More on the Quick Flip In case there’s anyone left that reads my blog but not Fred’s, he wrote a great follow-up posting today about the "quick flip," and how entrepreneurs and VCs have totally different (but reconcilable) views on these things.
Archives / March, 2005
Counter Cliche: Ready, Set, Exit
Counter Cliche: Ready, Set, Exit Fred’s VC Cliche of the week is the about the Quick Flip. My counter to that is Ready, Set, Exit (image from Google Images). Most quick flips involve a huge element of luck. For every quick flip out there, there are dozens of companies that thought they’d be quick flips and ended up crashing and burning instead. Back in 1999, when we started Return Path, another Internet entrepreneur I knew loved the idea so much that he told me to start writing the book then, because I would be able to sell the for $100 million before we even had a product in the market. He said the title of the book would be Ready,…
I'm Sorry, What Year Is It?
I’m Sorry, What Year Is It? My colleague Tami Forman saw the attached leaflet posted on the subway in NYC. I’m not sure which is funnier — that someone wrote it and put it up, or that two people ripped off the phone number to make follow-up calls. Fred, Brad, Greg, anyone interested?
Prepping RSS for Prime Time, Part II
Prepping RSS for Prime Time, Part II David Daniels from Jupiter wrote a good article yesterday in ClickZ about RSS and email marketing. It reads like a response to comments he received after publishing his main report on this topic earlier in the month. He tackles three main points: spam/clutter, personalization, and the (impending) flood of vendors. It’s definitely worth a quick read if you care about the RSS/email debate and space. I addressed this topic a little bit last June here, although somehow I forgot about the personalization challenge. I think RSS is closer to prime time than it was then, but it’s still not quite ready to go toe to toe with email or other forms or more…
Convergence Continues
Convergence Continues So according to this article and this one, Acxiom is going to acquire Digital Impact in a much more friendly way (e.g., with more money) than InfoUSA was trying to last month. This will probably be mixed news for DI employees, but it’s certainly good news for the email sector overall. It builds on and extends the trend that really got going in the last 12 months for the big offline direct marketing companies to more fully embrace email as an integrated part of the DM mix for their clients. InfoUSA has already gobbled up a few of the smaller players in the space, and Harte-Hanks bought PostFuture as well. Why is it good? Everyone wins. Clients win…
Playing To Win
Playing To Win This weekend’s reading included Hardball, by George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer, which started as an article in Harvard Business Review sometime last year. The book is a fleshed out version of the article, so don’t expect meaningful new revelations if you’ve already read it, but it is an incredibly valuable read, with lots more and more detailed case studies. As with most business books, it’s not really geared towards small, entrepreneurial companies, but that doesn’t matter. Most of the principles of competition — and how to win — are timeless. The basic principles, each of which gets a chapter, are on Unleashing Massive Force, Exploiting Anomalies (perfect for the data junkie within), Threatening the Competition’s Profit Zones,…
Dumb Money
Dumb Money I don’t have a counter cliche to Fred’s two-for-one this week on Passing the Hat and Ponying Up, but I’ll counter with a different, somewhat related Fred cliche that I was reminded of today when reading Paul Graham’s essay entitled A Unified Theory of VC Suckage (form your own opinions of it, but it’s nothing if not thorough and experience-based). There’s nothing worse than dumb money backing a dumb idea or management team. The dumb idea or team can destroy an emerging sector pretty quickly, and the dumb VC behind the deal will just keep ponying up. For the record, the converse is also true — there’s nothing better than smart money behind a great idea and solid…
From Blog to Book – Beyond Bullets
From Blog to Book – Beyond Bullets Hats off to fellow blogger Cliff Atkinson, who has just published a book called Beyond Bullet Points. Cliff and his company, Sociable Media, consult on PowerPoint and presentations and have a great theory about how to do great presentations. They follow the “clear, simple, and please God not so boring” guidelines espoused by a number of us in the business world, including Brad and of course Seth. (BTW, if you haven’t read Seth’s e-book/treatise on Really Bad PowerPoint, you should do that as well, although I can’t find a link to it at the moment.) One of the coolest parts of the book is that it really started out as Cliff’s blog, Beyond…
Today’s Wheel: Parsley
Today’s Wheel: Parsley Spiritually akin to my recent posting As Simple As The Wheel is Seth Godin’s posting today about Parsley, and why we don’t necessarily eat it off our plate but notice when it’s not there.
Email Deliverability Data
Email Deliverability Data We just published our 2004 year-end email deliverability report. Feel free to download the pdf, but I’ll summarize here. First, this report is very different from the reports you see published by Email Service Providers like Digital Impact and DoubleClick, because (a) it measures deliverability across a broad cross-section of mailers, not just a single ESP’s clients, and (b) it is a true measure of deliverability — what made it to the inbox — as opposed to the way some ESPs measure and report on deliverability, which is usually just the percentage of email that didn’t bounce or get outright blocked as spam. Headline number one: the “false positive” problem (non-spam ending up in the junk mailbox)…
Developer User Guide?
Developer User Guide? Tom Evslin wrote a two-part series this week called “Managing Programming for CEOs” (links here for Part I and Part II). The first is pretty funny, and the second has some good thoughts in it, especially around milestone creation. But if Tom’s had the experice he relays in Part I in real-life over and over, I have a suggestion for him: get a great head of development he can trust, and work closely with him or her over the years to build a relationship of mutual trust so those issues are no different than they are with functional managers of other departments. We are fortunate enough at Return Path to have two such individuals in Andy Sautins…