Matt Blumberg - Startup CEO: How to Build A Company to Success

CONTENTS

Cover design: C. Wallace

Cover illustration: Business group iStockphoto.com/

Pavel Losevsky; Office Interior by C. Wallace

Copyright 2013 by Matt Blumberg. All rights reserved.

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

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 9781118548363 (Hardcover); ISBN 9781118683279 (ePDF);

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To our board and team at Return Path, who have patiently helped me go through almost 14 years of on-the-job training in the matter; and to Mariquita, Casey, Wilson and Elyse, who have patiently lived with someone who is both a startup CEO and co-CEO 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

FOREWORD

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

What you dont 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 teams reporting structure and The Social Network certainly didnt include a montage of Mark Zuckerberg interviewing potential executives about the finer points of operating leverage. These, nonetheless, are the types of things that CEOs spend the vast majority of their time doing (as more than a couple of once-eager entrepreneurs have learned, to their dismay). One startup CEO I know who has made those realities central to his public persona is Return Paths CEO, Matt Blumberg.

Ive 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 hes 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 therebut so are the vacation policies, the meeting routines, the forecasting models, and the best practices for recruiting talent. Theyre not as glamorous as the Next Big Thing but theyre the key to every startups 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 Offices Change of Address service does for snail mail. He and his team expanded their focus to a much wider set of email-related problems: building distribution lists, conducting online customer surveys, and so on. As markets shifted, Matt narrowed the companys focus to email deliverability. As that business grew ever more successful, Return Path has set its larger sights on email intelligence, solving domain-related problems like spoofing, phishing and competitive tracking.

As a four-time CEO (currently at Twitter), I can say this with a relative degree of certainty: most companies dont 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 theyre 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.

Matts 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, Only Once , and he brings it to fruition in this wonderful book. Read it and you will get a master class in building companies from someone whos honed that skill for more than a decade.

Dick Costolo

CEO of Twitter

April 2013

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The list of people to thank for their role in the development of this book is long but it has to start with my long-time board member and friend Brad Feld. Brad and I started our respective blogs, Feld Thoughts ( www.feld.com ) and Only Once ( www.onlyonceblog.com ) on the same dayMay 10, 2004sitting next to each other in our shared office space in Superior, Colorado and trying to figure out how to use Typepad templates. Brad has been a great friend and valuable business partner for more than a decade now. When Brad started writing books with John Wiley & Sons as his publisher, we had a conversation about my someday writing a book inspired by the content of my blog. I was one of the many contributors to his first book, Do More Faster: Techstars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup; then when he asked me to read a draft of his second book, Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer or Your Venture Capitalist , I returned the manuscript with a markup that became a series of about 40 or 50 sidebars called The Entrepreneurs Perspective. Brad got good feedback on those contributions from many of his readers and introduced me to his publishing team at Wiley about this book and the rest is history. Brad offered a number of valuable insights on this book as well as helping me navigate the publishing process along the way.