Debunking the Myth of Hiring for Domain Expertise vs. Functional Expertise

As a CEO scaling your business, you’ll invariably want to hire in new senior people from the outside.  Even if you promote aggressively from within, if you’re growing quickly enough, you’ll just need more bodies.  And if you’re growing really fast, you will be missing experience from your employee base that you’ll need to augment.

For years, I’ve thought and heard that there’s a basic tradeoff in hiring senior people — you can hire someone with great domain expertise, or you can hire someone with great functional expertise, but it’s almost impossible to find both in the same person, so you need to figure out which is more important to you.  Would I rather hire someone who knows the X business, or someone who is a great Head of X?  Over the course of the last year, I’ve added four new senior executives to the team at Return Path, and to some extent, I’ve hired people with deep functional expertise but limited domain expertise.  Part of that has been driven by the fact that we are now one of the larger companies in the email space, so finding people who have “been there, done that” in email is challenging.

But the amount of senior hiring I’ve done recently has mostly shown me that the “domain vs. functional” framework, while probably accurate, is misleading if you think of it as the most important thing you have to consider when hiring in senior people from the outside.

What’s more important is finding people who have experience working at multiple growth stages in their prior jobs, ideally the scaling stage that you’re at as a business.  It makes sense if you stop and think about it.  If your challenge is SCALING YOUR BUSINESS, then find someone who has DONE THAT before, or at least find someone who has worked at both small companies and larger companies before.  I suppose that means you care more about functional expertise than domain expertise, but it’s an important distinction.

Looking for a new industrial-strength CFO for your suddenly large business?  Sure, you can hire someone from a Fortune 500 company.  But if that person has never worked in a startup or growth stage company, you may get someone fluent in Greek when you speak Latin.  He or she will show up on the first day expecting certain processes to be in place, certain spreadsheets to be perfect, certain roles to be filled.  And some of them won’t be.  The big company executive may freeze like a deer caught in the headlights, whereas the stage-versatile executive will invariably roll up his or her sleeves and fix the spreadsheet, rewrite the process, hire the new person.  That’s what scaling needs to feel like.

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 was a catchy title I caught in our shared Kindle library at a moment when I wasn’t connected to wifi and had nothing to read. Thanks to Mariquita for buying it…it was a good read.

The book is funny, irreverent, and deep. It speaks a lot about pain and failure and how those can help create resilience. It is also chock full of great anecdotes including a particularly memorable one about Pete Best, the original drummer for the Beatles who got fired by the rest of the band on the eve of their becoming famous.

Here’s one particularly representative quote:

Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it. To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain. In contrast, if you’re able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable.

Every founder would benefit from reading this book. It won’t stop you from giving a f*ck about everything (it can’t), but it might give you a couple tools for not giving a f*ck about some things, which would clear up some mental capacity for other more important things!

Was anyone else as appalled as I am by the contents of Connie Loizos’s recent article, Coming out of COVID, investors lose their taste for board meetings? The stories and quotes in the article about VCs reducing their interest and participation in Board meetings, not showing up, sending the junior associate to cover, etc. are eye opening and alarming if widespread. 

The reasons cited in the article are logical—overextended VCs, Zoom fatigue, and newbie directors. Connie’s note that “privately, VCs admit they don’t add a lot of value to boards” is pretty funny to read as a CEO who has heard a ton of VCs talk about how much value they add to boards (although the good ones DO add a lot of value!).  

For the most part, everything about the substance of this article just made me angry.  

Disengaged or dysfunctional boards aren’t just bad for CEOs and LPs; they’re bad for everyone. If the world has truly become a place where the board meeting is nothing more than a distraction for CEOs, and investors think it’s a tax they can’t afford, then it’s time to hit the reset button on boards and board meetings. 

Here are four things that need to happen in this reset:

VCs need to do their job well or stop doing it. The argument that investors did too many deals in the pandemic so now they don’t have any time is a particularly silly one, since the pandemic reduced the amount of time VCs needed to spend on individual board meetings as well. I used to have four board meetings each year with directors who were traveling for the meetings, having dinners, spending time with the team and sitting in on committee meetings. 

Today, boards are lucky to have one in-person meeting a year (more on that later). And as everything else takes less time, and there’s little transit, any given VC should have doubled the time they spend on board meetings.

Serving on a board post-investment is a central part of the VC role. They have obligations to the founders they back and to the LPs they represent. The entire role is “find deals, execute deals, manage the portfolio.” 

If they no longer have time for the third job, they need to admit that to both founders and LPs before stepping down. If a VC can’t be bothered to focus on minding their investments and adding value, they should work with the company to find their replacement.  

CEOs need to take their job as leader of the board seriously. Would a good CEO just throw their hands up if they found management team meetings boring or a waste of time? No. They’d fix the structure of the team or meetings. If not, they shouldn’t be the CEO. 

It’s no different with boards. Whether or not the CEO is the board chair, they’re the leader of the organization. So, one of the few “must do” items in their job description is leading the board. The board is part of the CEO’s team, just like the management team. 

CEOs get to call the meetings, run the meetings, and insist on attendance. The CEO’s obligation is to make it easy and meaningful for everyone so the board isn’t a tax but rather a secret weapon for the company’s success. As my long-time independent director Scott Weiss used to tell me, boards consume whatever you put in front of them. Garbage in, garbage out. That means paying careful attention to the board materials, to meeting etiquette, and everything in between.

If the CEO doesn’t know how to do that, they should find a CEO mentor who can teach them, observe some well run boards in action through their network, or read Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors, a book I just published along with co-authors and VCs Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani.

Here’s one tip on making Board prep more efficient: work your Operating System and your Board Book formats so you do one set of reporting for the company and management team that is 95% reusable without any changes for your board.

The format for Board meetings needs to evolve. Board meetings need to evolve in our world of hybrid work just as office work needs to evolve. The format that works for in-person can’t just “lift and shift” to Zoom as is, indefinitely.

Here’s how I’m steering my board:

• I insist on one or two “old school” meetings per year, meaning in-person attendance required, half a day long, and including a meal and even an activity. If I’m only going to see my directors together infrequently, I make it mandatory, but I also make it worthwhile and fun.
  
• Remote meetings that happen between the in-person meetings are becoming shorter and tighter. I still send out a lot reading material beforehand, but I make sure to keep the focus on a fixed number of major topics to keep the discussion engaging.
  
• We need a new set of expectations around Zoom meeting etiquette for long meetings. It’s okay to ask people to close their email, browser, and Slack before the meeting starts. If a meeting is more than two hours long, a 15 minute break in the middle is important. Use breakout rooms to mix up topic discussions and working sessions.
  
• I am trying a new meeting format to maximize director conversation and team development. I start every meeting with a director-only session for half an hour that’s not exactly an Executive Session but is more fun and social—usually including a nonwork discussion topic, as if we were sitting around the dinner table having a cocktail. That gets the conversational juices flowing. Then when my team and observers join the meeting, I ask those people to turn their video off, and I ask directors to adjust their Zoom setting to “hide participants not on video” to keep the number of Zoom squares down to the bare minimum. Any time a team member or observer wants to engage in a particular topic, they turn their video on. Then we follow the meeting with Executive Session and Closed Session and a single-director debrief with me. That is a lot of moving pieces to manage, I find that but doing so keeps the meeting fresh and well paced.
  
• Finally, I’m following Fred Wilson’s advice and running a very short survey post-meeting to ask directors basic questions so they can summarize their thinking for me and the team: What are we doing well? What do we need more work on? And did the meeting meet your expectations?

Companies need to Follow the Rule of 1s

The secret to engaged and diverse boards is to mix up their membership more than most companies do. Our Board Benchmark study at Bolster indicates that the vast majority of private company boards have no independent directors at all—only founders and investors—and every year, the vast majority of the “open independent seats” specified in those companies’ charters go unfilled. 

It’s hard work hiring a new independent board member, and it rarely rises to the top of the CEO’s priority list. But the more independent the board is, and the more diverse the board is in every way (in terms of demographics as well as experience and background), the more robust the conversations around the table become, and the more valuable the board is to the CEO.

My Rule of 1s for building highly effective boards is simple:

• Add independent directors to your board on Day 1
• Try to limit your Board to 1 founder/team member
• Then, for every 1 investor on your board,
• Add 1 independent director

A great board is one of a company’s greatest assets. A weak board can kill a company. A mediocre board is just a waste of time. There’s no question that running an effective board, or serving as an effective director, takes serious time and energy and diligence. But that’s not a reason not to try.

(This post first ran on TechCrunch+ and is also running on the Bolster blog)

The Gift of Feedback, Part III

I’ve written about our 360 Review process at Return Path a few times in the past:

• overall process
• process for my review in particular
• update on a process change and unintended consequences of that process change)
• learnings from this year’s process about my staff

And the last two times around, I’ve also posted the output of my own review publicly here in the form of my development plan:

• Here in 2008
• Here in 2009

So here we are again.  I have my new development plan all spruced up and ready to go.  Many thanks to my team and Board for this valuable input, and to Angela Baldonero (my fantastic SVP People and in-house coach), and Marc Maltz of Triad Consulting for helping me interpret the data and draft this plan.  Here at a high level is what I’m going to be working on for the next 1-2 years:

• Institutionalize impatience and lessen the dependency dynamic on me.  What does this mean?  Basically it means that I want to make others in the organization and on my team in particular as impatient as I am for progress, success, reinvention, streamlining and overcoming/minimizing operational realities.  I’ll talk more about something I’ve taken to calling “productive disruption” in a future blog post
• Focus on making every staff interaction at all levels a coaching session.  Despite some efforts over the years, I still feel like I talk too much when I interact with people in the organization on a 1:1 or small group basis.  I should be asking many more questions and teaching people to fish, not fishing for them
• Continue to foster deep and sustained engagement at all levels.  We’ve done a lot of this, really well, over the years.  But at nearly 250 people now and growing rapidly, it’s getting harder and harder.  I want to focus some real time and energy in the months to come on making sure we keep this critical element of our culture vibrant at our new size and stage
• I have some other more tactical goals as well like improving at public speaking and getting more involved with leadership recruiting and management training, but the above items are more or less the nub of it

One thing I know I’ll have to do with some of these items and some of the tactical ones in particular is engage in some form of deliberate practice, as defined by Geoffrey Colvin in his book Talent is Overrated (blog post on the book here).  That will be interesting to figure out.

But that’s the story.  Everyone at Return Path and on my Board – please help me meet these important goals for my development over the next couple of years!

Calling for the Boss’s Head

Maybe it’s just a heightened sense of awareness on my part, but I feel like our culture has really turned up the time-to-fire-the-boss-o-meter to a new level of late.  What is going on that has caused the media and vocal people among us feel this thirst for public lynchings over a single incident?  The list isn’t small — just in recent weeks or months, you have Rumsfeld, Dunn (HP), Gonzales, Imus, Wolfowitz, and even last week, Snyder (Vonage).  And I’m sure there are a dozen others, both corporate and political, that I’m not dredging up mentally here on a Sunday night.

Now I’m all for accountability, believe me, but sometimes it doesn’t help an organization for someone to resign at the top over a single incident.  Jarvis says it best when he says that he would have fired Imus a long time ago because he’s boring and because he’s always been a racist, not because of a few choice words last week.  Should chronic poor performers be dismissed regardless of level?  Absolutely.  Should a leader be forced to step down just to make a point?  I’m much less certain.  In some ways, to carry Jarvis’s theme forward, that kind of dismissal is just a sign to me of lackadaisical oversight along the way, finally coming to a head.

I’m no psychologist, but my guess is that in many cases, a flash dismissal of another otherwise competent leader can pretty bad and traumatic for the underlying organization (be it a company or country).  Consider the alternative — an honest apology, some kind of retribution, and a clear and conspicuous post-mortem — that leaves the ship with its captain and sends the message to the troops that honest mistakes are tolerated as long as they’re not repeated and amends are made.

This in no way is meant to defend the actions of any specifics of the above list.  For many of them, their actions may have prompted an unrecoverable crisis of confidence.  But for my part, I’d rather see regular accountability and transparency, not just at the peaks and troughs.

Saying Goodbye

Seth Godin’s post yesterday of the same title has this good advice for businesses who are shutting down:

It seems to me that you ought to say goodbye with the same care and attention to detail and honesty you use to say hello. You never know when you’ll be back.

The same should be said of companies and employees.  We always try in interviews to be as kind as possible to candidates who we are not going to hire.  I’m sure we don’t always get it right at all levels, but I always make a personal phone call and usually send a handwritten letter to finalists for senior jobs.  Once, when I had to “ding” a candidate for a VP level job who was expecting an offer based on something I said, I even sent him a bottle of his favorite wine.  You don’t have to go to those extremes all the time, but sending a candidate a letter or more formal email or giving him or her a phone call if they’ve taken the time to come in and interview goes a long way towards building your company’s brand as an employer.  And you never know when a candidate who isn’t a fit for one position is a perfect fit for another position.  Calling back is much easier if you say goodbye the right way the first time around.

I try to do the same thing with employees who leave the company, regardless of who terminates the employment relationship.  I do my best to see or at least call the departing employee on or near his last day to thank him for his service and – if appropriate – let him know that the door is always open if he wants to come back someday.

And we ask the same of employees who leave of us – that they say goodbye the right way.  We ask departing employees to give us as much of a heads up as possible that they’re considering looking for a new job (without retribution, of course).  If people have decided to leave, we ask for three weeks’ notice instead of the traditional two or less.  Again, we don’t get this from everyone, but we do get it from many.  And for people’s “lame duck” time, we ask them to stay focused and complete the documentation and transition of their responsibilities in as orderly a manner as possible. 

There’s just no good reason to burn a bridge, even if for whatever reason you feel wronged by an employer or an employee.

Less is More

I have a challenge for the email marketing community in 2009. Let’s make this the Year of “Less is More.”

Marketers are turning to email more and more in this down economy. There’s no question about that. My great fear is that just means they’re sending more and more and more emails out without being smart about their programs. That will have positive short term effects and drive revenues, but long term it will have a negative long term impact on inboxes everywhere. And these same marketers will find their short term positive results turning into poor deliverability faster than you can say “complaint rate spike.”

I heard a wonderful case study this week from Chip House at ExactTarget at the EEC Conference. One of his clients, a non-profit, took the bold and yet painful step of permissioning an opt-out list. Yikes. That word sends shivers down the spine of marketers everywhere. What are you saying? You want me to reduce the size of my prime asset? The results of a campaign done before and after the permission pass are very telling and should be a lesson to all of us. The list shrank from 34,000 to 4,500. Bounce rate decreased from 9% to under 1%. Spam complaints went from 27 to 0 (ZERO). Open rate spiked from 25% to 53%. Click-through from 7% to 22%. And clicks? 509 before the permissioning, 510 after. This client generated the same results, with better metrics along the way, by sending out 87% LESS EMAIL. Why? Because they only sent it to people who cared to receive it.

This is a great time for email. But marketers will kill the channel by just dumping more and more and more volume into it. Let’s all make Less Is More our mantra for the year together. Is everyone in? Repeat after me…Less Is More! Less Is More!

Charting A New Path:  Focus is Our Friend

When Return Path turned six years old a few years ago, I wrote a post on my personal blog (OnlyOnce) titled You Can’t Tell What the Living Room Looks Like from the Front Porch. The essence of the post is that flexibility is a key success factor in starting and growing a business, and sometimes the business turns out different than what you thought when you wrote that business plan. At the time, I was commenting on how different Return Path turned out – operating five businesses – than we did when we started the original ECOA business in 1999.

Today, the message rings more true than ever. On the heels of our recent announcement that we have acquired our largest competitor in the deliverability space, Habeas, we announced a series of moves internally that chart a very new path forward for the company. We are:

• selling our ECOA business to FreshAddress, Inc., our long-time esteemed competitor in the email list hygiene and updating business;
• spinning out our Authentic Response market research business and our Postmaster Direct lead generation, list rental, and online media brokerage business into a new company called Authentic Response; and
• combining our Strategic Solutions consulting business in with the consulting portion of our Sender Score deliverability and whitelisting business to form a new, powerful global professional services team inside of Return Path

The title of this post says it all. Focus is Our Friend. Return Path and Authentic Response will be able to concentrate on their respective businesses, with more focus and resources to get the job done in the high quality, innovative way each has become known for.

Look for each business to come out with more exciting announcements in the weeks and months ahead as they begin to execute more swiftly as independent, focused companies. We wish our new partner – FreshAddress – well with the ECOA businesses that they’ve acquired from us. It’s hard to let go of one’s original business. I will have to blog about that separately sometime soon. We want to thank our dedicated clients and employees for their once and future contributions as we chart this new path forward.

You never do know what the living room looks like from the front porch.

Onward!

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

Why Publishing Will Never Be the Same, Part II

In Part I of this series, I talked about our experience at Return Path publishing a book back in January through a new type of print-on-demand, or self-publishing house called iUniverse and why I thought the publishing industry was in for a long, slow decline unless it changes its ways.

We had another interesting experience with iUniverse more recently that reinforces this point.  It turns out, although iUniverse is mainly a “self publisher,” they also have a traditional publishing model called their Star Program, which includes an editorial review process.  The good news for us is that they contacted us and said they liked our book so much, and sales are strong enough, that they’ve given it an Editors’ Choice and Readers’ Choice notation and they want to put it in the Star Program.  That was very exciting!  I mean, who doesn’t want to be a star?  The bad news is that the traditional model isn’t particularly compelling.  This is the deal they’ve offered:

– A 3-year exclusive for them (our current contract is non-exclusive)

– Diminished control over the IP

– Diminished royalties

– iUniverse would re-publish the book, which means (a) it would become unavailable for 6 months before the re-launch, (b) they would give it a new cover and re-edit the book, (c) we could revise the content if we want, and (d) they’d have control over all final decisions around the editorial and cover

– iUniverse would do more active marketing of the book

Ok, so this could be a compelling deal, if the “more active marketing” was really going to move the needle for us.  So we asked more about what that gets us.  The answer:

– Sending the book out for reviews (we did this within our industry but certainly not by broader business press, although we probably could do so on our own)

– Setting up book signing events (hard to imagine this is interesting for a business how-to book like this)

– Setting up interview or radio appearances (again, we did this in-industry but not broader)

– Introducing us to the buyer from Barnes & Noble retail stores (success rate unknown – too early to tell in the program’s life)

The folks at iUniverse had no idea what we could even project in terms of increased sales from these activities.  When we pushed on this a little bit more on the tangible benefits of marketing, their end comment was “the most successful books are the ones where the authors are out actively promoting them.”

We haven’t made a decision on this one yet.  Their support is probably valuable on balance, the change in royalty structure isn’t material, and assuming we could carve out the IP issues to our satisfaction, it could be a good way to issue a second edition with less cost.  The in-store presence is really the wild card that could really tip the scales.

But the lure of legitimacy (e.g., someone else published it with an editorial review process, we didn’t just pay to play) is the biggest thing in iUniverse’s favor on this one, and that’s what I have to imagine will decrease over time for the publishing industry as it becomes easier and easier for individuals to publish content, market it, and establish credibility by having other individuals rate and review it.

Thanks to my colleague Tami Forman for her assistance on these postings (and for managing the book project!).  Tami is too modest to tell anyone, but she is a wonderful writer and has a blog that she updates not nearly often enough on food — she used to be the food editor for iVillage.