Taking Stock

Every year around this time, I take a few minutes to reflect on how the business is doing, on my goals and development plans, and on what I want to accomplish in the coming year.  Although most of that work is focused on how to move the business forward, I also make sure to take stock of my own career trajectory.  I always ask myself three questions when I do this:

1. Am I having fun at work?
2. Am I learning and growing as a professional?
3. Is my work financially rewarding enough, either in the short term or in the long term?

Of course, I always shoot for 3 YES responses.  Then I know my career is on track.  But as long as I get 2 YESses, then I feel like I’m in good shape, and I know which one to work on in the coming year.  I’m not sure I’ve ever had a situation in the dozen years of running Return Path where I’ve had 0 or 1 YESses.  If I did, I’d probably spend more time thinking about whether I was still in the right job for me.

I think these three questions can work for anyone, not just a CEO.  Hopefully everyone takes the time to take stock like this at least once a year.  It’s healthy for everyone’s career development.

Promiscuity

I figure the title will entice someone new to read this (although he or she might be sorely disappointed with the actual content).  Fred’s posting today about VCs’ conflicts of interest, besides giving me fodder for my weekly counter-cliche posting, brings up another interesting point, one about entrepreneurs and their levels of confidentiality or secrecy about their business plans.

I heard a quote once from Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins that has stayed with me for years:  that “to be successful in the new economy you must be open to the point of promiscuity.”  I think Khosla is right.  As Fred says, VCs are notorious for meeting lots of companies before making an investment, and as an entrepreneur on the other side of the table, it’s impossible to completely protect your ideas and thoughts if you want to attract outside capital.  You just have to trust that the VCs are going to be as honest as possible in how they use the information you share with them.  Same goes for potential partnerships and even M&A as well.  You simply can’t have productive conversations on those topics without opening the proverbial kimono at least a little bit.

But being promiscuous with the state secrets of your business carries certain risks as well.  If the partnership or M&A conversation goes awry, you could easily find yourself with a competitor that knows part of your game plan.  We’ve had this happen at least once at Return Path, and to this day, it still irritates the heck out of us.  But we still think we made the right decision at the time to share that information — and now at least we know that our new competitor isn’t creative enough to come up with his own ideas!

On a completely side note, anyone who’s not using desktop search like Google or the Lookout plugin for Outlook is missing out.  I couldn’t remember the exact quote from Vinod Khosla, but I remembered that it was emailed to me years ago by my colleague Mary Lynn McGrath.  It took Lookout 0.06 seconds to find the exact email from September of 2000 using keywords McGrath and Vinod.  Amazing (and thanks again, Mary Lynn!).

The Value of Paying Down Technical Debt

Our Engineering team has a great term called Technical Debt, which is the accumulation of coding shortcuts and operational inefficiencies over the years in the name of getting product out the door faster that weighs on the company’s code base like debt weighs on a balance sheet.  Like debt, it’s there, you can live with it, but it is a drag on the health of the technology organization and has hard servicing costs.  It’s never fun to pay down technical debt, which takes time away from developing new products and new features and is not really appreciated by anyone outside the engineering organization.

That last point is a mistake, and I can’t encourage CEOs or any leaders within a business strongly enough to view it the opposite way.  Debt may not be fun to pay off, but boy do you feel better after it’s done.  I attended an Engineering all-hands recently where one team presented its work for the past quarter.  For one of our more debt-laden features, this team quietly worked away at code revisions for a few months and drove down operational alerts by over 50% — and more important, drove down application support costs by almost 90%, and all this at a time when usage probably doubled.  Wow. 

I’m not sure how you can successfully scale a company rapidly without inefficiencies in technology.  But on the other side of this particular project, I’m not sure how you can afford NOT to work those ineffiencies out of your system as you grow.  Just as most Americans (political affiliation aside) are wringing their hands over the size and growth of our national debt now because they’re worried about the impact on future generations, engineering organizations of high growth companies need to pay attention to their technical debt and keep it in check relative to the size of their business and code base.

And for CEOs, celebrate the payment of technical debt as if Congress did the unthinkable and put our country back on a sustainable fiscal path, one way or another!

As a long Post Script to this, I asked our CTO Andy and VP Engineering David what they thought of this post before I put it up.  David’s answer was very thoughtful and worth reprinting in full:

 I’d like to share a couple of additional insight as to how Andy and I manage Tech Debt in the org: we insist that it be intentional. What do I mean by “intentional”

•  There is evidence that we should pay it
• There is a pay off at the end

 What are examples of “evidence?”

•  Capacity plans show that we’ll run out of capacity for increased users/usage of a system in a quarter or two
• Performance/stability trends are steadily (or rapidly) moving in the wrong direction
• Alerts/warnings coming off of systems are steadily or rapidly increasing

 What are examples of “pay off?”

•  Increased system capacity
• Improved performance/stability
• Decreased support due to a reduction in alerts/warnings

 We ask the engineers to apply “engineering rigor” to show evidence and pay-offs (i.e. measure, analyze, forecast).

 I bring this up because some engineers like to include “refactoring code” under the umbrella of Tech Debt solely because they don’t like the way the code is written even though there is no evidence that it’s running out of capacity, performance/stability is moving in the wrong direction, etc. This is a “job satisfaction” issue for some engineers. So, it’s important for morale reasons, and the Engineering Directors allocate _some_ time for engineers to do this type of refactoring.  But, it’s also important to help the engineer distinguish between “real” Tech Debt and refactoring for job satisfaction.

Book Short:  Alignment Well Defined, Part II

Getting the Right Things Done:  A Leader’s Guide to Planning and Execution, by Pascal Dennis, is an excellent and extraordinarily practical book to read if you’re trying to create or reengineer your company’s planning, goal setting, and accountability processes. It’s very similar to the framework that we have generally adapted our planning and goals process off of at Return Path for the last few years, Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage (book, post/Part I of this series).  My guess is that we will borrow from this and adapt our process even further for 2014.

The book’s history is in Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing system, and given the Lean meme floating around the land of tech startups these days, my guess is that its concepts will resonate with most of the readers of this blog.  The book’s language — True North and Mother Strategies and A3s and Baby A3s — is a little funky, but the principles of simplicity, having a clear target, building a few major initiatives to drive to the target, linking all the plans, and measuring progress are universal.  The “Plan-Do-Check-Adjust” cycle is smart and one of those things that is, to quote an old friend of mine, “common sense that turns out is not so common.”

One interesting thing that the book touches on a bit is the connection between planning/goals and performance management/reviews.  This is something we’ve done fairly well but somewhat piecemeal over the years that we’re increasingly trying to link together more formally.

All in, this is a good read.  It’s not a great fable like Lencioni’s books or Goldratt’s classic The Goal (reminiscent since its example is a manufacturing company).  But it’s approachable, and it comes with a slew of sample processes and reports that make the theory come to life.  If you’re in plan-to-plan mode, I’d recommend Getting the Right Things Done as well as The Advantage.

An Execution Problem

My biggest takeaway from the TED Conference this week is that we — that is to say, all of us in the world — have an execution problem.  This is a common phrase in business, right?  You’ve done the work of market research, positioning, and strategy and feel good about it.  Perhaps as a bigger company you splurge and hire McKinsey or the like to validate your assumptions or develop some new ones.  And now all you have to do is execute — make it happen.  And yet so many businesses can’t make the right things happen so that it all comes together.  I’d guess, completely unscientifically, that far, far more businesses have execution problems than strategic ones.  Turns out, it’s tough to get things to happen as planned BUT with enough flexibility to change course as needed.  Getting things done is hard.

So what do I mean when I say that humanity has an execution problem?  If nothing else, the intellectual potpourri that is TED showed me this week that we know a lot about the world’s problems, and we don’t lack for vision and data on how to solve them.  A few of the things we heard about this week are the knowledge — and in many cases, even real experiences — about how to:

– Steer the evolution of deadly disease-causing bacteria to make them more benign within a decade

– Build world class urban transportation systems and growth plans to improve urban living and control pollution

– Drive down the cost of critical pharmaceuticals to developing nations by 95%

– Dramatically curb CO2 emissions

We have the knowledge, and yet the problems remain unsolved.  Why is that?  Unlike the organized and controlled and confined boundaries of a company, these kinds of problems are thornier to solve, even if the majority of humans agree they need to be solved.  Whether the roadblock is political, financial, social — or (d) all of the above — we seem to be stuck in a series of execution problems.

The bright spot out of all of this (at least from this week’s discussions) is that, perhaps more than ever before in the history of mankind, many of our most talented leaders AND our wealthiest citizens are taking more of a personal stake in not just defining the problems and solutions, but making them happen.  They’re giving more money, buiding more organizations, and spending more time personally influencing society and telling and showing the stories.  It will take years to see if these efforts can solve our execution problems, but in the meantime, the extraordinary efforts are things we can all be proud of.

Collaboration is Hard, Part II

In Part I, I talked about what collaboration is:

partnering with a colleague (either inside or outside of the company) on a project, and through the partnering, sharing knowledge that produces a better outcome than either party could produce on his or her own

and why it’s so important

knowledge sharing as competitive advantage, interdependency as a prerequisite to quality, and gaining productivity through leverage

In Part II, I’ll answer the question I set out to answer originally, which is why is collaboration so hard?  Why does it come up on so many of our development plans year in, year out?  As always, there isn’t an answer, but here are a few of my theories:

1. It doesn’t come naturally to most of us.  Granted, this is a massive sweeping generalization, but Western culture (or at least American culture) doesn’t seem to put a premium on workplace teaming the way, say Japan does, or even Europe to a lesser extent.  The "rugged individual," to borrow a phrase from our historical past, is a very American phenomenon.  Self-reliance seems to be in our DNA, and the competitive culture that we bring to our workplace is not only to beat out competitive companies to our own, but often to beat out our colleagues to get that next promotion or raise.  The concept that "I win most when we all win" is a hard one for many of us to grasp.  Even in team sports, we celebrate individual achievement and worship heroes as much as we celebrate team championships.
2. You don’t know what you don’t know.  (with full attribution for that quote to my colleague Anita Absey.)  Since knowledge sharing and learning is at the heart of collaboration, and since collaboration doesn’t come naturally to us, that leads me to my second point.  Even if you are acting in your own self-interest most of the time at work (not that you should act that way), logic would dictate that you would be interested in collaborating just so you can learn more and do a better job in the future.  But the fact that you don’t know what you don’t know might make you far less likely to partner with a colleague on a project since you are committing an investment of your time up front with an uncertain outcome or learning at the end of it.  Only when we have had historical success collaborating with a particular individual — and learned from it and improved ourselves as a result — are we most comfortable going back to the collaboration well in the future.
   
3. It’s logistically challenging.  This may sound lame, but collaboration is hard to fit into most of our busy lives.  We all work in increasingly fast-paced environments and in a very fluid and dynamic industry.  Collaboration requires some mechanics such as lining up multiple calendars, multiple goal sets, and compromising on lots of aspects of how you would do a project on your own that present a mental hurdle to us even when we think collaboration might be the right thing to do.  With that hurdle in place, we are only inclined to collaborate when it’s most critical — which doesn’t develop the good habit of collaborating early and often.

I’m sure there are other reasons why Collaboration is Hard, but this is a start.  As I think about it, I will work on a necessary Part III as well here — how to foster collaboration in your organization.

I am fortunate in my current job to spend a lot of time talking to other founders and CEOs. I mentor and coach them, my company and I help counsel them on executive and board searches, and I spend time with them at conferences and seminars. Even when I am giving them advice, I always take time to learn what they’re doing, what works, and what doesn’t work. I’ve noticed a consistent set of behaviors and practices common among the successful founder operators – the ones who go on to lead their companies through multiple chapters of growth and sometimes never hire the “seasoned operator” to come in and take over. 

#1 – They are students of the game. It’s easy to get mired in the day to day details of building a business from scratch. The best founders are the ones who take time to watch, read, and learn. They want to see what other entrepreneurs do and they ask probing questions about what works and doesn’t work. They read blog posts, articles, and books. They listen to podcasts and constantly try to apply learnings to their company. They seek out coaches and mentors. 

#2 – They have positive and regular (and sometimes extreme) personal habits. It’s easy to get sucked into working all the time when you’re building a business from scratch and counting every penny and every minute. However, observing how successful CEOs manage their time shows that either very early mornings or very late nights are pretty common, and not in the way you might think. A 4:30 or 5 am alarm for regular exercise, or drawing a hard line around “no work after 6” means the leader is committed to personal time to stay fresh, and connect with friends and family. Abraham Lincoln is quoted as having said “Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

#3 – They know how to leverage themselves. It’s easy as a founder to think you’re the only person who can get something done. Delegation is hard, and it often involves investing more time to train someone else how to do something than doing it yourself. The best founders figure out how to squeeze every minute out of the day by remembering that building a startup is a team sport and that building up the team around them is the key to their own productivity. 

#4 – They have great work hygiene. It’s easy to not respond to emails or texts or Slack messages because they’re not the most important thing you have going on. It’s easy to not send a Thank You note after a meeting or take time to connect with a colleague on a human level. The best founders are the ones who know the power of their own words, the power of their own presence, and who find the time to inject that power into others’ lives.

#5 – They have a recurring belief in creative destruction. It’s easy to create a new company because there’s a need in the market to disrupt incumbents. Creative destruction is central to the story of entrepreneurs everywhere. It’s very hard to apply that same creative destruction mentality to your own work. The best founder operators are the ones who are not just capable of tearing down an industry…but are equally capable and enthusiastic about tearing down their own product, their own team, and their own business processes in order to build them back up. MVPs are often too “M” and need to be replaced and upgraded consistently over time.

None of these practices is the path of least resistance—they require extra effort. I’m not sure what the cause and effect is here. A weak founder with bad product market fit and an untrusting attitude towards employees can’t just start waking up early and reading a lot and magically become successful. But on the margin, enough correlation leads me to believe that there’s something in the combination of these practices that leads to the competitive edge, the informed intuition, the vision, and the ability to motivate the people around them that are common in successful founder operators. 

Selecting Your Investors

Fred Wilson has been a venture investor and director in Return Path since 2000, first with Flatiron Partners and then with Union Square Ventures.  We’ve been through a lot of wars together.  In a couple of weeks, he and I are team-teaching a class in Entrepreneurship at Princeton, and the professor gave us the assignment of writing two pairs of blog posts to tee up discussion with the class.  This is the first one…and Fred’s post on the other side of the topic is here.  Next week, we’ll address the topic of building a successful CEO-VC partnership once it’s established.

If you’re fortunate enough to have built a really strong early stage company, you will find yourself in the position of being able to pick from a number of potential venture investors.  The better your business and the more exciting the space you’re trying to tackle…the more investors you’ll find circling around you.  Here are a few tips for ending up with the best long-term partner as an investor.

1. Look for VC portfolios that have a lot of “like” companies (B2B, B2C, media, tech, etc.).  One of the strongest points of value that venture investors bring to the table is pattern matching, and you can maximize that by making sure the investor you end up with has seen a multitude of companies like yours
2. Check references carefully.  Don’t be shy – prospective VCs are checking up on you, and you have every right to do the same with them.  When Fred first invested in Return Path, he gave me a list of every CEO he had ever worked with and said “Call anyone you want on the list.  Some of these guys I worked well with, a couple I fired.  But they’ll all tell you what I’m like to work with.”  First prize is the VC who volunteers this information.  Second prize is the VC who gives it to you when you ask.  A distant third price is the VC who gives you two names and ask for time to prep them ahead of time
3. Focus on the person first, the firm second.  Having a good venture firm is important.  But at the end of the day, you’re dealing with a person first and foremost.  That’s who will be on your board giving you advice and measuring your performance.  Better to have an A person at a B firm than a B person at an A firm (of course, even better to have an A person at an A firm).  This means two things – selecting a great person to be on your Board, and also making sure you end up with a person who has enough juice within his or her firm to get things done on your behalf with the partnership
4. Always have a BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement – a fancy way of saying Plan B).  This is probably the most important piece of advice I can offer.  And this is true of any negotiation, not just a term sheet.  It’s often said that good choices come from good options. Sometimes, you have to walk away from a deal where you’ve invested a lot of time, energy, and emotion.  But as an entrepreneur, you can mitigate the number of times you have to walk away by developing good alternative options to a particular deal. That way, if one option doesn’t pan out as you’d hoped, another very good option is waiting in the wings.  If you negotiate with two or three VCs, you’ll have a great backstop and won’t let the emotional investment in the deal get the best of you.  Yes, you will spend twice to three times the amount of time on the process, but it’s well worth it
5. Don’t be swayed by promises of help.  I’ve heard VCs say it all.  They’ll help you fill out your management team.  They’ll get you customers.  They’ll help with your back office.  They’re loaded up with value-add.  If venture investor has staffed his or her firm with support personnel who are available free of charge to portfolio companies (this does happen once in a while), then assume your VC will be as helpful as possible, but no more or less helpful than another investor
6. Handle the negotiation yourself, in person as much as possible.  The best way to get to know someone’s character is to negotiate a deal with him.  This gives you lots of opportunities to look for reasonableness, and to see if he or she is able to focus on the big picture.  The biggest warning sign to look for is someone who says things like “you have to agree on this term, because this is how we always do deals.”  By the way, how you handle yourself in this negotiation is equally important.  The financing is the line of demarcation between you and the VC courting each other, and the VC joining your board and effectively becoming your boss
7. “Pay up” for quality and for a clean security.  There is a world of difference between good VCs and bad VCs (both the individual partners and the firms) that will ultimately have a lot to do with how successful your company can become.  The quality of your VC isn’t more important than the quality of your product or your team, but it’s right up there.  But – and this is an important but – you should expect to “pay” for quality in the form of slightly weaker terms (whether valuation or type of security).  Similarly, I’d always sacrifice valuation for a clean security.  Everyone always thinks that price/valuation is the most important thing to maximize in a deal. However, the structure of the security can be much more important in the long run.  Whether the VCs buy 33 percent of your company or 30 percent of your company is much less important than having a capital structure that’s easy for an outsider to understand and want to join

As with all things, there are probably another dozen items that could be added to this list, but it’s a good starting point.  However, your more important role as CEO is to put your company in a position where you can select from a number of high quality investors, so start there!

Last week, I wrote about the concept of the Operating Philosophy, and how it fits with a company’s Operating Framework and Operating System and defines the essence of who you are as a company…what form of company you are.

While we had a loose Operating Philosophy at Return Path, we never really crisply articulated it, and that caused some hand-wringing at various points over the years, as different people interpreted our “People First” mantra in different ways. So this time around at Bolster, we’re trying to be more intentional about this up front. We have labeled our company a “Mostly Self Managed Organization” or MSMO (pronounced Miz-Moh). We made those up.

Our Operating Philosophy – we are a Mostly Self-Managed Organization, or MSMO (pronounced Miz-Mo, a term we just made up). The MSMO is the product of years of work, research, practical learning, and thinking on our part.  Self-Management has been important to me my whole career as a manager and leader.  Over the last 15 years, the team and I have studied various forms of self-management with interviews and onsite meetings at Netflix, Gore, Nucor, Morningstar, and Zappos.  While we implemented some aspects of it at Return Path, we are trying to take the implementation a step further here at Bolster from the beginning.

Of all those companies, what we’re doing is probably closest to the Operating Philosophy of W.L. Gore & Associates, which you can find written out online without a name but with the description that “individuals don’t need close supervision; what they need is mentoring and support.” The embodiments of the Operating Philosophy at Gore may be different from those we create at Bolster, but the essence of the philosophies is pretty similar.

Why a MSMO?  We employ smart people, and smart people crave autonomy, purpose, and mastery (according to Daniel Pink) and do their best work when they have those things in alignment.  

So, how do we define self-management at Bolster?  We aren’t going to be a DAO.  I don’t think that model works for a for-profit multifaceted corporation – complete Self-Management is too chaotic.  Leadership and mentorship matter and make a difference in guiding strategy, critical decisions, and careers. Holocracies or other unnamed structures like that of Morningstar are ok, but they are so rigidly ideological that they require an immense amount of work-around, or scaffolding, to be practical.

But we aren’t a traditional fixed top-down hierarchy, either.  We are going to run the business in a way that lets people co-create their work and be responsible for driving their own feedback and development with a support structure.  That’s the ideology we have. Letting talented people loose to do their best work is critical; but leadership, judgment, and experience matter, too. If not, why bother having a CEO, or a VP of anything? Why not just pay everyone the same thing and hope they can all figure out the complexities of the business together?

We believe the MSMO is the best operating philosophy to allow high performers to do their best work. 

At Bolster, we are leaning into things like social contracts, peer feedback, career mentorship, individuals translating our Operating Framework into priorities and work, flexible work streams and team leadership, instead of fixed permanent hierarchies, rotating chairs of key company meetings, and market-level-based compensation.  

What we are steering away from are things like traditional titles, micromanaging or overmanaging, traditional performance reviews linked to compensation and complex incentive compensation structures, and fixed organization boundaries and structure.

We’ll see if our MSMO Operating Philosophy works. If not, we’ll iterate on it. That’s the good thing about adherence to an ideology of philosophy as opposed to an ideology of practices. Who knows – maybe the MSMO concept and even its quirky name will catch on!

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!

Job 1

The first “new” post in my series of posts about Return Path’s 14 Core Values is, fittingly,

Job 1:  We are all responsible for championing and extending our unique culture as a competitive advantage.

The single most frequently asked question I have gotten internally over the last few years since we grew quickly from 100 employees to 350 has been some variant of “Are you worried about our ability to scale our culture as we hire in so many new people?”  This value is the answer to that question, though the short answer is “no.”

I am not solely responsible for our culture at Return Path. I’m not sure I ever was, even when we were small.  Neither is Angela, our SVP of People.  That said, it was certainly true that I was the main architect and driver of our culture in the really early years of the company’s life.  And I’d add that even up to an employee base of about 100 people, I and a small group of senior or tenured people really shouldered most of the burden of defining and driving and enforcing our culture and values.

But as the business has grown, the amount of responsibility that I and those few others have for the culture has shrunk as a percentage of the total.  It had to, by definition.  And that’s the place where cultures either scale or fall apart.  Companies who are completely dependent on their founder or a small group of old-timers to drive their cultures can’t possibly scale their cultures as their businesses grow.  Five people can be hands on with 100.  Five people can’t be hands on with 500.  The way we’ve been able to scale is that everyone at the company has taken up the mantle of protecting, defending, championing, and extending the culture.  Now we all train new employees in “The RP Way.”  We all call each other out when we fail to live up to our values.  And the result is that we have done a great job of scaling our culture with our business.

I’d also note that there are elements of our culture which have changed or evolved over the last few years as we’ve grown.  That isn’t a bad thing, as I tell old-timers all the time.  If our products stayed the same, we’d be dead in the market.  If our messaging stayed the same, we’d never sell to a new cohort of clients.  If our values stayed the same, we’d be out of step with our own reality.

Finally, this value also folds in another important concept, which is Culture as Competitive Advantage.  In an intellectual capital business like ours (or any on the internet), your business is only as good as your people.  We believe that a great culture brings in the best people, fosters an environment where they can work at the top of their games even as they grow and broaden their skills, increases the productivity and creativity of the organization’s output through high levels of collaboration, and therefore drives the best performance on a sustained basis.  This doesn’t have to be Return Path’s culture or mean that you have to live by our values.  This could be your culture and your values.  You just have to believe that those things drive your success.

Not a believer yet?  Last year, we had voluntary turnover of less than 1%.  We promoted or gave new assignments to 15% of our employees.  And almost 50% of our new hires were referred by existing employees.  Those are some very, very healthy employee metrics that lead directly to competitive advantage.  As does our really exciting announcement last week of being #11 in the mid-sized company on Fortune Magazine’s list of the best companies to work for.