Book Short: Legal Aid The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law, by Constance Bagley (HBS) and Craig Dauchy (Cooley Godward), while not exactly a page-turner, is a great reference book for even experienced CEOs. It’s pretty broad in its coverage of all major legal issues an entrepreneur will face, from patent law to firing employees. Remember, you may make fun of lawyers on occasion or grips about their fees, but they DID attend law school for three years, after all. If nothing else, the $20 on this book will almost certainly save you at least 10x that in reduced legal fees someday, for something.
Archives / June, 2005
A Lighter, Yet Darker, Note
A Lighter, Yet Darker, Note I’ve been meaning to post about this for some time now since my colleague Tami Forman introduced me to this company. It’s a riot. You know all those well-intentioned, but slightly cheesy motivational posters you see in places like dentists’ offices? The kind that talk about “Perseverence” and “Commitment” and “Dare to Dream” and have some beautiful or unique, usually nature-centric image to go with them and their tag line? For the sarcastic among us, you must visit Despair, Inc.’s web site, in particular any of the “Individual Designs” sections featured on the left side navigation. The posters are brilliant spoofs on the above, with such gems as “Agony” and “Strife” and “Despair” (whose tag…
Wanted: VP Marketing – A-Players Only!
Wanted: VP Marketing – A-Players Only! I’m going to try an experiment and post a job description on my blog. We’ll see how this works! Return Path is looking for its next head of marketing. Jennifer Wilson, our current and long-standing VP Marketing, is going out on maternity leave in the fall and is going to return afterwards in a part-time capacity, so we’re looking for someone new to join the team and help take the company to the next level. Most of the details are in the job description, but the vitals are: – Based in NYC or Denver, CO – Must have previous experience running a marketing effort – Mix of B2C and B2B, but B2B is probably…
Sender Score: Credit Scores for Emailers
Sender Score: Credit Scores for Emailers Yesterday, I wrote about email authentication, and why, although it’s great, it won’t stop spam without the emergence and scaling of accreditation and reputation systems. Today, Return Path has announced the beta launch of Sender Score, our new reputation management system. Sender Score is a groundbreaking service that we’ve been working on for a long time here. The best way to think about it (or the analog analog, as Brad might say) is as a FICO or credit score for email. We’ve gone out and compiled TONS of data about emailers, much as the credit bureaus do when they gather financial profile and transaction data about individuals and businesses. But our data, when aggregated…
Why We Love Email Authentication, But Why It Won’t Stop Spam
Why We Love Email Authentication, But Why It Won’t Stop Spam Microsoft made a big announcement today that they’re taking email authentication, in the form of Sender ID, very seriously. They’re using a stick, not a carrot. Emailers who do not publish a proper Sender ID record are now going to (a) find themselves in the bulk mail folder at Hotmail and MSN, and (b) have a big fat disclaimer thrown on top of their emails from Microsoft warning users that the email’s source can’t be authenticated. At Return Path, we’re big fans of authentication, and we’re sponsoring the upcoming Email Authentication Summit in a couple of weeks in New York as one way of supporting the effort — encouraging…
Chink in the Open Source Armor?
Chink in the Open Source Armor? I discovered something by accident yesterday about Firefox (which I love) that is giving me a little pause around the beauty of open source. Maybe I’m missing something – if I am, please comment. I went to download some new extensions into Firefox, and the Mozilla site said I had to upgrade to the new version of Firefox (1.0.4) in order to access any extensions. Before I did the upgrade on my machine, I upgraded my colleague Lisa’s (I was about to show her what extensions were, so I figured it would be best to make a clean start there with 1.0.4). But once I upgraded her, I discovered that none of the extensions…
Counter Cliche: Sleeves, or Shoes?
Counter Cliche: Sleeves, or Shoes? Fred’s VC Cliche of the Week this week is about "rolling up your sleeves." It’s a good one about how investors need to really understand a business inside and out in order to be effective board members – that they have to believe that they work for the CEO as much as the other way around. One of my very first posts on this blog over a year ago talked about the fact that as a CEO, you have to remember that you don’t just work for your board, but you also work for your customers and your employees. It’s the same principle. My counter cliche this week is that Sometimes You Have to Walk…
It’s Easy to Feel Like a Luddite These Days
It’s Easy to Feel Like a Luddite These Days You know, I feel like I’m a pretty progressive, early adapter kind of guy. I’m a technology entrepreneur. We got the iPod for Windows the minute it came out. TiVo Series I. One of the very first wireless hubs to create our own wireless LAN at home. I blog. I have an RSS feed. But it’s hard to stand still these days, even for a few months. So here’s my big admission — I still don’t entirely “get” tagging or podcasting. But I’m making a big push to try them out over the next couple of weeks and see where it goes. I’ll try tagging first, using, of course, del.icio.us. Fred…
Who Said VCs Don't Add Value?
Who Said VCs Don’t Add Value? In case there’s anyone out there who reads my blog but not Brad Feld’s — if you’re a Firefox user, you have to read this posting about pipelining and take the two minutes to implement it. It’s phenomenal. Thanks, Brad!
Counter Cliche: Who’s The Dog in this Scenario?
Counter Cliche: Who’s The Dog in this Scenario? Fred’s VC cliche of the week is a good one — “If you lie down with dogs, you’ll come up with fleas.” His point is a good and simple one, that VCs shouldn’t take people risks in deals and shouldn’t try to back management teams they have serious concerns about (ethical or otherwise) in the hopes of trying to change the team or change management. The obvious counter cliche is that entrepreneurs run that same risk in accepting capital from less-than-savory venture investors. An ethically-challenged investor can wreak havoc on a young company, potentially tying the company up with peripheral legal problems or even damaging the company’s attempts at raising future rounds…
The (Email) Elephant in the Room
The (Email) Elephant in the Room Email marketing continues to be under attack by some members of the media who are looking to stir up melodrama and controversy and seem to be uninterested in or unwilling to look at real metrics from real companies who are enjoying unparalleled success with email. I can’t say this any better than Bill McCloskey from Email Data Source, who writes in MediaPost: The Elephant in the Room that no one is willing to talk about is that Spam is not the problem. The problem is the OVERREACTION to Spam. This overreaction is not something that is hurting e-mail marketing communications–it is hurting all communications. Read the full column here. It’s great. UPDATE: Apparently, the…