Today, we are announcing the big news that my company, Return Path, has acquired NetCreations, Inc. Since there ought to be some small perk for subscribing to a CEO’s ramblings on a blog or via RSS, I thought I’d give everyone here the heads up before the news hits the wire tomorrow. (I am fully aware that this is also an excuse for a rare bit of self-promotion, so my apologies in advance.) We are very excited about this move. It puts, under one roof, a great client base and an unparalleled collection of advanced, ROI-generating email services: customer acquisition, customer retention, delivery assurance, and quick turnaround market research. Most marketers and publishers we talk to say the two hardest…
Archives / June, 2004
Starbucks, Starbucks, Everywhere
A while ago, Fred Wilson wrote a posting about the incredible ubiquity Starbucks has achieved in recent years. I wrote a comment at the time, but I never know who actually reads blog comments other than the author. The comment was: Talk about ubiquity…my wife and I were just travelling in Asia and saw many Starbucks there, which was not a surprise. The one that WAS a surprise, however, which completely blew me away, was the Starbucks located in the middle of the Forbidden City/Imperial Palace in Beijing, the 600+ year old home of China’s emperors from the Ming and Qing Dynasties. To be fair, it was tastefully done (no big green awning), and if it weren’t in its particular…
It’s Official – There’s a Blog About Everything
Well, not everything yet, but that day is getting closer. Jack, my VP Finance and an avid blog reader (but not yet publisher) pointed me to Beyond Bullets, a relatively new blog about Powerpoint written by Cliff Atkinson, described in his bio as “a leading authority on Powerpoint and organizational communications.” Who knew such an expert existed? The blog is pretty good and worth reading for people who regularly design and give stand-up presentations and are tired of the same old, same old Powerpoint templates. I read through most of the postings so far, and while some are a little esoteric, many of the tips are great. Most are either about the actual software and things you can do with…
Doing Well by Doing Good
I went to an amazing event this weekend. One of my close friends, Raj Vinnakota, started an education foundation about 7 years ago in Washington, D.C., called the SEED Foundation. The foundation’s first venture is the nation’s first urban public charter boarding school, located in the Anacostia section of town and dedicated to providing a college prep environment for kids who otherwise might not even finish high school in the inner city of D.C. The school has had a tremendous amount of national recognition, from Oprah, to Time, to Good Morning America, to Newsweek. The school has now been up and running for six years, starting with a group of seventh graders back in 1998, and this Saturday, that first…
Good Question – How's the Blog Working Out So Far?
My dad, one of the smartest people I know, asked me a good question last week. “How’s the blog working out so far?” My answer was generally “I’m not sure,” but as I thought about it more, I saw “good” coming from four different categories, in order of importance to me: Thinking: One of the best things publishing a blog has done has been to force me to spend a few minutes here and there thinking about issues I encounter in a more structured way and crystallizing my point of view on them. Invaluable, but mostly for me. Employees: A number of my employees read it, although I’m not exactly sure who since RSS is anonymous. I know this is…
Breaking Up is Hard to Do
Fred Wilson has a great posting today about how as a VC, it’s important to tell CEOs the truth when you don’t fund them so they can learn from the experience. As someone who’s been dinged by his share of VC’s (although not yet by Fred), I completely agree. He drew a great comparison to a conversation he had with a woman on an airplane about telling someone she didn’t want to go on a second date with him. I’ve always felt that as a manager, firing someone is a lot like breaking up with a significant other. As the song says, Breaking Up is Hard to Do! This is particularly true when the person is either a long-time employee…
FTC on Email – Missing the Point
Today, the FTC very shrewdly punted on the issue of the proposed “Do Not Email” list implementation, saying that authentication systems need to be put in place before such a list can be considered. This buys the world more time to work on more effective, market-driven solutions to the spam and false positive problems. I read a few interesting posts on this today, including one from Jeff Nolan which nicely captured Chuck Schumer’s elegant combination of demagoguery and idiocy about this issue; and one from Anne Mitchell pointing out that they’re about six months late with their conclusion. Feels about right for the federal government. What’s interesting to me is that all of the comments by and about the FTC…
CEO, Party of Two
We spent the weekend in Hudson, New York, a charming, urban-renewing town about two hours north of the city. My cousins Michael & Marianne opened a wine store called Hudson Wine Merchants on the main drag in town, Warren Street (343 Warren St. to be exact, you should definitely check it out if you’re ever in Hudson). The store opened for the first time Friday evening, and we had the first full day on Saturday. Mariquita and I, and some other friends of Michael & Marianne’s, helped do everything from stock the shelves, to clean the windows, to use the price tag gun (fun!), to work the register and the very fickle POS software, to watch my cousin’s daughter as…
Gmail – I Don’t Get It
I honestly don’t get all the buzz about Gmail, Google’s new email service. I took a look at it today to see what the the big deal was. It’s got a few features which are marginally better than other webmail services, but not too many and not massively better. The free storage is not a big issue for most users, although it may cause a few power users to switch over. The most interesting feature in my mind is the ability to use Google Search on your own email file, which is very useful. All in all, it’s a good product, but all these people talking about how 30mm people are going to switch over to it must be seeing…
Lessons from the Gipper
There’s been much coverage in the news of Saturday’s passing of President Ronald Reagan, but I will add a new wrinkle by trying to distill down what I know and remember of The Great Communicator’s leadership style into a few simple lessons of note for CEOs. Lesson 1: Sunny optimism motivates the people you lead, but only when it’s balanced with hard-headed realism. Reagan’s message that tomorrow can be a better day than today was powerful and timely for the American psyche, but he didn’t just assume that because he said it, it would be true. He backed up his message with (a) an understanding that the American economy itself was in the doldrums in the late ’70s, and (b)…
Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Well
I was reminded again today of this very simple but important principle in two separate instances with people on the team here at Return Path. I’ll describe them anonymously here, as I always will when I discuss things that happen at my company. In one case, someone sent a document out to a prospect that was not “client-ready.” It had all the right content, but it was poorly formatted, not as well-organized as it could have been, had a couple of typos, and wasn’t on our company template. My colleague’s comment: “it got the job done, didn’t it?” My response: “it doesn’t matter — it didn’t look world class.” In another case, someone had a relatively minor task to do,…