreme case of “first time manager”– I went from managing nobody to managing 1 person to managing something like 20 people inside 6 months.  As a result, I feel like I learned a couple lessons more quickly than I might otherwise have learned them.  One was around micromanagement and delegation.  When I went from 0 to 1 direct report, I micromanaged (I still feel bad about that, Alissa).  But when I went from 1 to 20, I just couldn’t micromanage any more, and I couldn’t do it all myself.  I had to learn how to delegate, though I’m sure I was clumsy at it at first.

The larger lesson I learned when I went from 1 direct report to 5 (each of whom had a team underneath her) is that different people and different teams require different management styles and approaches.  This is what I call management by chameleon.  As a chameleon has the same body but shows it differently as situations warrant, you can have a consistent management philosophy but show it differently when you are with different direct reports or teams.

On my original team at MovieFone, I had one person who was incredibly quantitative and detail/process oriented and who indirectly managed a lot of products and processes outside our group.  I had another who was a complete newbie to the company and to an operating role (she was a former management consultant) with a large number of entry level employees in the field.  I had another who was an insanely creative insomniac trying to blaze new trails and create editorial content inside a technology company.  A fourth was a very broad thinking generalist, one of those great corporate athletes, who managed whatever fell between the cracks.  And the last was a commercial banker turning herself into a relationship management specialist working with an unorthodox business model and partners who half the time felt threatened by us.

In short, I had five incredibly different people to manage with five incredibly different functions and team types/employees under them.

And I learned over time — I like to think I learned it in a hurry, but I’m sure it took a couple of years, and I’m probably still working on it — that trying to manage those people and the second-level identically was counterproductive.  A small example:  8 a.m. meetings for the insomniac never worked well.  A bigger example:  diving into strategic topics with the former consultant who just joined the team and had never managed anyone before was a little bit of focusing on the forest and forgetting about the trees.

At the end of the day, you are who you are as a manager.  You are hard-charging, you are great at developing individuals, you seek consensus.  But how you show these traits to your team, and how you get your team to do the work you need them to do, can differ greatly person by person.

I Don’t Want to Be Your Friend (Today), part III

My first thought when my colleague Jen Goldman forwarded me a SlideShare presentation that was 224 pages long was, “really?”  But a short 10 minutes and 224 clicks later, I am glad I spent the time on it.

Paul Adams, a Senior User Experience Researcher at Google, put the presentation up called The Real Life Social Network.  Paul describes the problem I discuss in Part I and Part II of this series much more eloquently than I have, with great real world examples and thoughts for web designers at the end.

If you’re involved in social media and want to start breaking away from the “one size of friend fits all” mentality – this is a great use of time.

You've Never Seen a Girl Like This

I played hookey last night and went to a concert in San Diego — The Laura Roppe band was playing.  Laura is one of my oldest and dearest friends — we met in second grade and then went to junior high and high school together.  The title of this post is the title of her first album and its first song.  It's also true of Laura — she's one remarkable person.  Her web site is here. If you like country rock and female singer-songwriter music (think of Shania Twain or Norah Jones as comparables, although Laura is more versatile than both), and if you like discovering new up and coming artists, listen to the samples on her site, buy her album, or find her on iTunes.

I can't possibly do justice to Laura's story, which she tells very nicely on her web site here.  But the short of it is that she is in the middle of a dramatic personal transformation from brilliant lawyer to self made rock star, all while being a great mom and wife and just finishing up an exhausting 6-month successful fight against cancer.  Hopefully that's enough of a teaser to get you to at least give her music a sample!

I've been listening to her music on my ipod for months now, but especially after seeing her perform live last night, I have no doubt that she will be on an international tour within the next 12 months.  She is already getting great buzz and radio play in the US as well as Western Europe, and she's been nominated for a bunch of music awards.

I've never done a music recommendation post before in 5 years of blogging, and I may never do one again.  But Laura's story and music are just tremendous, and her lyrics are just plain fun.

Living With Less…For Good?

Like all companies, Return Path is battening down the hatches a bit on expenses these days.  Our business is very strong and still growing nicely, but in this environment, the specter of disaster looms large, so there's no reason not to be more cautious and more profitable.

We weren't an extravagant company before this, and we never have been. But there is almost always room to save. Less travel, leaner budgets for office cafeterias, no more pilates classes in the Colorado office.  We've been very clear internally that our three priorities are protecting everyone's job, everyone's salary, and everyone's health benefits.  Hopefully things continue to go well and those can remain sacrosanct.

We are now a few months into our various cost savings plans, and it's great to see the results on the income statement and balance sheet.  More than that, it's great to see how everyone in the company is rallying around the common cause and looking for other ways to save money as well.  We've made it chic to be cheap.  And so far, there's no impact on the business. 

It will be interesting to me to see what happens on the far end of this economic badness.  It's often said the companies that make it through times like these emerge stronger on the other side, and I think I now understand why:  it's clear to me that some of the changes will work long term and some will only work short term, which means that we'll learn during this period that we can live with less. 

That doesn't mean we were profligate in the past; but it does mean that I think we are going to retrain ourselves.  We don't have to send 10 people to a big trade show to have an impact and drive the business forward.  We don't have to be the vendor who picks up the tab at the end of the night.  We don't need to pay for half the company to have cell phones (a very 1999 policy) to retain top talent.  I bet we will learn those things — and a bunch of others to come — in the next few months.

The (Email) Elephant in the Room

Email marketing continues to be under attack by some members of the media who are looking to stir up melodrama and controversy and seem to be uninterested in or unwilling to look at real metrics from real companies who are enjoying unparalleled success with email.

I can’t say this any better than Bill McCloskey from Email Data Source, who writes in MediaPost:

The Elephant in the Room that no one is willing to talk about is that Spam is not the problem. The problem is the OVERREACTION to Spam. This overreaction is not something that is hurting e-mail marketing communications–it is hurting all communications.

Read the full column here.  It’s great.

UPDATE:  Apparently, the column is only available if you register for MediaPost (grrr…).  It’s good enough, and free, but don’t feel compelled.  Two other useful paragraphs to read are below:

And all this hysteria is wiped up without looking at the facts. Because if you look at the facts, you’d see a pattern emerge. For instance, according to the DMA, e-mail has the second-highest ROI of any direct marketing channel, even with reduced deliverability and open rates. The fact is that if you examine the clickstream data from companies such as Hitwise, you will see that the biggest traffic driver time and time again is e-mail. E-mail is not just an important interactive marketing channel, it is the most important marketing channel–but you’d never know it judging by today’s trade shows and industry publications.

In the name of keeping us free of viagra ads in our inbox, we have crippled the most efficient communications system ever developed. We have allowed the free flow of information to be hijacked by fanatics. And because no one speaks for the e-mail industry, this is going on under our noses with no cry of protest.

Jeff Nolan has a great post entitled Pick Your VC Carefully. A must read for any entrepreneur (or VC for that matter).

It’s worth the full read, but his main points are:

1. Pick the right type of investor — big, small and specialized, financial, corporate.

2. Check their references!

3. Make sure you understand how much pull your investor has within his or her firm.

All good advice, some overlap with my posting on How to Negotiate a Term Sheet with a VC. My only addition beyond what’s already in that post is that if you’re adding a new investor into a syndicate, make sure you have your existing investors spend time speaking with the prospective investor, both with you present and without you present. You’ll learn a lot about your future board dynamics that way.

Luck Matters ( and You Can Only Make Some of It)

There was a great article recently in the Financial Times that’s worth reading here.  (Warning – you might have to complete a free registration in order to read this article.)  The premise is that most outliers, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s term, achieve their super status at least partly through luck.  And once that status is achieved, the good things just pile on from there.  This concept is as much Gladwell’s as that term is.

I always say that “you can make your own luck.”  And to some extent, that’s true.  Hard work and persistence and creativity can eventually open up doors on their own, no question about it.  While this article doesn’t say there are limitations to that axiom, it does note that hard work, persistence, and creativity PLUS some good luck is the more likely path to being #1 in your field.

Think about it this way – why is the most gifted golfer of the last 15 years someone who grew up in Southern California with a father who loved golf, and not, say, someone from the sub-Saharan region of Africa?  The latter person might have the equivalent amount of raw talent as Tiger Woods, maybe even more grit and determination.  But he’s probably never even heard of golf.

So what’s the lesson here for business leaders?  First, count your blessings.  You’re probably where you are for a bunch of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with you.  Second, look for other people to work with you who are lucky as well.  I read somewhere once that Tony Hsieh of Zappos asks every person he interviews if he or she is a lucky person – and that question pulls a lot of weight for him.  Finally, put your head down and work hard.  While this point is 100% valid, the thing is…you can’t do anything about it anyway, so you might as well push as hard as you can to do the best you can with what you’ve got!

We run a massive employee survey every year or so called The Loop, which is powered by Culture Amp.  We are big fans of Culture Amp, as they provide not only a great survey tool but benchmarks of relevant peer companies so our results can be placed in external context as well as internal context.

The survey is anonymous and only really rolled up to large employee groups (big teams, departments, offices, etc.), and we take the results very seriously.  Every year we run it, we create an Organization Development Plan out of the results that steers a lot of the work of our Leadership team and People team for the coming year.

I just read every single comment that employees took the time to write out in addition to their checkbox or rating responses.  This year, that amounted to over 1,200 verbatim comments.  I am struggling to process all of them, for a bunch of reasons you’d expect.  Next year we may give employees some examples of comments that are hard to process so they understand what it’s like to read all of them…and we may reduce the number of places where employees can make comments so we try to get only the most important (and more detailed) comments from people to keep the volume a little more manageable.

But I thought it might be useful to give some general advice to people who write comments on anonymous surveys.  Your company may have every good intention of following up on every last comment in an employee survey (we do!), but it’s difficult to do so when:

• The comment is not actionable.  For example, “The best thing about working at Return Path is…’I can afford to live nearby.'”  That doesn’t do much for us!
• The comment is too vague.  For example, “I’m not the engineer I was a year ago” – we have no idea what that means.  Is it a plus or a minus?  What is behind it?
• The comment is likely to be in conflict with other comments and doesn’t give enough detail to help resolve conflicts.  40 positive comments about the lunch program in an office and 40 negative comments about the lunch program in the same office kind of get washed out, but “Lunches are good, but please have more gluten-free options” is super helpful.
• The comment lacks context.  When the answer to the question “What would be the one thing we could do right away to make RP a better place to work?” is “Investing in some systems,” that doesn’t give us a starting point for a next step.
• The commenter disqualifies him or herself.  Things like “Take everything I’m saying with a grain of salt…I’m just an engineer and have no real idea of what I’m doing” that punctuate a comment are challenging to process.
• The commenter forgets that the comments are anonymous.  “I have serious problems with my manager and often think of leaving the company” is a total bummer to hear, but there’s not a lot we can do with it.  I hope with something like this that you are also having a discussion with someone on the People team or your manager’s manager!

We’re doing everything employees would expect us to do – reading the ratings and comments, looking at trends over time, breaking them down by office and department, and creating a solid Organizational Development Plan that we’ll present publicly and follow up on…but hopefully this is useful for our company and others in the future as a guide to more actionable commenting in employee surveys.

Counter Cliche:  How Much Paranoia is Too Much Paranoia?

Fred’s VC cliche of the week this week, Opening the Kimono, is a good one.  He talks about how much entrepreneurs should and should not disclose when talking to VCs and big partners — companies like Microsoft or Google, for example.

In response to another of Fred’s weekly cliche postings back in April, I addressed the issue of opening the kimono with VCs in this posting entitled Promiscuity.  But today’s topic is the opposite of promiscuity, it’s paranoia.

I was talking with a friend a few months back who’s a friend and fellow CEO of a high profile, larger company in a similar space to Return Path.  He was obsessing about the secrecy surrounding the size of his business and wouldn’t tell me (a friend) how much revenue his company had, even within a $20mm band.

He pursued this secrecy pretty far.  He never shared financials with his employees.  He never told anyone the metrics, not even his close friends and family.  He even withdrew his company from consideration for a high-profile award for growth companies which it had entered into and won in prior years since someone might be able to string together enough years of data to compute their size.

Why?  Because he didn’t want any venture capitalists to figure out how big they had gotten and decide to throw money at upstart competitors.  Talk about a closed kimono!

I’m much more open book than that with Return Path, but I have a tremendous amount of respect for this guy, so I gave the matter some thought.  There are certainly some situations which call for discretion, but I couldn’t come up with too many that would drive my guiding principle to be secrecy.

1. Being “open book” with employees is essential.  Your people need to know where the business stands and how their efforts are contributing to the whole.  More important, they need to know that you trust them.

2. Using some key metrics to promote your company can be very helpful.  I challenge you to show me a marketing person who doesn’t want to brag about how big you are, how many customers you have, what market share you have.

3. There’s no reason to worry about Venture Capitalists.  Sure, they can fund a competitor, but they’ll do that without knowing exactly how much revenue you have, how quickly.  The good ones are good at sniffing out market opporunities ahead of time.  The bad ones, you care about less anyway.

4. All that said, you can never be paranoid enough about the competition.  Assume they’re all out to get you at every turn, that they’re smarter, richer, quicker, and better looking than you are.  Live in fear of them eating your lunch.

Paranoia is healthy (just ask Andy Grove), but it does have its limits around the basics of your business, and around how you treat employees.

Learn Word of Mouth Marketing

Our friend, former RP colleague, and WOM guru Andy Sernovitz is hosting a small-group word of mouth marketing seminar. Usually he only does private training for companies at a very large price, so this is a rare chance for 50 people to get the best introduction to word of mouth that there is.  I blogged about his book a while back here.

We’ve arranged for a $250 discount for our clients. Use code “welovereturnpath” when you register (kind of catchy code, isn’t it?).

This is a very practical, hands-on course. In one intense day, you will:

• Master the five steps of word      of mouth marketing
• Construct an action plan that      your company can start using the very next day
• Get the same training that      big corporations (Microsoft, TiVo, eBay) have received — for a fraction      of what they paid
• Know how to translate word of      mouth marketing into real ROI
• Participate in an active,      intense day of practical brainstorming (not boring theory)
• Learn from Andy Sernovitz,      the guy who literally wrote the book on word of mouth marketing

Andy promises you will learn a repeatable, proven marketing framework that is easy to execute, affordable, and provides measurable results within 60 days.

More information: http://events.gaspedal.com

Chicago: July 30 and September 4

Pass it on: http://events.gaspedal.com/banners