Archives / December, 2010

Book Short: Beyond 10,000 Hours

Book Short: Beyond 10,000 Hours In Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell (post, buy), we are taught, among other things, that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something, as well as a dash of luck and timing, as opposed to huge amounts of innate and unique talent.  In Talent is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin, this theory comes to life, with a very clear differentiating point – it’s not just logging the 10,000 hours, it’s HOW the hours are spent. Colvin’s main point is that the hours need to be spent in what he calls “deliberate practice.”  The elements of deliberate practice are best explained with his example of Jerry Rice, although you can…

The iPad’s Limitations as a Business Device

The iPad’s Limitations as a Business Device I love my iPad.  Let me just start with that.  I’ve found lots of use cases for it, and it’s very useful here and there for work.  But I’ve seen a bunch of people trying to use it as a primary business device, which I can’t quite figure out.  Here are the things that prevent me from making it my main business device: lack of keyboard (can mitigate with the keyboard dock, which I have) lack of mouse (not a killer limitation, just takes some getting used to, also the arrows on the keyboard dock help) lack of connection to files and true Office compatibility (this can largely be mitigated through a combination…

The UnEmployee

The UnEmployee We have a few people who I think of an UnEmployees.  They are people who we have almost hired over the years (sometimes more than once), but never have, people who are in our industry and are friends of Return Path.  Sometimes they are clients or partners, sometimes they aren’t.  Sometimes they have a token stock option grant as advisors, sometimes they don’t. In any case, these people have played an incredibly valuable role in our company’s development over the years.  They are extra “eyes and ears” for us that have often served up valuable information before any of our regular employees heard things.  They have made powerful connections for us with other companies in the industry.  They…

Turn it up to Eleven!

Turn it up to Eleven! For some reason, I didn’t do this the very first year I started writing OnlyOnce, but on December 6 every year since then, I’ve marked the anniversary of Return Path‘s founding here. In the midst of an otherwise fantastic year, this hasn’t been a particularly good couple of weeks for us.  We have been targeted by a company we’ve never heard of before for a lawsuit that angrily denounced our business, and while the suit doesn’t have a shred of merit, it will probably cost us an arm and leg to make it go away.  And the recent phishing attack incident is a long way from being behind us as well.  We’ll come through both…

Selling a Line of Business

Selling a Line of Business It’s been a couple of years since Return Path decided to focus on our deliverability business by divesting and spinning out our other legacy businesses. That link tells some of the story, and the rest is that subsequently, Authentic Response divested part of the Postmaster Direct business to Q Interactive.  Those three transactions, plus a number of experiences over the years on the buy side of similar transactions (Bonded Sender, Habeas, NetCreations), plus my learnings from talking to a number of other CEOs who have done similar things over the years, form the basis of this post.  The Authentic Response spin-out was also partially chronicled by Inc. Magazine in this article earlier this year. It’s…