(The following post was written by one of Return Path’s long-time senior managers, Chris Borgia, who runs one of our data science teams and has run other support organizations in the past, both at Return Path and at AOL.  I don’t usually run guest posts, but I loved the topic with Chris suggested it, and it’s a topic that I’d only have a limited perspective on!)

Managing Up in a Growing, Global Workplace

For many years, I thought “managing up” was a cheap way of getting ahead. I thought someone who managed up was skilled at deceiving their boss into thinking they were more accomplished than they really were.

I have since learned that managing up, or managing your boss, is not devious, but is actually a valuable discipline. When you learn to manage up successfully, you empower your boss to better represent your interests to influencers in the organization.

If you are a manager, you should realize that in addition to managing your boss, you can help your employees effectively manage you. When our employees help us to be successful, we are further enabled to invest in their success. This symbiosis is seen in any relationship – the more you help the other person, the more they will be able to – and want to – help you. If you are a manager, it’s important to realize that your employees should be managing up, and you can encourage them to do so by being vulnerable, admitting ignorance, and asking for support.

There are many books and articles on managing up or managing one’s boss. The essentials are fairly consistent:

• Understand your boss’s goals, priorities, and needs
• Know your boss’s strengths and weaknesses
• Set mutual expectations to build trust
• Communicate and keep your boss informed

You’ll need to be intentional about the essentials no matter where you work, but there are additional challenges of managing up in a growing, global workplace like Return Path. In a growing company, you’re likely to work for a boss who is new to their role, the company or the industry. In a global company, you may report to a boss who works in another office, or even in another country. The fundamental aspects of managing up are the same, but these situations can require a tailored approach.

When your boss is new to their role, the company, or the industry

In a growing company, you’re likely to report to someone who is new to their role in the company, new to the company itself, or even new to the industry. You can be invaluable to your boss in closing the knowledge gap and enabling them to make the best decisions for you and your team.

• Process Help your boss understand how the department operates. How are goals and priorities determined? How do people communicate? What does the team expect from the boss?
• People If your boss doesn’t know the people, they may lack the appropriate empathy in a given situation. Help them understand your team’s needs and how their decisions impact the people.
• Decision Making Your boss will likely need additional data to help them make decisions. Providing your boss with this data up front, saving them from admitting ignorance, will go a long way to developing a strong relationship.
• Context Sometimes your boss won’t know what they don’t know, so providing your boss the context around issues, decisions, and goals will enable them to make the best decisions for your team.

When your boss works in another office or country

In a global workplace, it’s likely that at some point you will have a boss who works in another office or even in another country. Having a remote boss offers many opportunities for managing up.

• Visibility Your boss doesn’t see you – or possibly others on the team – every day, so you might want to communicate more about the day-to-day operations of the team. At times, it will feel like you are sharing minutia, but it’s likely your boss will find this valuable in developing a complete understanding of what is going on.
• Insight If you work in a core office, you have a tremendous opportunity to be your boss’s eyes and ears.  What are you seeing or hearing locally that might change your boss’s plans or perspective? What are people worried about? Are there any rumors your boss should be aware of?
• Culture If your boss is in a different country, you will need to develop a relationship that considers any cultural differences. Cultural differences are seen in office attire, working hours, email habits, vacation schedules, and more. Bosses in some cultures may expect more deference, while in others they may expect more direct honesty. Understanding your boss’s culture, and helping her understand yours, will develop mutual respect and expectations to make each other successful.

Your relationship with your boss is a symbiotic one. Your boss can’t be successful unless you are, so they are your champion.  Learning to effectively manage up, especially in a growing, global workplace, is not nefarious business. Your boss will represent and support you to the best of their abilities. The more you enable your boss, the better they can support you, and everybody wins.

A New Season for Bonded Sender (now Sender Score Certified)

(With apologies to my non-email industry readers for such a long detailed posting)

Ah, spring.  New life is everywhere.  Winter clothes are being put away, birds are returning from their winters in the south, flowers are blooming.  We at Return Path are doing our part by announcing the “rebirth” of our Bonded Sender Program, the Internet’s largest and oldest email accreditation program, or whitelist, as Sender Score Certified.

Since we acquired Bonded Sender last fall, we’ve had the opportunity to go on a “listening tour” – talking to marketers, publishers, ESPs, ISPs, spam filtering companies, system administrators, email appliance manufacturers – you name it.  What we learned was that the program was ground-breaking when it was launched in 2002 but that it needed a makeover in order to meet the challenges that have evolved around spam and deliverability for both senders and receivers during the past few years.

Our listening tour revealed that the Bonded Sender of old had four core issues that weren’t sitting well with the Internet community at large:

1.  Data validity:  some senders questioned the accuracy of some of the application and compliance metrics used;

2.  Black box:  a complete lack of transparency led many senders to be unclear as to what was driving them to fail applications or have bonds debited;

3.  Bond:  there isn’t a purchasing department in America that knows how to post a bond or understands why they should; and

4.  Complaints:  as far as ISPs were concerned, even though mailers had to pass some serious hurdles to join the program, mailers who were in the program still managed to generate too many complaints among their end users.

A spring cleaning was in order, and we had the experts to get the job done.   The deliverability gurus inside Return Path — George Bilbrey, Tom Bartel, Robert Barclay, Leslie Price, Dan Deneweth, and others — working with a myriad of external advisors, delivered the makeover the program needed.

So today, Bonded Sender is reborn as Sender Score Certified.  We have worked hard to address all four main beefs about the program, while keeping the elements of the program that have worked well.  So here’s what you can expect of the new program.  First, what’s new and different:

1.  New and Improved Data:  the program is now powered by our newly launched Sender Score Reputation database, which George wrote about last week – a robust source of reputation information sent to us daily by scores of different sources on the Internet, including B2B and B2C, domestic and international, ISP and commercial filters;

2.  Complete transparency:  the Sender Score Reputation Monitor service allows clients to have 100% visibility into every metric tracked for the program, including some super-cool drill-down features;

3.  Bye-Bye, Bond:  these high standards make the bond unnecessary (and they really made us need to find a new name – can you imagine Bondless Sender?).   You’re either on the list, or you’re not.  The transparency makes it much easier for us to work with our clients on compliance; and

4.  Radically Reduced Complaints:  the new standards have allowed us to raise the bar on the quality of the program.  We’ve built the statistical model underlying the program to have a VERY high correlation with some leading spam filters, enabling us to remove a huge number of senders who were previously on the whitelist.  The result?  Our largest ISP user, Microsoft, reports to us a nearly 90% drop in the number of complaints in their network coming from users of the program – and that was off a very small number of complaints to begin with, relative to the rest of the email universe.

OK, you say – sounds great.  But what did we actually keep about the program?

1.  We still partner with third-party watchdog non-profit TRUSTe to perform a critical, detailed practices accreditation of incoming clients as well as help us with compliance;

2.  We still use SpamCop complaint data as one data feed for the program’s compliance – but now it’s just one of several; and

3.  We still have more than 35,000 domains, including Hotmail, MSN, Outblaze and Roadrunner, as well as users of Spam Assassin and Ironport appliances, using the program to help determine what email to let through.

So spring has sprung at Return Path for our delivery assurance business.  The Bonded Sender makeover is done, and the new Sender Score Certified is here to innovate the next generation of email accreditation and whitelists for the industry.

For more on Sender Score Certified, read our press release or the program requirements today.

Big Apple, Little Company

Ed Daciuk, on of my blog subscribers, questions:  What is your view on the benefits of being in NYC as a startup?

Fred wrote a good posting several months ago and a related one this week on early stage investing in the NYC market from the perspective of a venture capitalist.  His main points:  (1) NYC is a great place to invest in early stage tech-related businesses as long as they’re not "core technology" businesses like semiconductor or hardware, because (2) core technology companies are more exciting to investors, and therefore the investors have clustered around those companies in places like Silicon Valley or Boston.  He also thinks this dynamic is changing as more and more successful companies are started as technology-enabled service businesses as opposed to pure tech companies.

As someone who’s been in tech-enabled services businesses in NYC for 10 years now, I couldn’t agree more with this last point.  But I thought I’d address Ed’s question from the entrepreneur’s perspective as well.

First, why is New York a great place for a startup?

1. Access to customers.  There is far greater concentration of major corporations and agencies headquartered in and around the NYC area, making it much easier to see and talk to prospects and customers in this market.

2. Lots of talent.  There are lots of people, meaning there are lots of people to hire.  Some disciplines are easier than others to find talent, but the labor pool is just huge.

3. Convenience.  This is always one of NYC’s main selling points, and it applies here as well.  It’s mainly a collection of little things like being able to see a customer or investor in minutes by foot or mass transit and late night food delivery, but all those extra minutes you save here and there add up!

4. Idea generation.  The density and complexity of the city’s business landscape make it a natural for stimulating great ideas, especially in the service and media sectors.

5. Work ethic.  New Yorkers are accustomed to working startup hours in many professions — banking, consulting, law, etc., so it’s much more natural to have a team pounding away at the office early and late than it is in other geographies.

But it’s not all that easy.  New York can also be a difficult place for a startup because:

1. It’s expensive.  Very expensive.  People cost more, benefits cost more, T&E costs more, rent costs more.

2. Space is limited.  There’s no such thing as starting out in someone’s garage, because there are no garages — only teeny tiny apartments.  And no one takes a lease with room to grow because that extra space comes at such a premium.

3. Good money is harder to find.  As Fred says, it’s getting better, but the environment still isn’t as rich with high quality VCs as places like Silicon Valley or Boston.

4. Even when you do find good money, valuations are tougher.  For whatever reason, I’ve always found that "west coast" valuations are more generous than "east coast" valuations.

On balance, I’d say it’s probably a wash — there are plusses and minuses of NYC as a place for startups.  But it’s definitely not, as conventional wisdom would have it, an inhospitable environment for startups.

This post was inspired by Startup CXO and was originally published by Techstars on The Line.

If you’re new to the Chief Customer Officer role, we’d like to share some advice we wish we had learned earlier in our careers. There are a few common misconceptions about customers and the service organization. If you don’t realize these as misperceptions, you can spend a lot of time dealing with issues that are not real, but perceived. We have identified five of these common misperceptions, although we are sure there are more.

Misperception #1: The service organization fully controls churn (customer attrition)

In a lot of organizations you’ll see the service organization be measured solely on customer churn. If you really think about it, there are many elements that come into play that impact churn, including

• How the customer is sold
• The quality of the product
• How easy it is to onboard the customer
• How easy it is to use the product
• How easy it is for the customer to understand what kind of value they’re getting out of the product

Of course, the service functions do have a critical role, but they’re not the only functions in a company that impact churn. The responsibility for churn also lies with sales, engineering, marketing, and other teams. One reason why you need a C-level senior person in charge of all service operations is because you need someone who understands the customer experience broadly and that person has to work cross-functionally to ensure customer retention.

Misperception #2: The service organization is just a cost center

In many businesses, if a function isn’t generating new revenue, it’s seen as “second class.” From our perspective revenue retained is revenue gained and the service organization has a big impact on retaining revenue. In addition, the account management portion of a service organization is often in charge of up-sale and cross-sale opportunities which can be huge areas of growth. CCOs should work within their company to alter that misperception of service as a cost center because the service organization can have a huge impact on revenues.

Misperception #3: Service teams should focus on responding to defections

I’ve recently found a situation where the customer success team is built to focus on the clients who have raised their hand and said, “I want to leave.” This reactive approach drives low job satisfaction and isn’t the “best and highest use” of a service team’s time. By the time a customer is frustrated enough, or isn’t seeing the value enough, that they want to leave — you’ve missed a window of opportunity. The right focus should be proactively helping customers reach their desired business objectives. If you can do that, most customers will stay. That’s the theory behind the rise of the customer success team and that’s what great companies are doing today.

Misperception #4: Service’s job is to “paper over” gaps in the product

There is a widespread practice of covering for product issues by throwing service at the problem. That certainly can work, but it’s not optimal. The superior approach is to focus the service team on becoming a trusted advisor for customers, helping those customers achieve their desired outcomes. To do that, the CCO will have to work cross-functionally with the product team, the marketing team, and the sales team to drive a more friction-free customer experience.

Misperception #5: Service is boring and tactical

There is a wide-spread misperception that working in the service organization is boring. It’s mundane, it’s tactical, it doesn’t appeal to people who think strategy is grander than tactics. I don’t agree with that at all. A great service organization starts with a strategy. It starts with an understanding of customer segmentation. It includes thinking about the different customer personas and how to define an appropriate and valuable customer experience. That core strategy actually takes a while to develop. Once the strategy takes hold, it is core to driving retention over time. And, while a lot of people perceive that the service organization jobs are boring, or just answering trouble tickets or reacting to client problems, that’s not the whole role. It is a strategic role as well. 

The Chief Customer Officer has a big impact on the success of a company, especially startups and scaleups, and their function touches nearly every aspect of a company. To give your company the best chance of scaling, the Chief Customer Officer should understand, pinpoint, and manage misperceptions so that they can devote their time, energy, and resources to the real problems that help customers.

Dumb Money

I don’t have a counter cliche to Fred’s two-for-one this week on Passing the Hat and Ponying Up, but I’ll counter with a different, somewhat related Fred cliche that I was reminded of today when reading Paul Graham’s essay entitled A Unified Theory of VC Suckage (form your own opinions of it, but it’s nothing if not thorough and experience-based).

There’s nothing worse than dumb money backing a dumb idea or management team.

The dumb idea or team can destroy an emerging sector pretty quickly, and the dumb VC behind the deal will just keep ponying up.  For the record, the converse is also true — there’s nothing better than smart money behind a great idea and solid team.

The classic dot com version of dumb money is the company who decides to give away its core service for free (the one where they compete with other players) in order to try to make money at something else.  It could take 2 years and a ton of VC money before that company is out of business, having figured out that they needed to charge for their core business — and that process can wash out other companies in the process who are being smarter and more conservative about things.

So instead of just cheering that your competitor is dumb, dig in and look at how smart the money is behind the company.  If the money is dumb, too, beware!

As I mentioned earlier this summer, I’ve been working on a new startup the past few months with a group of long-time colleagues from Return Path.  Today, we are officially launching the new company, which is called Bolster.  The official press release is here.

Here’s the business concept.  Bolster is a talent marketplace, but not just any talent marketplace.  We are building a talent marketplace exclusively for what we call on-demand (or freelance) executives and board members.  We are being really picky about curating awesome senior talent.  And we are targeting the marketplace at the CEOs and HR leaders at venture- and PE-backed startups and scaleups.  We’re not a search firm.  We’re not trying to be Catalant or Upwork.  We’re not a job board. 

To keep both sides of the marketplace engaged with us, we are also building out suites of services for both sides – Members and Clients.  For Members, our services will help them manage their careers as independent consultants.  For Clients, our services will help them assess, benchmark and diversify their leadership teams and boards. 

We have a somewhat interesting founding story, which you can read on our website here.  But the key points are this.  I have 7 co-founders, with whom I have worked for a collective 88 years — Andrea Ponchione, Jack Sinclair, Shawn Nussbaum, Cathy Hawley, Ken Takahashi, Jen Goldman, and Nick Badgett.  We have three engineers with whom we’ve worked for several years who have been on board as contractors so far – Kayce Danna, Chris Paynes, and Chris Shealy.  We have four primary investors, who I’ve also known and worked closely with for a collective 77 years — High Alpha and Scott Dorsey (another veteran of the email marketing business), Silicon Valley Bank and Melody Dippold, Union Square Ventures and Fred Wilson, and Costanoa Ventures and Greg Sands.  Pretty much a Dream Team if there ever was one.

So how did our team and I get from Email Deliverability to Executive Talent Marketplace?  

It’s more straightforward than you’d think.  If you know me or Return Path, you know that our company was obsessed with culture, values, people, and leadership development.  You know that we created a cool workforce development nonprofit, Path Forward, to help moms who have taken a career break to care raise kids get back to work.  You know that I wrote a book for startup CEOs and have spent tons of time over the years mentoring and coaching CEOs.  Our team has a passion for helping develop the startup ecosystem, we have a passion for helping people improve and grow their careers and have a positive impact on others, and we have a passion for helping companies have a broad and diverse talent pipeline, especially at the leadership level.  Put all those things together and voila – you get Bolster!

There will be much more to come about Bolster and related topics in the weeks and months to come.  I’ll cross-post anything I write for the Bolster blog here on OnlyOnce, and maybe occasionally a post from someone else.  We have a few opening posts for Bolster that are probably running there today that I’ll post here over the next couple weeks.

If you’re interested in joining Bolster as an executive member or as a client, please go to www.bolster.com and sign up – the site is officially live as of today (although many aspects of the business are still in development, in beta, or manual).

A Path Forward in California!

Back in March I was proud to announce the launch of Path Forward, a nonprofit on a mission to get people back to work after they’ve taken time off to care for a loved one.  I’m even more thrilled today to announce the launch of a Path Forward program in California with six top tech companies — Go Daddy, Demandbase, CloudFlare, Coursera, Instacart and Zendesk. They are all accepting applications now for October start dates. Click on the links above to see all their opportunities.

As a CEO I know how hard it is to find great talent. The Center for Talent Innovation estimates that nearly 30% of college-educated women have taken away from their careers to serve as caregivers to children or aging family members. They have also found that while 90% of them try to return to work, only 40% are able to land full-time jobs. As an industry, we simply can’t afford to lose thousands of talented women who become frustrated by attempts to restart their professional careers.

Please join me in supporting this organization in fulfilling its mission. If you know people in California who might be looking for opportunities to restart their careers, send them to Your Path Forward in California where they can access all the job postings for the fall program.

And if you think Path Forward would be a great program for your company, email the fine folks at [email protected] to learn more.

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about the Agile methodology on this blog. For those of you who are regular readers, you may remember a post I wrote about our Agile Everywhere initiative— where all Return Path teams were tasked with implementing agile practices. A little over a year later, I want to update you on our agile journey–where we are now and how we got there.  My colleague Cathy Hawley (our head of People) will write a more detailed series of guest posts  for those of you who want to get more details of our transformation process.

Before we started our Agile Everywhere initiative, only our product and engineering teams were using agile. The rest of the organization (a few hundred people!) weren’t at all familiar with agile practices. Despite this, there were a few things that helped accelerate our transformation:

1. Strong executive buy-in
2. A clear vision
3. Agile-friendly company culture and values
4. A passionate project team
5. Resident agile experts

These 5 initial ingredients proved to be essential and enabled us to hit the ground running in Q1 2016. We started out by experimenting with non-technical pilot teams from all different offices, functions, and levels. After a couple months of experimentation, early qualitative results from pilot team members suggested that implementing agile principles was enhancing team communication and productivity. So we embarked on our next step, implementing agile practices across all non-technical teams at Return Path.

We are now 18 months into our transformation and the data shows us that the transformation is helping with our productivity:  we track a  metric that is comprised of many different measures of business performance that fall into 3 main themes–operating efficiency, planning effectiveness, and business success. So far we have already seen a 51% increase in the metric from Q4 2015 (before our Agile Everywhere initiative) to Q1 2017. We are emboldened by these promising results, but still have a lot of work to do to ensure that all teams at RP are taking full advantage of agile and reaping its benefits. Keep an eye out for Cathy Hawley’s posts for more information about our agile adventure, soon to be published the RP blog.

When the series is over, I’ll publish a summary with all the specific post links here as well.

Book Short:  Is CX the new UX?

Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine from Forrester Research, was a good read that kept crossing back and forth between good on the subject at hand, and good business advice in general.  The Customer Experience (CX) movement is gaining more and more steam these days, especially in B2B companies like Return Path.  The authors define Customer Experience as “how your customers perceive their interactions with your company,” and who doesn’t care about that?

A few years ago, people started talking a lot more about User Experience (UX) as a new crossover discipline between design and engineering, and our experience at Return Path has been that UX is an incredibly powerful tool in our arsenal to build great technical products via lean/agile methods.  The recurring thought I had reading this book, especially for companies like ours, was “Is CX the new UX?”

In other words, should we just be taking the same kind of lean/agile approach to CX that we do with technical product development and UX — but basically do it more holistically across every customer touchpoint, from marketing to invoice?  It’s hard to see the answer being “no” to that question, although as with all things, the devil is in the implementation details.  And that’s true at the high level (the authors talk about making sure you align CX strategy with corporate strategy and brand attributes and values) as well as a more granular level (what metrics get tracked for CX, and how do those align with the rest of the companies KPIs).

The book’s framework for CX is six high-level disciplines: strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement, governance, and culture — but you really have to read the book to get at the specifics.

Some other thoughts and quotes from the book:

• the book contains some good advice on how to handle management of cross-functional project teams in general (which is always difficult), including a good discussion of various governance models
• “to achieve the full potential of customer experience as a business strategy, you have to change the way you run your business. You must manage from the perspective of your customers, and you must do it in a systematic, repeatable, and disciplined way.”
• one suggestion the book had for weaving the customer experience into your culture (if it’s not there already) is to invite customers to speak all-hands meetings
• another suggestion the book had for weaving the customer experience into everyone’s objectives was one company’s tactic of linking compensation (in this case, 401k match) to customer experience metrics
• “Customer Experience is a journey, not a project. It has a beginning but it doesn’t have an end.”

Thanks to my colleague Jeremy Goldsmith for recommending this book.

We’ve been in business at Return Path for almost 18 years now.  We’ve seen a number of competitors come and go across a bunch of different related businesses that we’ve been in.  One of the things I’ve noticed and never quite understood is that many of our competitors expend a lot of time and energy publicly trash talking us in the market.  Sometimes this takes the form of calling us or our products out by name in a presentation at a conference; other times it takes the form of a blog post; other times it’s just in sales calls.  It’s weird.  You don’t see that all that often in other industries, even when people take aim at market leaders.

During the normal course of business, one of sales reps might engage in selling against specific competitors — often times, they have to when asked specific questions by specific prospects — but one thing you’ll never see us do is publicly trash talk a single competitor by name as a company.  I’m sure there are a couple people at Return Path who would like us to have “sharper elbows” when it comes to this, but it’s just not who we are.  Our culture is definitely one that values kindness and a softer approach.  But good business sense also tells me that it’s just not smart for four reasons:

• We’re very focused and disciplined in our outbound communications — and there’s only so much air time you get as a company in your industry, even among your customers — on thought leadership, on showcasing the value of our data and our solutions, and on doing anything we can do to make our customers more successful.  Pieces like my colleague Dennis Dayman’s recent blog post on the evolution of the data-driven economy, or my colleague Guy Hanson’s amazingly accurate prediction of the UK’s “unpredictable” election results both represent the kind of writing that we think is productive to promote our company
• We’re fiercely protective of our brand (both our employer brand and our market-facing brand), and we’ve built a brand based on trust, reputation, longevity, and being helpful, in a business that depends on reputation and trust as its lifeblood — as I think about all the data we handle for clients and strategic partners, and all the trust mailbox providers place in us around our Certification program.  Clients and partners will only place trust in — and will ultimately only associate themselves with — good people.  To quote my long time friend and Board member Fred Wilson (who himself is quoting a long time friend and former colleague Bliss McCrum), if you lie down with dogs, you come up with fleas.  If we suddenly turned into the kind of company that talked trash about competition, I bet we’d find that we had diminished our brand and our reputation among the people who matter most to us.  Our simple messaging and positioning showcases our people, our expertise, and our detailed knowledge of how email marketing works, with a collective 2,000 years of industry experience across our team
• Trash talking your competition can unwittingly expose your own weaknesses.  Think about Donald Trump’s memorable line from one of the debates against Hillary Clinton – “I’m not the puppet, you’re the puppet” – when talking about Russia.  That hasn’t turned out so well for him.  It’s actually a routine tactic of Trump, beyond that one example.  Accuse someone else of something to focus attention away from your own issues or weaknesses.  Don’t like the fact that your inauguration crowd was demonstrably smaller than your predecessor’s?  Just lie about it, and accuse the media of creating Fake News while you’re at it.  Disappointed that you lost the popular vote?  Accuse the other side of harvesting millions of illegal votes, even though it doesn’t matter since you won the electoral college!  Think about all these examples, regardless of your politics.  All of them draw attention to Trump’s weaknesses, even as he’s lashing out at others (and even if you think he’s right).  We don’t need to lash out at others because we have so much confidence in our company, our products, and our services.  We are an innovative, happy, stable, profitable, and growing vendor in our space, and that’s where our attention goes
• Publicly trash talking your competition just gives your competition extra air time.  As PT Barnum famously said, “You can say anything you want about me, just make sure you spell my name right!”

Don’t get me wrong.  Competition is healthy.  It makes businesses stronger and can serve as a good focal point for them to rally.  It can even be healthy sometimes to demonize a competitor *internally* to serve as that rallying cry.  But I am not a fan of doing that *externally.*  I think it makes you look weak and just gives your competitor free advertising.

Another Only Once Moment, Sort Of

I’ve never handed over the reins of a company before (no, I’m not leaving, and we aren’t selling Return Path).  But I did the other day, for the first time.  As many people know, last year we reorganized the company to focus entirely on deliverability and whitelisting and spun out Authentic Response, a company in the online market research business, into a completely separate entity. 

Since then, I have been CEO of both companies.  Although Return Path has had more of my focus — Authentic Response had excellent day-to-day leadership under Co-Presidents Jeff Mattes and Rob Mattes — I’ve still been working in both businesses.

Today, we officially announced the hiring of my replacement, Jim Follett.  Jim was formerly CEO of Survey Sampling, a larger company in the online market research business, and has over 20 years of prior experience as a senior executive in market research and information services companies.  While we still share the office in New York and I will stay on as Chairman, the percentage of time I can now devote to Return Path is now 100% — the first time it’s ever been that way (for the deliverability business).

I didn’t start Authentic Response, and I’ve never been deep in the bones of the business the way I am Return Path.  Even so, I definitely experienced a range of emotions at our all-hands meeting where we introduced Jim to the company that I don’t regularly experience at the same time:  mainly a mix of pride in the work the team has done on my watch, excitement for the business, and sadness at not working quite as closely with the nearly 100 people in Authentic Response going forward.

I’m sure someday, I will hand over the reins to Return Path.  No time soon, but that day eventually comes for every entrepreneur.  If this was a preview, it will be an emotional day.

But for now, I’m mainly happy to welcome Jim to the family, and I’m excited for the entire Authentic Response business as it embarks on the next chapter in the company’s journey.