You Have to Shoot to Score Fred’s recent post called From Messes to Successes left me thinking about the reasons why successful companies often have rough patches along the road to their ultimate success — the times Fred refers to when he says “they’re a mess.” First, his premise is right. Good companies are often a mess. Probably more than most outside Board members (even good VC ones) even realize! And while his explanation as to why this occurs, which is that the company focuses exclusively on the product to the exclusion of infrastructure, scaling, and planning issues, may be right some of the time, let me offer an alternative explanation. I always tell people internally that You Have to…
Archives / April, 2008
Wither the News? (Plus a Bonus Book Short)
Wither the News? (Plus a Bonus Book Short) It’s unusual that I blog about a book before I’ve actually finished it, but this one is too timely to pass up given today’s news about newspapers. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen, at least the first 1/2 of it, is a pretty intense rant about how the Internet’s trend towards democratizing media and content production has a double dirty underbelly: poor quality — “an endless digital forest of mediocrity,” no checks and balances — “mainstream journalists and newspapers have the organization, financial muscle, and and credibility to gain access to sources and report the truth…professional journalists can go to jail for telling…
Executive and Closed Sessions
Executive and Closed Sessions Brad has a good post up about what he calls “closed sessions” in Board meetings — time at the end of the meeting reserved for a conversation with Board members ONLY, no other observers or non-Board management. While we differ in terminology, I agree completely with the sentiment and with his logic. We call the part of the meeting that Brad describes the Executive Session. We’ve always done them. And the Board and I find it incredibly useful, and a good practice, even if there are no contentious or puzzling issues during a meeting. Not that our Board holds back much, but the Executive Session is a good time for us to connect 100% freely about…
Drawing the Line
Drawing the LineWe are having a bit of a debate at the moment internally around our Sender Score deliverability business about how to handle clients who are in businesses that are, shall we say, not exactly as pure as the driven snow. As a company that provides software and services to businesses without a vertical focus, we are often approached by all sorts of companies wanting our services where we don’t love what they do. Examples include: Gambling Tobacco Neutriceuticals Guns Adult content or products Our challenges are along three dimensions, each of which is a little different. But common threads run through all three dimensions. Dimension 1: Our deliverability technology platform. Our basic technology is used by mailers of…
Poor Systems Integration Just Makes It Worse
Poor Systems Integration Just Makes It Worse I attended a day of classes at Harvard Business School in 1992 as a college senior. I distinctly remember a case study on how poor systems integration was impacting companies’ ability to get a whole view of their customers and thus provide high service levels. In fact, the case study I remember was about American Airlines and how one system showed that a customer’s flights had been delayed or canceled, while another system showed a customer’s travel patterns and was able to tell when the customer had defected to another airline, and a third system sent out rewards and notices to customers. That was 16 years ago. I received an email from American…
No Recession at Return Path
No Recession at Return Path I know, I know. I shouldn’t jinx us. But we’re growing like mad at the moment, so much so that we have well almost 50 open positions now across all divisions of the company. If you want to come join one of the fastest growing, most innovative, and just plain coolest places to work in the industry, we’d love to talk to you. What’s driving the growth? All our operating units have open positions. Sender Score (deliverability/whitelisting) has the most openings and is growing explosively. But Authentic Response (market research) and Postmaster (lead generation) both have openings as well Geographic expansion. We have a bunch of openings in Europe as well as in the U.S. …
What's the Response Rate on This Campaign?
What’s the Response Rate on This Campaign? This is a doosie. I will hide names to protect the guilty, but I just received my third form letter in the last five years from the CEO of one of the big public companies in the direct marketing space inviting me to sell Return Path to him. It was delivered via FedEx with some of the company’s marketing materials and public financial reporting. All I will note is the ironic list of ways that this letter does not conform to direct marketing best practices: It’s not personal It’s only theoretically relevant Behavioral targeting would catch that similar mailings in the past haven’t generated a response Treating solicitation of a CEO about M&A…