Gmail, I Don’t Get It, Part III

This is the third in a somewhat drawn-out series of postings on Gmail featuring some interesting data from Return Path’s Email Change of Address service, which captures self-reported address change data from nearly 1 million consumers every month.

The first posting, back when Gmail launched nearly a year ago, was that I didn’t understand the fuss.  This is even more true now that Yahoo is in a “free storage” war with Google.

The second, in November, had some change of address stats reporting that the numbers of people joining Gmail was tiny relative to other ISPs…and also that Gmail was starting to have people switch away from it, but only at the rate of about 1 for every 3 people joining it.

So we have some new updated data now from the first quarter that are even more interesting.  First, the number of people joining Gmail seems to have flattened out over the last couple of months.  Our metric is about 14,000 in each of the last few months (remember, that’s not the whole number, just 14,000 out of our 1 million).  But the flattening is the highlight.  There’s still the same competitive set — lots of Hotmail churn, some Yahoo, very little from AOL and other providers.

Here’s the kicker, though.  At least within our data set, we actually saw more people LEAVE Gmail than join Gmail in February and March.  That surprised me quite a bit.  One side note, about 9% of the change volume for Gmail is people changing from one Gmail account to another.

Is Gmail in trouble?  I doubt it.  But I do continue to wonder if they’ll ever be able to achieve the market share in email that people predicted at the beginning of Gmail.

Doing Well By Doing Good, Part III

In Part I of this series, I blogged about my friend Raj Vinnakota and his amazing adventure starting the SEED School and Foundation in Washington, D.C.  In Part II, I extended the conversation to some of the things we do at Return Path to help make the world a better place — even though our business model is less “inherently virtuous” than that of many other organizations, particularly non-profits.

One thing we did last fall in the wake of the hurricane devastation on the Gulf Coast was pledge to send one or two groups down to New Orleans with Habitat for Humanity to assist in the recovery and reconstruction efforts, giving people the week of paid time off and covering a portion of their travel expenses.  We have six member of the company down there right now.

My colleague Tom Bartel is blogging about the experience every day this week, so far posted here, here, and here.  (And if I had to guess, since this posting will live on the web long after today, I’d say his postings for the next two days will be here and here.)  It’s an amazing story, a grim reminder of both how much damage there is AND how little has been done so far in more than six months since Katrina, and Tom chronicles it well.

I’m incredibly proud of our whole team down there — Tom, Stephanie Miller, Dan Deneweth, Melinda Plemel, Jeremy McGuire, and Harry Pallick (apparently the group’s Tool Captain — who knew he had that hidden talent?).  Way to go, guys!

UPDATE:  Tom’s final two postings are here and here.

Blogiversary, Part III

OnlyOnce turns three today.  While year 1 was exciting and year 2 was still a build, this year has been more about maintenance.  I don’t mean that in a bad way — I still enjoy writing it, but I am finding it a little tougher to make time for it (probably more a function of other things going on in life).  Also, I periodically catch myself starting some post or other and realizing that I wrote it, or something much like it, sometime in the past!

I think in honor of the third blogiversary, I’ll reinvigorate today by posting three times!

Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part III: The First Debate

Well, there you have it. Both of my first two postings on this subject — Realism vs. Idealism and Admitting Mistakes — came up in last night’s debate.

At one point, in response to Kerry’s attempted criticism of him for expressing two different views on the situation in Iraq, Bush responded that he thought he could — and had to — be simultaneously a realist and an optimist. And a few minutes later, Kerry admitted a mistake and brilliantly turned the tables on Bush by saying something to the effect of “I made a mistake in how I talked about Iraq, and he made a mistake by taking us to war with Iraq — you decide which is worse.”

So each candidate exhibited at least one of the traits of good corporate leadership, but on this front anyway, I think Kerry did a better job last night in turning one of his mistakes into a zinger against his opponent.

Book Short – Blink part III – Undo?

I just finished reading Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, and honestly, I wish I could hit Life’s Undo button and reclaim those hours.  I love Michael Lewis, and he’s one of those authors where if he writes it, I will read it.  But this one wasn’t really worth it for me.

Having said that, I think if you haven’t already read both Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (review, buy) and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (review, buy), then it might be worth it.  But having read those two books, The Undoing Project had too much overlap and not enough “underlap” (to quote my friend Tom Bartel) – that is, not enough new stuff of substance for me.  The book mostly went into the personal relationship between two academic thinkers, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.  It also touched on some of the highlights of their work, which, while coming out of the field of psychology, won them a Nobel prize in Economics for illuminating some of the underlying mechanics of how we make decisions.

The two most interesting pieces of their work to me, which are related in the book, are:

First, that human decision-making is incredibly nuanced and complex, and that at least 25% of the time, the transitive property doesn’t apply.  For example, I may prefer coffee to tea, and I may prefer tea to hot chocolate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I prefer coffee to hot chocolate.

From the book, “When faced with complex multidimensional alternatives, such as job offers, gambles or [political] candidates, it is extremely difficult to utilize properly all the available information.” It wasn’t that people actually preferred A to B and B to C and then turned around and preferred C to A. It was that it was sometimes very hard to understand the differences. Amos didn’t think that the real world was as likely to fool people into contradicting themselves as were the experiments he had designed.  And the choice created its own context: Different features might assume greater prominence in the mind when the coffee was being compared to tea (caffeine) than when it was being compared to hot chocolate (sugar). And what was true of drinks might also be true of people, and ideas, and emotions. The idea was interesting: When people make decisions, they are also making judgments about similarity, between some object in the real world and what they ideally want. They make these judgments by, in effect, counting up the features they notice. And as the noticeability of features can be manipulated by the way they are highlighted, the sense of how similar two things are might also be manipulated.”

Second, what Kahneman and Tversky called Prospect Theory, which is basically that humans are more motivated by the fear of loss as opposed to the greed of gain.  I’ve written about the “Fear/Greed Continuum” of my former boss from many years ago before.  I’m not sure he knew about Kahneman and Tversky’s work when he came up with that construct, and I certainly didn’t know about it when I first blogged about it years ago.  Do this experiment – ask someone both of these questions:  Would you rather be handed $500 or have a 50% chance of winning $1,000 and a 50% of getting nothing?  Then, Would you rather hand me $500 or have a 50% chance of owing me $1,000 and a 50% chance of owing me nothing?  Most of the time, the answers are not the same.

For fun, I tried this out on my kids and re-proved Prospect Theory, just in case anyone was worried about it.

Anyway, bottom line on this book – read it if you haven’t ready those other two books, skip it if you have, maybe skim it if you’ve read one of them!

(This is the third post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  First two posts are here and here.)

Friday, March 20, Day 4

• Morning pilates going pretty well, a good daily routine here
• Wellness Screening on the way in for the first time.  Uniformed National Guard guys taking temperature on surface of face/temples.  Can’t get it to work – takes 6x
• Leadership and prioritization of important over urgent – staff the team
• Strategic National Stockpile failure – they send us 60,000 masks and Colorado is using 68,000/day.  They send us ZERO ventilators. Seems like it’s neither strategic nor a stockpile. Guess it really is every state for itself
• Unclear sometimes what the actual role of the state is – sometimes procuring, sometimes getting private sector to procure with some coordination, etc.
• Getting out in front of the parade – the private sector is swarming all over this, how can we help coordinate and channel the energy?
• State gov seems incredibly nimble here – seconding people from departments all over to the crisis, etc.  Bureaucracy is real, but it can melt away in an emergency, or when the governor wants it to. Really impressive
• Going to try DoorDash and see if it’s any different than UberEats.  (It’s not.) Big night.

Saturday, March 21, Day 5

• Saturday but office still 75%
• Wellness Screening again.  Still can’t get thermometer to work for quite a while
• Mike Willis asked for feedback and observations (good) – they are
  • Atmosphere in EOC calm, focused, integrated, SMART, nimble, fast – opposite of “government”
  • Opening meeting on Tuesday morning – calm, focused, caring, quiet urgency
  • Didn’t realize he was military
  • Mentioned yesterday’s “not vetted, not integrated, not helpful” moment, poignant but respectful
• Team pull up, drowning in emails, plan to get organized
• Governor briefing
• Working on replacing me…
• Seamless prioritization of things that are gateway items and enablers.  We have a project tracker, but it’s almost useless. Mostly we are just doing prioritization in the moment.  No choice. Crisis mode
• Gov call – carefully weighing isolation strategy (economic as well as risk of civil disobedience) with number of projected deaths – sounds like the same conversation I’m reading about in the papers at the national level, but really interesting to see it up close and personal. Asked for plan around making food and services safer – super thoughtful “it’s not the economic activity that causes problems, it’s social proximity, are there ways we can keep one and minimize the other?”
• Colorado still has around 500 cases statewide – about ¼ of Westchester County.  Denver has less than 100. Still, feels like we are watching the tsunami coming at us in slow motion
• Dinner at a very close friend’s house who lives in town – elbow bumps and sat at the other end of the table.  Fun and social, but feels like even things like this are about to come to an end. Got to do laundry

Sunday, March 22, Day 6

• Sunday but office still 75%
• Multiple failures again with wellness screen, then we figure it out – on the walk over from the hotel, it’s cold enough that my skin temperature is out of range for the contact thermometers they have.  Since I am coming in early when there is no line, my face is too cold when I get to the front
• Adding staff, nowhere to put them, no organized email lists, working on org charts, have to retool O/S for meetings/tasks.  A little chaotic, but at least I know how to do this stuff
• Finally got connection to NY State to do some benchmarking on testing – doesn’t seem like states coordinate or share info a lot, but the team there was happy to 
• Finally have a few minutes to do planning on major swim lanes
• More working on replacing me
• This is the problem with statistics.  Models are only as good as the inputs, and the inputs here seem like they’re all over the place…not just here in CO, but everywhere.  It’s not like we have a pandemic every year to refine our math
• Interviewing Sarah Tuneberg (came in via Brad) to replace me with Lisa and Stan – she’s AWESOME and she’s hired – starts on the spot by coming in to stand with us behind the Governor at a press conference.  Talk about a rapid recruiting process!
• Seems like she will be awesome.  Probably way better than me – has a ton of public health and emergency/disaster response experience in addition to some private sector/startup/tech experience
• Her first worry never even occurred to me – Fatality Management – morgue surge capacity.  “Gift to the living” – so awesome
• Lameness of Trump press conference – self praise followed by sycophants in the midst of a typhoon
• Gov press conference (here) – authentic and well received.  “Grim reaper” was quite poignant. He worked in the key messages we asked him to about public misinformation of testing, talking points was Google Doc with 30+ people in it – good example of collaboration and control, seamless, last minute but still came out great.  Announces social distancing and lots of good examples about groceries, jogging, still no lockdown
• Lots of RP Colorado people seeing press conference…phone buzzing like mad in my pocket!  So many awesome notes from friends and former colleagues thanking me for being there to help, only one or two snarky comments about my orange tee shirt while others were in blazers (hey, it was a Sunday and the presser was called last minute!)

Stay tuned for more tomorrow…

I’ve written a couple times this past year about our ReturnShip program, which is a 4-month paid internship program designed for women who have been out of the workforce for more than 3 year to re-enter and  build credible and relevant experience, and to expand the talent pool for our organization.  I wrote about the initial concept when we launched v2 of the program, and then again when v2 concluded with the hiring of four of the six participants.

I’m immensely proud of our organization for inventing the program (Andy Sautins, our CTO, gets credit) and for managing it so well during the last cycle (Cathy Hawley, our VP People, and Miranda Reeves, VP Solution Management, get lead credit, but lots of other people had a hand in its success).

Yesterday, we officially launched v3 of the program and are very excited about how it is scaling.  The launch was coincident with a visit to our office by Congressman Jared Polis, who represents our district in Colorado, as part of his Startup Day Across America visit to the district, which was exciting for us.

v3 of the program is poised to take the concept to the next level.  We will have almost 40 Returnees in the program – but we’ve taken the program beyond Return Path and beyond our Colorado office.  We are going to place Returnees in five locations – Broomfield, Colorado, New York City, Austin, Indianapolis, and London – and we recruited five like-minded partner companies to join the program as well.  SendGrid, ReadyTalk, MWH Global, and SpotXchange will participate in the program in the Denver area, and Seattle-based Moz will participate as well.  We are still going to administer the program out of Return Path, with Andy and Cathy being joined by Katie Green from our People team as well as Laura Harrison, one of our v2 Returnees, as program manager (among others).

We are starting the recruiting cycle now for the program, which starts mid-October.  While we are getting a centralized web site up and running, in the meantime, you can see the available openings on the respective company web sites:

• ReturnPath @ http://bit.ly/1PhaweF
• MWH Global @ http://bit.ly/1JfHUgz
• SpotXchange @ http://bit.ly/1CPqR22
• Sendgrid  @ http://bit.ly/1CTmjtk
• ReadyTalk @ http://bit.ly/1gu4sU1
• Moz (coming soon)

Here are a couple pictures from our time with Congressman Polis yesterday – one of him and Laura Harrison, Karen Brockwell, and Lisa Stephens (three of our v2 Returnees), and one of me along with representatives of the other participating companies.

I’ve gotten to know a number of Bolster members over the last few years, and one who I have come to appreciate quite a bit is Tim Porthouse. I’m on Tim’s email list, and with his permission, I’m reprinting something he wrote in his newsletter this month on the topic of CEO engagement in politics and current events. As you may know, I’ve written a bunch on this topic lately, with two posts with the same title as this one, Should CEOs wade into Politics (part I here, part II here). Thanks to Tim for having such an articulate framework on this important subject.

Your Leadership Game: “No Comment.”

Should you speak up about news events/ politics?

Most of the time, I say, no!

Startup CEOs feel pressure to speak up on news events: Black Lives Matter, Abortion, LBGTQ+ rights, the conflict in Israel/Palestine, Trump vs. Biden. Many tell me they feel pressured to say something, but are deeply conflicted.

Like you, I am deeply distressed by wars, murder, restrictions on human rights, bias, and hate. But if we feel something, should we say something?

Before you speak up, ask the following questions:

1.      Mission relevance. Is your startup’s success or mission on the line? Are customers or employees directly impacted? Example: It makes sense for Airbnb to advocate when a city tries to ban short-term rentals. It makes sense to advocate for your LBGTQ+ employees when a state tries to restrict their rights.

2.      Moving the needle. Will speaking out change anything? If you “denounce” something or “take a stand,” what really happens? Example: If you have employees in a state banning abortion and you tell them your startup will support them as much as the law allows, this could create great peace of mind for employees. But if your startup does not operate in Ukraine or Russia, then denouncing Russia does little (and Russia does not care!)

3.      Expertise. Do you have a deep understanding of the situation? It’s usually more complicated than it appears, especially at first. Once you speak out, you have painted yourself into a corner you will be forced to defend.

4.      Precedence and equivalence. If you issue a statement about today’s news event, will you react to tomorrow’s event? Why not? Where do you draw the line?Someone will be offended that you spoke up about X but not Y.

5.      Backlash. Are you ready to spend significant time engaging with those who disagree with you?It can get ugly quickly, and mistakes can be costly. Plus, the American public is tiring of business leaders commenting on the news.

6.      Vicarious liability. Who are you speaking for? When you say, “Our startup denounces X”?Does the whole company denounce it? You don’t know, and probably not. Does the Leadership Team? They may feel pressured to support you. What you are really saying is, “I denounce X!” OK, great, then say it to your friends and family. Leave your startup to talk about business.

If your answers are “yes,” – then speak out.

If not, I recommend keeping quiet.

In my opinion, our job is to build great companies, not debate current events.

By not speaking out, you can say, “We don’t talk politics here.” You can shut down any two-sided arguments at work and say, “Let’s get back to work,”removing a big distraction. Remember when employees protested because Google was bidding for Pentagon contracts?

I realize that you will be challenged to make a statement, that, “Saying nothing is unacceptable/ complicit.” But whoever challenges you will only be satisfied if you support their view.

If you still want to speak out, I respect your choice. Some of you will be angry with me for writing this, and I accept that. I’m asking you to think carefully before you make a statement.

I have an end of year work routine that’s a pull-up and self-assessment. I’ve been doing this for years, and I’ve written about its evolution in Part I and Part II of this series.

I’ve always taken a few minutes at this time of the year to ask myself these four questions:

• Am I having fun at work?
• Am I learning and growing as a professional?
• Is my work financially rewarding enough, either in the short-term or in the long-term?
• Am I having the impact I want to have on the world?

If I answer at least 2.5 of these questions as yes, I feel like things are on track. If I am below that, or even at 2.5 sometimes, it’s time for a rethink of what I’m doing or how I’m doing it.

I was having lunch with my friend Bryton, the CEO of Aquabyte, a few weeks back, and that conversation spurred on a 5th question, which I’ll now add to my end of year routine:

• Am I excited about what I’m doing?

I’ve realized now that I’m over two years into the journey at Bolster that there’s a significant value in being really into the subject matter of the business. I thought I was at Return Path…but now I realize that I wasn’t nearly as excited about what I was doing as I could have been. Our work at Bolster of helping founders be more successful is more personally meaningful to me than solving email deliverability challenges. That work had real impact on the world…but I just wasn’t into it as much.

And that makes a big difference in answering the general question of “Am I on track?” at the end of the year. I’ll skip next week and see you all in 2023. Happy New Year and Happy Holidays, everyone!

Book Short:  On The Same Page

Being on the same page with your team, or your whole company for that matter, is a key to success in business.  The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni, espouses this notion and boils down the role of the CEO to four points:

1. Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
2. Create organizational clarity
3. Overcommunicate organizational clarity
4. Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems

Those four points sound as boring as bread, but the book is anything but.  The book’s style is easy and breezy — business fiction.  One of the most poignant moments for me was when the book’s “other CEO” (the one that doesn’t “get it”) reflects that he “didn’t go into business to referee executive team meetings and delivery employee orientation…he loved strategy and competition.”  Being a CEO is a dynamic job that changes tremendously as the organization grows.  This book is a great handbook for anyone transitioning out of the startup phase, or for anyone managing a larger organization.

I haven’t read the author’s other books (this is one in a series), but I will soon!

5 Ways to Get Your Staff on the Same Page

[This post first appeared as an article in Entrepreneur Magazine as part of a new series I’m publishing there in conjunction with my book, Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business]

When a major issue arises, is everybody at your company serving the same interests? Or is one person serving the engineering team, another person serving the sales team, one board member serving the VC fund, another serving the early-stage “angels” and another serving the CEO? If that’s the case, then your team is misaligned. No individual department’s interests are as important as the company’s.

To align everyone behind your company’s interests, you must first define and communicate those goals and needs. This requires five steps:

1. Define the mission. Be clear to everyone about where you’re going and how you’re going to get there (in keeping with your values).
2. Set annual priorities, goals, and targets. Turn the broader mission into something more concrete with prioritized goals and unambiguous success metrics.
3. Encourage bottom-up planning. You and your executive team need to set the major strategic goals for the company, but team members should design their own path to contribution. Just be sure that you or their managers check in with them to assure that they remain in synch with the company’s goals.
4. Facilitate the transparent flow of information and rigorous debate. To help people calibrate the success, or insufficiency, of their efforts, be transparent about how the organization is doing along the way. Your organization will make better decisions when everyone has what they need to have frank conversations and then make well-informed decisions.
5. Ensure that compensation supports alignment (or at least doesn’t fight it). As selfless as you want your employees to be, they’ll always prioritize their interests over the company’s. If those interests are aligned – especially when it comes to compensation – this reality of human nature simply won’t be a problem.

Taken in sequence, these steps are the formula for alignment. But if I had to single out one as the most important, it would be number 5: aligning individual incentives with companywide goals.

It’s always great to hear people say that they’d do their jobs even if they weren’t paid to, but the reality of post-lottery-jackpot job retention rates suggests otherwise. You, and every member of your team, “work” for pay. Whatever the details of your compensation plan, it’s crucial that it aligns your entire team behind the company’s best interests.

Don’t reward marketers for hitting marketing milestones while rewarding engineers to hit product milestones and back office personnel to keep the infrastructure humming. Reward everybody when the company hits its milestones.

The results of this system can be extraordinary:

• Department goals are in alignment with overall company goals. “Hitting product goals” shouldn’t matter unless those goals serve the overall health of your company. When every member of your executive team – including your CTO – is rewarded for the latter, it’s much easier to set goals as a company. There are no competing priorities: the only priority is serving the annual goals.
• Individual success metrics are in alignment with overall company success metrics. The one place where all companies probably have alignment between corporate and departmental goals is in sales. The success metrics that your sales team uses can’t be that far off from your overall goals for the company. With a unified incentive plan, you can bring every department into the same degree of alignment. Imagine your general counsel asking for less extraneous legal review in order to cut costs
• Resource allocation serves the company, rather than individual silos. If a department with its own compensation plan hits its (unique) metrics early, members of that team have no incentive to pitch in elsewhere; their bonuses are secure. But if everyone’s incentive depends on the entire company’s performance, get ready to watch product leads offering to share developers, unprompted.

This approach can only be taken so far: I can’t imagine an incentive system that doesn’t reward salespeople for individual performance. And while everyone benefits when things go well, if your company misses its goals, nobody should have occasion to celebrate. Everybody gets dinged if the company doesn’t meet its goals, no matter how well they or their departments performed. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it also important preventive medicine.