Startup CEO (OnlyOnce – the book!), Part III – Pre-Order Now

My book, Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, is now available for pre-order on Amazon in multiple formats (Print, Kindle), which is an exciting milestone in this project!  The book is due out right after Labor Day, but Brad Feld tells me that the more pre-orders I have, the better.  Please pardon the self-promotion, but click away if you’re interested!

Here are a few quick thoughts about the book, though I’ll post more about it and the process at some point:

• I’ll be using the hashtag #startupceo more now to encourage discussion of topics related to startup CEOs – please join me!
• The book has been described by a few CEOs who read it and commented early for me along the lines of “The Lean Startup movement is great, but this book starts where most of those books end and takes you through the ‘so you have a product that works in-market – now what?’ questions”
• The book is part of the Startup Revolution series that Brad has been working on for a couple years now, including Do More (Even) Faster, Venture Deals, Startup Communities, and Startup Life (with two more to come, Startup Boards and Startup Metrics)
• Writing a book is a LOT harder than I expected!

At this point, the best thing I can do to encourage you to read/buy is to share the full and final table of contents with you, sections/chapters/headings.  When I get closer in, I may publish some excerpts of new content here on Only Once.  Here’s the outline:

Part I: Storytelling

• Chapter 1: Dream the Possible Dream…Entrepreneurship and Creativity, “A Faster Horse,” Vetting Ideas
• Chapter 2: Defining and Testing the Story…Start Out By Admitting You’re Wrong, A Lean Business Plan Template, Problem, Solution, Key Metrics, Unique Value Proposition and Unfair Advantages, Channels, Customer Segments, Cost Structure and Revenue Streams
• Chapter 3: Telling the Story to Your Investors…The Business Plan is Dead. Long Live the Business Plan, The Investor Presentation, The Elevator Pitch, The Size of the Opportunity, Your Competitive Advantage, Current Status and Roadmap from Today, The Strength of Your Team, Summary Financials, Investor Presentations for Larger Startups
• Chapter 4: Telling the Story to Your Team…Defining Your Mission, Vision and Values, The Top-down Approach, The Bottom-Up Approach, The Hybrid Approach, Design a Lofty Mission Statement
• Chapter 5: Revising the Story…Workshopping, Knowing When It’s Time to Make a Change, Corporate Pivots: Telling the Story Differently, Consolidating, Diversifying, Focusing, Business Pivots: Telling a Different Story
• Chapter 6: Bringing the Story to Life…Building Your Company Purposefully, The Critical Elements of Company-Building, Articulating Purpose:  The Moral of the Story, You Can Be a Force for Helping Others—Even If Indirectly

Part II: Building the Company’s Human Capital

• Chapter 7: Fielding a Great Team…From Protozoa to Pancreas, The Best and the Brightest, What About HR?, What About Sales & Marketing?, Scaling Your Team Over Time
• Chapter 8: The CEO as Functional Supervisor…Rules for General Managers
• Chapter 9: Crafting Your Company’s Culture…, Introducing Fig Wasp #879, Six Legs and a Pair of Wings, Let People Be People, Build an Environment of Trust
• Chapter 10: The Hiring Challenge…Unique Challenges for Startups, Recruiting Outstanding Talent, Staying “In-Market”, Recruitment Tools, The Interview: Filtering Potential Candidates, Two Ears One Mouth, Who Should You Interview?, Onboarding: The First 90 Days
• Chapter 11: Every Day in Every Way, We Get a Little Better…The Feedback Matrix, 1:1 Check-ins, “Hallway” Feedback, Performance Reviews, The 360, Soliciting Feedback on Your Own Performance, Crafting and Meeting Development Plans      
• Chapter 12: Compensation…General Guidelines for Determining Compensation, The Three Elements of Startup Compensation, Base Pay, Incentive Pay, Equity              
• Chapter 13: Promoting                …Recruiting from Within, Applying the “Peter Principle” to Management, Scaling Horizontally, Promoting Responsibilities Rather than Swapping Titles               
• Chapter 14: Rewarding: “It’s the Little Things” That Matter…It Never Goes Without Saying, Building a Culture of Appreciation
• Chapter 15: Managing Remote Offices and Employees…Brick and Mortar Values in a Virtual World, Best Practices for Managing Remote Employees
• Chapter 16: Firing: When It’s Not Working…No One Should Ever Be Surprised to Be Fired, Termination and the Limits of Transparency, Layoffs

Part III: Execution

• Chapter 17: Creating a Company Operating System…Creating Company Rhythms, A Marathon? Or a Sprint?
• Chapter 18: Creating Your Operating Plan and Setting Goals…Turning Strategic Plans into Operating Plans, Financial Planning, Bringing Your Team into Alignment with Your Plans, Guidelines for Setting Goals
• Chapter 19: Making Sure There’s Enough Money in the Bank…Scaling Your Financial Instincts, Boiling the Frog, To Grow or to Profit? That Is the Question, First Perfect the Model, Choosing Growth, Choosing Profits, The Third Way
• Chapter 20: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Financing…Equity Investors, Venture Capitalists, Angel Investors, Strategic Investors, Debt, Convertible Debt, Venture Debt, Bank Loans, Personal Debt, Bootstrapping, Customer Financing, Your Own Cash Flow
• Chapter 21: When and How to Raise Money…When to Start Looking for VC Money, The Top 11 Takeaways for Financing Negotiations
• Chapter 22: Forecasting and Budgeting…Rigorous Financial Modeling, Of Course You’re Wrong—But Wrong How?, Budgeting in a Context of Uncertainty, Forecast, Early and Often
• Chapter 23: Collecting Data…External Data, Learning from Customers, Learning from (Un)Employees, Internal Data, Skip-Level Meetings, Subbing, Productive Eavesdropping
• Chapter 24: Managing in Tough Times…Managing in an Economic Downturn, Hope Is Not a Strategy—But It’s Not a Bad Tactic, Look for Nickels and Dimes under the Sofa, Never Waste a Good Crisis, Managing in a Difficult Business Situation
• Chapter 25: Meeting Routines…Lencioni’s Meeting Framework, Skip-Level Meetings, Running a Productive Offsite
• Chapter 26: Driving Alignment…Five Keys to Startup Alignment, Aligning Individual Incentives with Global Goals
• Chapter 27: Have You Learned Your Lesson?…The Value (and Limitations) of Benchmarking, The Art of the Post-Mortem
• Chapter 28: Going Global…Should Your Business Go Global?, How to Establish a Global Presence, Overcoming the Challenges of Going Global, Best Practices for Managing International Offices and Employees
• Chapter 29: The Role of M&A…Using Acquisitions as a Tool in Your Strategic Arsenal, The Mechanics of Financing and Closing Acquisitions, Stock, Cash, Earn Out, The Flipside of M&A: Divestiture, Odds and Ends, Integration (and Separation)
• Chapter 30: Competition…Playing Hardball, Playing Offense vs. Playing Defense, Good and Bad Competitors
• Chapter 31: Failure…Failure and the Startup Model, Failure Is Not an Orphan

Part IV: Building and Leading a Board of Directors

• Chapter 32: The Value of a Good Board…Why Have a Board?, Everybody Needs a Boss, The Board as Forcing Function, Pattern Matching, Forests, Trees, Honest Discussion and Debate
• Chapter 33: Building Your Board…What Makes a Great Board Member?, Recruiting a Board Member, Compensating Your Board, Boards as Teams, Structuring Your Board, Board Size, Board Committees, Chairing the Board, Running a Board Feedback Process, Building an Advisory Board
• Chapter 34: Board Meeting Materials…“The Board Book”, Sample Return Path Board Book, The Value of Preparing for Board Meetings
• Chapter 35: Running Effective Board Meetings…Scheduling Board Meetings, Building a Forward-Looking Agenda, In-Meeting Materials, Protocol, Attendance and Seating, Device-Free Meetings, Executive and Closed Sessions
• Chapter 36: Non-Board Meeting Time…Ad Hoc Meetings, Pre-Meetings, Social Outings
• Chapter 37: Decision-Making and the Board…The Buck Stops—Where?, Making Difficult Decisions in Concert, Managing Conflict with Your Board
• Chapter 38: Working with the Board on Your Compensation and Review…The CEO’s Performance Review, Your Compensation, Incentive Pay, Equity, Expenses
• Chapter 39: Serving on Other Boards…The Basics of Serving on Other Boards, Substance, or Style?

Part V: Managing Yourself So You Can Manage Others

• Chapter 40: Creating a Personal Operating System…Managing Your Agenda, Managing Your Calendar, Managing Your Time, Feedback Loops
• Chapter 41: Working with an Executive Assistant…Finding an Executive Assistant, What an Executive Assistant Does
• Chapter 42: Working with a Coach…The Value of Executive Coaches, Areas Where an Executive Coach Can Help
• Chapter 43: The Importance of Peer Groups…The Gang of Six, Problem-Solving in Tandem
• Chapter 44: Staying Fresh…Managing the Highs and Lows, Staying Mentally Fresh, At Your Company, Out and About, Staying Healthy, Me Time
• Chapter 45: Your Family…Making Room for Home Life, Involving Family in Work, Bringing Work Principles Home
• Chapter 46: Traveling…Sealing the Deal with a Handshake, Making the Most of Travel Time, Staying Disciplined on the Road
• Chapter 47: Taking Stock of the Year…Celebrating “Yes”; Addressing “No”, Are You Having Fun?, Are You Learning and Growing as a Professional?, Is It Financially Rewarding?, Are You Making an Impact?
• Chapter 48:  A Note on Exits…Five Rules of Thumb for Successfully Selling Your Company

 If you’re still with me and interested, again here are the links to pre-order (Print, Kindle).

The Best Laid Plans, Part III

Once you’ve finished the Input Phase and the Analysis Phase of producing your strategic plan, you’re ready for the final Output Phase, which goes something like this:

Vision articulation.  Get it right for yourself first.  You should be able to answer “where do we want to be in three years?” in 25 words or less.

Roadmap from today.  Make sure to lay out clearly what things need to happen to get from where you are today to where you want to be.  The sooner-in stuff needs to be much clearer than the further out stuff.

Resource Requirements.  Identify the things you will need to get there, and the timing of those needs – More people?  More marketing money?  A new partner?

Financials.  Lay them out at a high level on an annual basis, on a more detailed level for the upcoming year.

Packaging.  Create a compelling presentation (Powerpoint, Word, or in your case, maybe something more creative) that is crisp and inspiring.

Pre-selling.  Run through it – or a couple of the central elements of it – with one or two key people first to get their buy-in.

Selling.  Do your roadshow – hit all key constituents with the message in one way or another (could be different forms, depending on who).

The best thing to keep in mind is that there is no perfect process, and there’s never a “right answer” to strategy — at least not without the benefit of hindsight!

People have asked me what the time allocation and elapsed time should or can be for this process.  While again, there’s no right answer, I typically find that the process needs at least a full quarter to get right, sometimes longer depending on how many inputs you are tracking down and how hard they are to track down; how fanatical you are about the details of the end product; and whether this is a refresh of an existing strategy or something where you’re starting from a cleaner sheet of paper.  In terms of time allocation, if you are leading the process and doing a lot of the work yourself, I would expect to dedicate at least 25% of your time to it, maybe more in peak weeks.  It’s well worth the investment.

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.)

We were excited to close the sale of our Consumer Insights business last week to Edison, as I blogged about last week on the Return Path blog.  But it brought back to mind the great Yogi Berra quote that “it ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

We’ve done lots of deals over our 18 year existence.  Something like 12 or 13 acquisitions and 5 spin-offs or divestitures.  And a very large number of equity and debt financings.

We’ve also had four deals that didn’t get done.  One was an acquisition we were going to make that we pulled away from during due diligence because we found some things in due diligence that proved our acquisition thesis incorrect.  We pulled the plug on that one relatively early.  I’m sure it was painful for the target company, but the timing was mid-process, and that is what due diligence is for.  One was a financing that we had pretty much ready to go right around the time the markets melted down in late 2008.

But the other two were deals that fell apart when they were literally at the goal line – all legal work done, Boards either approved or lined up to approve, press releases written.  One was an acquisition we were planning to make, and the other was a divestiture.  Both were horrible experiences.  No one likes being left at the altar.  The feeling in the moment is terrible, but the clean-up afterwards is tough, too.  As one of my board members said at the time of one of these two incidents – “what do you do with all the guests and the food?”

What I learned from these two experiences, and they were very different from each other and also a while back now, is a few things:

• If you’re pulling out of a deal, give the bad news as early as possible, but absolutely give the news.  We actually had one of the “fall apart at the goal line” deals where the other party literally didn’t show up for the closing and never returned a phone call after that.  Amateur hour at its worst
• When you’re giving the bad news, do it as directly as possible – and offer as much constructive feedback as possible.  Life is long, and there’s no reason to completely burn a relationship if you don’t have to
• Use the due diligence and documentation period to regularly pull up and ask if things are still on track.  It’s easy in the heat and rapid pace of a deal to lose sight of the original thesis, economic justification, or some internal commitments.  The time to remember those is not at the finish line
• Sellers should consider asking for a breakup fee in some situations.  This is tough and of course cuts both ways – I wouldn’t want to agree to one as a buyer.  But if you get into a process that’s likely to cause damage to your company if it doesn’t go through by virtue of the process itself, it’s a reasonable ask

But mostly, my general rule now is to be skeptical right up until the very last minute.

Because deals are not done until they are done.

Welcome to the new Return Path.

For a tech company to grow and thrive in the 21st century it must be in a state of constant adaptation. We have been the global market leaders in email deliverability since my co-founder George Bilbrey coined that term back in 2002. In fact, back in 2008 we announced a major corporate reorganization, divesting ourselves of some legacy businesses in order to focus on deliverability as our core business.  

 Since then Return Path has grown tremendously thanks to that focus, but we have grown to the point where it’s time for us to redefine ourselves once again.  Now we’re launching a new chapter in the company’s history to meet evolving needs in our marketplace. We’re establishing ourselves as the global market leaders in email intelligence. Read on and I’ll explain what that means and why it’s important.

What Return Path Released Today

We launched three new products today to improve inbox placement rate (the new Inbox Monitor,  now including subscriber-level data), identify phishing attacks (Email Brand Monitor), and make it easier to understand subscriber engagement and benchmark your program against your competition (Inbox Insight, a groundbreaking new solution). We’ve also released an important research study conducted by David Daniels at The Relevancy Group.

The report’s findings parallel what we’ve been hearing more and more recently. Email marketers are struggling with two core problems that complicate their decision making: They have access to so much data, they can’t possibly analyze it fast enough or thoroughly enough to benefit from it; and too often they don’t have access to the data they really need.

Meanwhile they face new challenges in addition to the ones email marketers have been battling for years. It’s still hard to get to the inbox, and even to monitor how much mail isn’t getting there. It’s still hard to protect brands and their customers from phishing and spoofing, and even to see when mail streams are under attack. And it’s still hard to see engagement measurements, even as they become more important to marketing performance.

Email Intelligence is the Answer

Our solution to these problems is Email Intelligence. Email intelligence is the combination of data from across the email ecosystem, analytics that make it accessible and manageable, and insight that makes it actionable. Marketers need all of these to understand their email performance beyond deliverability. They need it to benchmark themselves against competitors, to gain a complete understanding of their subscribers’ experience, and to accurately track and report the full impact of their email programs.  In fact, we have redefined our company’s mission statement to align with our shift from being the global leader in Email Deliverability to being the global leader in Email Intelligence:

We analyze email data and build solutions that generate insights for senders, mailbox providers, and users to ensure that inboxes contain only messages that users want

The products we are launching today, in combination with the rest of our Email Intelligence Solution for Marketers that’s been serving clients for a decade, will help meet these market needs, but we continue to look ahead to find solutions to bigger problems. I see our evolution into an Email Intelligence company as an opportunity to change the entire ecosystem, to make email better, more welcome, more effective, and more secure.

David’s researchoffers a unique view of marketers’ place in the ecosystem, where they want to get to, how much progress they’ve made, and how big a lead the top competitors have opened up against the rest. (It can also give you a sense of where your efforts stack up vs. the rest of the industry.) There are definitely some surprises, but for me the biggest takeaway was no surprise at all: The factors that separate the leaders are essentially the core components of what we define as Email Intelligence.

People First

I do not think it’s telling that my fourth post in this series of posts on Return Path’s core values (kickoff post, tag cloud) is something called People First.  Ok, it probably should have been the first post in the series.  To be fair, it is the first value on our list, but for whatever reason, the value about Ownership was top of mind when I decided to create this series.

Anyway, at Return Path,

We believe that people come first

And we aren’t shy about saying it publicly, either.  This came up in a lengthy interview I did with Inc. Magazine last year when we were profiled for winning an award as one of the top 20 small- and mid-sized businesses to work for in America.  After re-reading that article, I went back and tried to find the slide from our investor presentations that I referred to.  I have a few versions of this slide from different points in time, including one that’s simpler (it only has employees, clients, and shareholder on it) but here’s a sample of it:

That pretty much says it all.  We believe that if we have the best and most engaged workforce, we will do the best job at solving our clients’ problems, and if we do that well, our shareholders will win, too.

How does this “people first” mentality influence my/our day-to-day activities?  Here are a few examples:

• We treat all employees well, regardless of level or department.  All employees are important to us achieving our mission – otherwise, they wouldn’t be here.  So we don’t do a lot of things that other companies do like send our top performing sales reps on a boondogle together while the engineers and accountants slave away in the office as second-class citizens.  That would be something you might see in a “sales first” or “customer first” culture
• We fiercely defend the human capital of our organization.  There are two examples I can think of around this point.  First, we do not tolerate abusive clients. Fortunately, they are rare, but more than once over the years either I or a member of my senior team has had to get on the phone with a client and reprimand them, or even terminate their contract with us, for treating one of our employees poorly and unprofessionally. And along the same lines, when all economic hell broke loose in the fall of 2008, we immediately told employees that while we’d be in for a rough ride, our three top priorities were to keep everyone’s job, keep everyone’s compensation, and keep everyone’s health benefits. Fortunately, our business withstood the financial challenges and we were able to get through the financial crisis with those three things intact.
• We walk the walk with regard to employee feedback.  Everyone does employee satisfaction surveys, but we are very rigorous about understanding what areas are making people relatively unhappy (for us, even our poor ratings are pretty good, but they’re poor relative to other ratings), and where in the employee population (office, department, level) those issues lie.  We highlight them in an all-hands meeting or communication, we develop specific action plans around them, and we measure those same questions and responses the next time we do a survey to see how we’ve improved
• We invest in our people.  We pay them fairly well, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  We invest in their learning and growth, which is the lifeblood of knowledge workers.  We do an enormous amount of internal training.  We encourage, support, and pay for outside training and education.  We are very generous with the things that allow our employees to be happy and healthy, from food to fitness to insurance to time off to a flexible environment to allowing them to work from another office, or even remotely, if their lives require them to move somewhere else
• I spend as little time as I possibly can managing my shareholders and as much time as I can with employees and prospective employees.  That doesn’t mean I don’t interact with my Board members – I do that quite a bit.  But it does mean that when I do interact with them, it’s more about what they can do for Return Path and less about reporting information to them.  I do send them a lot of information, but the information flow works well for them and simultaneously minimizes my time commitment to the process:  (1) reporting comes in a very consistent format so that investors know WHAT to expect and what they’re looking at, (2) reporting comes out with a consistently long lead time prior to a meeting so investors know WHEN to expect the information, (3) the format of the information is co-developed with investors so they are getting the material they WANT, and (4) we automate as much of the information production as possible and delegate it out across the organization as much as possible so there’s not a heavy burden on any one employee to produce it
• When we do spend time with customers (which is hopefully a lot as well), we try to spread that time out across a broad base of employees, not just salespeople and account managers, so that as many of our employees can develop a deep enough understanding of what our customers’ lives are like and how we impact them

There are plenty of companies out there who have a “shareholder first” or “customer first” philosophy.  I’m not saying those are necessarily wrong – but at least in our industry, I’ll bet companies like that end up with significantly higher recruiting costs (we source almost half our new hires from existing employee referrals), higher employee churn, and therefore lower revenue and profit per employee metrics at a minimum.  Those things must lead to less happy customers, especially in this day and age of transparency.  And all of those things probably degrade shareholder value, at least over the long haul.

Return Path Core Values, Part II

As I said at the beginning of this series, I was excited to share the values that have made us successful with the world and to also articulate more for the company some of the thinking behind the statements.

You can click on the tag for all the posts on the 13 Return Path’s core values, but the full list of the values is below, with links to each individual post, for reference:

1. We believe that people come first
2. We believe in doing the right thing
3. We solve problems together and always present problems with potential solutions or paths to solutions
4. We believe in keeping the commitments we make, and communicate obsessively when we can’t
5. We don’t want you to be embarrassed if you make a mistake; communicate about it and learn from it
6. We believe in being transparent and direct
7. We challenge complacency, mediocrity, and decisions that don’t make sense
8. We believe that results and effort are both critical components of execution
9. We are serious and passionate about our job and positive and light-hearted about our day
10. We are obsessively kind to and respectful of each other
11. We realize that people work to live, not live to work
12. We are all owners in the business and think of our employment at the company as a two-way street
13. We believe inboxes should only contain messages that are relevant, trusted, and safe

As I noted in my initial post, every employee as of August 2008 was involved in the drafting of these statements.  That’s a long post for another time, but it’s an important part of the equation here.  These were not top-down statements written by me or other executives or by our People team.  Some are more aspirational than others, but they are the aspirations of the company, not of management!

More Good Inc.

Last year I was pleased and proud to write about our debut on the Inc. 500 list of America’s fastest growing companies.  At that time I wrote that “Now our challenge, of course, is STAYING on the list, and hopefully upping our ranking next year!”  Well, I am again please and proud to announce that we, in fact, stayed on the list.  (You can read all the Inc. coverage here and see our press release about the ranking here.)

Unfortunately, we didn’t make the second part of our goal to up our rank.  But, we did up our growth – our three-year revenue growth rate was 18% higher than last year.  This is a testament to the hard work of our team (now 150 strong!) and wouldn’t be possible without the support of our many great clients (now 1,500 strong!).  Most importantly, we see no end in sight.  In fact, 2008 promises to be an even bigger year for us as we poise for continued growth.  By the way, would you like to be part of a team that has now ranked as one of America’s fastest growing companies two years in a row?  Check out our Careers page and join the team that is advancing email marketing, one company at a time.

The Gift of Feedback, Part II

I’ve written a few times over the years about our 360 feedback process at Return Path.  In Part I of this series in early 2008, I spelled out my development plan coming out of that year’s 360 live review process. I have my new plan now after this year’s process, and I thought I’d share it once again.  This year I have four items to work on:

1. Continue to develop the executive team.  Manage the team more aggressively and intentionally.  Upgrade existing people, push hard on next-level team development, and critically evaluate the organization every 3-6 months to see if the execs are scaling well enough or if they need to replaced or augmented
2. Formalize junior staff interaction.  Create more intentional feedback loops before/after meetings, including with the staff member if needed, and cultivate acceptance of transparency; get managers to do the same.  Be extra skeptical about the feedback I’m getting, realizing that I may not get an accurate or complete picture
3. Foster deeper engagement across the entire organization.  Simplify/streamline company mission and balanced scorecard through a combination of deeper level maps/scorecards, maybe a higher level scorecard, and constant reinforcing communication.  Drive multi-year planning process to be fun, touching the entire company, and culminating in a renewed enthusiasm
4. Disrupt early and often, the right way.  Introduce an element of productive disruption/creative destruction into the way I lead, noting item 2 around feedback loops

Thanks to everyone internally who contributed to this review.  I appreciate your time and input.  Onward!

(This is the fourth post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Other posts in order are 1, 2, and 3.)

Monday, March 23, Day 7

• Wellness screening – put hot cup of coffee against my temples – now finally the thermometer works (although I can’t say that it gives me a high degree of comfort that I have figured out a workaround!)
• Furious execution and still backlog is growing no matter how much I do – thank goodness team is growing.  Never seen this before – work coming in faster than I can process it, and I am a fast processer. Inbox clean when I go to bed, up to 75 when I wake up, never slows down
• Private sector explosion – this guy can print 3D swabs – but are they compliant?  This guy has an idea for cleansing PPE, this guy can do 3D printing of Ventilator replacement parts, etc.  How to corral?
• Corporate Volunteer form is up – 225 entries in the first 12 hours – WOW
• Congressmen and Senators – people contact them, so they want to help, they want to make news, not coordinated enough with state efforts
• Jay Want – early diagnosis losing sense of smell – low tech way to New Normal
• Coordination continues to be key – multiple cabinet level agencies doing their own thing while multiple private sector groups are doing their own thing (e.g. App – “everyone thinks they’re the only people who have this idea”)
• Mayor of Denver just announced lockdown, I guess that trumps the state solution in town, maybe it’s ok since that just leaves rural areas a bit fuzzier
• Need to revise OS – team is about to go from 3 to 9, private sector spinning up
• Brad OS and State employee OS are different – Slack/Trello/Zoom are not tools state employees are familiar with or can even access.  Now what?
• Kacey insists the team works remotely other than leaders and critical meetings so we can role model social distancing.  GOOD CALL
• One of our private sector guys goes rogue on PR, total bummer – this part (comms) about what we are doing could be more coordinated for sure, but not a priority
• Lots of texts/call with Jared, such a smart and thoughtful guy, really interesting

Tuesday, March 24, Day 8

• Been a week, feels like a month
• Fluid changes to both OS for team and OS for private sector group
• Zoom licenses – state will take a couple weeks to procure them, gotta work around it with Brad
• Slack app won’t get through the firewall.  Maybe IT’s supervisor can do us a favor?
• Comp – interesting expedited process – normally takes 65 days to get approval for temps, today we got it done in an hour!  Comp levels seem incredibly low. But we got done what we needed to get done
• Some minor territorial conflicts with state tech team and our private sector tech team.  Will have to resolve. Surprising how few of these there have been so far given that our team is new and shiny and breaking rules
• Big new Team meeting for first time with Sarah in lead, Red/Yellow/Green check-in (I like that – may have to borrow it!)
• Starting to feel obsolete – love that!  Sarah crushing it, totally feels like the right leader, need to make sure she has enough support (might need an admin?)
• Also…maybe I’m not feeling well?  A little worried I am getting sick. Hope that’s not true, or if it is, hope it’s not the BAD kind of sick.  Going to go work from hotel rest of afternoon
• Call with Jared – concern about managing state’s psychology – testing and isolation services
• Prep for press conference tomorrow

Wednesday, March 25, Day 9

• Woke up feeling awesome – phew – hopefully that was just fatigue or stress induced
• Sarah drowning a bit, feels like me on my 3rd day so makes sense
• Reigning in and organizing private sector seems like a full time job.  We are going to recruit my friend Michelle (ex-RP) to come work with Brad on volunteer management. HALLELUJAH!
• Whiteboard meeting with Kacey holding up her laptop so they can see it on Zoom – hilarious – technology not really working, but we are making the best of it
• State role – facilitate alt supply chain to hospitals since normal chain is broken…also maintain emergency state cache – complex but makes more sense now
• More territorial things starting to pop up with state government…processing volunteers
• Comms overload – here comes the text to alert you to the email to alert you to the phone call
• This team/project is clearly a case of finite resources meets infinite scope and infinite volunteer hand-raising
• Gov press conference – issues Stay at Home order through April 11 (interesting, that wasn’t in the version of the talking points I saw several hours before)
• Meeting some of our new team members.  I can’t even keep up with them, I think we’re up to 15+ now.  Kacey and Kyle are recruiting machines and all these people’s managers are just loaning to us immediately.  Love that.
• Amazingly talented and dedicated state employees – seem young, probably not paid well, but superior to private sector comprables in some ways 
• Talk with Kacey and Sarah about staff/not drowning
• Kacey feels like Sarah is doing a great job, so she cleared me to go home (wouldn’t have gone without her saying ok, she understands how this whole thing is working way better than I do – I guess that’s what a good chief of staff does!)

Stay tuned for more tomorrow…

A New Path Forward

Welcome to the world, Path Forward, Inc.!

I’m thrilled to announce the launch today of Path Forward, a new non-profit with a goal of empowering millions of women to rejoin the workforce after taking time out for childcare. We are launching today with a Crowdrise campaign.   See more about that below.  And we launched with a bang, too – the organization is featured in this really amazing story on Fortune.

The concept started at Return Path two years ago, as I wrote about here and again here, when our CTO Andy Sautins came to me with a simple but powerful idea of creating a structured program of paid fellowships with training for women who want to reenter the workforce but find it difficult to do so because of rusty skills, lapsed networks, or societal bias. We expanded the program later that year with partner companies ReadyTalk, SendGrid, MWH Global, SpotX, and Moz, as I wrote about here.  The response from both participants and companies has been nothing short of amazing.

The day after I put up that last post about v2 of the program, a human resources leader at PayPal gave me a call and asked if we could help them structure a program for their engineering organization, too.  That’s when it struck me that the idea of midcareer internships as one means of providing an on-ramp to the paid workforce for people who’d been focused on caregiving could work for many companies, and also that for this program to work and scale up, it couldn’t be an “off the side of the desk” project for the People Team at Return Path.  So we decided to create a new company separate from Return Path to carry out this important work.  And we decided that with a practical, but social mission, it should be a non-profit, dedicated to creating and managing networks of companies offering opportunities to many more people.

To date, the program has served nearly 50 participants (mostly women, but a couple of stay-at-home dads, too!) and 7 companies in 6 cities around the world, producing an impressive 80% hire rate.  The participants who have been hired by us and our partner organizations have made impressive contributions to their companies’ businesses and cultures.  The companies have benefitted from their experience and passion.  That’s what I call product-market fit.  Now it’s time to officially launch the new organization, and scale it up!  Our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, in the language of Jim Collins) is that within 10 years, we want to serve 10,000 companies and 1 million women and men.  We want to reduce the penalty that caregivers face when they take time away from paid work.  We want to transform lives by getting people who want to work, back to work in jobs that leverage all their many skills and talents.  We want to help companies tap into an incredibly important but overlooked part of the talent pool to grow their workforces.  We want to change the world.

We’ve been able to assemble a strong Board of Directors to lead this effort.  Joanne Wilson, often better known as Gotham Gal and the founder of the Women’s Entrepreneur Festival, is joining me as Board Co-chair. Joanne is a force to be reckoned with in championing women founders in tech.  Brad Feld joins our Board with great credentials as an early-stage investor, but more importantly he’s served for more than 10 years as Board Chair of the National Center for Women and Technology.  Media luminary and investor Cathie Black was most recently the President of Hearst Magazines having previously served as President and Publisher of USA Today.  Cathie has been the “first” woman many times and has broken her share of glass ceilings.  Rajiv Vinnakota is the Executive Vice President of the Youth & Engagement division at the Aspen Institute and prior to that was the co-founder and CEO of The SEED Foundation, a non-profit managing the nation’s first network of public, college-preparatory boarding schools for underserved children which he started and successfully scaled up for more than 17 years.  Cathy Hawley, our long-time VP of People at Return Path, gets (though often deflects) the lion’s share of the credit for conceiving and championing the original return to work program at Return Path.  It is, truly, an embarrassment of riches. We are so thrilled to have them all on board Path Forward’s Board.

On the staff side I’m also pleased to announce that one of my long-time executive lieutenants at Return Path, Tami Forman, has accepted the role of Executive Director of Path Forward. I can’t think of anyone better for this role. Tami is the consummate storyteller, which every good founder and Startup CEO needs to be! More importantly she has been living and breathing work/life integration for eight years since the birth of her daughter (followed by a son). She is absolutely passionate about the idea that women can have jobs and families and live big lives. And, more importantly, she’s dedicated to the idea that taking a “break” (she and I agree it’s not a break!) to care for a loved one shouldn’t sideline anyone’s career dreams.

I can’t wait to see how far this idea can go. I truly believe this program can have a measurable, positive impact on thousands of companies across the country and the world.

Please join me and Tami and our talented Board on this journey.  Help us change the world.  There are three ways to participate:

• Click here if your company would like to learn more about having the Path Forward program in the future
• Click here if you would like to return to the workforce after a break and think a Path Forward fellowship might be a good, well, path forward for you
• And as a non-profit, we need financial help! Click here to contribute to our Crowdrise campaign, the goal of which is essentially a $500k “Series A” round (although it’s a non-profit, so this is a purchase of emotional equity, not actual equity) to move from product-market fit to a proven business model!

(Please note – we haven’t yet received word of our non-profit status yet from the IRS, though we expect it in the next couple of months.  As such, any donation now is not tax deductible until after the certification comes through.  While there’s some risk that we don’t gain non-profit status…we don’t think the risk is large.)