Archives / April, 2006

Doing Well By Doing Good, Part III

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…

Conference Overload

Conference Overload Our little email/online marketing industry is overrun with conferences.  It’s completely out of control.  I’m surprised no one else has started complaining or blogging about it, so let me be the first.  Here’s an incomplete inventory of but a few months of what our team is attending: February — DKIM Implentation Summit, MAAWG, DMA Financial Services Conference, RSA March — DMA Leaders Forum, ARF Annual April — ESPC Deliverability Boot Camp, Email Authentication Summit, Marketing Sherpa, DMA Direct Marketing to Business Conference, MRA 20th Anniversary Show May — Catalog Conference, Mediapost’s Email Insider Summit, ISPCON, INBOX June — DoubleClick/Epsilon Email Conference, DM Days, MAAWG, Ad:Tech, MRA Annual, AMA ART, CASRO Plus a few other smaller local events and…

Counter Cliche: Pick a Geek Term

Counter Cliche:  Pick a Geek Term Fred has a good cliche this week — he talks about how an organization has a particular "clock speed" and needs to hire people who can operate at that speed. I agree whole-heartedly but have always referred to this exact thing in a different way.  We have always said when we’ve acquired another company that we need to "port that company onto our Operating System."  So pick your favorite geek term, but I like the notion of porting someone to another operating system better because it implies that people can change a little bit more.

Counter Cliche: I Know When I See One, Too

Counter Cliche:  I Know When I See One, Too I haven’t written a counter to one of Fred’s VC Cliche’s of the Week for a while now, but today’s was too good to resist.  While I haven’t (and most entrepreneurs haven’t) worked with 200 VCs, I have seen, heard about, been one (sort of), and worked with enough of them to know enough to comment as follows:  as is the case with Fred and entrepreneurs, I’m not sure I can define what makes a great VC in one phrase, but I know one when I see one, and here are some of the characteristics they exhibit: – Major pattern recognition — "I’ve seen this movie before, and I know how…

A New Season for Bonded Sender (now Sender Score Certified)

A New Season for Bonded Sender (now Sender Score Certified) (With apologies to my non-email industry readers for such a long detailed posting) Ah, spring.  New life is everywhere.  Winter clothes are being put away, birds are returning from their winters in the south, flowers are blooming.  We at Return Path are doing our part by announcing the “rebirth” of our Bonded Sender Program, the Internet’s largest and oldest email accreditation program, or whitelist, as Sender Score Certified. Since we acquired Bonded Sender last fall, we’ve had the opportunity to go on a “listening tour” – talking to marketers, publishers, ESPs, ISPs, spam filtering companies, system administrators, email appliance manufacturers – you name it.  What we learned was that the…

links for 2006-04-13

The Growth Guy: Nine tricks buyers use to “steal” your company Really thorough posting (battle scars *may* be present based on the level of detail) about how to best position your company for sale. (tags: Entrepreneur VC)

An Undignified End to an Internet Pioneer

An Undignified End to an Internet Pioneer I was one of Wingspan Bank’s first customers when they opened their online banking system as a division of Bank One back in 1997 or so.  Wingspan closed its doors and merged with Bank One probably about 6 years ago now, with (if I remember correctly) only 77,000 customers — obviously, the world had changed a lot, and online banking no longer required a dedicated “online bank.” Even after Wingspan closed, I kept my Wingspan-turned-Bank One account, although there wasn’t much money in it and I didn’t really use it for much of anything.  Finally, last week, I decided to close the account — easy, I figured, since Bank One had merged with…

links for 2006-04-07

terrygold.com: Hiring Salespeople Good posting from Terry Gold of Gold Systems on his experiences over the years hiring and ramping up a sales team. (tags: Entrepreneur Sales Management)

At What Price False Positives?

At What Price False Positives? As has been covered in many places, including Direct and The Wall Street Journal, Verizon settled a lawsuit yesterday over “too aggressive” spam filtering, or what we in the business call false positives — filtering out legitimate, non-spam emails as spam.  This is a huge problem that part of our business at Return Path, our Delivery Assurance Solutions group, has been fighting for years. The gist of the settlement is that Verizon is changing the way it filters spam to make sure more legitimate mail gets through, and that it is refunding various small amounts of money or free months of service to customers who complained about the problem. I am NOT a believer in…