First Rate Intelligence One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald, as he wrote in 1936 in “The Crack Up” (which you can read here in Esquire): The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. Before seeing this article recently, though, I’m not sure I’d ever seen the sentence that follows: One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. I’ve talked about the Highs and Lows of being an entrepreneur a couple times in the past — here as it relates to the…
Archives / April, 2011
Guest Post: Staying Innovative as Your Business Grows (Part Two)
As I mentioned in a previous post, I write a column for The Magill Report, the new venture by Ken Magill, previously of Direct magazine and even more previously DMNews. I share the column with my colleagues Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey and we cover how to approach the business of email marketing, thoughts on the future of email and other digital technologies, and more general articles on company-building in the online industry – all from the perspective of an entrepreneur. I recently posted George’s column on Staying Innovative as Your Business Grows (Part One). Below is a re-post of George’s second part of that column from this week, which I think my OnlyOnce readers will enjoy. Guest Post: Staying…
Backwards
Backwards I came to an interesting conclusion about Return Path recently. We’re building our business backwards, at least according to what I have observed over time as the natural course of events for a startup. Here are a few examples of what I mean by that. Most companies build organically for years…then start acquiring others. We’ve done it backwards. In the first 9 years of our company’s life, we acquired 8 other businesses (SmartBounce, Veripost, Re-Route, NetCreations, Assurance Systems, GasPedal Consulting, Bonded Sender, Habeas). Since then, we’ve acquired none. There are a bunch of reasons why we front loaded M&A: we were working hard to morph our business model to achieve maximum success during the first internet downturn, we knew…
BookShort: Vive La Difference
Book Short: Vive La Difference Brain Sex, by Anne Moir and David Jessell, was a fascinating read that I finished recently. I will caveat this post up front that the book was published in 1989, so one thing I’m not sure of is whether there’s been more recent research that contradicts any of the book’s conclusions. I will also caveat that this is a complex topic with many different schools of thought based on varying research, and this book short should serve as a starting point for a dialog, not an end point. That said, the book was a very interesting read about how our brains develop (a lot happens in utero), and about how men’s and women’s brains are…
The Fear/Greed Continuum
The Fear/Greed Continuum My old boss from a prior job used to say that every buyer (perhaps every human in general) could be placed at any point in time somewhere on the “fear/greed continuum” of motivation, meaning that you could win him or her over by appealing to the appropriate mix of those two driving forces if you could only figure out where the person sat on the spectrum. I’ve found this to be true in life, more in selling situations than anything else, but probably in any negotiation. Think about some examples: Is your product an ROI sale (you’re appealing to greed), or do all your prospect’s larger competitors use you (fear they’ll get fired if they don’t adopt)?…