A few days ago, David Brown at Techstars wrote a great post titled “Staying Organized with Workflow” about how he stays organized. Brown and I work across the hall from each other and interact regularly. Often he’ll send me a note about something and I’ll just wander over and talk to him. He’s always available, super responsive on email, and very good at having a three minute meeting that results in a decision. ...
Since I’ve had dealing with email on my mind recently, I thought I’d write about how to deal with email after a long vacation. Over the years, I’ve heard over and over again from people who never going on vacation or getting off the grid explaining that they can’t imagine doing this because they would be more stressed out when they return to all the email they have to respond to. I don’t think it has to be that way. ...
I get 300+ non-spam emails a day. No matter how diligent I am at unsubscribing from stuff, I still get an endless stream of valid, opt-in email that I want to unsubscribe to. Google takes good care of my spam and they even jumped all over my complaints about their spam filtering , figured out the problem, and fixed it (thanks friends at Google). So, I’m not talking about spam, but all the rest of the stuff that I don’t need to see right away. ...
I try to respond to all of my emails. I’ve always been like this – it’s just part of my value system. I used to be annoyed by other people who don’t, but I let go of that emotion a long time ago. But I still try to respond to all of my emails. A big hint, which is the reason for this post, is to ask specific questions if you want a real response. ...
Lately, I’ve been struggling to figure out the best way to have expanding email groups. I’ve tried all the obvious stuff and nothing is satisfying to me. Historically, I’ve just used Google Groups. That’s great for things like the Foundry Group CEO list, where we control the list, but then we have to host it at a @foundrygroup.com domain. For the Colorado CEO Jobs list, we were using Yahoo Groups for a while. Even with the new upgrade last year I find the UX to be terrible so I recently moved it over the Google+. Now I’m hearing complaints about not getting the emails which usually results from notifications being turned off, but you wouldn’t know that unless you were paying attention. And, if you don’t have a Google+ account, you can’t be on the list. ...
I woke up this morning to another wave of holiday email cards. I had over 50 of them this morning. Yesterday I probably had at least 50 – by the end of the day it was likely over 100. STOP! UNSUBSCRIBE. I’ve never really understood the physical holiday card thing. I think it’s a secret ploy by the US Government to keep the USPS in business. I used to get a lot of Merry Christmas cards, which just annoyed me since I’m jewish and don’t celebrate Christmas. The world has become more politically (or religiously) correct so these are now Happy Holiday cards. ...
I turned 48 on December 1st. I took a week off the grid (from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving until the Wednesday after my birthday) – part of my quarterly off the grid routine with Amy. We had a very mellow birthday this year, spent it with a few friends who came to visit us in San Diego at the tennis place we love to hide at, and basically just slept late, played tennis, read a lot, got massages, ate nice food, and had adult activities. ...
Today, Return Path launched three new products and reframed its business as “email intelligence.” Matt Blumberg, Return Path’s CEO has an excellent post up titled Email Intelligence and the new Return Path. Return Path is an extraordinary company that I’m proud to have been involved with for the past 12 years. At our board meeting last week, Matt gave me and Fred Wilson our 12 year anniversary gift – a pair of red Return Path-branded Adidas sneakers. I still vividly remember the phone call Fred and I had where we cut a deal to merge two nascent companies – Veripost and Return Path – in what became Return Path. We cut a deal in 10 minutes – I offered up a 50/50 merger and Fred suggested he wanted a little more since Return Path had raised 3x the money Veripost had. I responded with “how about 55/45” and Fred said “it’s a deal.” ...
tl;dr – Yes. I’m on the all@company.com list for a number of the companies I’m on the board of. CEOs and entrepreneurs who practice TAGFEE welcome this. I haven’t universally asked for inclusion on this list mostly because I hadn’t really thought hard about it until recently. But I will now and going forward, although I’ll leave it up to the CEO as to whether or not to include me. In an effort to better figure out the startup board dynamic, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of continual communication with board members. The companies I feel most involved in are ones in which I have continual communication and involvement with the company. This isn’t just limited to the CEO, but to all members of the management team and often many other people in the company. Working relationships as well as friendships develop through the interactions. ...
In December I wrote a post titled It’s Not About Having The Most Friends, It’s About Having The Best Friends . Since then I’ve been systematically modifying my social networking behavior and cleaning up my various social graphs. As a significant content generator in a variety of forms (blogs, books, tweets, videos) and a massive content consumer, I found that my historical approach of social network promiscuity wasn’t working well for me in terms of surfacing information. ...