Counter Cliche:  Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There

Fred had a great posting the other day about Analysis Paralysis.  And he’s right, a lot of the time.  But I’ve always thought that Newton’s third law of motion can be applied to cliches — that every cliche has an equal and opposite cliche (think “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” vs. “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder”).

The counter cliche to Analysis Paralysis is “Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There” — another great lesson taught to me by my old boss at MovieFone.  While startup businesses generally do need to move quickly and nimbly, there are times and places, particularly when negotiating something, where stopping or moving very slowly works to your advantage.  This can be true in any situation — hiring someone, working on a strategic partnership, acquiring a company or selling your own company, and yes, on occasion, even in closing business with a client.

Slowing down or stopping a negotiation helps you accomplish two critical things to achieving an optimal result:

1. It allows you to gain a little perspective on what you’re negotiating and consider other alternatives.  It’s easy to get caught up in the heat of a negotiation.  While that negotiating process can be addictive, you always want to make sure you really want what you’re going after and that you’ve taken every step you can to shore up your alternatives.

2. It lets you see how important the deal is to the other party.  If you change the pace of a negotiation, you can more easily see how the other party responds to that change of pace.  Do they fade away, or do they keep calling and pressing for forward movement?

There’s a time and a place for everything in a startup.  Sometimes it’s to run hard, but sometimes it’s to stand still.

Fred’s VC Cliche of the Week this week is called "the pass," which is the euphemism that VCs have adopted when they decide not to invest in a particular company or entrepreneur.  Fred’s VC wisdom comes down to this:

1 – Say no quickly to the things you know you aren’t going to do

2 – Don’t take an opportunity into diligence unless you are willing to spend enough time to truly  undersand it, and if you don’t invest, make sure you are willing to spend time explaining why.

It won’t make it any easier on the entrepreneur who is trying to find someone to invest in his business that you are passing, but they might learn something from the discussion, and in the end you will gain their respect.

And in this age where VCs and their money are a dime a dozen and great entrepreneurs are rare, respect from entrepreneurs is critical to success in the VC business.

The counter cliche is that the same advice applies to entrepreneurs who "pass" on a particular VC.  There are many times where startups (especially good ones) have offers on the table or are pursuing them from multiple VCs.  That strategy is a must and one that I’ve blogged about before. 

VCs may be a dime a dozen, but great ones are hard to find.  If you find yourself in the position of having to "pass" on one of them — follow Fred’s advice and do it quickly, politely, and without wasting any more of their time.

Just Say No

A recent study by AOL (published here in CNET) says that on average, people in America check email five times per day and can’t go without it for more than three days at a time.  And six out of ten respondents said they check email on vacation.

While I’m as guilty as anyone of perpetuating these statistics, I am a big fan of taking regular time off from email.  Whether it’s a day each week, or a whole weekend here or there, or at least one week vacation per year, it’s important to Just Say No every once in a while.  Even Fred took an email holiday recently, to great success, I believe.  The great thing about email is that they’ll all be there waiting for you when you log back in.

Another Entrepreneur Blog

My friend Jason Devitt, founder and CEO of mobile application company Vindigo, is contemplating his next career move and has started to blog more actively about entrepreneurship (after a 9-month around-the-world honeymoon which made for a great travel blog).

His most recent post is about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, which I thought was great, and he promises more good ones on related topics to come soon.

A Thankful Moment

While there are certainly some aspects of being a CEO that are full of those proverbial thankless tasks…there are some moments that are just the opposite.  And boy are those rewarding.

I had one this morning.  While I frequently get nice emails or handwritten cards from employees after they interview or start or get a promotion or raise — and those are all great — this is one I can easily blog about because it’s online.

Yesterday was the first official day of work for Neil Schwartzman, who actually joined us many months ago as a consultant running compliance for our Sender Score Certified whitelist but just finally became a full-time employee as we set up a Canadian entity and International entity and whatever our lawyers and accountants told us we had to do in order to be legit about hiring out of the country.

Neil’s thank you post is very entertaining (I promise, our objective isn’t to have employees drinking and slacking off!), but more than that, rewarding in that he says we do a good job at Return Path of walking the walk around ethics, reputation, and high standards in what we do for the email ecosystem.  Now that’s rewarding.

But in some ways, it’s even more meaningful coming from Neil.  Just as he says he took a risk in coming to work with us, we took a risk in bringing him on board.  As a leading voice in the anti-spam community, Neil is exactly the kind of person that spooks out some of our clients who think of anti-spammers as the enemy.  Our view is, as you can imagine, more nuanced.  Anti-spammers who do their job well are a legitimate marketer’s best friend because they are keeping the inbox clean of actual spam.  As we tell our clients, we are a big tent here — the only way we will solve our clients’ deliverability problems is by working WITH the receivers of the world on common language, rules, standards, and metrics — not working AGAINST them.  And that’s where Neil has done such a great job for us so far — bringing his unique perspective on the spam problem and working alongside many others on our deliverability team like Tom Bartel, Tom Sather, Leslie Price, Melinda Plemel to help keep the world safe for email.

So thanks, Neil…and right back at you!

A Network of Teams, Not an Integrated System

We were in and out of the hospital a lot back in March/April for the last few weeks with one of our kids (she’s ok now).  One of us was with her 24 hours a day for the 10-11 days she was hospitalized, with lots of down time, which gave me lots of time to observe health care in action.  While she ultimately got very good care at a very good hospital, it was incredibly clear to me that the hospital functioned as a network of teams, not as an integrated system.

The nurses were great.  Followed their routine practices and responded to doctors’ orders on cue.  Same with the nursing assistants.  Same with the docs.  Same with the phlebotomists and labs.  Same with the hospital support staff.  But the hand-offs from one team to the next, and from one shift to the next within a team, were seriously lacking.

What was wrong with this?  Nothing was optimized around the patient.  I mentioned this to my father-in-law, who is an HMO executive, and he noted that the concept of “patient-centric care” was a hot topic in managed care right now — but that it had also been a hot topic 10-15 years ago, to no apparent end (and not just in this one hospital that we were at).  Seems like customer relationship management became a persistent priority in the rest of the business world years ago.  Why hasn’t this stuck in health care?

This was a great exercise for me in thinking about the customer-centric view of a business.  We talk here at Return Path about “stapling yourself to a customer” to see what they see.  Every business should go through that exercise at some level regularly to make sure they’re functioning as an integrated system as far as the outside world is concerned.

These Things Do Take Lots of Care and Feeding

Pete Blackshaw wrote a really thoughtful piece in ClickZ today entitled “Ten Reasons Why I Should Stop Blogging.”  It’s a good read if you’re a middle of the road blogger…or particularly if you’re thinking about starting a new blog.

One of the most common things early stage CEOs say to me once they find product-market fit and make a few sales is “I need a CRO.” The answer is almost always, “no, you don’t.” A couple years ago I wrote about the evolution of enterprise selling organizations in this post. Reading that is a good place to start this topic. Go ahead…I’ll still be here when you come back.

Welcome back!

So in the early days of a company, it’s all “selling on whiteboard.” The need that early stage CEOs have that prompts them to tell me they need a CRO is simple the need to have help selling.

What the CEO really needs is a couple of very good early stage sales reps. People who are senior enough and clever enough to hold clients’ attention. People who are junior enough to accompany the CEO or other founders on dozens of “selling on whiteboard” sessions with clients to be able to start doing that work on their own. And People who can help the transition from “selling on whiteboard” to “selling on Powerpoint” by doing some very basic documentation of the selling process, buying centers, influencers, and value proposition.

It may also be true that the CEO doesn’t really know much about sales — maybe it’s a technical founder, or even a founder who came up through marketing or product management — and that part of the “I need a CRO” comment is really just an admission that the CEO doesn’t really know how to structure and manage a sales effort. In that case, my first suggestion is that the CEO read the excellent Startup Sales section within Startup CXO. And if that’s not enough, then there are over 1,200 fractional CROs in the Bolster marketplace who can give you anything from an hour of consulting to a couple days per week as a fractional executive to help you put some structure in place for your new sales reps. Once you have a repeatable sales motion, you can hire more reps and a Sales Manager/Director or VP.

So no, you don’t need a CRO. But there are lots of things you can do to get the help you need in the early days of selling that are less expensive, less risky, and a better fit for early stage companies.

I hate just doing linkblogs, but Fred’s thoughts this morning on Facebook and privacy around the beacon issue are spot on. 

Two highlights I couldn’t agree with more:

When the internet knows who you are, what you do, who your friends are, and what they do, it goes from the random bar you wander into to your favorite pub where your friends congregate and the bartender knows your drink and pours it for you when you walk in the door

and

These privacy backlashes do some good though. They keep big companies like Google and Facebook sensitized to the issue. And so we hope that they ‘do no evil’ with this data they are collecting

Read the full post here.

Investment in the Email Ecosystem

Last week, my colleague George Bilbrey posted about how (turns out – shocking!) email still isn’t dead yet.

Not only is he right, but the whole premise of defending email from the attackers who call it “legacy” or “uninteresting” is backwards.  The inbox is getting more and more interesting these days, not less.  At Return Path, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of startup activitiy and investment (these two things can go together but don’t have to) in in front end of email in the past couple years.  I’d point to three sub-trends of this theme of “the inbox getting more interesting.”

First, major ISPs and mailbox operators are starting to experiment with more interesting applications inside their inboxes.  As the postmaster of one of the major ISPs said to me recently, “we’ve spent years stripping functionality out of email in the name of security – now that we have security more under control, we would like to start adding functionality back in.”  Google’s recent announcement about allowing third-party developers to access your email with your permission is one example, as is their well-documented experiment with NetFlix’s branded favicon showing up in the inbox starting a few months back.  And Hotmail’s most recent release, which has been well covered online (including this article which George wrote in Mediapost a couple months ago) also includes some trials of web-like functionality in the inbox, as well as other easy ways for users to view and experience their inboxes other than the age-old “last message in on top” method.  Yahoo has done a couple things along these lines as well of late, and one can assume they have other things in the works as well.

I wouldn’t be surprised if many ISPs roll out a variety of enhanced functionality over the next couple of years, although these systems can take a lot of time to change.  Although some of these changes present challenges for marketers and publishers, these are generally major plusses for end users as well as the companies who send them email – email is probably the only Internet application people spend tons of time in that’s missing most state of the art web functionality.

Second, although Google Wave got a lot of publicity about reinventing the inbox experience before Google shut it down a couple weeks ago, there are probably a dozen startups that are working on richer inboxes as well, either through plug-ins or what I’d call a “web email client overlay” – you can still use your Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, or other address (your own domain, or a POP or IMAP account), but read the mail through one of these new clients.  Regardless of the technology, these companies are all trying, with different angles here or there, to make the inbox experience more interesting, relevant, productive, and in many cases, tied into your “social graph” and/or third-party web content.

The two big ones here in terms of active user base are Xobni, an Outlook plugin that matches social graph to inbox and produces a lot of interesting stats for its users; and Xoopit, which recently got acquired by Yahoo and wraps content indexing and discovery into its mail client.

Gist matches social graph data and third-party content like feeds and blogs into something that’s a hybrid of plugin and stand-alone web application.  That sounds a little like Threadsy, although that’s still in closed beta, so it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going to surface out of it.  There’s also Zenbe and Kwaga, and Xiant, which focus on creating a more productive inbox experience for power users.

Furthermore, services like OtherInbox and Boxbe aim to help users cut through the clutter of their inboxes and simultaneously create a more effective means for marketers to reach customers (say what you will about that concept, but at least it has a clear revenue model, which some of the other services listed above don’t have).

Finally, a number of services are popping up which give marketers and publishers easy-to-use advanced tools to improve their conversion or add other enhanced functionality to email.  For example, RPost, a company we announced a partnership with a couple months back, provides legal proof of delivery for email with some cool underlying technology.  LiveClicker (also a Return Path partner) provides hosted analytics-enabled email video in lightweight and easy-to-use ways that work in the majority of inboxes.

Sympact (another Return Path partner) dynamically renders content in an email based on factors like time of day and geolocation – so the same email, in the same inbox, will render, for example, Friday’s showtimes for New York when I open it in my office on Friday afternoon but Saturday’s showtimes for San Francisco after I fly out west for the weekend.  And a Belgian company called 8Seconds (you guessed it, another Return Path partner) does on-the-fly multivariate testing of email content in a way that blows away traditional A/B methods.  While these tools require some basic things to be in place to work optimally, like having images on by default or links working, they don’t by and large require special deals with ISPs to make the services function.

While these tools are aimed at marketers, they will also make end users’ email experiences much better by improving relevance or by adding value in other ways.

Some of this makes me wonder whether there’s a trend that will lead to disaggregation of the value chain in consumer email – splitting the front end (what consumers see) from the back end (who runs the mail server).  But that’s probably another topic for another day.  In the meantime, I’ll say three cheers for innovation in the email space.  It’s long overdue and will greatly enrich the environment in the coming years as these services gain adoption.