Matt Blumberg - Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business (Techstars)

1. Chapter 12
2. Chapter 26

1. Chapter 3
2. Chapter 12
3. Chapter 21
4. Chapter 41

Matt Blumberg

Copyright 2020 by Matt Blumberg. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Names: Blumberg, Matt, author.

Title: Startup CEO + website : a field guide to scaling up your business / Matt Blumberg.

Other titles: Startup CEO and website

Description: Second edition. | Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2020] | Previous edition: Startup CEO. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020022821 (print) | LCCN 2020022822 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119723660 (Hardcover) | ISBN 9781119723714 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781119723776 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: Chief executive officers. | Executive ability. | Small businessManagement.

Classification: LCC HD2745 .B384 2020 (print) | LCC HD2745 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/2dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022821

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022822

Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: shuoshu/Getty Images

To my board and executive team at Return Path, who patiently helped me go through 20 years of onthejob training in the matter; and to Mariquita, Casey, Wilson, and Elyse, who have patiently lived with someone who is both a startup CEO and coCEO of our family.

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt, Citizenship in a Republic, speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

The public face of a startup CEO can seem pretty glamorous dramatic product announcements, exciting travel, and speaking appearances, leading a team as it grows and takes steps to fulfill its mission.

What you don't see is what a CEO does on a regular basis, day after day after day. Nobody imagines Google CEO Larry Page working out the mechanics of the option pool or the global sales team's reporting structure and The Social Network certainly didn't include a montage of Mark Zuckerberg interviewing potential executives about the finer points of operating leverage. Nonetheless, these are the types of things that CEOs spend the vast majority of their time doing (as more than a couple of onceeager entrepreneurs have learned, to their dismay). One startup CEO I know who has made those realities central to his public persona is Return Path's CEO, Matt Blumberg.

I've had the pleasure of working with Matt for many years. He was on my board of directors at FeedBurner before the Google acquisition in 2007 and he's been a valuable colleague and adviser ever since.

For nearly a decade, Matt has documented every element of the startup CEO experience. The product launches and mergers and acquisitions are all there but so are the vacation policies, the meeting routines, the forecasting models, and the best practices for recruiting talent. They're not as glamorous as the Next Big Thing, but they're the key to every startup's success.

When he launched Return Path in 1999, Matt started with this simple idea: an email change of address database that would do for the digital world what the post office's change of address service does for snail mail. He and his team expanded their focus to a much wider set of emailrelated problems: building distribution lists, conducting online customer surveys, and so on. As markets shifted, Matt narrowed the company's focus to email deliverability. As that business grew ever more successful, Return Path has set its larger sights on email intelligence, solving domainrelated problems like spoofing, phishing, and competitive tracking.

As a fourtime CEO (currently at Twitter), I can say this with a relative degree of certainty: most companies don't survive that many changes in direction over that many years. Return Path, by contrast, has survived and thrived: they have 400 employees around the world and they're closing in on $100 million in revenue. How did they do it? By focusing on all the unglamorous bits and building a company resilient enough to weather major pivots, the occasional divestiture, and (most recently) a global economic crisis.

Matt's experience proves that the hard work of building a company is far more important than the excitement of coming up with The Idea. Until this book, I have yet to see anybody lay out all the details of this extremely difficult and unique job. He started the process on his blog,