Style, or Substance? I had an interesting conversation the other day with a friend who sits on a couple of Boards, as do I (besides Return Path’s). We ended up in a conversation about some challenges one of his Boards is having with their CEO, and the question to some extent boiled down to this: a Board is responsible for hiring/firing the CEO and for being the guardians of shareholder value, but what does a Board do when it doesn’t like the CEO’s style? There are lots of different kinds of CEOs and corporate cultures. Some are command-and-control, others are more open, flat, and transparent. I like to think I and Return Path are the latter, and of course my…
Archives / August, 2010
Feature Request, Part II
Feature Request, Part II In Part I, I asked for time zone alerts on cell phones for off-hours and a mechanism for alerting people when they’re replying-to-all when they were bcc’d. Today, I ask for an iPhone (and I suppose Android) app: turn a photo of a whiteboard into a Word or PPT document!
Investment in the Email Ecosystem
Investment in the Email Ecosystem Last week, my colleague George Bilbrey posted about how (turns out – shocking!) email still isn’t dead yet. Not only is he right, but the whole premise of defending email from the attackers who call it “legacy” or “uninteresting” is backwards. The inbox is getting more and more interesting these days, not less. At Return Path, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of startup activitiy and investment (these two things can go together but don’t have to) in in front end of email in the past couple years. I’d point to three sub-trends of this theme of “the inbox getting more interesting.” First, major ISPs and mailbox operators are starting to experiment with more interesting applications…
The Value (and Limitations) of Benchmarking
The Value (and Limitations) of Benchmarking I think I am starting to drive my team nuts a little bit. I have suggested, prodded, and executed a ton of external benchmarking projects this year, all of which have different leaders inside Return Path doing both systematic and ad hoc phone calls and meetings with peer companies and aspirational peer companies to understand how we compare to them in terms of specific metrics, practices, and structures. It’s some combination of the former management consultant in me rearing its head, and me just trying to make sure that we stay ahead of the curve as we rapidly scale our business this year. Why go through an exercise like this? One answer is that…