Book Short:  The Little Engine that Could

Authors Steven Woods and Alex Shootman would make Watty Piper proud.  Instead of bringing toys to the children on the other side of the mountain, though, this engine brings revenue into your company.  If you run a SaaS business, or really if you run any B2B business, Revenue Engine:  Why Revenue Performance Management is the Next Frontier of Competitive Advantage, will change the way you think about Sales and Marketing. The authors, who were CTO and CRO of Eloqua (the largest SaaS player in the demand management software space that recently got acquired by Oracle), are thought leaders in the field, and the wisdom of the book reflects that.

The book chronicles the contemporary corporate buying process and shows that it has become increasingly like the consumer buying process in recent years.  The Consumer Decision Journey, first published by McKinsey in 2009, chronicles this process and talks about how the traditional funnel has been transformed by the availability of information and social media on the Internet.  Revenue Engine moves this concept to a B2B setting and examines how Marketing and Sales are no longer two separate departments, but stewards of a combined process that requires holistic analysis, investment decisions, and management attention.

In particular, the book does a good job of highlighting new stages in the buying process and the imperatives and metrics associated with getting this “new funnel” right.  One that resonated particularly strongly with me was the importance of consistent and clean data, which is hard but critical!  As my colleague Matt Spielman pointed out when we were discussing the book, the one area of the consumer journey that Revenue Engine leaves is out is Advocacy, which is essential for influencing the purchase process in a B2B environment as well.

One thing I didn’t love about the book is that it’s a little more theoretical than practical. There aren’t nearly enough detailed examples.  In fact, the book itself says it’s “a framework, not an answer.”  So you’ll be left wanting a bit more and needing to do a bit more work on your own to translate the wisdom to your reality, but you’ll have a great jumping off point.

Book short:  Life Isn’t Just a Wiki

One of the best things I can say about Remote: Office Not Required,  by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, is that it was short.  That sounds a little harsh – part of what I mean is that business books are usually WAY TOO LONG to make their point, and this one was blessedly short.  But the book was also a little bit of an angry rant against bad management wrapped inside some otherwise good points about remote management.

The book was a particularly interesting read juxtaposed against Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last which I just finished recently and blogged about here, which stressed the importance of face-to-face and in-person contact in order for leaders to most effectively do their jobs and stay in touch with the needs of their organizations.

The authors of Remote, who run a relatively small (and really good) engineering-oriented company, have a bit of an extreme point of view that has worked really well for their company but which, at best, needs to be adapted for companies of other sizes, other employee types, and other cultures.  That said, the flip side of their views, which is the “everyone must be at their cubicle from 9 to 5 each day,” is even dumber for most businesses these days.  As usual with these things, the right answer is probably somewhere in between the extremes, and I was reminded of the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go farm go together” when I read it.  Different target outcomes, different paths.

I totally agree with the authors around their comments about trusting employees and “the work is what matters.”  And we have a ton of flexibility in our work at Return Path.  With 400 people in the company, I personally spend six weeks over the summer working largely remote, and I value that time quite a bit.  But I couldn’t do it all the time.  We humans learn from each other better and treat each other better when we look at each other face to face.  That’s why, with the amount of remote work we do, we strongly encourage the use of any form of video conferencing at all times.  The importance of what the authors dismiss as “the last 1 or 2% of high fidelity” quality to the conversation is critical.  Being in person is not just about firing and hiring and occasional sync up, it’s about managing performance and building relationships.

Remote might have been better if the authors had stressed the value that they get out of their approach more than ranting against the approaches of others.  While there are serious benefits of remote work in terms of cost and individual productivity (particularly in maker roles), there are serious penalties to too much of it as well in terms of travel, communication burden, misunderstandings, and isolation.  It’s not for everyone.

Thanks to my colleague Hoon Park for recommending this to me.  When I asked Hoon what his main takeaway from the book was, he replied:

The importance of open communication that is archived (thus searchable), accessible (transparent and open to others) and asynchronous (doesn’t require people to be in the same place or even the same “timespace”).  I love the asynchronous communication that the teams in Austin have tried: chatrooms, email lists (that anyone can subscribe to or read the archives of), SaaS project management tools. Others I would love to try or take more advantage of include internal blogs (specifically the P2 and upcoming O2 WordPress themes; http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/), GitHub pull requests (even for non-code) and a simple wiki.

These are great points, and good examples of the kinds of systems and processes you need to have in place to facilitate high quality, high volume remote work.

I’ve written a lot over the years about Return Path’s Core Values (summary post with lots of links to other posts here).  And I’ve also written and believe strongly that there’s a big difference between values, which are pretty unchanging, and culture, which can evolve a lot over time.  But I had a couple conversations recently that led me to think more philosophically about a company’s values.

The first conversation was at a recent dinner for a group of us working on fundraising for my upcoming 25th reunion from Princeton.  Our guest speaker was a fellow alumnus who I’ve gotten to know and respect tremendously over the years as one of the school’s most senior and influential volunteer leaders.  He was speaking about the touchstones in his life and in all people’s lives — things like their families, their faith, the causes they’re passionate about, and the institutions they’ve been a part of.  I remember this speaker giving a similar set of remarks right after the financial crisis hit in early 2009.  And it got me thinking about the origins of Return Path’s values, which I didn’t create on my own, but which I obviously had a tremendous amount of influence over as founder.  Where did they come from?  Certainly, some came from my parents and grandparents.  Some came from my primary and secondary education and teachers.  Some came from other influences like coaches, mentors, and favorite books.  Although I’m not overly observant, some certainly came from Hebrew school and even more so from a deep reading of the Bible that I undertook about 15 years ago for fun (it was much more fun than I expected!).  Some came from other professional experiences before I started Return Path.  But many of them either came from, or were strongly reinforced by my experience at Princeton.  Of the 15 values we currently articulate, I can directly tie at least seven to Princeton:  helpful, thankful, data-driven, collaborative, results-oriented, people first, and equal in opportunity.  I can also tie some other principles that aren’t stated values at Return Path, but which are clearly part of our culture, such as intellectually curious, appreciative of other people’s points of view, and valuing an interdisciplinary approach to work.

As part of my professional Reboot project, this was a good reminder of some of the values I know I’ve gotten from my college experience as a student and as an alumni, which was helpful both to reinforce their importance in my mind but also to remember some of the specifics around their origins – when and why they became important to me.  I could make a similar list and trade and antecedents of all or at least most of our Company’s values back to one of those primary influences in my life.  Part of Reboot will be thinking through all of these and renewing and refreshing their importance to me.

The second conversation was with a former employee who has gone on to lead another organization.  It led me to the observation I’ve never really thought through before, that as a company, we ourselves have become one of those institutions that imprints its values into the minds of at least some of its employees…and that those values will continue to be perpetuated, incorporated, and improved upon over time in any organization that our employees go on to join, manage part of, or lead.

That’s a powerful construct to keep in mind if you’re a new CEO working on designing and articulating your company’s values for the first time.  You’re not just creating a framework to guide your own organization.  You’re creating the beginning of a legacy that could potentially influence hundreds or thousands of other organizations in the future.

I was trading emails a few weeks ago Elliot Noss from Tucows about the current state of the economy after being on a panel together about it, and he wrote:

The market is fascinating right now. Heated competition AND layoffs and hiring freezes. It feel like an old European hotel where there are two faucets, one is too hot and the other too cold.

While a quick rant about European hotel bathrooms could be fun…we’ll just stick to the sink analogy. As anyone who has ever tried to use one of these sinks that Elliot describes knows, they’re hard to use and illogical. Sure, sometimes you want freezing water and sometimes you want scalding water (I guess), but often, you want something in between. And the only way to achieve that is to turn on both freezing and scalding at the same time? That’s weird.

Then I was on another email thread recently with a group of CEOs, when John Henry from Ride With Loop said this:

Whatever the climate, we all surely agree there is no bad time to build a good business.

How true that is!

But here’s the worrisome part. It’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen next. We are in uncharted territory here with a land war in Europe, a partial global oil embargo of a top tier oil producer, a pandemic, supply chain problems, etc. etc. There are days and circumstances where everything feels normal. Plenty of businesses, especially in the tech sector, are kicking ass. And yet there are days and circumstances that feel like 2001 or 2009. It’s tough to navigate as a startup CEO. Yes, it’s obvious you should try to have a couple years of cash on hand, and that you should be smart about investments and not get too far ahead of revenue if you’re in certain sectors (presumably if you’re in an R&D intensive field and weren’t planning to have revenue for years on end, life isn’t all that different?). But beyond that, there’s no clear playbook.

And that’s where the worrisome line comes in. I saw Larry Summers on Meet the Press last weekend, who predicted that

a recession would come in late 2023.

Wait, what? Aren’t things messed up now? Yes, inflation is high, the stock market is down, and interest rates are creeping up. But the economy is still GROWING. Unemployment is still LOW. Summers’ point is a reminder that contraction is likely, but it may still be a ways off, it depends how the Fed handles interest rate hikes (and about a zillion other things), and it’s impossible to predict. That was more worrisome to me. If we’re navigating choppy waters now, it may not just be for a couple of quarters. It may be that 4-6 quarters from now, we are in for 2-3 quarters of contraction. That is a more than most companies are able to plan for from a cash perspective.

Frothy macro environments lead to bad businesses getting created, too many lookalike businesses popping up, or weak teams getting funded. When the tide goes out, as they say, you can see who is swimming naked. But if you’re building a good business, one that has staying power and a clear value proposition, with real people or clients paying real money for a real product or service, and if you’re serious about building a good company, keep on keeping on. Be smart about key decisions, especially investment decisions, but don’t despair or give up.

We’ll all get through this.

Firsts, Still

After more than 13 years in the job, I run into “firsts” less and less often these days.  But in the past week, I’ve had three of them. They’re incredibly different, and it’s awkward to write about them in the same post, but the “firsts” theme holds them together.

One was incredibly tragic — one of our colleagues at Return Path died suddenly and unexpectedly.  Even though we’ve lost two other employees in the last 18 months to cancer, there was something different about this one.  While there’s no good way to die, the suddenness of Joel’s passing was a real shock to me and to the organization, and of course more importantly, to his wife.

The second was that I came face to face with a judge in the state of Delaware for the first time around some litigation we’re in the middle of now.  While I can’t comment on this for obvious reasons, you never think when you decide to incorporate in Delaware that a trip to a courthouse in Wilmington is in your future.

The third, which can only be described as bittersweet, is that we had our first long-time employee retire!  Now THAT’S something you never think about when you run a startup.  But Sophie Miller Audette, one of our first 20 employees going back to 2000 and the sixth longest tenured person at the company today, has decided to retire and move on to other adventures in her already rich life.  A quick search on my blog reveals that I’ve blogged about Sophie three times since I started OnlyOnce 9 years ago (as of next week).  The first time was in 2004 when I quoted her memorable line, “In my next life, I want to come back as a client.”  The second and third times were in 2005 and were about the company’s commitment to helping to find a cure for Multiple Sclerosis, which Sophie was diagnosed with almost 10 years ago now.  Sophie has been an inspiration to many of us for a long time, and while we’ll miss her day-to-day, she’ll always be part of the Return Path family.  Picture of her, me, and Anita at her “retirement dinner” earlier this week below.

I always say that one of the best parts about being in this job for this long is that there are always new challenges and new opportunities to learn and grow.  The last couple weeks, full of firsts, proved the point!

Welcome to the new StartupCEO.com!

I started writing this blog in May of 2004 with an objective of writing about the experience of being a first-time entrepreneur — a startup CEO — inspired by a blog post written by my friend, long-time Board member and mentor Fred Wilson entitled “You’re only a first time CEO once.”  The blog and the receptivity I got along the way from fellow startup CEOs encouraged me to write a book called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, which was originally published in 2013 and then again as a second edition last year in 2020.

Today I am relaunching the blog as StartupCEO.com both to reflect that relevance of that brand as the book continues to get good traction in the startup ecosystem, and to reflect the fact that I’m now on my second startup as CEO, so “Only Once” doesn’t seem so fitting any more.

The web site has a very minimalist design – and I realize many of you read posts on either RSS or email — those will still operate the same as they have been (no new RSS feed).

As I approach the first anniversary of starting our new company, Bolster, where we help startup CEOs scale their teams, themselves, and their boards, I am recommitting to this blog and will try to post at least once a week.  Because there is a lot of overlap between this blog and Bolster’s blog (which I’d encourage you to subscribe to here either by email or RSS), posts will occasionally show up on both blogs, or I’ll put digests of Bolster blog posts here.  

But the Bolster blog will be broader and will also have many additional authors besides me, while this blog will remain distinct about some of the experiences I’m having as a startup CEO.

I realize I haven’t posted much lately.  As you may know, the title of this blog, OnlyOnce, comes from a blog post written by my friend and board member Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures entitled You Are Only a First-Time CEO Once, which he wrote back in 2003 or 2004.  That inspired me to create a blog for entrepreneurs and leaders.  I’ve written close to 1,000 posts over the years, and the book became the impetus for a book that another friend and board member Brad Feld from Foundry Group encouraged me to write and helped me get published called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business back in 2013.

Today is a special day in my entrepreneurial journey and in the life of the company that I started back in 1999 (last century!), Return Path, as we announce that Return Path has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an exciting new company called Validity.  Press release is here.

Over almost 20 years, we’ve built Return Path into one of the largest and (I think) most respected companies in the email industry.  We’ve had a culture of innovation that has led to some groundbreaking products for our customers and partners to help make email marketing work better for consumers as well as marketers, and to help keep inboxes safe and clean for mailbox providers and security companies.  

But the company is unusual in many respects.  One of those is longevity. I’m not sure how many Internet companies started in 1999 are still private, backed and led by the same team the whole time, and generally in the same business they started in.  Another is our values-driven “People First” culture. From Day 1, we have believed that if we attract and retain and develop and invest in the best people, we will make our customers successful with great products and service, and that if we do right by our customers, we will do right long term by our shareholders.  While I know that not every employee who ever walked through our doors had a great experience, I know most did and hope that all of them realize we tried our best. Finally, I’m proud that our company gave birth to a non-profit affiliate Path Forward a few years back at the hands of executives Andy Sautins, Cathy Hawley, and Tami Forman.  Path Forward helps parents get back to work after a career break and helps companies improve their gender diversity and hiring biases and has already been a game changer for dozens of companies and hundreds of women.

Today, Return Path serves almost 4,000 customers in almost every country on the globe, with $100 million in revenue, profitable, and excited about the next leg of our brands’ and our products’ lives in the care of Validity.  If you haven’t heard of Validity before today, watch out – you will hear a LOT about them in the weeks and months ahead. They are an incredibly exciting new company with a vision to help tens of thousands of companies across the globe improve their data quality but also help them use data to improve business results.  That vision, inspired by a new friend, CEO Mark Briggs, is a wonderful fit for Return Path’s products and services and people.

To finish this post where I started, Fred’s exact words in that post which got this blog going were:

What does this mean for entrepreneurs and managers? It means that the first time you run a business, you should admit what you are up against. Don’t let ego get in the way. Ask for help from your board and get coaching and mentoring. And recognize that you may fail at some level. And don’t let the fear of failure get in the way. Because failure isn’t fatal. It may well be a required rite of passage.

All of that is true and has been great advice for me over the years.  But Fred left out one important piece, which is that entrepreneurs need to constantly thank the people around them who either work their butts off as colleagues in the business or who give them helpful advice and coaching.  Return Path’s journey has been a long one, longer than most, and the full list of people to thank is too long for a blog post.

I’ve noted Fred and Brad in this post already and I want to thank them and also thank Greg Sands from Costanoa Ventures, the third member of our “dream team” investor syndicate, for their friendship and unwavering support and good counsel for me and Return Path for almost two decades, as well as many other board members we’ve had over the years including long-time independent directors Jeff Epstein, Scott Petry, and Scott Weiss.

I want to thank my co-founders Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey, and anyone who has ever been on my executive team, including long-time execs Ken Takahashi, Shawn Nussbaum, Cathy Hawley, Dave Wilby, Anita Absey, Angela Baldonero, Andy Sautins, Louis Bucciarelli, Mark Frein, and David Sieh.  There’s nothing quite like being in the proverbial foxhole with someone during a battle or two or ten to forge a tight bond. I want to thank Andrea Ponchione, my extraordinary assistant for 14 years, who keeps me running, sane, and smiling every day. I want to thank my executive coach Marc Maltz and the members of my CEO Forum for allowing me to be unplugged and for their friendship and advice.  I want to thank all of Return Path’s 430 employees today and over 1,300 ever for their hard work in building our company and culture together and for our 4,000 customers and partners for putting their faith in us to help them solve some of their biggest challenges with email.

Finally, no thank you list for this journey would be complete without saying a special thank you to my wonderful wife Mariquita and kids Casey, Wilson, and Elyse.  They deserve some kind of special honor for being inspirational cabin-mates on the entrepreneurial roller coaster without ever being asked if they were up for it.

This event may inspire me to begin writing more regularly again on OnlyOnce.  Stay tuned!

(This post is running concurrently on the Return Path blog.)

It is now widely understood that the Internet runs on data. I first blogged about this in 2004—14 years ago!— here.  People have come to expect a robust—and free!—online experience. Whether it’s a shopping app or a social media platform like Instagram, these free experiences provide a valuable service. And like most businesses, the companies that provide these experiences need to make money somehow. Consumers are coming to understand and appreciate that the real cost of a “free” internet lies in advertising and data collection.

Today, the Wall Street Journal ran an article exploring the data privacy practices of Google and some of the third party developers who utilize their G Suite ecosystem. Return Path was among the companies mentioned in this article. We worked closely with the journalist on this piece and shared a great deal of information about the inner workings of Return Path, because we feel it’s important to be completely transparent when it comes to matters of privacy.  Unfortunately, the reporter was extremely and somewhat carelessly selective in terms of what information he chose to use from us — as well as listing a number of vague sources who claimed to be “in the know” about the inner workings of Return Path. We know that he reached out to dozens of former employees via LinkedIn, for example, many of whom haven’t worked here in years.

While the article does not uncover any wrongdoings on our part (in fact, it does mention that we have first-party relationships with and consent from our consumers), it does raise a larger privacy and security concern against Google for allowing developer access to Gmail’s API to create email apps. The article goes on to explain that computers scan this data, and in some rare cases, the data is reviewed by actual people. The article mentions a specific incident at Return Path where approximately 8,000 emails were manually reviewed for classification. As anyone who knows anything about software knows, humans program software – artificial intelligence comes directly from human intelligence.  Any time our engineers or data scientists personally review emails in our panel (which again, is completely consistent with our policies), we take great care to limit who has access to the data, supervise all access to the data, deploying a Virtual Safety Room, where data cannot leave this VSR and all data is destroyed after the work is completed.

I want to reaffirm that Return Path is absolutely committed to data security and consumer data privacy. Since our founding in 1999, we’ve kept consumer choice, permission, and transparency at the center of our business. To this end, we go above and beyond what’s legally required and take abundant care to make sure that:

1. Our privacy policy is prominently displayed and written in plain English;
2. The user must actively agree to its terms (no pre-checked boxes); and
3. A summary of its main points is shown to every user at signup without the need to click a link

While a privacy expert quoted in the article (and someone we’ve known and respected for years) says that he believes consumers would want to know that humans, not only computers, might have access to data, we understand that unfortunately, most consumers don’t pay attention to privacy policies and statements, which is precisely why we developed succinct and plain-English “just-in-time” policies years before GDPR required them. When filling out a form people may not think about the impact that providing the information will have at a later date. Just-in-time notices work by appearing on the individual’s screen at the point where they input personal data, providing a brief message explaining how the information they are about to provide will be used, for example:

It’s disappointing to say the least that the reporter called this a “dirty secret.”  It looks pretty much the opposite of a secret to me.

In addition to our own policies and practices, Return Path is deeply involved in ongoing industry work related to privacy. We lead many of these efforts, and maintain long-term trusted relationships with numerous privacy associations. Our business runs on data, and keeping that data secure is our top priority.

Further, I want to address the scare tactics employed by this journalist, and many others, in addressing the topics of data collection, data security, and who has access to data. It’s common these days to see articles that highlight the dangers that can accompany everyday online activities like downloading an app or browsing a retail website. And while consumers certainly have a responsibility to protect themselves through education, it’s also important to understand the importance of data sharing, open ecosystems, and third party developers.  And more than that, it’s important to draw distinctions between companies who have direct relationships with and consent from consumers and ones who do not.

While they may not be top of mind, open ecosystems that allow for third-party innovation are an essential part of how the internet functions. Big players like Facebook and Google provide core platforms, but without APIs and independent developers, innovation and usability would be limited to big companies with significant market power and budgets—to the detriment of consumers. Think about it—would Facebook have become as wildly popular without the in-app phenomenon that was Farmville? Probably, but you get the point: third party applications add a new level of value and usefulness that a platform alone can’t provide.

Consumers often fall into the trap of believing that the solution to all of their online worries is to deny access to their data. But the reality is that, if they take steps like opting out of online tracking, the quality of their online experience will deteriorate dramatically. Rather than being served relevant ads and content that relates to their browsing behaviors and online preferences, they’ll see random ads from the highest bidder. Unfortunately some companies take personalization to an extreme, but an online experience devoid of personalization would feel oddly generic to the average consumer.

There’s been a lot of attention in the media lately—and rightfully so—about privacy policies and data privacy practices, specifically as they relate to data collection and access by third parties. The new GDPR regulations in the EU have driven much of this discussion, as has the potential misuse of private information about millions of Facebook users.

One of Return Path’s core values is transparency, including how we collect, access and use data.  Our situation and relationship with consumers is different from those of other companies. If anyone has additional questions, please reach out.

Startup CEO (OnlyOnce – the book!)

One of the things I’ve often thought over the years since starting Return Path in 1999 is that there’s no instruction manual anywhere for how to be a CEO.  While big company CEOs are usually groomed for the job for years, startup CEOs aren’t…and they’re often young and relatively inexperienced in business in general.  That became one of the driving forces behind the creation of my blog, OnlyOnce (because “you’re only a first time CEO once”) back in 2004.

Now, over 700 blog posts later, I’m excited to announce that I’m writing a book based on this blog called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Building and Running Your Company.  The book is going to be published by Wiley & Sons and is due out next summer.  The book won’t just be a compendium of blog posts, but it will build on a number of the themes and topics I’ve written about over the years and also fill in lots of other topics where I haven’t.

The catalyst for writing this book was Brad Feld.  Brad has been a friend, mentor, investor, and Board member for over a decade.  We’ve had many great times, meals, and conversations together over the years, not the least of which was staggering across the finish line together at the New York City Marathon in 2005.  Brad started writing books a few years ago, and I’ve been peripherally involved with them, first with Do More Faster:  TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup (I contributed one of the chapters) and then with Venture Deals:  Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist (I wrote all the “Entrepreneur Perspective” sidebars).

Those are great books, and they’ve been incredibly well received by the global entrepreneurial community.  But then Brad got the bug, and now he’s in the middle of writing FOUR new books with Wiley that will all come out over the next year.  They are:

• Startup Communities:  Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
• Startup Life:  Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur
• Startup Metrics:  Making Sense of the Numbers in Your Startup
• Startup Boards:  Reinventing the Board of Directors to Better Support the Entrepreneur

These four books, plus the two earlier ones, plus Startup CEO, are all part of the Startup Revolution series.  While I’ll continue to do most of my blogging and posting here on OnlyOnce, I’d also encourage you to check out the Startup Revolution site and sign up to be a member of that community.  I’ll be doing some things on that site as well in connection with Startup CEO, and it’s a more concentrated place to post and comment on all things Startup.  In addition, we’ll be putting a bunch of add-ons to the book on that site closer to publication time.

I hope Startup CEO becomes a standard for all new CEOs.  I don’t think I have all the answers, but at least others can benefit by learning from my 13 years of successes and mistakes!  Now all I have to do is go write the darned thing.

9/11’s 10th

I wasn’t yet writing this blog on 9/11 (no one was writing blogs yet), and if I had had one, I’m not sure what I would have written.  The neighborhood immediately surrounding the World Trade Center had been my home for more than seven years before the twin towers fell, and it continued to be my home for more than seven years after they fell.  That same neighborhood was Return Path‘s home for its first 18 months or so, across two different offices.  Like all Americans, the attack felt personal.  Like all New Yorkers, it was in our face.  But it hit home in a different way for those of us who lived and worked in Lower Manhattan.

For the seven years after the attacks, I stopped by Ground Zero on the morning of 9/11 to reflect and memorialize the event.  I won’t be doing that this year — between living outside the city, the kids, and the likely overwhelming crowds, it doesn’t make sense.  So this post will have to suffice as this year’s reflection on the 10th anniversary of that awful day.

My memories from that day and the weeks that followed are a little jumbled now, as memories often are.  The things I remember most vividly, both personal and professional, are:

• The smell and the smoke.  Up until the New Year, over 3 months after the attacks, a plume of smoke was rising from Ground Zero, and the air had a putrid smell of burning everything — building materials, fuel, fragments of life
• I had left the city that morning to drive to a meeting in Danbury, Connecticut at Pittney-Bowes with our then head of sales, Dave Paulus.  We both received calls on our cell phones at the same instant from Mariquita and Pam telling us to turn on the news, that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.  For a while, everyone assumed it was an accident.  We continued with our meeting, although it kept getting interrupted with more bad news coming in via our senior contact’s assistant, until she wheeled a TV into the conference room so we could watch for ourselves
• I couldn’t get back into the city that night, so Dave and I crashed at my Grandma Hazel’s house in Westchester.  When I finally did get home, Mariquita and I met up and stayed with our friends Christine and Andrew on the upper west side and listened all night to the fighter planes cruising up and down the Hudson River, sentries on patrol
• When we finally could go back to our apartment, we had to go on foot from Canal Street south, and we had to show proof of residence (in our case, a copy of our lease) to get past the military guards.  With no traffic allowed and no subways running in Lower Manhattan for a week or two, the streets had an eerie emptiness about them.  The prevalence of national guardsmen and NYPD patrols toting machine guns made it feel like a war zone
• At work, where the Internet 1.0 meltdown was still in process, we were in the middle of negotiating a life-saving financing and acquisition of Veripost with Eric Kirby and George.  We hit the pause button on everything, but we picked back up and dusted ourselves off within a day and got those deals done within a few weeks and saved the company
• We had one junior employee in our New York office who got into his car on the afternoon of 9/11, drove to New Hampshire, and never contacted us again.  Just completely blew a fuse and dropped out.  It wasn’t until we tracked down his parents a few days later that we even knew he was safe and sound
• I was fortunate not to lose anyone close in the attacks, but my friend Morten lost over a dozen close friends who were all traders from his town in New Jersey.  He attended every single funeral.  How he got through that (and how others got through their many losses) remains beyond my comprehension, even today

The only thing I have really blogged about over the years related to 9/11 was my post Morning in Tribeca in 2004 when the skeleton of WTC7, the first rebuilt building, was going up.  Now that the Freedom Tower is rising, it finally feels like the Ground Zero site has great forward momentum and will in fact be fully renewed in a few years once the bulk of this construction is done and the tenants have moved in.  That will be a great day for New York, and for America.

Americans have long operated under an unwritten deal with media companies (for our purposes here, let’s call this the Old Media Deal). The Old Media Deal is simple: we hate advertising, but we are willing to put up with an amazing amount of it in exchange for free or cheap content, and occasionally one of those ads slips through to the recesses of our brain and influences us in some way that old school marketers who trade in non-addressable media can only dream of. Think about it:

– 30 minutes of Friends has 8 minutes of commercials (10 in syndication!)
– The New York Times devotes almost 75% of its total column inches to ads
– We get 6 songs in a row on the radio, then 5 minutes of commercials
– The copy of Vogue‘s fall fashion issue on my mom’s coffee table is about 90% full page ads

The bottom line is, advertising doesn’t bug us if it’s not too intrusive and if there’s something in it for us as consumers.

Since I started working in “New Media” in 1994, I’ve thought we had a significantly different New Media Deal in the works. The New Media deal is that we as American consumers are willing to share a certain amount of personal information in exchange for even better content, more personalized services, or even more targeted marketing — again, as long as those things aren’t too intrusive and provide adequate value. Think about how the New Media Deal works:

– We tell Yahoo that we like the Yankees and that we own MSFT stock in order to get a personalized home page
– We tell Drugstore.com what personal health products we buy so we can buy our Q-tips and Benadryl more quickly
– We tell The New York Times on the Web our annual income in order to get the entire newspaper online for free
– We let PayTrust know how much money we spend each month so that we can pay our bills more efficiently
– We let Google scan our emails to put ads in in them based on the content to get a free email account
– We give their email address out to receive marketing offers (even in this day and age of spam) by the millions every day

Anyway, after a few years of talking somewhat circuitously about this New Media Deal, my colleague Tami Forman showed me some research the other day that backs up my theory, so I thought it was time to share. In a study conducted by ChoiceStream in May 2004, 81% of Internet users expressed a desire for personalized content; 64% said they’d provide insight into their preferences in exchange for personalized product and content recommendations; 56 would provide demographic data for the same; and 40% said they’d even agree to more comprehensive clickstream and transaction monitoring for the same. All of these responses were stronger among younger users but healthy among all users. Sounds like a New Media Deal to me.

Don’t get me wrong — I still think there’s a time and a place for anonymity. It’s one of the great things about RSS for certain applications. And privacy advocates are always right to be vigilant about potential and actual abuses of data collection. But I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that we have a New Media Deal, which is that people are willing to sacrifice their anonymity in a heartbeat if the value exchange is there.

P.S. Quite frankly, I wish I could give spammers a little more personalized information sometime. They’re going to email me anyway — they may as well at least tell me to enlarge a part of my body that I actually have.