Best CEO/Entrepreneur Quote Ever, By a Mile

I’ve seen and heard a lot of these.  But perhaps it’s fitting that on Independence Day, I realized that this gem of a quote, not specifically about entrepreneurs or CEOs but very applicable to them, comes from President Theodore Roosevelt in his “Citizenship in a Republic” speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, April 23, 1910:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Amen, Brother Teddy.  This quote is so good that it appears twice independently (once from me, once in a contributor’s sidebar) in my almost-ready-to-pre-order book, Startup CEO.  In fact, let me quietly take this opportunity to start a bit of a hashtag movement around the topic at #startupceo.  More to come on this next week!

I’ve always thought my grandmother was a remarkable person. At age 92 (sorry to publish it, Gma), she is pretty hip — drives a Lexus, plays a mean game of bridge, carries a cell phone, and until recently, used WebTV.

She was getting tired of the slow connection via dial-up, so Mariquita and I gave her an old laptop we had and installed a cable modem (I have to commend Cablevision of Westchester/Optimum Online on a very smooth and easy installation process), so now she’s the world’s newest computer user. Those of us who work with computers every day take some of the basics for granted, but if you’ve never used Windows or a mouse before, this stuff is not easy to learn.

But I’m proud to say that Grandma Hazel, after three short days, is using Outlook, used Return Path to announce her change of email address to her address book, set up 1-click on Amazon and bought a couple books, read my blog, and even subscribed to receive email alerts when I post.

After 5 years of WebTV, I think she’s in for a real treat with how fast the web can be and how much there is to explore out there. And if anyone can figure out how to use this stuff, it’s her. Welcome to the web and to blogs, Gma!

Blogiversary, Part VII

Today marks the seventh anniversary of OnlyOnce.  I haven’t marked the date with a post in three years, but here was my last such post (with links to prior posts in it).  In sum up until now, my reasons for blogging have been written up as:

• “Thinking” (writing short posts helps me crystallize my thinking)
• “Employees” (one of our senior people once called reading OnlyOnce “getting a peek inside Matt’s head)
• My book reviews help me crystallize my takeaways from books and serve as a bit of a personal reference library
• I like writing and don’t get to do it often

After seven years, though, I’m going to add another important point of value for me for writing OnlyOnce:  now, at 672 posts (including 27 that are scheduled but not yet posted – easy a record for me), this blog now serves as a repository for me of my own lessons learned, best practices, anecdotes, and aphorisms.  Thanks to Lijit, it’s easy for me and others to search.  Thanks to the new WordPress format and design by my friends at Slice of Lime, the categories and tagging make it much easier to navigate.

I probably get one question a week from a fellow CEO or prospective entrepreneur or employee that, instead of typing out an answer or setting up a meeting, I can actually just send a link as a starting point.  Sometimes there are follow-up questions, sometimes there aren’t.  But the blog is proving to be a very efficient form of documentation.

I am now a big fan of my new Treo 600. It’s not so new, I’ve had it for a couple of months, but I figured out a couple of things on it today that really throw it over the top in my book.

In general, it’s a very good convergence device. The combination of phone, Palm apps, and email is very well done. It needs a longer battery life, but it lasts for a full day with pretty heavy usage, which is acceptable. I love not carrying around both a phone and a blackberry any more.

The first thing that took it from being a good device to being a great one was our installation of the GoodLink Exchange server software. It is instantaneous, two-way wireless synch between the device and my Outlook profile. That means no docking, never being out of step with changes made to my profile in my office, and full access to all my Outlook folders, not just the inbox.

But what really made the difference for me was that I figured out how to rig the device to also be an MP3 player today. So now, on short business trips anyway, I am down to one device and one battery charger from three and three.

It’s a combination of Pocket-Tunes software on the device, an SD chip, which you can now get up to 1GB of storage (about 300 MP3 files), and an adaptor that connects my computer to the SD chip via USB to load the MP3 files. The sound quality is much better than I expected, although I do miss my ipod, and it plays both through headphones (you need an adaptor for that, too), and outloud using the phone’s speaker capabilities. So you have to do a little work to make it an MP3 player, but it’s worth it!

Now the only thing that has to happen is that Verizon needs to offer service on this device. T-Mobile’s coverage in NYC is awful.

Counter Cliche:  Ready, Set, Exit

Fred’s VC Cliche of the week is the about the Quick Flip.  My counter to that is Ready, Set, Exit (image from Google Images).

Most quick flips involve a huge element of luck.  For every quick flip out there, there are dozens of companies that thought they’d be quick flips and ended up crashing and burning instead.  Back in 1999, when we started Return Path, another Internet entrepreneur I knew loved the idea so much that he told me to start writing the book then, because I would be able to sell the for $100 million before we even had a product in the market.  He said the title of the book would be Ready, Set, Exit.

We were careful not to behave that way, and that’s one of the reasons we’re still here and doing as well as  we are doing today.

As nice as it is to be an investor or an entrepreneur who falls into a Quick Flip scenario, beware of anyone who’s planning on Ready, Set, Exit, whether you’re being pitched to invest, to join the company, or even to be a customer.  Ready, Set, Exit scenarios can’t be manufactured or counted on (if they could, everyone would do them), and that whole mentality is completely antithetical to the stamina required to build a real company.

I think it’s analogous to what everyone tells you when you’re in junior high or high school:  you’ll never find a girlfriend/boyfriend if you’re out looking for one.

Fig Wasp #879

I have 7 categories of books in my somewhat regular reading rotation:  Business (the only one I usually blog about), American History with a focus on the founding period, Humor, Fiction with a focus on trash, Classics I’ve Missed, Architecture and Urban Planning (my major), and Evolutionary Biology.  I’m sure that statement says a lot about me, though I am happy to not figure it out until later in life.  Anyway, I just finished another fascinating Richard Dawkins book about evolution, and while I usually don’t blog about non-business books, this one had an incredibly rich metaphor with several business lessons stemming from it, plus, evolution is running rampant in our household this week, so I figured, what the heck?

The Dawkins books I’ve read are The Selfish Gene (the shortest, most succinct, and best one to start with), The Blind Watchmaker (more detail than the first), Climbing Mount Improbable (more detail than the second, including a fascinating explanation of how the eye evolved “in an evolutionary instant”), The Ancestor’s Tale (very different style – and a great journey back in time to see each fork in the evolutionary road on the journey from bacteria to humanity), and The God Delusion (a very different book expounding on Dawkins’ theory of atheism).  All are great and fairly easy to read, given the topic.  I’d start with either The Selfish Gene or maybe The Ancestor’s Tale if you’re interested in taking him for a spin.

So on to the tale of Fig Wasp #879, from this week’s read, Climbing Mount Improbable.  Here’s the thing.  There are over 900 kinds of fig trees in the world.  Who knew?  I was dimly aware there was such a thing as a fig tree, although quite frankly I’m most familiar with the fig in its Newton format.  Some species reproduce wildly inefficiently — like wild grasses, whose pollen get spread through the air, and with a lot of luck, 1 in 1 billion (with a “b”) land in the right place at the right time to propagate.  At the opposite end of the spectrum stands the fig tree.  Not only do fig trees reproduce by relying on the collaboration of fig wasps to transport their pollen from one to the next, but it turns out that not only are there over 900 different kinds of fig trees on earth, there are over 900 different kinds of fig wasps — one per tree species.  The two have evolved together over thousands of millenia, and while we humans might take the callous and uninformed view that a fig tree is a fig tree, clearly the fig wasps have figured out how to swiftly and instinctively differentiate one speices from another.

So what the heck does this have to do with business?  Three quick lessons come mind.  I’m sure there are scores more.

1. Collboration only works when each party benefits selfishly from it.  Fig wasps don’t cross-pollenate fig trees bcause the fig trees ask nicely or will fire them if they don’t.  They do their job because their job is independently fulfilling.  If they don’t — they probably die of starvation.  They’re just programmed with a very specific type of fig pollen as their primary input and output.  We should all think about collaboration this way at work.  I wrote a series of posts a couple years back on the topic of Collboration Being Hard, and while all the points I make in those posts are valid, I think this one trumps all.  Quite frankly, it calls on the core principle from the Harvard Project on Negotiation, which is that collaboration requires a rethinking of the pie, so that you can expand the pie.  That’s what the fig trees and fig wasps have done, unwittingly.  Each one gets what it needs far more so than if it had ever consulted directly with the other.  The lesson:  Be selfish, but do it in a way that benefits your company.

2. Incredibly similar companies can have incredibly distinct cultures.  900+ types of fig tree, each one attracting one and only one type of fig wasp.  Could there be anything less obvious to the untrained human eye?  I assume that not only would most of us not be able to discern one tree or wasp type from another, but that we wouldn’t be able to disdcern discern any of the 900+ types of trees or wasps from thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions (in the case or urbanites) types of trees or bugs in general!  But here’s the thing.  I know hundreds of internet companies.  Heck, I know dozens of email companies.  And I can tell you within 5 minutes of walking around the place or meeting an executive which ones I’d be able to work for, and which ones I wouldn’t.  And the older/bigger the company, the more distinct and deeply rooted its culture becomes.  The lessons:  don’t go to work for a company where you’d even remotely uncomfortable in the interview environment; cultivate your company’s culture with same level of care and attention to detail that you would your family — regardless of your role or level in the company!

3. Leadership is irrelevant when the operating system is tight.  You think fig wasps have a CEO?  Or a division president who reports into the CEO that oversees both fig wasps and fig trees, making sure they all cross-pollenate before the end of the quarter?  Bah.  While as a CEO, you may be the most important person in the organization sometimes, or in some ways, I can easily construct the argument that you’re the least important person in the shop as well.  If you do your job and create an organization where everyone knows the mission, the agenda, the goal, the values, the BHAG, whatever you want to call it — withoutit needing to be spelled out every day — you’ve done your job, because you’ve made a company where people rock ‘n’ roll all night and every day without you needing to be in the middle of what they’re doing. 

I’m sure there are other business lessons from evolutionary biology…send them along if you have good thoughts to share!

Learn Word of Mouth Marketing

Our friend, former RP colleague, and WOM guru Andy Sernovitz is hosting a small-group word of mouth marketing seminar. Usually he only does private training for companies at a very large price, so this is a rare chance for 50 people to get the best introduction to word of mouth that there is.  I blogged about his book a while back here.

We’ve arranged for a $250 discount for our clients. Use code “welovereturnpath” when you register (kind of catchy code, isn’t it?).

This is a very practical, hands-on course. In one intense day, you will:

• Master the five steps of word      of mouth marketing
• Construct an action plan that      your company can start using the very next day
• Get the same training that      big corporations (Microsoft, TiVo, eBay) have received — for a fraction      of what they paid
• Know how to translate word of      mouth marketing into real ROI
• Participate in an active,      intense day of practical brainstorming (not boring theory)
• Learn from Andy Sernovitz,      the guy who literally wrote the book on word of mouth marketing

Andy promises you will learn a repeatable, proven marketing framework that is easy to execute, affordable, and provides measurable results within 60 days.

More information: http://events.gaspedal.com

Chicago: July 30 and September 4

Pass it on: http://events.gaspedal.com/banners

I received in the mail yesterday (by overnight priority mail, no less), a 400+ page prospectus from Mittal, a Dutch company in which I apparently own a few shares of stock through a managed mutual fund I’m part of. This book was BIG – well over 2 inches thick and big enough to have a binding strip instead of staples. And it had enough legalese in it to put anyone to sleep.

What did I do with it? After ranting about how silly it was to ever print such a thing for mass push distribution to an audience that largely doesn’t care about it — straight into the trash. With a big thud, of course.

What a ridiculous waste. Why print it on paper at all? Make it available online via pdf. Email shareholders or send them a postcard or leave an automated voicemail and ask them if they want a hard copy. Figure out which shareholders are in a managed fund, and send a single copy to the fund manager, since the individuals don’t even know they’re shareholders or don’t make decisions about individual stocks in the fund. Do something that costs less and doesn’t destroy trees that 99% of people will never read.

Shame on Mittal and their bankers, proudly displayed on the cover of the book — Goldman Sachs, Citigroup Credit Suisse, HSBC and Societe General.

Counter Cliche:  How Much Paranoia is Too Much Paranoia?

Fred’s VC cliche of the week this week, Opening the Kimono, is a good one.  He talks about how much entrepreneurs should and should not disclose when talking to VCs and big partners — companies like Microsoft or Google, for example.

In response to another of Fred’s weekly cliche postings back in April, I addressed the issue of opening the kimono with VCs in this posting entitled Promiscuity.  But today’s topic is the opposite of promiscuity, it’s paranoia.

I was talking with a friend a few months back who’s a friend and fellow CEO of a high profile, larger company in a similar space to Return Path.  He was obsessing about the secrecy surrounding the size of his business and wouldn’t tell me (a friend) how much revenue his company had, even within a $20mm band.

He pursued this secrecy pretty far.  He never shared financials with his employees.  He never told anyone the metrics, not even his close friends and family.  He even withdrew his company from consideration for a high-profile award for growth companies which it had entered into and won in prior years since someone might be able to string together enough years of data to compute their size.

Why?  Because he didn’t want any venture capitalists to figure out how big they had gotten and decide to throw money at upstart competitors.  Talk about a closed kimono!

I’m much more open book than that with Return Path, but I have a tremendous amount of respect for this guy, so I gave the matter some thought.  There are certainly some situations which call for discretion, but I couldn’t come up with too many that would drive my guiding principle to be secrecy.

1. Being “open book” with employees is essential.  Your people need to know where the business stands and how their efforts are contributing to the whole.  More important, they need to know that you trust them.

2. Using some key metrics to promote your company can be very helpful.  I challenge you to show me a marketing person who doesn’t want to brag about how big you are, how many customers you have, what market share you have.

3. There’s no reason to worry about Venture Capitalists.  Sure, they can fund a competitor, but they’ll do that without knowing exactly how much revenue you have, how quickly.  The good ones are good at sniffing out market opporunities ahead of time.  The bad ones, you care about less anyway.

4. All that said, you can never be paranoid enough about the competition.  Assume they’re all out to get you at every turn, that they’re smarter, richer, quicker, and better looking than you are.  Live in fear of them eating your lunch.

Paranoia is healthy (just ask Andy Grove), but it does have its limits around the basics of your business, and around how you treat employees.

Hackoff – The Blook

Fred and Brad have already posted some pertinent details as well, but here’s a must-read for you – entrepreneur Tom Evslin, who has a great blog, has just launched an online book, serialized as a blog.  It’s about a fictitious Internet bubble company called Hackoff.com (nice name!), and you can subscribe to the episodes of the book, either by RSS feed or by email.  The first episode and various subscription options are all here.

Tom’s a great writer and had front row seats/was a lead actor in the bubble.  The first episode has me hooked.  This is going to be fun!

RSS Advertising

This is two-day-old news by now, but in case you missed it, we just announced than we – Return Path – are partnering with Feedburner to take RSS advertising to the next level (coverage here, here, and here).

As you probably know if you receive my feed or other ones, Feedburner has been doing some experimenting with ad units at the bottom of feeds for months now, first using Amazon and more recently Google AdSense to serve up ads.  And as you may know if you look at ads closely, neither of those services has done a great job making the ads truly relevant.  I can’t tell you, for example, the number of times I write a posting about a book, and the ad has absolutely nothing to do with books, let alone the book or author I’m writing about.  My favorite one was a posting Fred wrote called “Why a Conservative Turns Liberal,” with an ad called “Meet Conservative Singles” — probably not Fred’s intent, although it certainly brought a smile to my face.

Anyway, what we’re doing with Feedburner is very simple.  Our Customer Acquisition Solutions group sells lead generation products to hundreds of advertisers each month in the form of either email list rental or web-based lead gen based on categories of interest expressed by consumers who sign up with our Postmaster Direct service.  Feedburner has categorized a number of the 100,000+ feeds they publish as “Consumer Electronics” or “Computing and Technology,” which are two of the strongest categories we have, both in terms of consumers and in terms of advertisers.

So our salesforce is going to add “RSS” as an option for our advertisers in those categories, and we will work with Feedburner to insert demo-targeted ads into select feeds.  We and Feedburner both acknowledge this is an experiment, but we’re very optimistic about the results: the demographics should line up perfectly and provide our advertisers with a new channel as part of their existing campaigns.  I’m sure Dick or someone else at Feedburner will blog about it as well at some point, and if we learn anything  truly interesting after the first few months, we’ll let the world know!