Lighten Up!

As with Brad, I love a good rant, and Dave McClure’s wild one this week about how VCs and Lawyers Need to Simplify, Innovate, and Automate is fantastic.  I have a roughly 3 foot shelf in my office that has all the bound paper documentation for the financings and M&A we’ve done here over the years and have always felt like it’s an enormous waste on many levels.  The insanity of the faxes, zillions of signatures, original copies, and triplicates is overwhelming.

But the core of the rant is a beautiful and simple suggestion that those who invest in lightweight technology companies and automation platforms should learn how to use just those technologies in their own businesses.  I couldn’t agree more, and it reminds me of my least favorite answer EVER from a VC about why some piece of legal documentation had to be done a certain way:  “Because that’s the way we always do it.”  That argument doesn’t even work when a parent uses it on a 5 year old!

I think lawyers are particularly problematic to this cause, because even if an innovative VC wanted to do things easier and differently, the lawyers would probably throw up all over it.  But in the end, if the VC is the client, he or she can and should overrule and manage counsel.  The world is now moving at too quick a pace to keep deal paperwork in the stone ages.

Clients at Different Levels

Recently, I’ve become more aware that we have a huge range of clients when it comes to the level of the person we interact with at the client organization.  I suppose this has always been true, but it’s struck me much more of late as we’ve really ramped up our client base in the social networking/web 2.0 arena, where most of our clients are CEOs and COOs as opposed to Email Marketing Managers.

Of course, we don’t care who our day-to-day client is, as long as the person is enough of a decision maker and subject matter expert to effectively partner with us, whether it’s on deliverability via Sender Score or on list management or advertising via the Postmaster Network.  There are two main differences I have seen between the levels of client.  I suppose neither one is an earth-shattering revelation in the end, though.

First, the CEO/COO as client tends to be a MUCH MORE ENGAGED and knowledgeable client.  Some of these people know far, far more about the ins and outs of micro details of their businesses (and in the case of deliverability, the micro details of how ISPs filter email) than our average client.  I’d expect this type of client to be in command of the macro details of his or her business, but the level of "in the weeds" knowledge is impressive.  These clients are thirsty for information that goes beyond the scope of our work together.

Second, the CEO/COO as client is MUCH MORE PASSIONATE about his or her business.  It pisses them off when their email doesn’t get delivered.  They care deeply that our Postmaster opt-in might impact their registration rates by 0.5%.  They get very animated in discussions and tend to nod and gesture a lot more than take notes in a notebook.

My main takeaway from this?  If you run a business — how do you make sure your front line people are as fired up as you are?  You may never be able to give people the same kind of macro view you have of the company or the industry (although you can certainly make a good effort at it), but keeping people excited about what they do and igniting their intellectual curiosity on a regular basis will almost certainly lead to more successful outcomes in the details of your company.

I’ve published two editions of Startup CEO, a sequel called Startup CXO, and am a co-author on the second edition of Startup Boards. We also just (2025) published mini-book versions of Startup CXO specifically for five individual functions, Startup CFO, Startup CRO, Startup CMO, Startup CPO, and Startup CTO.

You’re only a startup CEO once. Do it well with Startup CEO, a “master class in building a business.”

—Dick Costolo, Partner at 01A (Former CEO, Twitter)

Being a startup CEO is a job like no other: it’s difficult, risky, stressful, lonely, and often learned through trial and error. As a startup CEO seeing things for the first time, you’re likely to make mistakes, fail, get things wrong, and feel like you don’t have any control over outcomes.

As a Startup CEO myself, I share my experience, mistakes, and lessons learned as I guided Return Path from a handful of employees and no revenues to over $100 million in revenues and 500 employees.

Startup CEO is not a memoir of Return Path’s 20-year journey but a CEO-focused book that provides first-time CEOs with advice, tools, and approaches for the situations that startup CEOs will face.

You’ll learn:

How to tell your story to new hires, investors, and customers for greater alignment How to create a values-based culture for speed and engagement How to create business and personal operating systems so that you can balance your life and grow your company at the same time How to develop, lead, and leverage your board of directors for greater impact How to ensure that your company is bought, not sold, when you exit

Startup CEO is the field guide every CEO needs throughout the growth of their company and the one I wish I had.

“Startup CXO is an amazing resource for CEOs but also for functional leaders and professionals at any stage of their career.”

– Scott Dorsey, Managing Partner, High Alpha (Former CEO, ExactTarget)

One of the greatest challenges for startup teams is scaling because usually there’s not a blueprint to follow, people are learning their function as they go, and everyone is wearing multiple hats. There can be lots of trial and error, lots of missteps, and lots of valuable time and money squandered as companies scale. My team and I understand the scaling challenges—we’ve been there, and it took us nearly 20 years to scale and achieve a successful exit. Along the way we learned what worked and what didn’t work, and we share these lessons learned in Startup CXO.

Unlike other business books, Startup CXO is designed to help each functional leader understand how their function scales, what to anticipate as they scale, and what things to avoid. Beyond providing function-specific advice, tools, and tactics, Startup CXO is a resource for each team member to learn about the other functions, understand other functional challenges, and get greater clarity on how to collaborate effectively with the other functional leads.

CEOs, Board members, and investors have a book they can consult to pinpoint areas of weakness and learn how to turn those into strengths. Startup CXO has in-depth chapters covering the nine most common functions in startups: finance, people, marketing, sales, customers, business development, product, operations, and privacy. Each functional section has a “CEO to CEO Advice” summary from me on what great looks like for that CXO, signs your CXO isn’t scaling, and how to engage with your CXO.

Startup CXO also has a section on the future of executive work, fractional and interim roles. Written by leading practitioners in the newly emergent fractional executive world, each function is covered with useful tips on how to be a successful fractional executive as well as what to look for and how to manage fractional executives.

A comprehensive guide on creating, growing, and leveraging a board of directors written for CEOs, board members, and people seeking board roles.

The first time many founders see the inside of a board room is when they step in to lead their board. But how do boards work? How should they be structured, managed, and leveraged so that startups can grow, avoid pitfalls, and get the best out of their boards? Authors Brad Feld, Mahendra Ramsinghani, and Matt Blumberg have collectively served on hundreds of startup and scaleup boards over the past 30 years, attended thousands of board meetings, encountered multiple personalities and situations, and seen the good, bad, and ugly of boards.

In Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors, the authors provide seasoned advice and guidance to CEOs, board members, investors, and anyone aspiring to serve on a board. This comprehensive book covers a wide range of topics with relevant tips, tactics, and best practices, including:

• Board fundamentals such as the board’s purpose, legal characteristics, and roles and functions of board members;
• Creating a board including size, composition, roles of VCs and independent directors, what to look for in a director, and how to recruit directors;
• Compensating, onboarding, removing directors, and suggestions on building a diverse board;
• Preparing for and running board meetings;
• The board’s role in transactions including selling a company, buying a company, going public, and going out of business;
• Advice for independent and aspiring directors.

Startup Boards draws on the authors’ experience and includes stories from board members, startup founders, executives, and investors. Any CEO, board member, investor, or executive interested in creating an active, involved, and engaged board should read this book—and keep it handy for reference.

Five new mini-books from Startup CXO, but with new bonus material and an obvious focus on each specific functional area.

Each book has several topics in common – chapters on the nature of an executive’s role, how a fractional person works in that role, how the role works with the leadership team, how to hire that role, how the role works in the beginning of a startup’s life, how the role scales over time, and CEO:CEO advice about managing the role.

In Startup CTO (Technology and Product), the role-specific topics Shawn Nussbaum talks about are The Product Development Leaders, Product Development Culture, Technical Strategy, Proportional Engineering Investment and Managing Technical Debt, Shifting to a New Development Culture, Starting Things, Hiring Product Development Team Members, Increasing the Funnel and Building Diverse Teams, Retaining and Career Pathing People, Hiring and Growing Leaders, Organizing Collaborating with and Motivating Effective Teams, Due Diligence and Lessons Learned from a Sale Process, Selling Your Company, Preparation, and Selling Your Company/Telling the Story.

In Startup CMO, the role-specific topics Nick Badgett and Holly Enneking talk about are Generating Demand for Sales, Supporting the Company’s Culture, Breaking Down Marketing’s Functions, Events, Content & Communication, Product Marketing, Marketing Operations, Sales Development, and Building a Marketing Machine.

In Startup CFO, the role-specific topics Jack Sinclair talks about are Laying the CFO Foundation, Fundraising, Size of Opportunity, Financial Plan, Unit Economics and KPIs, Investor Ecosystem Research, Pricing and Valuation, Due Diligence and Corporate Documentation, Using External Counsel, Operational Accounting, Treasury and Cash Management, Building an In-House Accounting Team, International Operations, Strategic Finance, High Impact Areas for the Startup CFO as Partner, Board and Shareholder Management, Equity, and M&A.

In Startup CRO, the role-specific topics Anita Absey talks about are Hiring the Right People, Profile of Successful Sales People, Compensation, Pipeline, Scaling the Sales Organization, Sales Culture, Sales Process and Methodology, Sales Operating System, Marketing Alignment, Market Assessment & Alignment, Channels, Geographic Expansion, and Packaging & Pricing.

In Startup CPO (HR/People), the role-specific topics Cathy Hawley talks about are Values and Culture, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, Building Your Team, Organizational Design and Operating Systems, Team Development, Leadership Development, Talent and Performance Management, Career Pathing, Role Specific Learning and Development, Employee Engagement, Rewards and Recognition, Reductions in Force, Recruiting, Onboarding, Compensation, People Operations, and Systems.

Collaboration is Hard, Part III

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 suggested a few reasons why collaboration is difficult for most of us

It doesn’t come naturally to us on a cultural level, it’s hard to make an up-front investment of time in learning when you don’t know what you’re going to learn, and there’s a logistical hurdle in setting up the time and framework to collaborate

So now comes the management challenge — if collaboration is so important and yet so hard, how do we as CEOs foster collaboration in our organizations?  Not to say we have the formula down perfect at Return Path — if we did, collaboration wouldn’t show up as a development item for so many people at reviews each year — but here are five things we have done, either in small scale or large scale, to further the goal (in no particular order):

1. We celebrate collaboration.  We have a robust system of peer awards that call out collaboration in different ways.  I will write about this in longer form sometime, but basically we allow anyone in the company to give anyone else in the company one of several awards (all of which carry a cash value) at any time, for any reason.  And we post the awards on the Intranet and via RSS feed so everyone can see who is being appreciated for what reason.  This tries to lower the cultural barriers discussed in the last post.
2. We share our goals with each other.  This happens on two levels, and it’s progressed as the company has gotten more mature.  On a most basic level, we are very public about posting our goals to the whole company, at least at the department level (soon to be at the individual level), so everyone can see what everyone else is working on and note where they can contribute.  But that’s only half the battle.  We also have increasingly been developing shared goals — they show up on your list and on my list — so that we are mutually accountable for completing the project.
3. We set ourselves up for regular collaborative communication.  Many of our teams and departments use the Agile framework for work planning and workflow management, including the daily stand-up meeting as well as other regularly scheduled communication points (see other posts I’ve written about Agile Development and Agile Marketing).  Agile takes out a lot of the friction caused by logistical hurdles in collaborating with each other.
4. We provide financial incentives for collaboration.  In general, we run a three-tiered incentive comp program.  Most people’s quarterly or annual bonuses are 1/3 tied to individual goals achievement (which could involve shared goals with others), 1/3 tied to division revenue goals (fostering collaboration within each business unit), and 1/3 tied to company financial performance (fostering at least some level of collaboration with others outside your unit).  This helps, although on its own certainly isn’t enough.
5. We provide collaboration tools.  Finally, we have had developed reasonably good series of internal tools — Wiki, Intranet, RSS feeds — over the years, all of which are about to be radically upgraded, to encourage and systematize knowledge sharing.  This allows for a certain amount of "auto collaboration" but hopefully also allows people to realize how much there is to be gained by partnering with other subject matter experts within the company when projects call for it, alleviating in part the "you don’t know what you don’t know" problem.

So that’s where we are on this important topic.  And I’m only finding that it gets more important as the company gets bigger.  What are your best practices around fostering collaboration?

A Model for Transparency

Rob Kalin from Etsy (a marketplace for handmade goods) wrote an outstanding blog post today that Fred describes as a transparent window into what makes the company tick.

I’d like to riff off of two themes from the post.

First, the post itself and the fact that Rob, as CEO of the business, is comfortable with this degree of transparency and openness in his public writing.

I still think that far few CEOs blog today.  There is probably no better window into the way a company works or the way a management team thinks than open and honest blogging.  One member of our team at Return Path described my blogging once as “getting a peek inside my brain.”  The handful of CEOs that I’ve spoken to about why they don’t blog have all had a consistent set of responses.  They’re too busy.  They don’t know how.  They want to delegate it to Marketing but someone told them they can’t.  They’re concerned about what “legal” will say.  They’re public and are worried about running afoul of SEC communication rules (perhaps Whole Foods’ CEO notwithstanding).

I’m not sure I buy any of that.  CEOs who see the value of blogging will find a way to have the time and courage to do it.  And any blogger is entitled to say some things and not say others, as competitive needs or regulations (or common sense!) dictate.

But today’s reality is that running a successful company means spending more time communicating to all constituents — both internal and external.  And with the democratization of information on the Internet, it’s even more important to be accurate, open, honest, and consistent in that communication.  Blogging is an easy and powerful way of accomplishing that end.  Between my personal blog here and Return Path’s blog, I have a reach of something like 25,000 people when I write something.  Talk about a platform for influence in my company and industry.  So while CEOs don’t have to blog…in the end the CEO who doesn’t blog will find him or herself (and his or her company) at a competitive disadvantage versus those who do.

One important note on this as well is that the willingness of a CEO to blog seems to vary inversely with the size of the company.  The bigger the company, the more risk-averse the CEO seems to be.  That’s not surprising.

Second, Rob’s point around the company’s challenge with communications:

Having a consistent message vs. letting humans be human…large corporations try to sanitize all their outgoing messages for the sake of keeping face…I want Etsy to stay human. This means allowing each person’s voice to be heard, even if it’s squeaky or loud or soft. I will not put a glossy layer of PR over what we do. If we trip, let us learn from it instead of trying to hide it; when we leap, let’s show others how to leap.

Rob’s right, this is a tough one.  And I think in the end it comes back to the market again.  Just as CEOs who don’t blog will ultimately find themselves at a competitive disadvantage, companies that complete whitewash all their messaging will also find themselves at a competitive disadvantage because the companies’ personalities won’t come through as strongly, and the company’s message won’t seem as genuine.  And to the same point as above, the more the Internet takes over communications and information, the more critical it is that companies are open and honest and transparent.

That doesn’t mean that a good contemporary Marketing effort can’t include providing guidance to a team on key message points or even specific language here and there, but it does mean that letting people inside a company speak freely on the outside, and with their own voices, is key.  We do that on the Return Path blog — most of us, most of the time, write our own posts.  Sometimes we have someone in marketing take a quick pass through a post to edit it for grammar, but that’s usually about it.

Thanks to  Rob for the great thoughts.  It would be great to see more CEOs out there doing the same!

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.

Why Do Companies Sell?

Fred has a good post today about Facebook and why they shouldn’t sell the company now, in which he makes the assertion that companies sell “because of fear, boredom, and personal financial issues.”  He might not have meant this in such a black and white way, and while those might all be valid reasons why companies decide to sell, let me add a few others:

• Market timing:  As they say, buy low – sell high.  Sometimes, it’s just the right time to sell a business from the market’s perspective.  Valuations have peaks and troughs, and sometimes the troughs can last for years.  Whether you do an NPV/DCF model that says it’s the right time to sell, or you just rely on gut (“we aren’t going to see this price again for a long time…”), market timing is a critical factor
• Dilution:  Sometimes, market conditions dictate that it isn’t the best time to sell, BUT company conditions dictate that continuing to be competitive, grow the top line, and generate long-term profits requires a significant amount of incremental capital or dilution that materially changes the expected value of the ultimate exit for existing shareholders (both investors and management)
• Fund life:  Fortunately, we haven’t been up against this at Return Path, but sometimes the clock runs out on venture investors’ funds, and they are forced into a position of either needing to get liquidity for their LPs or distribute their portfolio company holdings.  While neither is great for the portfolio, a sale may be preferable to a messy distribution

Fred’s reasons are all very founder-driven.  And sometimes founders get to make the call on an exit.  But factoring in a 360 view of the company’s stakeholders and external environments can often produce a different result in the conversation around when to exit.

The Acquisition (a parody of a parody)

I just spent a great 4th of July with my brother Michael, one of the finer and funnier people I know.  Among other things, we treated ourselves to about the 18th viewing of Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I on DVD.

One of our favorite moments in the movie is the Broadway musical version of “The Inquisition” (lyrics, download MP3).  Since both of us work in the online marketing industry (Michael is a marketing manager at search agency Did-It), Michael came up with the brilliant idea of a parody of a parody…so here goes, all in good fun.

The acquisition, what a show
The acquisition, here we go
We’re on a mission, have you heard the news?

The acquisition, serve those ads
The acquisition, we’re so glad
We’ll make an offer, that they can’t refuse

Google, don’t be boring
WPP, don’t feel set
Yahoo seems to be ignoring:
It’s better to lose your market cap than your market!

Hey, Steven Ballmer, what do you say?
“I just got back from Avenue A”
“Avenue A?  What’s Avenue A?”
“It’s what I ought not have bought, but I bought anyway!”

The acquisition, what a show
The acquisition, here we go
We know you’re wishin’ that we’d go away.
But the acquisition’s here and it’s here to stay!

Happy 4th, everyone!

Must Read Post on Entrepreneurship

As usual, I’m a little late to the party, but let me echo Fred’s and Brad’s sentiments and endorse Marc Andreesen’s new blog.  If you’re an entrepreneur or like thinking big entrepreneurial thoughts, this is a gooe blog to add to your blogroll.  My only critique is that some of his postings are really long — but they’re worth it.

His most recent post, which finally prompted me to post this, is a list of reasons why NOT to do a startup (it also includes a good list of reasons TO do a startup).

Just a snippet to pique your interest, but you have to click through to see all of it — the richness is in the details…

Why do one?

The opportunity to be in control of your own destiny

The opportunity to have an impact on the world

Why run for the hills?

A startup puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced (I blogged about that here and here)

You get told no — a lot

So a belated welcome to the blogosphere, Marc, and to everyone else, enjoy!

Is Permission Still Relevant?

My colleague Stephanie Miller wrote a great post on our Return Path blog this week entitled Is Permission Enough? The essence of her argument is:

…permission is not forever…Subscribers opt in and then promptly forget about their actions…Nor is permission a panacea. Opt-in doesn’t replace relevancy and keeping your promises.

And she goes on to give great examples of how marketers abuse permission and a great checklist of times marketers shouldn’t ASSUME permission, which is where the trouble starts.

So I concur — permission is never enough from a sender’s perspective.  But you still have to have it.  Why?  Read on.

I’d like to extend Stephanie’s argument from senders to receivers and question whether permission is as relevant as it once was in terms of how ISPs, filters, and blacklists determine whether or not to block mail.

The argument for permission as a relevant filtering criteria goes something like this:

1. Unsolicited commercial email = evil. It is the true definition of spam.  If I don’t ask for it, you have no right to send it to me.

The argument against permission as a relevant filtering criteria is more nuanced:

1. It doesn’t matter if something is opt-out quadruple opt-in. Users think of spam as “email I don’t want,” not “email I didn’t sign up for.”  As Stephanie says, bad email I signed up for is even worse than unsolicited email in some ways.  And look at the other side of the argument as well:  would you really mind getting an unsolicited/unpermissioned email if the content or offer was highly relevant to you, e.g., you seriously consider clicking through on it?

2. Permission can be easily faked or loopholed. Companies can operate multiple web sites and email lists and gather addresses from multiple sources and then point to the one “proper permission site” and claim that’s the origin of all the names on its list.  And companies can set up privacy policies in such a way that they can automatically opt users into multiple lists without the user’s permission unless the user reads the fine print.

3. Permission is hard to measure. Besides the fact that permission can be faked, the main way that blacklists and filters try to measure permission is by looking at spam trap hits.  Sometimes this works — the cases where the spam trap addresses are newly-created addresses that never sign up for lists.  But most ISP and other spam trap networks also include recycled email addresses as well — addresses that were real and probably did sign up for email newsletters and marketing at one point but have since gone inactive.  Yes, a mailer that hits this kind of spam trap address is probably guilty of sloppy list hygiene and poor or nonexistent targeting and customer segmentation.  But does this mean they’re a truly egregious spammer?

4. Reputation trumps permission. The world of reputation systems is driving quickly to the point where we can tell much more accurately and automatically if a mail stream is “good” or “bad” as defined by users in terms of complaints and as defined by infrastructure security, authentication, and various other metrics.

So where I come out on this is that permission is FAR LESS RELEVANT than it used to be for receivers as filtering criteria, but probably not 100% irrelevant yet.  Perhaps in a couple years as reputation data-driven filtering becomes refined and the norm, we will be able to be more accepting of highly targeted and relevant unsolicited email (as we are sometimes with highly targeted and relevant postal mail), but I’m not sure the world is psychologically there just yet.  There’s still too much egregious spam in the inbox, and as a result, while users primarily think of spam as “email I don’t want,” they also do still think of spam as “email I didn’t ask for.”

But for now, senders can certainly rely on permission — if and only if it’s up to date and contextual — as “first pass” screen on relevancy.

Where do you come out on this?

The Very Unfriendly Skies of United, Part II

In Part I, I described United’s horrendous customer service as it holds its customers hostage to pay an extra $44 to get out of a complete unsittable seat into a slightly better seat at 6 a.m. in the morning for no good reason.

Tonight, I am pleased to report that I have landed at LaGuardia on United, an hour late already and nearly 1 a.m., only to have them tell us that we have to sit on the tarmac for an hour because they can’t get their act together and open up a gate for us.

Boy, is this fun.  Frontier, anyone?  Jet Blue?  Even American with a connection in the dreaded O’Hare?