May 10 2004

You're Only a First Time CEO Once

And here I am. In the middle of that “once.” Fred Wilson wrote a great posting by that title on his blog, and it has stuck with me. When I decided to start a blog, it was the first thing that came to mind as a main theme for the blog, so there you go. Only Once it is.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m doing a blog. Part of it is fascination with the newest corner of the Internet and its related areas like RSS (clicking on that link will get you the RSS feed of this blog). Part of it is to try out the medium and see how it might work for the hundreds of marketers and publishers who are my company’s clients. I suppose part of it is to generate some interest in my company, Return Path, which in my extremely biased opinion is one of the most interesting companies in the email services business.

My one hesitation about starting a blog is that the other part of me feels like blogs are a bit narcissistic, and I can’t imagine who on earth would want to read whatever it is that pops into my head. But I’ll give it a try and promise not to go overboard on the extraneous postings.

So, I will probably post periodically about experiences of an entrepreneur, of the one time I’ll ever be a first-time CEO. But I may also post on other things periodically that match my interests: book reviews, travelogs, Princeton, great wines, maybe even the occasional political commentary to prove to my predominantly New York friends that (a) not all Republicans are bad, and (b) not all Jewish New Yorkers are Democrats.

So, here we go…enjoy!