Podcasts about return path

Hoje, o entrevistado é Celso Hummél, engenheiro eletrônico e Sales Director Latam na Appdome. Ele atuou em empresas globais como Trustwave, ReturnPath, NetIQ e SonicWall. Possui amplos conhecimentos em cibersegurança, com mais de 40 anos de experiência em setores como serviços financeiros, serviços públicos, governo, telecom e varejo. É membro de várias entidades, como a OWASP, ISSA Brasil e WOMCY. Iremos falar sobre o desafio da segurança de dados, quais são as principais ameaças emergentes que enfrentaremos nos próximos anos, como a inteligência artificial e o aprendizado de máquina serão utilizados para melhorar a defesa cibernética no futuro, os desafios éticos relacionados à cibersegurança, Internet das Coisas (IoT), 5G, computação em nuvem e blockchain, além da colaboração internacional entre empresas e países para combater as ameaças cibernéticas em uma escala global. Vale a pena conferir!

In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson welcomes Guy Hanson, Vice President of Customer Engagement at Validity, to discuss email deliverability, best practices, and industry insights.=================================================================Best Moments:(01:36) Guy's journey into the email marketing industry(05:27) Difference between email delivery and deliverability(11:37) The rise of "snooze" email delivery options(16:57) Best practices for email send times(22:19) Guy's podcast "Email After Hours" and other resources=================================================================Guest Bio:Guy Hanson is the Vice President of Customer Engagement at Validity and a recognized email and data industry expert. With a background in digital printing at Xerox, Guy transitioned into email marketing at the turn of the millennium. He spent nearly a decade at Return Path before joining Validity, where he continues to be a thought leader in email deliverability and best practices. Guy hosts the podcast "Email After Hours" and is a frequent speaker and contributor in the email marketing space.Don't forget to check out Guy's podcast, Email After Hours!=================================================================MASSIVE thank you to our Sponsor, Marigold!!Marigold is a relationship marketing platform designed to help you acquire new customers and turn them into superfans with their best-in-class loyalty solutions. Don't take my word for it though, American Airlines, Honeybaked Ham, Title Boxing, and Notre Dame University are also customers!Regardless of your size, check out Marigold today to get the solution you need to grow your business!Check out this free content from marigold that Jay has loved digesting, 5 Steps For Selecting The Right Email Marketing Platform.

Today I'm making friends with David Hauser who has a track record of founding multiple successful companies, building exceptional teams, and investing in innovative ideas.** What I Discuss with David:– Constantly running into each other at LifeTime Gym in Vegas– Why David always knew he was going to be an entrepreneur– How David's parents instilled work ethic in him– Coding websites in the early '00s– How David raised $20m as a 17 year old– Why college can't create entrepreneurs– Building and exiting several successful companies** (Psst... Before I tell you more about the guest, do you like this show? Please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts — even one sentence helps!

This episode is brought to you in partnership with www.enterprise-ireland.com Cybersecurity is a complex and ever-evolving field, but one thing remains constant: people are the most important element. In this podcast panel episode, we discuss the importance of collaboration and keeping people as the focus of cybersecurity work. Our panelists are experts in the field, and they share their insights on how to build a strong cybersecurity culture, how to effectively communicate cybersecurity risks to employees, and how to create a more inclusive and diverse cybersecurity workforce. Our panel includes: Ryan Lasmaili, CEO and Co-Founder of Vaultree, has built his career on a profound fascination for groundbreaking technology. His journey, marked by over a decade of experience in tech startups, is distinguished by strategic problem-solving, analytical insights, and forward-thinking solutions. Dennis Dayman is a Resident CISO for Proofpoint with more than 30 years of experience as a leader in security and privacy with a focus on information security and data privacy, data governance issues, protecting and improving data through industry policy, regulatory policy relations, and technical solutions. He is the co-author of Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams at StartupCXO.com. He has also held leadership roles in privacy and security at several other organizations, including Maropost, Return Path, and Eloqua. Dennis was appointed Advisor to the Data Privacy and Integrity Committee by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary. Brian Honan is CEO of BH Consulting an independent cybersecurity and data protection advisory firm based in Dublin, Ireland. Brian is an internationally recognised expert on cybersecurity. He is a member of the Advisory Group of the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA). Brian has previously acted as a special advisor to Europol's Cybercrime Centre (EC3), and is the founder of Ireland's first Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT). Our guest cohost is: Claire Walsh - who is currently a Senior Market Advisor for Cybersecurity in the Enterprise Ireland New York office, Claire's role is to support Irish cybersecurity companies to start and scale their businesses in the USA

E53: THIS WEEK'S GUEST - MATT BLUMBERGIn this episode, Matt talks about how: Creating better personal relationships with acquirers can de-risk M&A transactions To bounce back from a failed M&A transaction Building a company with a work/life balance in mind can lead to a great outcome GUEST BIO:Matt Blumberg, a former management consultant, a venture capitalist and early employee who helped MovieFone move into the Internet age and get acquired by AOL.With his well-rounded training, Matt's biggest professional success came by co-founding Return Path, a company that provides email intelligence solutions for marketers. Matt and his team grew the company to 500 employees and a hundred million in revenue. Along his 20 year journey, Matt was approached four times to sell the business, and after four failed attempts for various reasons he finally completed a sale to Validity, a consumer data company, in 2019.Today, Matt is the co-founder and CEO of Bolster, a talent marketplace to match highly experienced executives with fractional and project based roles to help startups scale.WHERE TO FIND MATT BLUMBERG:LinkedInX (Twitter)EPISODE REFERENCES AND READING MATERIAL:Validity Acquires Return Path, the leader in email deliverabilityThe Daily Bolster Podcast, with Matt BlumbergStartup CEO (by Matt Blumberg)Startup CXO (by Matt Blumberg)Startup Boards (by Matt Blumberg)Someone Just Offered To Buy Your Company: Now What? (blog)

QuoteAttempting to fit myself into a mold that did not suit me was my greatest mistake. I failed to recognize my strengths and where I found the most joy, which delayed my realization of how to optimize my success and happiness. Gaining a better understanding of myself was necessary. - Matt HoffmanWho is Matt Hoffman?Matt Hoffman, the Head of Talent and a Partner at M13, shares his experience in building startups and emphasized the role of high-performing teams in elevating individuals.Matt brings a wealth of experience and expertise to high-growth start-up organizations, with a passion for building innovative and authentic cultures that can scale with the business. By empowering and inspiring employees to do their best work through the best People Ops strategies, Matt can help your business create an environment where talent thrives and innovation flourishes.He is a certified Hudson executive coach, which further enhances his ability to develop talent and build amazing companies by focusing on the talented humans who make them great. With his skills and dedication, Matt is poised to make a significant impact in any startup organization he works with.Matt previously built and led the People functions at DigitalOcean and Return Path (#1 Best Place to Work in NYC and #2 in the US, respectively).Key Leadership learning moments (timestamps)00:03:11:14 - Keys to a Great Place to Work!00:04:19:16 - Leadership in Fast-Paced Environments00:05:59:19 - Going Back to a Teenage Matt00:08:06:04 - Creating His Own Firm00:08:59:18 - Changes in Matt's Perspective00:10:08:00 - A Father of 3 Daughters00:12:01:01 - Work-Life Balance - A Myth?00:13:56:21 - Tensions - Remote Work vs. In-Person00:16:07:09 - Challenges in Remote Work00:18:20:16 - College Degree - Not a Good Financial Investment?00:20:45:07 - Hiring People Without College Degrees00:23:57:22 - Coping With Mistakes00:27:00:13 - Trying Out New Things!00:28:18:02 - AI vs People00:30:40:03 - The Shift to Remote Work00:32:56:17 - Companies Should Invest in Development!00:35:39:19 - Understanding Development for Executives00:37:58:23 - Establishing Company DNA!00:40:11:15 - Setbacks in Leadership Conversations00:42:12:14 - Matt's Super Team00:44:34:07 - Matt's Biggest Mistake00:45:56:17 - Matt's Proudest Career Moments00:48:18:00 - Definition of Leadership00:49:31:04 - Thanks For Listening to Everyday Leadership Podcast!Matts links:LinkedInWebsiteFollow the podcastIf youve just stumbled across this podcast episode by chance, please click here to follow it so you never miss a future episode.If you want to learn more about this podcast, and myself, Sope Agbelusi, you can do so using any of the links below.Connect with Me Website Instagram LinkedIn Twitter YouTube Email: hello@mindsetshift.co.uk I am always keen to hear your thoughts and connect with the community of listeners. If you have any comments, feedback or thoughts, please drop me an email at https://mindsetshift.co.uk/#ask-me-anything

Quote “Attempting to fit myself into a mold that did not suit me was my greatest mistake. I failed to recognize my strengths and where I found the most joy, which delayed my realization of how to optimize my success and happiness. Gaining a better understanding of myself was necessary.” - Matt HoffmanWho is Matt Hoffman?Matt Hoffman, the Head of Talent and a Partner at M13, shares his experience in building startups and emphasized the role of high-performing teams in elevating individuals.Matt brings a wealth of experience and expertise to high-growth start-up organizations, with a passion for building innovative and authentic cultures that can scale with the business. By empowering and inspiring employees to do their best work through the best People Ops strategies, Matt can help your business create an environment where talent thrives and innovation flourishes. He is a certified Hudson executive coach, which further enhances his ability to develop talent and build amazing companies by focusing on the talented humans who make them great. With his skills and dedication, Matt is poised to make a significant impact in any startup organization he works with.Matt previously built and led the People functions at DigitalOcean and Return Path (#1 Best Place to Work in NYC and #2 in the US, respectively).Key Leadership learning moments (timestamps)00:03:11:14 - Keys to a Great Place to Work! 00:04:19:16 - Leadership in Fast-Paced Environments00:05:59:19 - Going Back to a Teenage Matt00:08:06:04 - Creating His Own Firm00:08:59:18 - Changes in Matt's Perspective00:10:08:00 - A Father of 3 Daughters00:12:01:01 - Work-Life Balance - A Myth?00:13:56:21 - Tensions - Remote Work vs. In-Person00:16:07:09 - Challenges in Remote Work00:18:20:16 - College Degree - Not a Good Financial Investment?00:20:45:07 - Hiring People Without College Degrees00:23:57:22 - Coping With Mistakes00:27:00:13 - Trying Out New Things!00:28:18:02  - AI vs People00:30:40:03 - The Shift to Remote Work00:32:56:17 - Companies Should Invest in Development!00:35:39:19  - Understanding Development for Executives00:37:58:23 - Establishing Company DNA!00:40:11:15 - Setbacks in Leadership Conversations00:42:12:14 - Matt's Super Team00:44:34:07 - Matt's Biggest Mistake00:45:56:17 - Matt's Proudest Career Moments00:48:18:00 - Definition of Leadership00:49:31:04 - Thanks For Listening to Everyday Leadership Podcast!Matt's links:LinkedInWebsiteFollow the podcastIf you've just stumbled across this podcast episode by chance, please click here to follow it so you never miss a future episode.If you want to learn more about this podcast, and myself, Sope Agbelusi, you can do so using any of the links below.Connect with Me Website Instagram  LinkedIn  Twitter YouTube Email: hello@mindsetshift.co.uk I am always keen to hear your thoughts and connect with the community of listeners. If you have any comments, feedback or thoughts, please drop me an email at https://mindsetshift.co.uk/#ask-me-anything

Quote “Attempting to fit myself into a mold that did not suit me was my greatest mistake. I failed to recognize my strengths and where I found the most joy, which delayed my realization of how to optimize my success and happiness. Gaining a better understanding of myself was necessary.” - Matt HoffmanWho is Matt Hoffman?Matt Hoffman, the Head of Talent and a Partner at M13, shares his experience in building startups and emphasized the role of high-performing teams in elevating individuals.Matt brings a wealth of experience and expertise to high-growth start-up organizations, with a passion for building innovative and authentic cultures that can scale with the business. By empowering and inspiring employees to do their best work through the best People Ops strategies, Matt can help your business create an environment where talent thrives and innovation flourishes. He is a certified Hudson executive coach, which further enhances his ability to develop talent and build amazing companies by focusing on the talented humans who make them great. With his skills and dedication, Matt is poised to make a significant impact in any startup organization he works with.Matt previously built and led the People functions at DigitalOcean and Return Path (#1 Best Place to Work in NYC and #2 in the US, respectively).Key Leadership learning moments (timestamps)00:03:11:14 - Keys to a Great Place to Work! 00:04:19:16 - Leadership in Fast-Paced Environments00:05:59:19 - Going Back to a Teenage Matt00:08:06:04 - Creating His Own Firm00:08:59:18 - Changes in Matt's Perspective00:10:08:00 - A Father of 3 Daughters00:12:01:01 - Work-Life Balance - A Myth?00:13:56:21 - Tensions - Remote Work vs. In-Person00:16:07:09 - Challenges in Remote Work00:18:20:16 - College Degree - Not a Good Financial Investment?00:20:45:07 - Hiring People Without College Degrees00:23:57:22 - Coping With Mistakes00:27:00:13 - Trying Out New Things!00:28:18:02  - AI vs People00:30:40:03 - The Shift to Remote Work00:32:56:17 - Companies Should Invest in Development!00:35:39:19  - Understanding Development for Executives00:37:58:23 - Establishing Company DNA!00:40:11:15 - Setbacks in Leadership Conversations00:42:12:14 - Matt's Super Team00:44:34:07 - Matt's Biggest Mistake00:45:56:17 - Matt's Proudest Career Moments00:48:18:00 - Definition of Leadership00:49:31:04 - Thanks For Listening to Everyday Leadership Podcast!Matt's links:LinkedInWebsiteFollow the podcastIf you've just stumbled across this podcast episode by chance, please click here to follow it so you never miss a future episode.If you want to learn more about this podcast, and myself, Sope Agbelusi, you can do so using any of the links below.Connect with Me Website Instagram  LinkedIn  Twitter YouTube Email: hello@mindsetshift.co.uk I am always keen to hear your thoughts and connect with the community of listeners. If you have any comments, feedback or thoughts, please drop me an email at https://mindsetshift.co.uk/#ask-me-anything

This is a special episode of the Remarkable Leadership podcast entitled My Remarkable Journey. Kevin sits down with Matt Blumberg to learn about his journey toward becoming the leader he is today. Matt is the CEO of Bolster, an on-demand executive talent marketplace. He believes humans like to keep learning and thinks about a career as a jungle gym, not a ladder. Your next step could be any bar you can reach. Further, he understands the importance of culture. You will have a culture regardless, so be intentional in shaping that culture and give everyone ownership. Meet Matt Name: Matt Blumberg  His Story: Matt Blumberg is a technology entrepreneur, business builder, and CEO of Bolster. Before Bolster, Matt was founder & CEO of Return Path, the market leader in email optimization, until its sale in 2019. Under Matt's leadership, Return Path won numerous employer of choice awards including #2 on Fortune Magazine's “Best Companies to Work for” list. Matt is a co-author of the second edition of Startup Boards, released in June 2022. https://startupceo.com/ https://linkedin.com/in/BlumbergMatt https://twitter.com/MattBlumberg https://facebook.com/BolsterTalent This episode is brought to you by... Remarkable Masterclasses. Each masterclass is designed to help you become the remarkable leader and human you were born to be. Details on how to get on board for a specific skill or get discounts each month can be found on our website. Book Recommendations Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business by Matt Blumberg The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business by Patrick M. Lencioni  

Cathy Hawley, former Chief People Officer of Return Path and Co-Founder of Bolster, sits down with Michael to discuss the importance of intentionality and an agile mindset in building a remote company culture, how people operations grew out of traditional human resources, and why employers should focus on a co-creating mentality when approaching its workforce.   Cathy is a strategic people leader, with an exceptional track record of laying the foundation for strong company cultures. After several years in the UK as a social services counselor, Cathy returned to the US as a human resources director. With her experience in the UK informing her people-centric approach to human resources, Cathy served as the Sr. Director of Human Resources at Epsilon for several years before joining Return Path as its Sr. People Director in 2008. Rising through the ranks to become the company's Chief People Officer, Cathy fostered a strong partnership with Matt Blumberg, Return Path's CEO, which was instrumental in helping the company build a development-focused culture. After departing Return Path in June 2019, Cathy teamed back up with Matt in 2020 to found Bolster, an executive talent marketplace, and to co-author Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams. In addition to her role at Bolster, Cathy serves as a Founding Board Member of Path Forward, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people to return to the workforce after taking time off to care for a loved one.Where to find Cathy: LinkedInBolsterMentioned on the episode: Matt Blumberg, former CEO of Return Path, co-founder of Bolster, & author of Startup CxO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your BusinessFred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square VenturesThe First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter by Michael D. Hawkins

Want to why certain companies produce the best products and have the happiest customers? Their secret is that they invest in their people and put them first. And this is exactly the philosophy of Lead to Succeed guest Matt Blumberg. Matt is the founder and CEO of Bolster, a new talent marketplace for on-demand executives and board members launched in 2020. Matt was previously Chairman & CEO of Return Path, the market leader in email optimization. Under Matt's leadership, Return Path won numerous “employer of choice” awards including #2 on Fortune Magazine's “Best Companies to Work for” list. Matt is also Founder and Chairman of Path Forward, a non-profit whose mission is to empower people to restart their careers after time spent focused on caregiving. He is also the author of Startup CEO: A field guide to scaling up your business, and Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Your Company's Critical Teams. Listen in and learn more about the importance of putting your employees first.

Matt Blumberg is the founder and CEO of Bolster, a marketplace for on-demand executive and board talent launched in 2020. Matt was Chairman & CEO of Return Path, Inc., the company he founded in 1999, until its sale to Validity in 2019. Return Path was the market leader in email optimization, helping thousands of businesses use the email channel more effectively to promote and protect their brands and winning numerous employer of choice awards including #2 on Fortune Magazine's “Best Companies to Work for” list. Prior to founding Return Path, Matt was founder and General Manager of the Internet division of MovieFone, Inc. (777-FILM) until the company's acquisition by AOL, and had previously worked in venture capital and management consulting.   In addition to his corporate entrepreneurial work, Matt is co-founder and Chairman of Path Forward, a nonprofit that was spun out of Return Path in 2016, whose mission is to empower women to restart their careers after time spent focused on caregiving, working with more than 75 companies including Apple, Amazon, Wal-Mart, Intuit, Campbell's Soup, PayPal, Verizon, and Oracle. He is also the author of 3 books: Startup CEO: A field guide to scaling up your business (based on his popular blog on entrepreneurship, StartupCEO.com), Startup CXO: A field guide to scaling up your company's critical functions and teams, and the forthcoming Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors, all published by Wiley & Sons.   Matt has been recognized as one of New York's 100 most influential technology leaders by Business Insider, by Crain's as one of New York's Top Entrepreneurs, and by Ernst & Young as an Entrepreneur of the Year finalist. He has served as a Board Member of numerous corporate, nonprofit, and community organizations, as well as Chairman of the Board of the Direct Marketing Association, and he completed a brief assignment as founder and leader of the State of Colorado's COVID-19 Innovation Response Team in 2020. Matt attended Princeton University where he graduated Summa Cum Laude with an A.B. in Urban Planning in 1992. He lives with his wife Mariquita and his three children, Casey, Wilson, and Elyse in Scarsdale, NY.

Contact info: Matt Blumberg Email: Matt@Bolster.com Website: https://www.Bolster.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/BlumbergMatt Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlosterTalent Twitter: https://www.twitter.com@MattBlumberg Bio: Matt Blumberg is a technology entrepreneur, business builder, and CEO of Bolster, an on-demand executive talent marketplace that helps accelerate companies' growth by connecting them with experienced, highly vetted executives for interim, fractional, advisory, project-based, full-time, or board roles. Before Bolster, Matt was founder & CEO of Return Path, the market leader in email optimization, until its sale in 2019. Under Matt's leadership, Return Path won numerous employer of choice awards including #2 on Fortune Magazine's “Best Companies to Work for” list. Prior to Return Path, Matt founded the Internet division of MovieFone (now a division of AOL), worked in venture capital at General Atlantic Partners, and prior to that, was a consultant at Mercer Management Consulting. Matt has served on numerous boards and chaired many of them, including public company, private company, nonprofit, local community, educational, and trade association boards. Through Bolster, Matt has helped place dozens of directors with private and public companies, as well as advised many CEOs on building and running their boards. Matt is a co-author of the second edition of Startup Boards, set to be released in June 2022.

Brady Volpe and John Downey discuss the theory of operation of return path signal levels in the return path. Why does the transmit power increase, rather than decrease like the downstream? How do two way splitters impact upstream and downstream signal levels? Why is the return always higher than the value the of tap The post Understanding Cable Network RF Return Path Signal Levels and Balancing appeared first on Volpe Firm.

Intro.(1:40) - Start of interview.(2:00) - Matt's "origin story". He grew up in San Diego, CA. He's lived in and around New York City for the last 30 years. After college he worked as a consultant (Mercer Consulting) and VC (General Atlantic). In 1995 he joined the executive team of MovieFone, a small cap public company. He helped the company "figure out what the internet was all about." They sold the company to AOL in 1999 (for $388M in stock). Then he started a company called Return Path in 1999. It was a 20-year run where they scaled the company to about $100m in revenue and 500 employees worldwide. They sold the business in 2019 to Validity. In 2020, he founded a new company called Bolster, a marketplace for on-demand executive and board talent. Along the way he wrote a couple of books (Startup CEO in 2013, and Startup CXO in 2021), and he's sat on several boards (such as those of Oblong, Authentic Response, Moz and Feedburner), one major trade association (DMA), some community/academic (local Little League, and a couple of different Princeton fundraising boards). He has been "increasingly spending time on board matters as his career has gone on."(5:50) - On the first edition of the book Startup Boards (2013), by Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani. Brad and Matt will publish the second edition of the book this June. It takes a fresh look at the topic, with more diverse voices. They added a section for aspiring board members (interested in becoming independent directors).(8:51) - On why he started his new company Bolster, a marketplace for executive and board talent. "About a quarter of our business is focused on running board searches for private venture-backed and public companies (in their first year they did about 30-40 board searches)." They want to "help startup CEOs rethink the way they use and find senior talent."(11:41) - On his focus on increasing the number and diversity of independent directors in venture-backed companies. Bolster's benchmarking study on independent directors in startup boards (based on a study of 250 private company boards):Only 32% of private company boards have independent directors. Half of boards have open independent director seats they expect to fill in the next 12 months.Compared with investor or management directors, independent director seats are 3 times as likely to be held by women. 86% of director seats overall are held by men, and 56% of early stage private company boards have no gender diversity at all.Four out of five seats on private company boards are held by individuals who are White, and 43% of boards are completely homogenous with regard to the race/ethnicity of their directors.CEOs are broadening their searches to diversify their boards. Two-thirds of CEOs are open to bringing on first-time directors, and 41% of independent directors have either some college or an under-graduate degree only (vs. a post-grad degree).Board composition tends to over-index on investors and management directors. 59% of boards have more than one management or founder director and 59% of boards have 2 or more investor directors.Men seem to have a slightly higher average earning potential (measured in basis points per year and grant value) compared to women directors at like companies.(12:40) - "Our Mantra is the 'Rule of Ones' : you should be putting independent directors from day one, private company boards should only have one founder on the board, and for every one investor you should have one independent."(13:59) - On Fred Wilson's Board Diversity Proposal. "Fred walks the walk on that one, as does Brad Feld and Greg Sands." (all 3 VCs are board observers on Bolster's board). "At the end of the day, they all have very meaningful voices in and outside the boardroom, but they have made room for us to bring very good and diverse candidates." [Bolster's board has 4 first-time independent directors.](18:50) - On the impact of record-breaking VC financings, SPACs, IPOs and M&A on startups. "It's put a lot more money and valuation into startups."(19:52) - On his advice to CEOs on how to manage their boards: "The CEO should think of it as having two teams: one team is the executive team, the other is the board." "Start by making sure board composition is right". Scott Weiss: "boards eat whatever you put in front of them." Matt's rule: "No slides in board meetings, it's not a dog and pony show."(23:41) - On virtual board meetings via Zoom or otherwise post-pandemic. "It used to be that boards would have four in-person meetings per year." "In the private company world, VCs are constrained by the number of boards they sit on, but with virtual board meetings their ability to sit on boards has gone up 40-50% [since they don't have to get on planes so much anymore]." Matt's best practice approach: "Once or twice a year the board should meet in-person, and the rest is OK to meet virtually."(26:23) - On ESG in private companies. "This is an area where private companies are ahead." On growth of public benefit corporations (PBCs).(30:03) - On diversity in startup boards. "There is a lot more awareness on the need and benefits for more diversity on boards." "It has to start with the commitment to add one or two independents."(35:43) - On the difference between CEO coaches and mentors: "A coach is someone who helps you be the best version of you. A mentor is someone who has done your job before, knows how to do it cold, has probably done it at your stage and the stage beyond. He/she can help you teach the craft of the job." "Executives need both a coach and mentor, sometimes it's the same person."(37:07) - What makes Bolster different for board searches? "It's faster and cheaper [because we have a curated and qualified marketplace.]"(39:08) - On how the pandemic has changed the geographic distribution of talent.  "People can live anywhere now." "NY has become a crypto talent pool." "I think there is a role for DAOs, but I don't think there will be a mass movement away from traditional corporate structures." "I think leadership matters, and companies would be hard pressed to make hard calls by vote [if you don't think that's true, look at Washington DC]."(41:30) - Matt's favorite books:The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand (1943)The Goal, by Eli Goldratt (1984) [in business books]The Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni (2012) ["my CEO bible"](42:32) - Who were your mentors, and what did you learn from them?His grandmother "I really learned resilience and grace from her."His dad "I learned perseverance and the importance of having a strong moral compass."(43:33) - Quotes that she thinks of often, or lives her life by: Theodore's Roosevelt "Man in the Arena" speech (1910): “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 them 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, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in 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 fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ("for me that's the entrepreneurs' quote").(45:05) - An unusual habit or an absurd thing that he loves: Mexican food! "I also love reading American and Presidential history."(46:21) - The living person he most admires? Oprah Winfrey is super interesting and inspiring. Jeff Bezos (innovation gene and perseverance). Jeremy Bloom, CEO of Integrate (the only athlete in history to ski in the Olympics and also be drafted into the NFL).Matt Blumberg is the founder and CEO of Bolster, a marketplace for on-demand executive and board talent. You can follow Matt at the following links:matt@bolster.comwww.linkedin.com/in/blumbergmattwww.startupceo.com (blog)www.twitter.com/mattblumbergwww.bolster.com__ You can follow Evan on social media at:Twitter: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/__Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

For our first episode of 2022, Jerry sits down with Matt Blumberg, founder and CEO of Bolster, a marketplace for on-demand executive and board talent. In this conversation, Matt describes how the knowledge and insight he gained during his 20 year run as the founder and CEO at Return Path, Inc. prepared him for the uncertainty that comes with being a second-time founder. The pair discuss Matt's latest book, Startup CXO, which serves as a handbook for defining the functional competencies and skills needed in various roles within an organization, and explore what companies can do to support their employees in scaling to meet the needs of the business. Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! Follow our step by step guides: - How To: Leave a Review on Your Computer: - How To: Leave a Review on Your iPhone: Never miss an episode! Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on all our episode releases.  

Welcome to an episode with the CEO and Co-Founder of Bolster, Matt Blumberg together with his Co-Founder Jack Sinclair. Get Matt's book here: https://amzn.to/3oqmBsv Matt Blumberg is a technology entrepreneur. He spent his entire career creating startups, scaling them, and sharing best practices of what works and what doesn't work for other CEOs and team members in the entrepreneurial community. His innovative email marketing company, Return Path, grew to $100mm in revenues and helped it to a successful exit in a strategic sale to Validity in 2019. Blumberg's company Bolster, an on-demand executive talent marketplace, helps accelerate companies' growth by connecting them with experienced, highly-vetted executives for various roles. It recently conducted a study on Independent Board Members and Board Diversity, which revealed that most early-stage startup boards lack racial and gender diversity as much as boards of more established startups. In this episode, Matt and Jack talked about what is really needed to build a successful startup and maintain a good business to prepare it for scaling up. For those who are thinking of venturing into the world of entrepreneurship and planning to start a company/business, this is for you. STARTUP CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams. Matt Blumberg: https://amzn.to/3oqmBsv Enjoying our podcast? Get access to sample advanced training episodes here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo We use affiliate links whenever possible (if you purchase items listed above using our affiliate links, we will get a bonus).

Matt Blumberg, Co-founder, and CEO of Bolster compares his experience founding Return Path in 1999 to scaling Bolster today. Return Path was one of the first companies to establish a "people first" culture where the circle of life for a high-growth, highly scalable business began with employees at the forefront, anchored in values of equity, parity, flexibility, and an intense focus on investing in employee development. Their focus on people first led to better customer outcomes, which led to better business outcomes. In this episode, Matt shares how his team at Bolster continues to champion providing unique tools for CEOs to unlock incredible potential for a new way of developing leaders and scalable businesses, leveraging data, not anecdotes. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/endeavornorthamerica/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/endeavornorthamerica/support

In this podcast, Matt Blumberg discussed his book Startup CXO, the insights it carries and shared how to build a thriving leadership that builds for tomorrow today. He sheds light on the importance of a good leader and how to achieve it effectively. Matt's Recommended Read: The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Ben Horowitz https://amzn.to/3edvsHV The Oxygen Advantage: Simple, Scientifically Proven Breathing Techniques to Help You Become Healthier, Slimmer, Faster, and Fitter by Patrick McKeown https://amzn.to/3k994TR Matt's Book: Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams by Matt Blumberg , Peter M. Birkeland https://amzn.to/3AWuyJL Podcast Link: iTunes: http://math.im/jofitunes Youtube: http://math.im/jofyoutube Matt is the founder and CEO of Bolster, a new talent marketplace for on-demand executives and board members launched in 2020. Matt was previously Chairman & CEO of Return Path, the market leader in email optimization, from 1999, until its sale to Validity. Under Matt's leadership, Return Path won numerous employer of choice awards including #2 on Fortune Magazine's “Best Companies to Work for” list. Prior to founding Return Path, Matt founded the Internet division of MovieFone (777-FILM) and had previously worked in venture capital and management consulting. Matt is Founder and Chairman of Path Forward, a non-profit that was spun out of Return Path in 2016 whose mission is to empower people to restart their careers after time spent focused on caregiving. He is also the author of Startup CEO: A field guide to scaling up your business, second edition published by Wiley & Sons in 2020, Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Your Company's Critical Teams, published by Wiley & Sons in 2021, and the forthcoming second edition of Startup Boards, to be published by Wiley & Sons in 2021 or 2022. Timelines: 1:10 Matt's journey. 3:22 The need for Bolster. 6:11 Tenets of a successful startup. 8:08 The kind of leadership required for a successful startup. 11:08 Best practices building a successful culture for a startup. 13:27 Pitfalls in leading a startup. 16:40 Qualities of a successful leader. 18:48 Tenets of a good leader in a startup environment. 22:00 Differentiating team expectations in small, mid, and large organizations. 24:06 Tips on grooming leaders in an organization. 25:47 The idea behind the book "Future of Thriving Startup CXO". 30:27 Research behind the book "Future of Thriving Startup CXO". 32:48 Picking the right authors for the book "Future of Thriving Startup CXO". 35:42 How does the on-demand leadership model fit into the life of a startup? 40:39 The role of technology in getting further access to leadership talent. 41:43 The future of leadership. 43:40 Rapidfire with Matt. 45:32 Matt's success mantra. 48:50 Matt's favorite reads. 50:20 Closing remarks. About TAO.ai[Sponsor]: TAO is building the World's largest and AI-powered Skills Universe and Community powering career development platform empowering some of the World's largest communities/organizations. Learn more at https://TAO.ai

Matt Blumberg is the founder and CEO of Bolster, a new talent marketplace for on-demand executives launched in 2020. Before Bolster, he was the CEO of Return Path. He has authored two books, namely: The Startup CEO and The Startup CXO.In this episode, Matt will take us through his entrepreneurship journey. He will give us in-depth details on how they founded Return Path, how they built the company culture, as well as their exit from the company. Matt also shares how he creates a support system, learned to say ”no,” and became a two-time CEO.

On July 22nd, 2021, Bolster Co-Founder and CEO Matt Blumberg joined High Alpha Managing Scott Dorsey for a conversation about his new book, Startup CXO. Unlike other business books, Startup CXO is designed to help each functional leader understand how their function scales, what to anticipate as they scale, and what things to avoid. Matt approached this topic with deep domain expertise in creating startups, scaling them, and sharing best practices of what works and what doesn't work for other CEOs and team members in the entrepreneurial community. Prior to Bolster, Matt was the Founder and CEO of Return Path, which he sold in 2019. In this episode, we revisit Matt's Speaker Series where you'll learn: Themes from his new book, Startup CXO Lessons from building, scaling, and selling ReturnPath The role of the CEO as functional supervisor and why they not only have to master the entirety of their role, but deeply understand other functions Candid advice on effectively managing and utilizing your board members and meetings

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 177, an episode with the CEO and Co-Founder of Bolster, Matt Blumberg together with his Co-Founder Jack Sinclair. Get Matt's book here: https://amzn.to/3oqmBsv Matt Blumberg is a technology entrepreneur. He spent his entire career creating startups, scaling them, and sharing best practices of what works and what doesn't work for other CEOs and team members in the entrepreneurial community. His innovative email marketing company, Return Path, grew to $100mm in revenues and helped it to a successful exit in a strategic sale to Validity in 2019. Blumberg's company Bolster, an on-demand executive talent marketplace, helps accelerate companies' growth by connecting them with experienced, highly-vetted executives for various roles. It recently conducted a study on Independent Board Members and Board Diversity, which revealed that most early-stage startup boards lack racial and gender diversity as much as boards of more established startups. In this episode, Matt and Jack talked about what is really needed to build a successful startup and maintain a good business to prepare it for scaling up. For those who are thinking of venturing into the world of entrepreneurship and planning to start a company/business, this is for you. STARTUP CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams. Matt Blumberg: https://amzn.to/3oqmBsv Enjoying our podcast? Get access to sample advanced training episodes here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo We use affiliate links whenever possible (if you purchase items listed above using our affiliate links, we will get a bonus).

In this podcast, Matt Blumberg discussed his book Startup CXO, the insights it carries and shared how to build a thriving leadership that builds for tomorrow today. He sheds light on the importance of a good leader and how to achieve it effectively. Matt's Recommended Read: The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Ben Horowitz https://amzn.to/3edvsHV The Oxygen Advantage: Simple, Scientifically Proven Breathing Techniques to Help You Become Healthier, Slimmer, Faster, and Fitter by Patrick McKeown https://amzn.to/3k994TR Matt's Book: Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams by Matt Blumberg , Peter M. Birkeland https://amzn.to/3AWuyJL Podcast Link: iTunes: http://math.im/jofitunes Youtube: http://math.im/jofyoutube Matt is the founder and CEO of Bolster, a new talent marketplace for on-demand executives and board members launched in 2020. Matt was previously Chairman & CEO of Return Path, the market leader in email optimization, from 1999, until its sale to Validity. Under Matt's leadership, Return Path won numerous employer of choice awards including #2 on Fortune Magazine's “Best Companies to Work for” list. Prior to founding Return Path, Matt founded the Internet division of MovieFone (777-FILM) and had previously worked in venture capital and management consulting. Matt is Founder and Chairman of Path Forward, a non-profit that was spun out of Return Path in 2016 whose mission is to empower people to restart their careers after time spent focused on caregiving. He is also the author of Startup CEO: A field guide to scaling up your business, second edition published by Wiley & Sons in 2020, Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Your Company's Critical Teams, published by Wiley & Sons in 2021, and the forthcoming second edition of Startup Boards, to be published by Wiley & Sons in 2021 or 2022. Timelines: 1:10 Matt's journey. 3:22 The need for Bolster. 6:11 Tenets of a successful startup. 8:08 The kind of leadership required for a successful startup. 11:08 Best practices building a successful culture for a startup. 13:27 Pitfalls in leading a startup. 16:40 Qualities of a successful leader. 18:48 Tenets of a good leader in a startup environment. 22:00 Differentiating team expectations in small, mid, and large organizations. 24:06 Tips on grooming leaders in an organization. 25:47 The idea behind the book "Future of Thriving Startup CXO". 30:27 Research behind the book "Future of Thriving Startup CXO". 32:48 Picking the right authors for the book "Future of Thriving Startup CXO". 35:42 How does the on-demand leadership model fit into the life of a startup? 40:39 The role of technology in getting further access to leadership talent. 41:43 The future of leadership. 43:40 Rapidfire with Matt. 45:32 Matt's success mantra. 48:50 Matt's favorite reads. 50:20 Closing remarks. About TAO.ai[Sponsor]: TAO is building the World's largest and AI-powered Skills Universe and Community powering career development platform empowering some of the World's largest communities/organizations. Learn more at https://TAO.ai

En esta sesión en vivo revisaremos los elementos básicos (y algunos avanzados) para diseñar, construir y mantener una ruta de retorno que nos permita ofrecer servicios bidireccionales con la mejor calidad de experiencia posible. Visita https://go.viavisolutions.com/latam-digital-xperience-3/p/1 para ver el video original. Si te interesa alguno de nuestros productos mándanos un Whatsapp al: +52 55 8069 4245

Having sold Grasshopper, the virtual phone service, for $175 million in 2015, David Hauser assessed his priorities. Grasshopper was his third launch and exit, following ReturnPath (email services) and Chargify (subscription management). "I decided to optimize for happiness, not for return on capital or profit," he said.

The Blue Jays said they need to improve, so they made some moves. Toronto acquired Corey Dickerson and Adam Cimber to provide left-handed offense and relief pitching, respectively. After re-tearing his Achilles, what does Mike Soroka's future look like now? Hector Santiago is this season's first player to receive a suspension for foreign substance abuse. All this (and more) on today's episode.

Matt Blumberg is the author of Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams. Matt led his first startup, Return Path, an email marketing company, to $100 mn in revenue and a successful exit in 2019. He is now building Bolster, an on-demand executive talent marketplace for startups. On the latest episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we caught up with the New York Based entrepreneur to discuss his latest book, Startup CXO. We talked about:

Today’s episode is with Mark Frein, the Chief People Officer & Head of Alumni Programs at Lambda School. Previously, Mark served as the Chief People Officer at both InVision and Return Path. He also ran his own leadership development consultancy and taught on HR topics as an adjunct professor.   Mark has an invaluable perspective and tons of advice to share after setting up several people orgs in a range of different companies. In this conversation, Mark shares his approach to the CPO role and his philosophy around the function more generally, including why he thinks at its core, it’s a data and analytical function and how to match the employee experience to your company’s competitive positioning.   He also gets incredibly tactical on a wide range of topics, from how to hire with empathy and advice for approaching skip-levels, to gathering employee feedback and driving career conversations.   Today’s conversation is a must-listen for both founders and early-stage people leaders trying to thoughtfully scale this function, as well as for current and aspiring managers hoping to hone their leadership and development chops.   You can follow Mark on Twitter at @freintime, and you can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson 

Having an efficient sales process in place can be the difference between a high-performing and an underperforming sales organization. 48% of participants from underperforming sales organizations said they didn't have a strictly structured and enforced sales process (Source: Harvard Business Review). Chris Ochs is a sales process optimization expert. He's currently the VP and head of sales at Factoreal, a marketing, automation, and customer engagement platform. Chris is also many other things. He is an entrepreneur, senior sales executive, public speaker, and endurance athlete with 20 years of management experience in companies ranging from organic food, software-as-a-service, online event planning, and email deliverability.  Chris is also the managing partner of CK-HS Consulting, a management consulting company. His company works with small businesses to improve operations and finances and increase the customer base. He has completed more than 50 triathlons, including two Ironman races. An Early Sales Journey Chris started hustling as a kid. He sold Girl Scout cookies for his sisters. When he got into Junior High, he made $200 a week selling lollipops. He was selling so many lollipops that the Dean of Boys suspected he might be selling drugs. That was when Chris realized he liked making money.  However, his real enabler was his first job. Right after college, he started selling Cutco knives. The job helped him make lasting connections but more importantly, it made him realize that he hated losing in sales. One day after he lost a sale, he called his manager frustrated to tell him about a customer who couldn't see how valuable the knives were. His manager told Chris he would teach him so that this would never happen again. This was the start of Chris's sales education. He started learning about sales as a process,  science, consumer psychology, behavior, and methodology. When he left the company 12 years later, he was one of the top managers in the history of the company. Building Sales Processes for Start-ups Chris spent the next 2 years helping a friend with a new companyーReturn Path. It was also one of the first companies in the space of digital marketing and data analytics. Even though he had no understanding of the technology, he built out their entire sales process till the company had achieved great success.  Chris's next stop was at ACTIVE Network, a global marketplace for activities and events that connects participants and activity organizers. When he first joined the company, Chris had a sales team of 24 people covering the U.S. and Europe, but they had not implemented a sales process. He was shocked when they told him it was taking them 3 days to respond to a sales lead.  He developed and refined a sales optimization process and strategy. By the end of the year, the company implemented it. Chris managed to increase deal velocity and the average order. The following year, the company witnessed $3 million of growth.  Despite the fact that the entire events industry began to shrink after that, Chris's department was the most profitable in the company. They were able to contribute $4 million of profit to a company that only posted $2 million of profit. In other words, the company would have had a $2 million loss without Chris's division. After Chris left ACTIVE Network, he worked with a friend to develop and implement a sales process for an organic food company in San Diego. Once again, Chris found himself in a business that he knew nothing about. But, this didn't stop him from implementing a sales process and shifting the company from one that lost $50,000 a month to a company with 12% growth month over month for the following year.  Business School and a Sales Consulting Company Chris started business school at UCLA where he specialized in finance, international management, marketing, and entrepreneurship. After he graduated, he looked around and realized that not many people in Los Angeles knew how to sell. So, he started his sales consulting company that specializes in driving sales through market analysis and sales force effectiveness.  Chris helped more start-ups get off the ground until most recently he joined Factoreal as Head of Sales. He feels that he has come full circle with his current job where he can put to use everything he's learned over the years.  Sales Optimization Strategies I asked Chris to tell us about some of his sales optimization secrets and strategies.  Sales is a Science Before Chris started business school, he always looked at sales as a science. We would also benefit from looking at sales this way, and viewing it as a process with inputs and outputs. When we do a presentation well, we're building value. We're presenting a solution that solves a problem. That's when we get a “yes” and close the sale.  Understand the Customer's “Why” We should ask ourselves “why would our ideal customer buy our products?” If we're not sure of the answer, then we haven't done enough probing. That's when we need to go back to the process before we can move any further. It's too expensive to neglect those steps because if we continue, we will get a “no” and the sale will be lost. We need to focus on providing value first. Chris believes it's important to know what drives our customers. When there's an objection, we need to dig deeper and try to uncover this objection. He recalls when he used to work with the organic food company selling goji berries to the Category Manager at the Whole Foods Market in Venice, California. Chris's customer cared much about leaving work at 3 pm to avoid the traffic jam, so he came to work at 5 am every day. Chris understood this, and when his customer asked for a meeting, Chris told him he would meet him at 5:20 am. His customer was so impressed, and it made him see that Chris took his work and their business seriously.  Chris showed his customer how buying his product would help reduce his customer turnover, increase his revenue, and become more profitable. Above all, Chris told him he wouldn't have to justify why he had to leave work early anymore.  Customers Asking for a Discount When the customer asked for a discount, Chris moved the conversation to another value proposition, offering to do a promotion for him in his local area instead. It would help drive more people to his customer's store, hence increase the traffic and sales.  “The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven't given them anything else to care about.” Seth Godin  Build Rapport Before Asking the Tough Questions We can't approach a customer and ask them about their marketing budget before we've broken the ice and provided value first. After they've seen the value we can offer them, they'll be willing to answer some of the tough questions. Key Takeaways Thank you so much Chris for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode: An efficient sales process can be the difference between a high-performing and an underperforming sales organization.  Sales should be regarded as a science. The output we get is the result of what we feed into the process.  It doesn't matter if we don't understand a certain technology or are working in an unfamiliar industry. These things can be learned. What matters is having a solid sales process. Before we can uncover our customers' objections and passion, we must first build rapport with them.   Strive to understand the core why's of our target audience.  Connect with Chris Ochs If you enjoyed this interview and want to connect with Chris Ochs or connect with him, you can find him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/chrisochs, visit his consulting company website www.ck-hs.com, or Factoreal website www.factoreal.com.  Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer? Did you like today's episode? Then please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content:   Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business   Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine.   Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel.   Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.   Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter. Share Your Story What strategies have you used to optimize your sales process? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers. Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/68-how-sales-process-optimization-can-transform-profitability/ 

This episode features an interview with Esther Flammer, Vice President of Demand Generation  and acting CMO of Conga.Esther is a senior marketing executive with nearly 20 years of B2B and agency experience in SaaS, high-tech, and non-profit sectors. Her dynamic leadership has driven success at high-growth B2B technology companies like Conga, Convercent, and Return Path.On this episode, Esther discusses the balance between the art and science of marketing, what B2B can learn from B2C, and the different motions that fuel high-transaction, high-volume inbound pipeline versus the targeted ABM strategies that drive complex, enterprise-level deals.Key TakeawaysMarketing is a delicate balance of art and science, but in demand gen, you’re going to need a lot of data to back up the strategies you employ for generating the pipeline needed to meet the company’s goals.If you sell to SMB and Enterprise, high-velocity, high-transaction deals are going to be very different than complex, enterprise-level deals. Make sure you have distinct go-to-market strategies for each segment and that you’re fueling both engines, but that you also understand the overlap between the two.In-person events are on hold, but virtual events are still a strong tactic. The reach is much larger but you have to be much more focused, purposeful, and intentional about the content to keep audiences engaged.Quotes“We see so much ROI and a lot of the bigger deals and true qualified pipeline coming from [our ABM efforts]. It’s a very multichannel, targeted effort, starting with the technology that provides propensity to buy data…really defining what those target accounts look like, adding in targeted advertising so that we can warm them up and truly personalize…then ensuring that we're delivering the right message to the right person at the right time, that it's personal, that it's relevant and it’s aligned with where they are in their buyer's journey.”“We were invited to be on a pilot to try out Qualified.com on Salesforce AppExchange…and it's been a game changer completely. We've always had high volumes from AppExchange and from each of our product listings, but we were able to see much higher conversions, more qualified conversations and true pipeline come from that. So we’re huge fans.”“Because of the fact that we don't really have live events where you would typically see conversations happening at a booth, [conversational marketing] has been a great addition to our full demand gen strategy and the tactics and channels that we're utilizing.”“I think there's a lot that B2B can learn from B2C–tech and data analysis and neuromarketing and things like that. B2B tech is, I feel like, just starting to do that in a sense, but there's a lot that we can do to actually provide really relevant content to people who are looking to purchase.”“I feel like when you're in demand generation, there's kind of always a target on your back just because you are accountable for the pipeline that the business needs to close in order to hit the bookings goals. Demand generation in most cases is front and center: What are you doing? What is your strategy? How are you producing more pipeline? ...Everything is very much kind of that art and science of marketing…So we use a lot of data and science to figure out how much pipeline we need, and for me, our goal of the demand gen team is predictable pipeline. We put a lot of effort into trying to figure out how much pipeline do we need to create in this quarter in order to hit our goals, both this quarter as well as next quarter and beyond.”SponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.LinksCheck out Conga's Agents of Change Podcast 

David Hauser is a Serial Entrepreneur, Investor, Author & the Founder of the virtual phone company - Grasshopper, which he bootstrapped and successfully sold in 2015 for $176M. He has been an entrepreneur from an early age, and the first company he co-founded at 17 was Return Path which raised $120 million and was acquired later on. David has been an investor and advisor for many companies, and has also co-founded a number of startups including Chargify, Spreadable, and PopSurvey. In this episode we discuss: - Steps to take to become a successful entrepreneur - Advice for young founders - How to find your "calling" & what problems to solve - Debt vs. Equity and when to take Each - How to Evaluate Risk & Make better Decisions - What to Focus on When Starting a Business - Where to Invest in 2021 - The Future of Work post-pandemic David Hauser - Bootstrapping & Scaling Companies to Success: 1:59 - Secret to Life Balance 2:17 - On Setting Priorities 2:45 - Managing Multiple Companies 4:07 - Where to Invest in 2021 5:08 - Growing on Social Media 6:01 - What it Takes to be a Successful Entrepreneur 6:56 - How to Figure Out Your "Calling" 8:01 - How to Know When to Walk Away from a Project 9:06 - Narrowing Down the Problems to Care About 10:20 - When Should You Monetize Your Business 11:46 - Debt vs. Equity and When to Get Each 13:01 - What Separates Good Entrepreneurs from the Great Ones 14:30 - Cash Flow Management Strategy 15:32 - What Should Entrepreneurs Focus Early On 17:55 - Dealing with the Pandemic 19:14 - Future of Work from Home 21:50 - Secret Sauce for a Successful Marketplace Platform 24:56 - Would You Rather Game 29:44 - How To Decide Which Opportunities to Pay Attention to 31:00 - Advice to a Younger Self 32:44 - Tips on Evaluating Risk 33:42 -The Best Way to Create Wealth & Multiply it 35:49 - Problems Entrepreneurs Can Focus On 38:17 - Finding an Investor 40:28 - Every Successful Person Should Have the Following 43:40 - What David is Learning & Working On Right Now 44:59 - A Millennial Is 45:13 - A Millennial Should Be 45:23 - A Millennial Is Not 45:37 - Connect with David

Building a company isn’t easy, and neither is selling one. Hear from local entrepreneurs-turned-Tech Coast Angels investors about the trials and tribulations they faced selling their own companies. TCA is the largest angel investment group in the country that has fueled new innovative companies since 1997, with one of its most active memberships in San Diego. Read more about the entrepreneurs featured on the podcast below:  Moderator Dean Rosenberg received funding from TCA in an early phase of a past business and has been an angel ever since. Since exiting, Dean has been an active member of the organization and is currently working as COO at Powur.  Nii A. Ahene sold his company, CPC Strategies to Tinuiti, which had grown organically without any external funding. Nii capitalized on the growing internet market to foster this growth and continues to do so at Tinuiti.  Alessandra Lezama holds an impressive selling record with four completed in the last 20 years. Alessandra talks about how each sale requires a different approach, but negotiation is key regardless. Recently, she started TOOTRIS, which is working to make childcare affordable, convenient, and on-demand.  Mike Wilson sold his family’s business AdvisoryWorld Financial Technology. He explains how they were not preparing to complete a sale when several of the company’s clients reached out with interest. It was eventually acquired by LPL Financial, where he currently serves as Executive Vice President.  Al Bsharah sold Email Copilot twice, with the intention of only landing at Seismic. The technology was sold to Return Path, but was ultimately acquired by Seismic, where almost all of his team still works. Al talks about how his goal is to keep the entrepreneur vibe, even at larger companies.  Tim Rout brought WiFi to military bases across the country with a previous company and was recently recruited to do the same for national parks. Access Parks has seen large growth in the past year as people have shifted to spending more time outdoors during the pandemic  Keep up with TCA: Website LinkedIn Facebook: @techcoastangels Thanks to our partners at Cox Business for their support in enabling us to grow the San Diego ecosystem.

Matt Blumberg, the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Bolster, adds his page to the Marketing Playbook. Hear how to create an outstanding company culture, learn from your mistakes and stay positive, clearly communicate the problem you solve, lessons from his book Startup CEO and successful exit Return Path, and the important technology he was tasked with building in 2020. Connect with Matt on LinkedIn, Twitter at @MattBlumberg, and StartupCEO.com

David Hauser ~ Founder of GrassHopper.com ~ Current Series ~ 100 Interviews with 100 Major Influencers   On the mic today we are joined by an individual who sold the company he and his partner built for $170 Million. David Hauser is a serial entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded multiple companies over the years, making his largest exit from Grasshopper.com. David and his partner are 100% focused on building companies that focus on rapid growth, and delayed gratification for themselves. This is how they took Grasshopper to $1 Million in year one, scaling it to $30 Million annual revenue then selling it after 12 years for the amount mentioned earlier for $170 Million.    David not only co-founded Grasshopper he also started Chargify that was invested into by Mark Cuban himself half a million dollars over a short three email exchange. David founded ReturnPath, SuperFat, invested in Intercom, Unbounce, Broove, The Hustle and 50+ more companies.  He is also a founding member of National Entrepreneurs' Day, and has been featured in Inc. Magazine's 30 Under 30!    02:27  Who is David Hauser?      11:11  Starting a Company His Second Year in College      14:23  Making $1 Million While Still in College      23:47  A Growth Business vs. A Lifestyle Business      28:25  Making the Decision to Sell for $170 Million      37:09  Remote Teams vs. Teams in an Office      39:47  Letting Go of Team Members that Get You to $5 Million But Can't Get    You to $10 Million      43:44  Why Happiness & Freedom Don't Come With Massive Amounts of Money      51:58  Valuing Experience Over Things      54:02  Importance of Catching People Doing Good Things      56:58  How You Do One Things is How You Do Everything      58:20  Work Hard Be Nice 01:05:36  Life Changing Books  01:10:45  Where to Find David    Contact Info: https://www.davidhauser.com/   Website: https://www.thebusinessmethod.com/david-hauser Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-business-method-podcast/id1069958541?mt=2 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly90aGVidXNpbmVzc21ldGhvZC5wb2RiZWFuLmNvbS9mZWVkLnhtbA%3D%3D Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2q8Q9t78sCL6kNkWlnV1Po  

Tami M. Forman is the chief executive of Path Forward, a nonprofit organization that creates mid-career internship programs to ease the transition back to work for women (and men) after taking a break for raising children or other caregiving responsibilities. Before founding Path Forward, Tami spent a decade as a tech marketing executive with data solutions provider, Return Path. Before that she worked in book publishing at Simon & Schuster and Houghton Mifflin and held senior-level editorial positions at iVillage and News Corporation. She is a frequent speaker on issues related to women’s participation in the workforce, having presented at the Grace Hopper Celebration, DisruptHR, Tech Inclusion, and the Conference Board’s Women’s Leadership Conference. She writes a career column for https://www.forbes.com/sites/tamiforman/#54fa03c85c2e (Forbes), is a https://fairygodboss.com/users/profile/Tami%2520M.%2520Forman (Fairygodboss VIP), and was named by Flexjobs as https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/top-career-experts-for-working-moms-follow-on-twitter/ (one of the top 20 career experts for working moms). She lives in New York City with her husband and two kids, aged 10 and 12.  On This Episode: Tami explains why she left media to move into the tech software company. Find out what social constructs hold women back. Discover why Tami is so inspired by Melinda Gates. Learn how leaders can be a catalyst for success by allowing their team to tap into their talents. Key Takeaways: Women’s lack of empowerment holds back entire countries. Leadership is within all of us. You must place a lot of emphasis on sustainability in addition to revenue. Tweetable Quotes: “To be a successful leader you have to be willing to admit when you don’t know.” “The radical transparency with which we live is not going away – it’s accelerating.” Tami Forman: pathforward.org Denis Gianoutsos: denis@leadingchangepartners.com https://my.captivate.fm/www.LeadingChangePartners.com%C2%A0 (www.LeadingChangePartners.com )

Randall Frietzsche, CISO at Denver Health is our feature guest this week. News from: Blone Beard, Return Path, Empower Retirement, StackHawk, CyberGRX, Red Canary, zvelo, ManagedMethods and a lot more! Support us on Patreon! Fun swag available - all proceeds will directly support the Colorado = Security infrastructure. Come join us on the new Colorado = Security Slack channel to meet old and new friends. Sign up for our mailing list on the main site to receive weekly updates - https://www.colorado-security.com/. If you have any questions or comments, or any organizations or events we should highlight, contact Alex and Robb at info@colorado-security.com This week’s news: Join the Colorado = Security Slack channel CTA Awards Nominations Are Open Colorado secretary of state sues USPS over election mailers she says misleads state's voters Denver-based buffalo sauce startup partners with local brewer for IPA sauce How to combat the pandemic of work-from-home injuries Colorado stops nearly $1 billion in unemployment benefits from being paid to scammers Former Return Path veterans launch new company that creates a marketplace for executive talent Empower Retirement in Greenwood Village reels in another big deal Meet Colorado's 2020 Inno on Fire Breaking down a breach with Red Canary’s incident handling team Deciphering Threat Signals: New Domain Registrations IT Self-Harm Monitoring is the Newest Ally in Student Suicide Prevention Job Openings: Ball Aerospace - Information Security Director State of Colorado OIT - Manager of Security, Risk, and Compliance Cognizant - Manager, Information Risk Management, Corporate Security (100% Remote) RE/MAX - Information Security Manager Xcel Energy - Senior Application Security/Penetration tester Bank of America - Cyber Threat Hunter - Information Security Engineer Red Canary - Incident Handler Universal Studios - Security Architect Ping Identity - Head of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Community Involvement Upcoming Events: This Week and Next: WIS & CSA - Get Sassy, with SASE - 9/15 ISSA C.Springs - 10th Annual Peak Cyber Symposium - 9/15-17 OWASP - September virtual meeting - 9/16 ASIS - 1ST ANNUAL ASIS SPORTING CLAYS EVENT AT KIOWA CREEK SPORTING CLUB - 9/17 ISC2 Pikes Peak - September Chapter Meeting - 9/23 C.Springs - September 2020 Online Series - 9/24 DC303 - September Meeting - 9/25 View our events page for a full list of upcoming events * Thanks to CJ Adams for our intro and exit! If you need any voiceover work, you can contact him here at carrrladams@gmail.com. Check out his other voice work here. * Intro and exit song: "The Language of Blame" by The Agrarians is licensed under CC BY 2.0

You may not be familiar with the venture capital firm M13. But you sure know their success stories… M13’s portfolio includes Pinterest, SpaceX, Lyft, and FanDuel. In fact, M13 has invested in 80 startups and already had 16 exits. Currently investing from its second fund of $175 million, M13’s secret isn’t just the $4M to $7M checks it writes. It’s in the expertise it lends to portfolio companies… And that includes Talent. Matt Hoffman is Partner & Head of Talent at M13. He works across the fund’s portfolio companies to ensure that they find, land, and keep the best-possible talent. And he knows how. Because prior, he served as VP People of DigitalOcean and Sr Director People of Return Path. Two super success stories. I just had a chance to spend 20 minutes with him. We covered a ton of things, and he really opened the kimono on hiring in Venture Capital companies.

Our next guest, George Bilbrey, is driven by creating innovative solutions to critical business challenges. George has started and scaled new businesses twice, brought new product categories to market four times, and developed business processes multiple times to solve challenges where the current solution was lacking.George graduated from Duke - Cum Laude in Economics. Then, he received his MBA from the University of North Carolina. From there, he was a partner in the telecommunications group at Mercer Management Consulting. George went on to become the founder of the industry’s first deliverability service provider, Assurance System, which merged with Return Path in 2003.Return Path scaled to $100 million in revenue and was sold to Validity in 2019. Now, George is taking on a new challenge and becoming the CEO of Signpost, a CRM and marketing automation provider.

Our next guest, George Bilbrey, is driven by creating innovative solutions to critical business challenges. George has started and scaled new businesses twice, brought new product categories to market four times, and developed business processes multiple times to solve challenges where the current solution was lacking.George graduated from Duke - Cum Laude in Economics. Then, he received his MBA from the University of North Carolina. From there, he was a partner in the telecommunications group at Mercer Management Consulting. George went on to become the founder of the industry’s first deliverability service provider, Assurance System, which merged with Return Path in 2003.Return Path scaled to $100 million in revenue and was sold to Validity in 2019. Now, George is taking on a new challenge and becoming the CEO of Signpost, a CRM and marketing automation provider.

Joe Prince-Wright from NBC Sports says the Bundesliga's return has shown other leagues how a path to a return can be done. Joe gets into a timeline for the EPL return and how testing is being done in European leagues

MESSAGE SUMMARY: No matter the hardness of a person’s heart, who has walked away from God, they will respond to your initiatives that are based on your love and trust. However, so many of us Christians are so focused on doing their religious or spiritual things and keeping to their “busy” schedules that they don’t have time to love and care for others. Is there anything you can do for someone with a calloused heart or who has walked away from God because they weren’t discipled? Yes, you must start by praying for them – asking God to move in their lives; asking God to intervene in their life situations; asking God to break up the hardness of their heart. Also, you must build a better personal relationship, with this person, through your trust and caring love. In Mathew 18:12-13, Jesus presents God’s perspective regarding the pursuit of even one person that has walked away: “What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish."   TODAY’S AFFIRMATION: Today, because of I am filled with the Holy Spirit, I will not be controlled by my Anxiety. Rather, I will walk in the Spirit’s fruit of Peace. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22f). SCRIPTURE REFERENCE (ESV): 1 Thessalonians 2:1-12; Acts 1:8; Romans 2:15-16; Psalms 47:1-9. THIS SUNDAY’S AUDIO SERMON: You can listen to Archbishop Beach’s Current Sunday Sermon: “Title: “Palm Sunday and Holy Week Lead Us Toward Jesus’ Death On the Cross for Our Sins and His Resurrection; Therefore, We Are Forgiven!", at our Website: https://awtlser.podbean.com/ WEBSITE LINK TO DR. BEACH’S SERMON VIDEO (“Jesus said to Thomas: “Palm Sunday and Holy Week Lead Us Toward Jesus’ Death On the Cross for Our Sins and His Resurrection; Therefore, We Are Forgiven!“): www.AWFTL.org/watch, DONATE TO AWFTL: https://mygiving.secure.force.com/GXDonateNow?id=a0Ui000000DglsqEAB

According to Return Path, more and more email correspondence is falling in to spam and promotions. And Matt Barnett tells us that to keep your brand relevant and your customers connected to your vision, personalized video is a medium any business can use to improve customer evangelism and conversions. Matt is a serial entrepreneur based out of Sydney AU, with a passion around changing conventional business communications through the power of personalized video messaging. His business, Bonjoro, is focused around helping businesses use personal video to convert more clients, create more customer evangelism and get more brand ambassadors. Today's show is sponsored by Audible.com. Audible.com is a leading provider of spoken audio entertainment and information. Listen to audiobooks whenever and wherever you want. Get a free book when you sign up for a 30-day free trial at audibletrial.com/businessgrowth.

Costanoa Ventures back tenacious and thoughtful founders who change how business gets done. The firm's investments include companies such as Alation, Demandbase, Directly, Kenna Security, Return Path, Roadster, and Quizlet. Mark Selcow is a partner at the early-stage investor in enterprise software. Mark invests in companies like LivelyHSA, Quizlet and Skedulo. Prior to joining Costanoa, Mark was a serial entrepreneur and operator, who led organizations in the enterprise software and consumer Internet sectors. He co-founded and served as President of two companies-- Merced Systems and BabyCenter. BabyCenter was sold to Johnson and Johnson in 2001 and Merced Systems was sold to NICE Systems in 2012. As a former founder of two startups and now investor, I invited him onto the podcast to learn how raising VC money previously as a founder has impacted his investment style and process and why he invests in enterprise technology versus consumer. We also discuss the interesting industries and trends he's tracking today. (areas where technology is helping workers become better and more adaptive performers; how and why technology is reinventing the financial and insurance markets).  

What was Brad Feld's experience as a board member of successful companies such as SendGrid like? How does the experience differ from a company such as ReturnPath, which took considerably longer to arrive at a positive exit? How about when to start a board as a startup and how to construct said board?Brad Feld has been a venture investor for over 30 years. He founded Foundry Group and has invested in companies such as FitBit, SendGrid and many others. In addition, Brad is a prolific blogger/author in the startup space, having authored many useful works such as Startup Boards and Venture Deals.In this episode, Brad shares stories about boards he has served on and the insights he has derived from those experiences. You will hear stories about conflicts and how they were resolved at the board level, and best practices for consensus building and on-boarding board members using a "board orientation package". We explore how to think about board construction at the earliest stages, the importance of boards as a helpful tool for early-stage companies, and the "emotional priorities" of the board.If you want to follow what Brad is up to, you can follow him on Twitter at @bfeld. For more podcasts on how to build better Boards, join us at www.boardsnetwork.com and follow us on Twitter @boardsnetwork.

Email deliverability tips you need to know with Alice Cornell So the major key to deliverability, the secret is to send an email that people want. But these days, spam is more much more likely to be mail people don't want, or are no longer interested in. But basic things, like making sure that your welcome message is right, can make such a massive impact on your overall deliverability. One of the things that I wanted to talk about a little was how targeting by segmentation was really hugely beneficial for us because we started treating our user base differently, depending on how engaged they were with our site. Most email deliverability issues that I come across come down to data quality, or frequency. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ SHARE THIS EPISODE: EMAIL DELIVERABILITY TIPS YOU NEED TO KNOW [just click to tweet] EMAIL DELIVERABILITY TIPS YOU NEED TO KNOW Most email deliverability issues that I come across come down to data quality, or frequency. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back listeners, to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today we're going to talk about email deliverability, and my guest is Alice Cornell. She is the Director of Email Deliverability at a company, or organization, that most of you have likely heard of, Change.org. After 18 years of working in the digital space for many large corporations, such as Return Path and Cheetah Mail, and a number of other email service providers, she now works for the world's biggest platform for social change. And they use email to enable 300 million users across the world to make the change that they want to see. Doug: I think you'll enjoy the dialogue, her simple advice on how you and I can take a look at what we're currently doing in email, make some changes, and see improvement in our engagement, and our deliverability. So I'd like you to join me, and welcome Alice to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. Hey, Alice. I'm super excited to have you on the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. So, welcome. Alice: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Doug: I was really excited, and looking forward to the interviews. I was just looking at your background, and your experience in this space, where many people struggle, and often people don't realize they struggle, and that's getting their email to the inbox. Do you want to share with our listeners just a little bit of backstory, as you discuss that you worked from the ESP side, and now you're switched to the brand side, and what that looks like? Alice: Sure. It's been an interesting transition from the ESP side through Return Path, to actually working directly for a brand. It makes me want to contact all my past customers and apologize to them because sometimes we don't realize how making a business case for deliverability can be really difficult, and now I understand that that can be a tough goal. Doug: Yeah, absolutely. So with the work that you're doing, you're in an interesting situation, because I'm assuming that when people are using the platform that you were... So you work for Change.org, right? Alice: That's correct. Doug: And so, I'm assuming that you've got this massive amount of people coming through, signing up for a petition. So you're going to have all sorts of email addresses, and lots of them are not going to be business email addresses. It'd be personal email addresses. So what does that look like from your point of view, from an email marketer, making sure the message gets there, compared to what we might experience as a business? Are they the same? Are they different? Alice: I think they are different, and I think that we have a particular challenge at Change.org, which is probably different from a lot of other people dealing with B to C. One, we're in 17 countries, which is always a challenge of itself. But our users come to us for very different reasons.

Conga is the leader in end-to-end Digital Document Transformation (DDX). The Conga Digital Document Transformation Suite drives segment-leading ROI by simplifying and automating intelligent data, documents, contracts, signing and reporting. In a nutshell, the company has a reputation for automating business productivity through end-to-end Digital Document Transformation. Conga recently made two announcements that captured my attention in the tech headlines. The first is a recent study with Vanson Bourne that found that the key to unlocking the potential of digital transformation is something organizations spend countless hours in every day, but may easily overlook: documents. In fact, documents are so imperative to a business’ success that according to the research, 89% of organizations say the key to successful digital transformation is getting a grip on their everyday documents. Conga also recently announced an integration with Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud to help manufacturing companies better their sales processes and achieve greater visibility in the contract process – a key step in successful digital transformation. Daniel Incandela is CMO at Conga and a former guest which officially makes him a friend of the show. I invited him back onto this daily tech podcast for a much-needed catch-up. A creative, strategic thinker, Daniel has more than 15 years of digital and marketing industry leadership experience. Daniel has led creative teams across myriad industries including the arts, sports and entertainment, sales, cloud, and marketing automation, which has earned him industry awards and a designation on the prestigious Indianapolis Business Journal’s Forty Under 40 list. Daniel also previously served as CMO at Return Path, and held leadership roles at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, ExactTarget, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

David Hauser has built a number of successful companies in the startup space, both organically and inorganically. He is the founder of Grasshopper, which was acquired by Citrix after he bootstrapped the company to $30M+. David founded Chargify and made it profitable, securing a Mark Cuban investment. He founded ReturnPath and is a founding member of National Entrepreneurs’ Day (http://entrepreneursday.org). David is an angel investor in Intercom, Unbounce, Munchery, Groove and more. He is a public speaker at FOWA, Big Omaha, LessConf, SuperConf, Entrepreneurs Organization, and has received major media coverage by CNN, Fox, Inc. Magazine, Fortune, Entrepreneur, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Inc. 30 Under 30. — As leaders and business owners, we prioritize other people’s needs. It is part of what makes us great leaders in the first place. You signed up for long days and late nights when you entered this world, but you can only operate at full capacity when you put your oxygen mask on first. Sometimes, to help others, you have to help yourself. David Hauser explores that notion and more in his new book, Unstoppable. We preach the importance of health and wellness, but we don’t always practice it ourselves. David Hauser struggled to prioritize self-care in the hustle-hard culture of modern entrepreneurship—a position that many of us are in right now. You have to recognize that there is no ‘right’ time to start practicing self-care and stop putting it off. When you achieve balance and become the best version of yourself, your business will reflect that. Health and wellness is a great place to start. In this episode of the Absolute Advantage podcast, David Hauser joins us to share his journey of personal development. He discusses the key principles in his book, “Unstoppable,” such as the optimization mindset, the myths surrounding diet and exercise, and the top things you should be paying attention to on your own journey. Click here to listen to the episode, and make sure to visit www.absoluteadvantagepodcast.com for more content that inspires, encourages and helps you grow and make an impact QUICKLY both professionally and personally. Ways to contact David Hauser: Website: https://www.unstoppablebook.com/ Twitter: @dh

Grubhub CRM lead and No-Shave November Co-Founder, Christine Hill gives us insight into, operationally, what it takes to have a successful IP Warming, survive a migration, and achieve high deliverability. Our very own Nicole Codd, previously at ReturnPath, adds her commentary from countless email setups.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Hi again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your MarTech industry discuss digest. I'm PJ Bruno, and I'm here today in Chicago in the Grubhub HQ. Joining us today, Christine Hill, who is basically a Renaissance woman in the marketing org here. How's it going? Thanks for being here.   [0:00:36] Christine Hill: It's going well. Thanks for having me.   [0:00:37] PJ Bruno: And rounding out the group today, I have Nicole Codd, who's also in town from our success org at Braze.   [0:00:43] Nicole Codd: Hey, PJ.   [0:00:44] PJ Bruno: Thanks so much for being here.   [0:00:45] Nicole Codd: Course.   [0:00:46] PJ Bruno: This episode is focusing on avoiding migration migraines, and also talking a little bit about IP warming. Christine has gone through a number of IP warmings, and so she's going to share some of her experience there. But before we jump in, Christine, correct me if I'm wrong, you were a part of kicking off No Shave November, is that right?   [0:01:03] Christine Hill: That's correct.   [0:01:05] PJ Bruno: How did that come about?   [0:01:06] Christine Hill: That's a family effort. My siblings and I, we lost our father to cancer a number of years ago. No Shave November for us was a way that we could take that pain and grief and do something about it, knowing that a lot of people are affected by cancer in their lives, whether it's a close relative, a friend, a neighbor, we grow our hair for those that lose it. That's No Shave November. It was a way that anyone of any bit of means could donate something small or something large and raise awareness by growing out their hair and starting that conversation.   [0:01:39] PJ Bruno: I love it. I'm sorry for your loss.   [0:01:42] Christine Hill: Thank you.   [0:01:42] PJ Bruno: I'll be growing my beard extremely long, big, wispy mustache. Nicole, you're going to take part.   [0:01:48] Nicole Codd: I will not. I'm sorry.   [0:01:50] PJ Bruno: Well, not the mustache on that, but you know, just letting it go.   [0:01:53] Nicole Codd: I'll let my hair grow out. I'll probably-   [0:01:55] Christine Hill: Skip your trim.   [0:01:56] Nicole Codd: I'll skip my trim that month.   [0:01:59] PJ Bruno: Beautiful. Were you involved in the marketing strategy around that as well? How did you divide up your team there?   [0:02:05] Christine Hill: Sure. It's something that my siblings and I kind of divide and conquer. I'm one of eight. People joke about having a baseball team. We tell our mother that she had a business. So I'm a marketer, I have a brother who's an engineer, another one who's in finance, and you fill in all the spots and it's basically a business. We take all of the skills that we have in the backgrounds that we've established and we came together to do it.   [0:02:29] PJ Bruno: That's unbelievable. You guys are dangerous. I got to assume there's an ongoing text thread. It's like, "When are we all going to just start the real company?" That's got to be ongoing conversation, right?   [0:02:39] Christine Hill: That's been a background conversation probably since I was in my early teens, like, "All right, what are we going to do? Hill Enterprise. It could be something."   [0:02:48] PJ Bruno: Oh my God, that's so exciting. Eight. God bless your mom. What were some of the lessons and techniques that you took with you from that experience which launched you onto this bigger mission you have here at Grubhub?   [0:03:03] Christine Hill: Sure. With that one, definitely learning how to build an audience, knowing that there were people out there that could relate to our cause and our mission but how to have them hear of who we are, how to get that awareness out there. We started with maybe a hundred or so followers, and how do you grow that? We took to social and all the digital means, because that's where people are. And using that, we were able to kind of be explosive and target a lot of people with minimal effort and minimal resources and really get it out there. From there, it took off because people relate to what it is.   [0:03:38] PJ Bruno: Well, if you guys out there looking to take part, go to no-shave.org to learn more info. We'd love for y'all to get involved. I know I will be. Moving on to IP warming academy, luckily both of you have a good amount of experience with this, some horror stories, I believe. First and foremost, IP warming is crucial to get right for your deliverability. For those of you who don't know what it is, it's sending first small amounts of email and then incrementally larger and larger amounts of email day after day so you can get the respect of your ISP and they know that you're not sending out blasts of email to people where it may not be super relevant. What do you need to be able to do that? Those are your first sends. What needs to be in order before you click the send button?   [0:04:26] Christine Hill: First and foremost, you need a plan with IP warming. I think a lot of people want to jump straight into it, and it is something you can jump into and ramp up fairly quickly. But you should have a plan with calculated risk because if it goes wrong at this point, it's a lot harder to get out of the hole if you had instead set yourself up with a solid foundation.   [0:04:46] Nicole Codd: And I think that's the main thing that people tend to forget about, is they don't necessarily think about the ramifications of if it doesn't go well. There's always these business needs that are like, "All right, we got to get this IP up and running. We have X deadline. Let's do everything possible to get it there." And because of that, they end up rushing through it and don't necessarily have a successful warming and they got to start from ground zero again.   [0:05:09] PJ Bruno: And this isn't a new problem.   [0:05:11] Nicole Codd: No, no.   [0:05:12] PJ Bruno: So why is it still happening? Why does it still happen?   [0:05:17] Christine Hill: We live in a world where we want things done yesterday, and so we think with that we rush it. And second to that is that we don't think about all of the stuff that's foundational to ensuring successful IP warming. So setting up all the authentications on the backend, registering your IPs, verifying your records, splitting your audience, cleaning your list, I don't think a lot of people do that before they start IP warming or migration. If you do that, you're going to set yourself up for success because you'll be sending to people who do want your messages, versus becoming someone who is spamming everyone at once. And the email clients pick up on that, and they'll block you.   [0:05:53] PJ Bruno: You mentioned list cleansing. Now, what exactly is that for people who don't know what that is?   [0:05:58] Nicole Codd: Yeah, so at a base level it's essentially getting rid of email addresses that aren't valid email addresses. If I'm going to a website and I know I don't necessarily want to receive mail from that specific company but I want the deal or whatever they're offering, I'll enter a fake email address. We'll see email addresses that are just a string of letters or something completely unintelligible, or there's potentially typo errors. So, see a lot of those. Gmail.con, or Yahoo with one O. So list cleansing is the process of running your email list through some sort of service or something you have on your own backend to get rid of those fake email addresses, get rid of typo errors to ensure that you're sending to real humans or real email addresses as opposed to fake ones.   [0:06:51] PJ Bruno: Gotcha. I forget who it was that we had the conversation about list cleansing, but we had a client who was adamant about not doing it because he said, "We don't give up on our users." I was like, "You're not quite getting it, though."   [0:07:07] Nicole Codd: You've got to hang on to those strings of unintelligible letters. It's very important.   [0:07:10] Christine Hill: It might turn into someone.   [0:07:13] Nicole Codd: It's very important.   [0:07:14] Christine Hill: To what Nicole said, removing the mal form users, unknown users, and those who haven't engaged in years, and I get wanting to hold on to them for business needs, but there's a certain cutoff point that it does not make sense to contact them through an email channel. There are other channels.   [0:07:29] Nicole Codd: I think that's a big, big, big, big one. People are always sitting there being like, "But what if they come back? What if I send them this one thing and that's what revitalizes them and they want to order from us and engage with us?" The thing is, if they haven't opened a message from you in years, they're probably not going to.   [0:07:49] Christine Hill: The likelihood is slim.   [0:07:50] Nicole Codd: Right, and especially with most companies these days, marketing is everywhere and I'm not going to need a email to think about your brand. There's going to be other methods, which I'm like, "Oh! Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Let me go back."   [0:08:05] PJ Bruno: All right, story time. Let's hear about your first IP warming. We don't need to name drop or anything, but I just want to hear a little bit about the first time you came up against it, some of those challenges.   [0:08:17] Christine Hill: Oh man, there's been so many. The first, I have a feeling it didn't go according to plan. I'm sure we didn't really have a plan. It was one of those rush case scenarios, "Let's get it done in two weeks," when I think even in the best case an IP warming probably takes a solid 30 days, even with a small MCL. We probably went out the gate sending to all records and wanting to trigger a very large program, versus starting with a small send size, gradually increasing it, and in that hitting our most engaged before those who are less engaged. I do know that in that first IP warming, we hit blocks with Gmail, with Microsoft, with AOL. Once you hit blocks, it's a lot harder to get into the user's inbox and you are digging yourself out of a hole.   [0:09:05] PJ Bruno: So blocking meaning the users blocked you, not an ISP.   [0:09:09] Christine Hill: The ISP blocked you.   [0:09:10] PJ Bruno: Got you. Okay.   [0:09:12] Christine Hill: Because you were, in fact, spamming people.   [0:09:17] PJ Bruno: Was there a comeback from that? What was the reaction from you and your team?   [0:09:22] Christine Hill: Usually for that, you need to register it with the ISP and get de-listed and say, "I am a true sender. I'm going to take step back and send to you in a rate. Will you recognize me and like allow me to be authenticated to get into the user's inbox?" And Nicole, if you want to add to this from your return path experience?   [0:09:39] Nicole Codd: No, that's exactly right. I think with mailbox providers you're kind of guilty until proven innocent, honestly. Their job is to protect their users, so the people signing up to use their inboxes, and because of that you're starting out with basically a reputation where they're going to treat you very carefully. So their initial inclination is going to be like, "Okay, you jumped up volumes too quickly. We're going to just shut it off because we don't trust that you're an actual good sender."   [0:10:13] PJ Bruno: So what kind of metrics are you looking at as far as IP warming? Is it really just like open, so it's just getting through it alive?   [0:10:20] Christine Hill: Yeah. Looking at sends, looking at your rate of deliverability, your bounces, hard bounces or soft bounces, and some of that would be your list cleaning, looking at engagement, so your opens and clicks, as well as the spam complaints that you're getting and unsub. So it's really looking at the full spectrum. What is happening positively, what's happening negatively, and what is our deliverability? What is the rate of sends landing into the user's inbox?   [0:10:46] PJ Bruno: What about any big either misconceptions when you went into your first or second one that you're like, "Oh I didn't know that's how that worked," and/or biggest takeaways from one of your first two IP warmers where you're like, "Yes, this is going to stick with me forever because I recognize how valuable it is."   [0:11:04] Christine Hill: One for me, looking at the metrics, looking at unsub versus spam, spam is worse to have a than unsub because unsub, you're telling me you don't want to receive my messages. I'll remove you. That's better than you marking me as spam, because when that happens then the email clients have that and it can push you off of landing in the inbox. Going through the first few, I realized that that's more important, and tied to that would be the list cleaning because if you had lists clean, you'd be sending to people who will likely be opening and not unsubscribing or marking you as spam.   [0:11:35] PJ Bruno: Interesting question here. Have you seen strategies where people make that unsub link a little more visible? Just because obviously pretty much every time I've seen it, it's the same thing that you've all seen. It's super small, it's at the very bottom, there's no context around it. Then you click and you link out and you do the motions.   [0:11:53] Christine Hill: So of the best practices is to put that unsub in the header. There are a lot of ESPs that make that very easy to do, or in Gmail if you have it a you're more likely to get through. And then those users who don't want to hear from you can click it versus marketing you as spam or filtering you to your spam folder.   [0:12:08] PJ Bruno: Nice.   [0:12:09] Nicole Codd: And also, even outside of that list unsubscribe header, something I've advised clients to do in the past is to move the little unsubscribe link at the bottom up towards the top, potentially. Because if I don't want your mail, my initial inclination is going to be to mark it as spam, not to scroll to the bottom of the email and click the unsubscribe link. That's going to take too much work and requires me going through the entire email.   [0:12:36] Christine Hill: In some of the migrations that we've done, when you've been part of another brand that then became part of Grubhub, we've put it in the body of the email, which might sound crazy, but it is that way for the user to hit unsub versus spam.   [0:12:48] PJ Bruno: And also they're making that transition, and so you guys are being super forthcoming with that opportunity. Well, I'm glad you mentioned migration. Why don't we migrate over to migration conversation? You've had a handful of those, and it's great. It means you found a better tool to support you and everything, but how can you be more agile and efficient beforehand? Because sometimes that eagerness can blind you to what it actually takes to get it done. So what does it take?   [0:13:14] Christine Hill: Again, IP warming, having a plan and having a realistic timeline. This is something that people rush a lot, but before all of that, it really is data. Understanding the data you have, how to map the data over to the new platform, and data in, data out. So what you're starting with is what you'll be working with. A lot of people will rush it with unclean data and will fix it later. Then, again, you're putting yourself back behind the starting line. So it's really the time to take to do it right, if allowed.   [0:13:46] Nicole Codd: And I think something people forget about is the time piece. So if you're on one platform and contract's coming up for renewal and you know you're migrating over to another platform, it's so important that you're putting that into motion well before you have to be off of that other platform, because mistakes happen. It always takes longer than you think it's going to, and it's way better to be fully moved over before you have to be off than to be trying to add months on and be like, "Oh my gosh, we need a few more months here before we can be fully on to this other platform." It'll just go much more smoothly if there's plenty of time in between.   [0:14:30] PJ Bruno: Without getting too nitty gritty into the details, are there steps to a migration? Obviously, the data needs to go from here to here. We need to make sure there's enough time. What are the pieces in between all that?   [0:14:44] Nicole Codd: The data mapping, ensuring that ... Something I see with a lot of clients is, like Christine said, it's kind of like a hodgepodge of data. And so ensuring you have something on your backend that is like, "This means X and this means Y," so that when you move it over it matches exactly. Because it's going to be a problem if one side says one thing, you move it over, and someone's like, "Oh, I thought this meant that." So ensuring you have proper data mapping on the backend.   [0:15:16] PJ Bruno: How much time do you like to give for a migration? What's the timeline?   [0:15:20] Christine Hill: It really depends on the amount of programs you're moving over and your list size. Part of it is that IP warming piece where you have to establish the IP and the domains and grow that up to be able to send, and second to that is being able to send your program, so your welcome stream, your reactivation, one offs, abandon cart, all of those things. Your list size could be 1 million, it could be 16 million. Those would take different lengths of time to migrate. The other thing that I've noticed a lot with migrations is people want to go out and launch a program that's easy to get up and running, so maybe like a one-off campaign, so a blast. That's not the way to do it. It's to do the gradual sends. So establish a program that isn't gated by a specific time. A welcome series could be a good one because you know that there's users just signed up and are engaged with your product or service, but in a way that are you okay with them receiving it in the first five days of becoming a user or the first one? Because if it's the first one and you have a large increase of users and you're not quite yet warmed, you won't be able to send to them.   [0:16:24] PJ Bruno: Okay. Story time once more, and you can choose what the prompt is. It's either/or. You can tell us about your biggest success with migration or one thing you wish you could do over again.   [0:16:37] Christine Hill: I have a biggest success one, I'd say. Grubhub, as we do, acquired another brand. We were given a very, very tight timeline to turn it around and migrate the users over into our full Grubhub experience, which would offer more restaurants, drivers, and a more powerful network for our users and our diners. There were a lot of records, and ones that typically we would scrub out, people who haven't been engaged in a very long time, that we wanted to hit, because as a business we believe that there could be some return. So there was a very big lesson. I was working with Braze's deliverability team. My initial thought at seeing this plan is, "There's no way we can hit these records. We will be blacklisted on every platform." I was pressed to do it and I said, "Okay, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this in the most calculated way that I can, a calculated risk, that ensures that we can maintain deliverability in some of the ESPs, like hopefully." It was a very, very old audience and I sliced the heck out of it to find the most engaged of this entire unengaged audience. I called it unfavorables, and I said that given the volume that we're sending to people who are engaged, who want to hear from Grubhub, we can only 10% of unfavorables of that total volume getting emails a day. And I started with the most engaged of this least engaged, stacked against Grubhub's very engaged. And day over day, and this was a 14-day migration that should have probably been 30 plus, I monitored it in the morning, in the mid day, in the evening, in the late evening. I knew that if any one thing went off, that I needed to be able to adjust it. I said, "I will do this, but I need the keys to be able to adjust it." We get through day one and day two, surprisingly not hitting any blocks, and I'm getting pressure to increase that 10% to a 20. Held my ground and did not and continued to say, "You know, we're prioritizing the most engaged of the unfavorables, and this percentage." We get through it and we're trickling through all the way through the list. And I think it came from Andrea on your delivery team was, "That's amazing. I'm not quite sure how you did that, but you were able to get through it." So that's my thought, too. Some deliverability god was looking down upon me. Again, as calculated of a risk as I could take, but knowing that what I was doing is not what I would choose to be doing, but for the business it made sense to push through. It was probably my most proud moment. I said, "If I can get through through this set of audience, I could migrate any audience."   [0:19:12] PJ Bruno: Yeah, totally. So when it comes to migration, good rule of thumb is do it bit by bit, monitor all the way.   [0:19:20] Christine Hill: And don't be afraid to adjust. If you do run into a block, it's better to adjust to take the time to do it then, versus to really put yourself back.   [0:19:29] Nicole Codd: That's huge. That's something everyone always forgets, too. They set this plan in place and they're like, "All right, I'm just going to let it run and let it sit." Having the ability to be able to be like, "All right, we're going to bump back today, or maybe we stay at the same volume for another few days," that's huge and that's not something people always think about. It tends to be a set it and forget it exercise, which doesn't work.   [0:19:53] PJ Bruno: It's a common thing we see with people taking automation in their hands. They think it's like, "Oh great, the job's done now." But I think the job's just beginning. You need to stay close to that.   [0:20:04] Christine Hill: I think for us, especially moving more and more over to the Braze platform, we shifted our email and our push and we use your in-app. Looking at our marketing holistically, omni-channel messaging for our users and hitting them on the channel that they are most engaged. So understanding that it might not be email, it might be push, it could be in-app, and having that congruent flow for a user. If we push you, what are you then seeing in our app? What are you then getting in your email later? And it's really opening up the door for us to be able to do that and to do it in real time, which is something before this, and when I first joined two and a half years ago, we were on multiple platforms and nothing was talking to each other. We couldn't have a program like that.   [0:20:47] PJ Bruno: Two and a half years is such a small amount of time. It's crazy. When you were telling me earlier that it was a team of two when you started, and now it's massive.   [0:20:56] Christine Hill: That's just an explanation of the growth here. It truly is explosive, and with that, we're not afraid to be taking risks and innovating. That to me is exciting, and it's nice to have a larger team and that manpower to do it.   [0:21:09] PJ Bruno: Love it. Also, you guys recently bought Tapingo, which is kind of Grubhub for college kids. Since you do have your hands in most things marketing here, is there something you guys are doing differently with your approach to that demographic?   [0:21:26] Christine Hill: We are. Tapingo is becoming Grubhub campus dining, and it's a whole new instance of Grubhub tailored to students, things that are in and around their campus, identity experience fit for that demographic that they'll use in their time in college. And as they graduate out of college, they'll graduate onto full Grubhub. But something that is more personalized for them.   [0:21:50] PJ Bruno: Now we've got to just do it for toddlers. We got to start them super young.   [0:21:54] Christine Hill: If you get them young, you can keep them longer.   [0:21:57] Nicole Codd: It's all about retention, you know?   [0:21:59] PJ Bruno: That's what I'm saying. We don't give up on our users. Awesome. Christine Hill, thanks so much for giving us your time.   [0:22:05] Christine Hill: Yeah, thank you.   [0:22:06] PJ Bruno: Nicole, thank you so much for being here in Chicago.   [0:22:08] Nicole Codd: Yeah, thanks for having me.   [0:22:10] PJ Bruno: And thank you for being here. Bye. [0:22:13]

Benchmark report analyzed 1,387 brands across all verticals using Return Path’s Consumer Network data for Microsoft, AOL, Gmail, and Yahoo subscribers between July 1, 2016, and June 30, 2018. This analysis maps the life-cycle from the initial email received from the brand through the first 12 months of subscription.

In this year’s annual benchmark report by Return Path has helped us have a deep understanding of email deliverability. Let’s have a look at the key findings of this report for the email marketing benefits.

David Hauser is a serial entrepreneur. He is best known for being the co-founder and CEO of Grasshopper, a virtual telephone service that was acquired by Citrix for $176 million that he bootstrapped without outside investors. The first company he co-founded at 17 was Return Path which raised $120 million and was acquired by Validity for an undisclosed amount. David has also co-founded a number of other startups including Chargify, Spreadable, PopSurvey, or Deck Foundry.

David Hauser is a serial entrepreneur. He is best known for being the co-founder and CEO of Grasshopper, a virtual telephone service that was acquired by Citrix for $176 million that he bootstrapped without outside investors. The first company he co-founded at 17 was Return Path which raised $120 million and was acquired by Validity for an undisclosed amount. David has also co-founded a number of other startups including Chargify, Spreadable, PopSurvey, or Deck Foundry.

Tami M. Forman is the Executive Director of Path Forward, a non-profit organization that creates mid-career returnship programs to ease the transition back to work for people who have taken a career break for caregiving. Path Forward trains HR teams and hiring managers on how to support these programs successfully and provide support to participants to make the experience successful. Tami is building this organization from the ground up, working with donors, partners, and participants to fulfill the organization’s mission. Tami spent a decade as a marketing executive with Return Path. Tami has previously held editorial positions at Simon and Schuster, Houghton Mifflin, iVillage, and News Corporation.   Key Takeaways: [1:38] Marc welcomes you to Episode 128 of the Repurpose Your Career podcast. Career Pivot this podcast to you; CareerPivot.com is one of the very few websites dedicated to those of us in the second half of life and our careers. Take a moment to check out the blog and the other resources delivered to you, free of charge. [2:08] If you are enjoying this podcast, please share it with other like-minded souls. Subscribe on CareerPivot.com, iTunes, or any of the other apps that supply podcasts. Share it on social media or just tell your neighbors, and colleagues. The more people Marc reaches, the more people he can help. [2:27] Next week, Marc will read a new chapter from the third edition of Repurpose Your Career.) Marc has released two chapters to the Repurpose Your Career review team. If you’d like to be part of that team, please go to CareerPivot.com/RYCTeam and you’ll receive new chapters as they become available. [2:51] Marc currently plans to release the book in mid-to-late September with both a virtual and a real book tour. He will be in Austin, NYC Metro Area, and D.C. during the months of September and October. Marc would love to meet his readers and listeners. [3:10] Reach out to Marc at Podcasts@CareerPivot.com if you’d be willing to give him some advice on setting up this tour. This includes venues if you’re from those areas. Marc would very much appreciate it. [3:27] This week, Marc is interviewing Tami Forman, the executive director of Path Forward. Marc introduces Tami with her bio. [4:27] Marc welcomes Tami to the Repurpose Your Career podcast. [4:44] Marc learned about returnships from Dan Corbin who was at Return Path at the same time as Tami. Marc invites Tami to talk about the origin and mission of Path Forward. [5:10] Path Forward is a nonprofit organization on a mission to help people who have taken time out of their career for caregiving to restart those careers. Most of the clients are women, but the programs are open to men and women who have taken chunks of time away from the paid workforce to care for children or elderly parents. [5:43] This concept started within Return Path, a privately-held software company based in New York City, with offices in Colorado, Austin, Texas, Indianapolis, and globally. The head of HR was working to help women in technology and doing unconscious bias training. She ran into resistance hiring women who had taken a career break. [6:43] The VP of HR realized that if she couldn’t influence the behavior of managers in her own company, there was a systemic problem. She worked with some people to put together a returnship, meaning a temporary assignment aimed at someone in mid-career. [7:09] The program was phenomenally successfully for the six people in the program and for the managers. Other companies noticed and reached out to VP of HR Cathy Hawley and CEO Matt Blumberg to learn how to run the program in their offices. [7:38] Matt decided to found a nonprofit and try to make a bigger impact by bringing it to many more companies. [7:48] Marc sees men and women taking time off to take care of elderly adult parents. Tami sees a lot of women with the “double whammy,” who took a few years off to take care of their children and then their mother or father got sick and needed care. Many women have filled both roles. She has also seen stay-at-home dads. [8:42] Childcare takes longer than elderly parent care, usually, so mothers raising children are out of the workforce longer. The longer the time out of the workforce, the longer it takes to get back into it. People taking a few years off for elder care have less difficulty getting a job. The age range of participants in the program is large. [9:57] Marc has a man in his online community who got laid off, took care of a parent, and now is being asked what he did for 18 months. “Taking care of Mom” is not very well received at the tech startups he is trying to penetrate. [10:17] How is a returnship different from an apprenticeship? The DOL has a specific definition to meet guidelines for a registered apprenticeship, but employers may use it less formally. Tami advises to anyone looking into any “ship” program is to get a strict understanding of what the program offers. [11:16] Tami considers a returnship to differ from an apprenticeship mainly in the amount of training supplied. Tami notes the Microsoft LEAP program which has a training component alongside a work project component as a “classic” apprenticeship. A returnship is about just the work. [12:03] People coming into a returnship have either directly applicable or transferrable experience they can put to work within the context of the returnship. They may need mentoring and would receive new-employee training. They have the basic skills. [12:45] Some of the companies Path Forward works with do have a training component as part of their returnship because they want to expand the types of people they are able to bring into the program. [13:01] Tami says during the interview process is the time to make sure you understand exactly what training and development the program offers and what the expectations are of you. [13:20] Marc notes that tech sector jobs would provide some training because of rapid change in the industry. Tami says that tech companies are having trouble finding people to maintain legacy tech stacks. Younger people don’t know how to do it or don’t want to. [13:50] Tami has worked with companies that have proprietary software where every engineer would have to be trained to work with it. [14:17] Understanding what the expectations are is very important. Tami is aware of organizations and programs, such as a boot camp or an online course, available to teach specific skills to people returning to the workplace. The training alone would not be enough to get you a job, so the returnship work piece makes the difference. [14:52] Kids don’t want to learn COBOL or Fortran. [15:07] Besides tech skills, returnships can work for any company hiring for any professional job. Path Forward has had the most success in partnering with tech companies in Northern California, New York, Denver, and LA. Technology has an acknowledged gender-balance problem alongside a talent problem. [16:08] The gender-balance issue, combined with the overall scarcity of talent, are the factors that lead to the success of returnship programs at tech firms. People out of the workforce are an untapped pool. Other industries may have gender-balance problems but no shortage of talent. They don’t feel the same pressure to bring in more people. [17:36] Tami’s advice to people looking for opportunities, in general, is to go where “the people aren’t.” Go where the jobs are plentiful and the people seem to be less so. [17:46] The ideal candidate for a returnship will have a background that matches what the job is. Someone who’s making a big career change will not typically be as successful. If you are making a career change, first get a lot of advice from people in the new career. Take a course. Take a consulting position. Accept a lower position. [19:36] If you worked in marketing, do a returnship in marketing. If you worked in engineering, do a returnship in engineering. That’s where the 16-week boost, getting you back in the seat, with a manager who can see what you can do, is really successful. [19:55] Tami sees that people who have a certain degree of resentment about the sacrifice that they’ve made and have ego issues about salary or position have a more difficult time than people who are open and have humility about them. It is better to be excited to be back and accept the opportunity after spending the time with family. [21:04] Marc recalls last week’s episode with Andrew Scott on the 100-Year Life and their conversation about mindset in CareerPivot.com/Episode-127. If you don’t have the proper mindset you will not be successful. [21:43] Tami shares a case study of Marina, in her mid-40s who made a career pivot from selling CDs by direct marketing at BMG Music. That world has gone away. However, her marketing skills were very transferable to different markets and channels. [22:58] Marina got a returnship in marketing at Return Path and ultimately landed on marketing analytics, where she still works, three years later. She also took the Hubspot digital marketing course to do her own reskilling. There are a lot of vendors in various industries who make free training available to increase their potential talent pool. [24:22] Tami shares Lisa’s story who was an engineer at IBM and had last coded using COBOL and Fortran. She had an EE degree, not a CS degree, because that wasn’t expected when she was studying. She had taken some software courses. Then she was out of the workforce for 20 years. [25:14] Lisa wanted to get her Master’s degree, but her college-age son told her that wasn’t how it’s done anymore. He recommended she take a couple of classes and go work for someone who would let her learn on the job. She got a returnship at Return Path as an engineer. She is still there and was promoted to a team lead position. [25:52] Besides her technical skills, they recognized her leadership and organizational skills she used as a stay-at-home mom for 20 years. She could inspire a team and get things done. [26:45] Marc spoke a couple of years ago at an Austin Community College coding boot camp. He explained that a lot of the plumbing has changed, but none of the concepts has. You can learn how to replumb things and use new tools. Sometimes you have to spend your own time and your own dollars to get trained. Look online. [27:30] Always be learning. You can work for 20 years in one job and get laid off when your job is not relevant. Constantly be in a mode of learning and staying relevant. [28:47] After the dotcom bust companies slowly stopped spending money on training their employees. It’s up to the individual to find their own training and stay up to date. [29:03] Managers making hiring decisions are very risk-averse. The returnship concept gives them permission to take a chance and not get in trouble. Companies working with Path Forward know the executives have sanctioned the program. [29:44] For listeners in cities without Path Forward returnships, think about ways you can do work for someone so they can see what you can do, in a way that lowers the risk for them. That might be freelancing, pro bono work, or volunteering. Build a website for a community group that’s doing something interesting. Showcase your real skills. [30:36] Networking is crucial. One way to network is to do work with someone. Another is to take classes with others. Get out from behind the computer and into the world. Find ways to work with people. That’s Tami’s last advice to listeners. [32:02] To learn more, sign up for the newsletter at PathForward.org/participant for news about every partner they sign. There is a page of other returnships at companies not working with Path Forward at pathforward.org/return-work-programs-around-us. There is also a Facebook page at Facebook.com/PathFWD and Twitter at @PathFWD. [33:21] Marc thanks Tami and hopes you enjoyed this episode. You might call this a movement of creating programs that help people reenter the workforce after a career break. Marc invites you to go back and listen to Episode 80 with Carol Fishman Cohen, the CEO of iRelaunch found at CareerPivot.com/episode-80. [33:59] Marc is working on setting up an interview with one or both of the people Tami mentioned in the interview. You will find links mentioned in this episode at CareerPivot.com/episode-128. [34:17] The Career Pivot Community website has become a valuable resource for 50 members who are participating in the Beta phase of this project. Marc is recruiting new members for the next cohort. [34:29] If you are interested in the endeavor and would like to be put on the waiting list, please go to CareerPivot.com/Community. When you sign up you’ll receive information about the community as it evolves. Marc will be spreading out new cohorts as the community starts some new projects. [34:51] Those who are in these initial cohorts set the direction of this endeavor. This is a paid membership community with group coaching and special content. More importantly, it’s a community where you can seek help. Go to CareerPivot.com/Community to learn more. They are now starting a writers’ group. [35:35] Marc invites you to connect with him on LinkedIn.com/in/mrmiller. Just include in the connection request that you heard Marc on this podcast. You can look for Career Pivot on Facebook, LinkedIn, or @CareerPivot on Twitter. [35:59] Please come back next week, when Marc will read a new chapter from the third edition of Repurpose Your Career. [36:09] Marc thanks you for listening to the Repurpose Your Career podcast. [38:51] You will find the show notes for this episode at CareerPivot.com/episode-128. [36:21] Please hop over to CareerPivot.com and subscribe to get updates on this podcast and all the other happenings at Career Pivot. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, the Google Podcasts app, Podbean, the Overcast app, or the Spotify app.

Host Tim Peterson of the Information Technology and Cyberlaw Committee interviews Dennis Dayman, the Chief Privacy and Security Officer of Return Path, on the evolution of privacy law and technology and what it means for the future of consumer privacy and electronic marketing efforts worldwide.

While ESPs focus on the specific email delivered to your inbox, MSPs focus on your entire mailbox behaviour to determine where they would filter and place emails within your inbox (spam/ trash/ promotions etc) So what are these metrics? Well according to a study conducted by Demand Metric and Return Path, there are six key email metrics that mailbox service providers track to create better filtering algorithms.

David Hauser’s life changed forever the moment he taught himself how to code. Like so many other nascent entrepreneurs, the power of computer programming set him on a lifelong path as a tinkerer, always fine-tuning and building in an effort to shape his and others’ futures. In much the same way Hauser learned how to code, his entire entrepreneurial journey has been one of unrelenting trial and error, involving a mix of success, failure, and personal and professional evolution. With the creation of tech companies like Grasshopper and Chargify, Hauser used his talents and curiosity to shape his own destiny, and make a splash in the startup world. Now, in his latest endeavor, he’s directed that very sense of experimentation to the field of health and fitness, with an upcoming book documenting his extensive adventures in improving his own physical well-being. But it all started with a few lines of code that enabled him to pursue a nontraditional professional life. “I always worked for myself since before high school,” Hauser says. “I never had a traditional job.” In the late 1990s, the internet was gaining unstoppable momentum, and as websites started to become viable means of doing business, the demand for web designers and ad creators increased dramatically. This shift granted new opportunities to clever teens on the cutting edge of new technology who wanted to make a few bucks (and sometimes much, much more) from the comfort of their childhood bedrooms. Hauser, who has no formal tech training, was one of these teens, swiftly making his way into the world of banner ad management and creating his own company WebAds360. “From there, I started grabbing onto different things, learning different technologies, working with other people,” he says. “But it all started with web design.” Before graduating college, he founded a second company, called ReturnPath, to help businesses that used permission-based email lists to keep their addresses up to date as subscribers graduated college or changed jobs. Being a teenage entrepreneur in the late 1990s and early 2000s presented some major limitations, however. For one, what phone number were prospective clients supposed to call? Cell phones of the time were still extremely basic and lacking features like putting a caller on hold or setting up a conference call. Meanwhile, home landlines might be answered by baffled family members. Neither option exactly screamed professionalism. It wasn’t just a problem for young people working at home, either, as lots of scrappy new entrepreneurs were lacking dedicated business phones. So when the born and raised New Yorker headed off to Babson College in Massachusetts, and met Siamak Taghaddos, another entrepreneur with a similar problem, they put their heads together to pursue a solution. Leaping Toward Success “It started with a really simple idea,” Hauser says. All they wanted was a way for tiny companies, startups, and solopreneurs to have the phone presence of a large, established company. And when neither he nor Taghaddos could find an existing solution to their problem, they did what so many successful entrepreneurs end up doing. They built their own solution. Because they were only out to solve a problem for their existing businesses, Hauser admits they didn’t spend a lot of time on research or planning. “It wasn’t well-researched necessarily, beyond the fact that we knew we had a problem, and we thought that we could solve it,” Hauser says. During the process of creating the solution to their own problem, they realized that they were really onto something. That maybe this was going to be much bigger than a new tool for their own tool belts. And because he and Taghaddos had their fingers in a lot of pies, and the money flowing in from their existing projects was enough to fund their new endeavor, they never needed to request outside funding. In 2003, the pair officially launched Grasshopper, a service that enabled small businesses to present themselves like big businesses using just a cell phone, complete with extensions, customizable greetings, and simultaneous call handling. Before long, Hauser shut down all of his other businesses, including WebAds360, and decided to focus entirely on the management and growth of Grasshopper. And business boomed. Small businesses and startups flocked to the service, delighted that it enabled them to operate with the professionalism of a well-established corporation. The company continued to grow for the next six years, when Hauser decided it was time to relinquish his role of CTO. “I was always relatively technical,” he says. “But I am definitely not a top programmer, and as we really started to build out the company, it was clear that we needed to have better leadership from a technical perspective, and I could apply my talents better elsewhere.” So, Hauser moved through another phase in his evolution as an entrepreneur and broadened his scope. “Rather than being just focused on the technology side, I spent a lot more time in company culture, HR, hiring, process, goals and how we implemented those,” he says. “I shifted my focus.” And as he stepped back, looking at Grasshopper from all angles, he saw possibility everywhere. Trial and Error Even though Grasshopper was a big success, Hauser’s head was bursting with new ideas and new problems to be solved. In 2009, he developed Chargify for streamlined recurring billing. Then in 2010, he created PackageFox, a way to secure guaranteed refunds from late or lost packages shipped through FedEx or UPS. And in 2011, he launched PopSurvey, a graphical survey creator. These are just a few of the self-funded side businesses born out of Grasshopper, and Hauser says there are many more that aren’t resume-worthy or that never saw the light of day. “Those are probably just the ones that became something,” he says. “There are tons of others that failed and never really got very far, or failed horribly bad and we lost a lot of money.” PopSurvey eventually fizzled out, overcome by competitors. PackageFox was an opportunity for Hauser to learn more about automation, but he eventually sold it off to someone in the space who could make better use of it. Hauser kept Chargify longer than either of the other two, but recently sold it, as well. And while Hauser learned much during this time of exploration and creation, he admits that it created a lot of tension within his team at Grasshopper. “We thought maybe we couldn’t keep growing Grasshopper, and we started all these things, and wasted a tremendous amount of time and money, but more importantly distracted ourselves—and even worse, probably, distracted the team—from the thing that was growing well. We could have just doubled down,” he says. “The success would have been much better than if we had wasted all that time, but that was the blind spot we had, and luckily we realized it.” Hauser says that internal blind spots are some of the most difficult challenges that founders face. While an entrepreneur is wrapped up in the excitement of a new creation, he says it can be nearly impossible to determine impartially whether or not that is the best possible use of time. “We’re overly invested in something, and we have that blind spot to maybe this isn’t the right thing to be working on right now,” he says. But whether by choice or by force, the decision to take the left fork instead of the right is eventually made. “I think sometimes it happens naturally. That progression just happens and you kind of see it,” he says. The problem is that sometimes it takes too long, and we over-invest in something that’s not productive, taking time away from something that has a much brighter future. And while he is thankful that the ultimate effect this period of distraction had on Grasshopper was minimal, he would have done things differently given the opportunity. “Looking back on it, it was not the best choice,” he says. “We should have focused on Grasshopper and grown Grasshopper.” But despite any amount of distraction, Grasshopper grew and grew until the company was raking in $30 million in annual revenue. Before long, the success of Grasshopper drew the attention of hungry eyes, and the acquisition calls started pouring in. Sales and Farewells “When we started the company, we had no exit plan,” Hauser says. “Our goal was to build a company we loved being at and loved doing what we were doing. That was it.” So when the first of the interested buyers knocked, Hauser turned them away empty-handed. But as Grasshopper was a privately funded company, without the limitations placed on it by investors and capital, interested buyers were not to be discouraged. Eventually, Citrix, a multinational software company, made them an offer that they couldn’t ignore. Citrix said that Grasshopper could retain their brand name, keep the team together and continue growing the company. Over the course of a year, Citrix worked with Hauser and Taghaddos until they recognized that this proposal was a great fit for everyone involved. So they decided to sign on the dotted line. As soon as the sale was finalized in 2015, both Hauser and Taghaddos bid their greatest success farewell, something Hauser describes as being “very emotionally difficult” but “best for both the company and Citrix.” He trusted the management team to keep steering the ship in the right direction, and with Citrix’s new ideas for growth and strategy, he knew the business was in good hands. Neither he nor his partner were interested in sticking around for “two more positions for highly paid executives with titles that are kind of meaningless in a big public company.” While he knew he had made the right decision, Hauser was rocked by the impact of his choice. “All of a sudden, your email address changes, your phone number, your identity,” he says. “For 12 years, I was the guy involved in Grasshopper, and I ran Grasshopper. That’s who I identified with and people identified me with, and that just changed overnight.” For a year after stepping away from Grasshopper, he continued with Chargify, but in July 2016, he sold that business, too. With a clean slate, Hauser stepped into his next phase of evolution. He explains that the core purpose of Grasshopper was to empower entrepreneurs to succeed. Now, he’s just hopped into a larger field. “After a year, I came back to and found my core purpose,” he says, “and that’s empowering others.” The Pursuit of Health It’s been two years since Hauser’s life changed with the sale of his two most successful brands, and he spent the latter half of that time on an exciting new project: himself. “I really wanted to change my life, and that included changing my exercise and diet, and I went from doing extreme endurance sports to practicing yoga six days a week,” he says. “Like massive change.” In pursuit of this change, he also took just about every test imaginable—blood tests, stool tests, sleep tests, DNA tests and more. All in the pursuit of a healthier life. And now he is ready to share what he has learned. Thirty pounds lighter, Hauser is releasing a book in 2019 called Evolve: Optimize Your Life, Body and Mind. In it, he busts myths around fad dieting, trendy workouts, and quick fixes, sharing instead the methodology he used to transform his own life. He also tackles many of the health sacrifices entrepreneurs make while chasing lofty goals. And despite all the changes he tried in his own life, he isn’t necessarily an advocate of massive life shifts or hours spent in the gym. He believes that often the little choices can make the most impact. “It’s always easier to work an extra hour past midnight because no one is bothering you, right?” he says. “It’s easy to pick up the phone and call for pizza, because you know you get that instant boost and gratification and can continue working for an extra hour. But I think, at the end of the day, what I care about is output and productivity, and I don’t think there is very much value in that extra hour of work when it is low productivity and low value, and it is just work for work’s sake.” Through his book, Hauser hopes to open the eyes of founders and non-founders alike to the power they have over their own lives and the small adjustments they can make that will bring huge impact. “The idea with the book is allowing people to understand that their life is a self-experiment and doing little things like maybe just buying a new pillow for your bed…could have massive gains,” he says. “Each thing in your life is an experiment, because you’re different from everyone else.” Once again, just as he did as a teenager learning to code, Hauser is relying on the power of trial and error—how the slightest adjustment, addition, or subtraction can make a big difference. He is, yet again, learning to crack the code, and yet again, hopes it can change lives. David Hauser’s Tips For Living A Healthier Life Since founding, building and selling Grasshopper, David Hauser has invested much of his time in pursuit of a healthier life. In 2019, he is releasing a book on the subject, “Evolve: Optimize Your Life, Body and Mind,” and these are just a few of the tips held inside for entrepreneurs pursuing a healthier lifestyle. For more information on the upcoming book, and a free chapter on the impacts of coffee, visit www.evolvebook.com.      Establish a Routine “I am a huge believer in routine,” Hauser says. “If you talk to the most successful people in the world, most of them will tell you routine is very important.” He is such a strong believer in routine that, even when he doesn’t plan to work out, he still goes to the gym because it’s on his schedule. By developing a routine that allows for more movement, more stability, and more sleep, he thinks entrepreneurs can improve their lives—as well as their businesses—in enormous ways.      Sleep More “As founders, understanding our sleep patterns—improving our sleep patterns—I think has tremendous effects and gains on our productivity the next day, the next week, the next year that we don’t realize,” Hauser says. By making more time for sleep, and being unwilling to compromise that time for a little extra work at the end of the day, he believes that entrepreneurs will actually be far more productive. Entering into each new day refreshed improves mood, interaction, and problem solving—all areas that are vital for success.      Experiment “Life is a self-experiment and doing little things like maybe just buying a new pillow for your bed…could have massive gains,” Hauser says. “Each thing in your life is an experiment, because you’re different from everyone else.” Even the smallest changes can make a massive impact, and what works for others may not necessarily be the best choice for you. By trying new ways to solving old, persistent problems, he believes people can make great impacts on their health, and what is more entrepreneurial than that? Key Takeaways The first company he started (in high school!) The Grasshopper origin story Entrepreneurial blind spots and distractions Why Hauser stepped down as CTO at Grasshopper Chargify, PopSurvey, PackageFox, and the other companies he’s started The story behind Citrix acquiring Grasshopper What Hauser did after stepping away from Grasshopper, and the emotional side of selling the company Pooling customer service for different products you’re building Marketing strategies they used to grow Chargify faster Hauser’s new book and new projects How to keep yourself healthy while working hard

Email continues to be an important and strategic form of communication. There are more and more people coming online every day, and these people are going to have emails. The number of emails being sent each year is growing. In this episode, Daniel Incandela, CMO at Return Path, tells us about how email still remains a high performing ROI channel for marketers to use if they will use it in a smart way. Hitting the inbox instead of the spam folder and having success with your email marketing campaign is all about providing value to your potential client.

  Google said they would not be reading your email.  Good News.  Listen in as I tell you what you probably don't want to know about Gmail's dirty little secret. There is a new report out from SANS. Today, I will discuss what it said about Anti-Virus.  Can you believe the Military is using home grade routers and then not even changing the default password?  We will discuss what led to some very important military documents showing up on the Dark Web and how it could have been prevented. There is so much to talk about that I ran out of time so be sure to check out the related articles below. Craig is putting up a new membership site (Yes, it is free, but you have to sign up)  On it will have all his special reports that he puts out and you will be the first to get them. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 07/28/2018 Gmail's dirty little secret. Anti-Virus is now ineffective - SANS report. Stolen military drone document. Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining us today. I don't know if you can hear that little Roomba going in the background here, she's cleaning up the room. We have we have a few things to talk about. This one is going to be kind of interesting. How well do the global warming predictions stand up? Because we've heard that. Of course, our whole world is about to fall apart. We're going to drown if we live in Florida, and everything is over with. You probably remember some of this, we'll talk a little bit about that. This is very, very cool article from the Cato Institute. We're going to talk about app developers, here when it comes to Google. They have committed to not reading your e-mails, but the same is not true. Yes, the app developer, so what are they doing. Did you realize thi?. Yeah, Hey, we have lots going on there.  [00:00:52] Yeah. [00:00:53] Half of cyber attacks are, well, more than half, are undetected via antivirus software. Talk about that. A new report, a new study coming out of SANS, the SANS Institute. We've got military documents stolen. Some plans here, about the drone the number one, in fact, drone, in the U.S. military the MQ9 Reaper drone, and it's all because of something I warned you about here on this show a few months ago if the military had been listening in. I know they do. But, if these guys have been listening in the military, we wouldn't have lost those secret documents. Google. We're going to talk about how they now have had no phishing incidents. More than eighty-nine thousand employees. How did they do that? Well, we'll talk about that the top voting machine vendor has admitted something that I suspected for a very long time. Yeah, how can you trust vendors of software, and make sure they don't install backdoors. How can you do that? Yeah. Well, we'll talk about that a little bit. You know I'm thinking about it we're not going to get all of these today. You ought to check them out on my Web site Inside Facebook and Twitter. The artificial intelligence battle going on over our social lives, and Data, as a fingerprint, in fact, data is a fingerprint. We'll talk about what that means to you, as well. Because you're not a safe and private online as you might think you are. All right, let's see how far we can get today. [00:02:36] All right. We're going to start here with tech's dirty little secret. Now, we know about Facebook. Do you see their stock this week? Wild ride. I think that Facebook stock was down 25 percent at one point. The way Facebook has been treating its users is just abysmal, frankly. You do remember a few years ago we talked about this, on the show here, but a few years ago when Facebook decided that if you liked somebody's page, so let's say I had a page, which I did, online and a lot of celebrities had a page on Facebook, as well. And they would post stuff for their audience, the people that liked them, Right. So, you could follow any kind of celebrity you wanted on Facebook. You could follow somebody that was a musician because you enjoyed their music and there's a couple of them out there that I really enjoy, some new guys. Anyhow, you could have the musician you could have someone like me or maybe another radio personality, whomever so you follow them, you like their page on Facebook, and when they posted something it would show up in your feed. So, you would see what they had to say, and that was the idea, Right. You followed them, you like them because you wanted to see what they had to say. It is that simple enough for you. And, what's happened now is Facebook says, ok well you have a million followers I'm going to show your post to maybe 500 if you want your post to be seen by more people. You have to pay. And, they do that to me all of the time which is why, I'm not a, you know big Facebook user. Well, one of the reasons, about a big Facebook user but I do post stuff up there and they say "hey pay five bucks, and we'll go ahead, and we will show your post to more people." [00:04:27] Well, wait a minute these people said that they wanted to follow me. They wanted to hear from me. Why do you not show them my information? So, a lot of the big celebrities just said forget it. Some of the people that had more than a million likes on their Facebook fan pages said forget it, I'm gone. They deleted the whole account. They left. Now, this is a few years ago. Fast forward to today. We've got Facebook doing, even more, deciding because they're the Decider, more deciding about what it is you might want to see. What you don't want to see. Doesn't matter what you say, doesn't matter that you like the page, doesn't matter that they're a family member. If it says congratulations. OK great. They give high your ranking and you're more likely to see it. But, I want to know what my family members are saying. I want to know what the people I'm following are saying. Is that too difficult? Is that something that Facebook can't do for me? Right, I think that's a really, really, big deal, frankly, because that's why I was on Facebook in the first place. To find out what these people had to say. But no, Facebook is busy trying to gain you to get you to click on something to feed you stuff. And particularly those people who are libertarian like myself or maybe they're conservative. And Facebook has been using academics to come in and spend some serious time helping them develop their algorithms. And you know the academics know better than you do. So, they're going to give you what they think you should see which does not include anything that isn't on the Socialist Left, Right.  [00:06:13] That's kind of the bottom line on this. [00:06:16] Obviously they're not going to feed anything from the hard right. But the question is? Where's that line? And, so just a regular moderate conservative person who's out there, middle of the road, is considered to be too far to the right by many of the algorithms. So your information is put out there. So, there's a lot of reasons people aren't using Facebook, the way they used to. Their profit forecast was down. So, their stock went way, way, down. And, they've been penalized, Right. The free market at work. Well, Google is getting into, say it has gotten into, and it's continuing to get into some trouble as well. [00:06:59] What's been going on on the Google front is kind of interesting, because Google was going through all of your mail. If you had Gmail Google went through it. They were looking for things and showing you ads based on what was in your e-mail. So, you know people kind of got upset because all of a sudden Google would be sending out a message about your bereavement. Because there was an e-mail about some uncle Dying or something and you would wonder about those ads. What are those ads all about what's Google doing here? And so Google, committed this was what, two or three years ago.  [00:07:32] Committed to not going through e-mail and while the dirty secret is that they may not be going through it, but a wall street journal examination found that app developers, software developers, who are using Google's API's are going through your e-mails. One of the companies that they had a look at and this is from an article from Douglas Macmillan over at the Wall Street Journal. One of those companies does Return Path Inc. Now they collect data from marketers, they scan the inboxes of more than 2 million people who signed up for, one of the free apps and Return Paths partner network, using a Gmail, Microsoft or Yahoo email address, so, think about this. Think about the that what was that silly game, that people used to play over on Facebook where you are planting things you know you're a farmer. What is the name of that? If you know the name. Go ahead and text me 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53. I can't think of it, anyway. [00:08:41] Those games when you sign up for them the app developers now gain access to certain of your information, and they don't have to be a game. They can be a tool, and you might remember of course that's what Cambridge Analytica was doing, yeah take our survey and now they've gained access to all kinds of Facebook information about you and your friends and their profiles. Right, then that's why they got into so much trouble. That's why Facebook, also this week, got this huge fine from the European Union. The maximum fine possible under this new G.D.P.R which is the new data protection policy. So, they levied the maximum fine possible which really, Facebook's not going to notice, from a financial standpoint, because it's Facebook just makes so much money.  [00:09:29] So, Google is giving that information away. You've got to be careful. Oh, yea Farmville. That's what it was. Thanks, guys. Farmville. There are a few of them I guess but that's when I was thinking I was Farmville.  [00:09:43] So, Return Path is one of them. [00:09:46] They're analyzing about 100 million emails a day, apparently, and at one point two years ago Return Path employees were reading about 8000 unredacted emails, employees. Okay, real people reading your emails per day eight thousand a day, while they're training their software. So, in another case, we've got Edison software which is another Gmail developer. They make this mobile app for reading and organizing your email. They personally reviewed the emails of hundreds of users to build a new feature and that's according to the company's CEO. So, letting users, employees read private potentially private right not necessarily all e-mails private but you know you consider e-mail private, don't you. That's a reasonable expectation, isn't it? You'd be upset if you found out people were reading your e-mails, Right. So, in this case, it's become common practice, for employees to read your e-mail. And frankly, it's a dirty little secret. Now neither Return Path or Edison asked users specifically if it could read their e-mails. They were just granted access to it. Really, really, bad news here. Now Facebook has allowed outside developers to gain access to the user's data, we know about that because of the Cambridge Analytica breach. Facebook says it stopped it in 2015. We're not going to go into all of that, but it's it's really kind of interesting to look at all of this, but remember, your data is not your data. Again, you are the product, right? We keep having to say that but a lot of people seem to forget about it. You are the product, you are not the customer? So, keep that in mind as you are going online and use your free e-mail and your free Facebook site to your free ecetera. Right. It isn't free. There is a cost [00:11:55] All right, it is cyber attack time here, with Craig Petersen. You know, that's what I do for a living. I don't attack people I protect them from attacks. In fact most of the time I get involved with a company when they have already been attacked. I picked up three or four new clients, this week alone, that have been attacked. One, of them, basically lost all of their finances. This is a small family owned business and they made, really kind of a cool little device, and wow, things things are bad when your bank account information is used or when your payments are redirected from you when the hackers get into your computers now, gain access to your bank accounts and just wire the money out, it's gone in 90 seconds. it's just nuts what happens out there while SANs came out, the SANS Institute. [00:12:53] Now, these are great guys and gals, obviously, but the great guys and they put together a number of training courses that you might want to check out, online at SANS dot org. Now one of the things they do is obviously they keep track of the exploits, and they just came out with their 2018 survey on Endpoint Protection and Response. So, they polled almost 300 I.T. information technology professionals. They asked about endpoint security concerns and practices. This year's survey. I want you guys to think about this for yourself. How do you measure up? Where do you fall in? In this survey, if you were asked OK. 42 percent of respondents reported and point exploits. So, that's pretty darn high. That's almost half as getting close to half of the respondents. These are information technology professionals, so, these are people who know the bottom line here of whether or not they're hacked, at least they're supposed to. And, almost half of them said that they did have exploits on endpoints. Now what the endpoint? Those are your computers. Basically, it's your Windows machines for the most part. Maybe your Mac? your Linux machine? Etcetera. Now, what's good about this is they're saying that's down from 53 percent last year, but the number of those who reported that they didn't know that they'd been breached, jumped from 10 percent to 20 percent. [00:14:36] So, maybe we're getting a little less honest, in some regards, this year with the tools, now. [00:14:43] You know I've talked about this before, in fact, if you attend one of my webinars I'll go through these stats but what is being reported right now, from our friends over at SANs is, that your traditional antivirus software, just doesn't work anymore. Antivirus systems, according to the survey. Now, these are professionals right. This isn't me. This isn't some marketer, right. Do you believe these guys? Do you believe these I.T. professionals? Well, they're saying that the antivirus systems, the traditional antivirus stuff, only detected endpoint compromise 47 percent of the time, 47 percent. Other attacks were caught through various types of automated alerts end point detection and response platforms, 32 to 26 percent. OK, so the most important attacks are intended to exploit the users. More than 50 percent of respondents reported drive-by incidents on the web. Now, all of this stuff is preventable and I think the industry, the security industry is doing everyone a huge disservice because they're all tooting their horns about how great they are and yet they are not great. None of the standard antivirus software companies you can think of, none of the standard firewall firms you can think of, None of these guys are actually anywhere near as good as they need to be or should be. And, I've I've said this before, right. [00:16:27] And so how can you believe their marketing. You've got John McAfee out there the founder of McAfee anti-virus saying McAfee antivirus is the worst. You've got Symantec senior executive saying yeah, antivirus is dead, don't use Symantec because it's just not worth it. And, then by the way somehow leaving his position the next day, it's just amazing. So, it goes on and on but, credential theft was used in many of these compromises. So, keep an eye on that. Keep an eye on phishing make sure you know what's happening. You want to use a really, really, good stack. You're not going to find that frankly from anybody, right now except Cisco. And unfortunately, it's not just antivirus software, anymore. It's what we're doing now. And what you're going to see most of the really good security professionals doing is a layered approach. I mean layered, layers, upon layers, there's multiple layers, on the endpoint on the multiple layers, on your computer. There's multiple layers on the network, and there's multiple layers of the network edge, where you might find a firewall. Okay. So, keep an eye out for that. And while it's disappointing but somehow this SANs survey is not surprising. Things are getting worse in Anti-Virus Software it's effective in less than half of the cases. [00:18:04] Speaking of antivirus and hacks, we talked on the show before, and it was all over the news about what the FBI had to say. Now, you know I worked with the FBI pretty closely I run their, national webinars for the entire InfraGard program which is the infrastructure Guardian stuff. Check it out online infragard dot org if you're involved with protecting your company's physical facilities or maybe your data facilities networks and stuff check it out, infragard dot Org. There are chapters, everywhere, there's like 80 chapters I think eighty plus nationwide and there is every state even here in New England. We have these chapters, so join your chapter. Keep up to date know what's going on, it's so important to have that information, in fact, you got to the webinar, I'm doing, again. We bring in experts, right. But in a few weeks and we're going to be talking with FRSecure, about this very issue here of how do you do security because you know you mentioned before the break in the last segment here how we have multiple layers on every part of the whole infrastructure. Well, he goes into some more detail where he's talking about the employees and the physical infrastructure. It's all well and good if you got the best of you know firewalled and anti-malware prevention and protection software and IDS and IPS, and all this stuff. But what if someone walks out the door with your server? And that's part of the HIPAA regulations. By the way, if you are involved with a medical practice, you've got to make sure all of your devices are physically locked down. All right, So, there's a lot to know, a lot to remember, a lot to learn. [00:19:52] So we'll be we'll be having him on. I just recorded the Web an hour with him yesterday, in fact, we're having him on soon. So. FBI warned and I brought it up here on the radio show too before the FBI warning came out warned globally that there are hackers who have hacked many of our routers. If you're using a router that has not had a software update a firmware update in a while? Particularly if you're using a lower-end router like a small business router or a personal router for your home. That device has been used, to send all of your data to Russia where important information is harvested out of it, and then it is sent back to you. So, you don't even know it's happened. It's really bad. Some of the stuff is crazy complex that they're doing. So, if you have not updated your router yet, I've got an article about that up on my Web site that leads you through, gives you step by step depending on who the manufacturer is. Some of the older ones you will not be able to update or upgrade. If you have a true business class router, a higher end router, and firewall something you pay north of two-thousand to five-thousand dollars for. And, by the way, you should be paying around five grand for a decent firewall, nowadays. But if you have one of these you're probably OK, at least for now. This article and I mentioned this is the beginning of this show is mind-blowing, because it's our number 1 drone out there, the MQ 9 Reaper drone. This is the number one drone, the top in the world. This thing can send missiles and can just do all kind of stuff.  [00:21:46] Well we found online in the dark web and by the way, I hope you're doing Dark Web scans for yourself and your family. But we found or having them done, we found out there, the plans not for the reaper itself, but the entire maintenance manual, manual on the MQ 9 a reaper, wow, ok. This is the maintenance. This is Delta training is included in this where it's showing how to use the reaper to attack and to blow up IED's that might be on the road. How to hit a convoy, OK. All of this information and it is being sold for, drum roll please 150 and 200 dollars, for the lot.  [00:22:39] Isn't that something. How did they get the information?  [00:22:44] Well, turns out, that apparently, and this is according to bleeping computer, here, Kaitlynn but apparently the military bases I.T. team had not changed their routers default F.T.P. credentials. In other words, the default credentials now they're using a Netgear [00:23:08] router. WHAT???? That is a personal home router, it is not military grade, it's not business grade. What the heck are they doing, using the Netgear Router or are they NUTS? And for two years give or take we've known that these Netgear routers have a default set of FTP credentials.  [00:23:34] So, the hacker also bragged about accessing footage of the MQ 1 Predator. My gosh what's going on? [00:23:44] So, if you're a business don't use these things! If you're the military, what the heck are you doing using these things? And if you're just a listener wondering what's going on, Appreciate you joining us today. Craig Peterson, of course, you can visit me online, all of today's articles including the ones we didn't get to like, 30 years on how well did global warming prediction stand up. Quick answer. They didn't. [00:24:08] And Google's 90000 employees how did they stop phishing. I'm going to have to do a special on that one. Top voting machine vendor admits it Restall installed remote access software on voting machines, that were sold to states. Your data is a fingerprint. And Facebook, Google, Twitter, they're all using AI to battle over your content. It's kind of interesting lots of stuff. Of course, you don't have time to get to it today. But, I appreciate you guys joining me. Visit me online Craig Peterson dot com. Make sure you get my alerts. The only way to do that is to text me. [00:24:47] You can ask any question, you can sign up for alerts, whatever you want. 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53 8 5 5 3 8 5 5 5 5 3. Have a great week. Thanks for joining us. Bye-bye.  --- Related articles: --- Gmail app developers have been reading your emails Inside Facebook, Twitter and Google’s AI battle over your social lives A Hacker Sold U.S. Military Drone Documents On The Dark Web For Just $200 Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States Google’s 89,000+ employees have had zero phishing incidents since switching to hardware security keys in 2017 Thirty Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Stand Up? ‘Data is a fingerprint’: why you aren’t as anonymous as you think online --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Message Input: Message #techtalk Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Google engineers and third-party app developers are given permission to read the emails of the 1.2 billion Gmail users around the world. In some cases this is done to train algorithms to handle the data contained in emails, but it does highlight the vulnerabilities of Google's permission system. Companies like Microsoft, Return Path and Edison Software have also been given access to Gmail user info and the problem applies to other online email services.

Talkin' Bout Email is THE podcast about email marketing and how to make the most of it for your business or organization. Brought to you by iContact Email Marketing. Episode three brings John and Hank together in Europe, talkin' bout: - The difference between European and US email marketing - What is an American Work-a-frolic to do when in France? - Quality vs. Quantity: the differences in international approaches - Instagram TV: YouTube killer? - How do ReturnPath and Edison help (or harm) your Gmail subscribers? - Cambridge Analytica: c’mon, man. - FEATURE: how and when to use an "Oops" email - How to stay inspired to affect change via email marketing And a whole bunch more! Have a question for Hank & John? Email podcast@icontact.com or send us a tweet @icontact.

Campaign Monitor merges with Emma and Delivra to launch new Campaign Monitor Brand. Could this be the most comprehensive email marketing solution suite of three SaaS products in the industry? Introducing Campaign Monitor’s suite of email marketing solutions Campaign Monitor brings together best-of-breed email marketing solutions and services to better support the email needs of all businesses by offering the following: Campaign Monitor: This market-leading self-service brand focuses on delivering a better experience compared to freemium brands, with a primary focus on high volume email senders trying to drive more engagement with subscribers. With its easy to use marketing tool, marketers are able to send beautiful, targeted newsletters to grow their business. Emma: Emma’s solution makes it easy for teams of all sizes to create and collaborate on beautiful campaigns. Its focus on delivering powerful personalization in an accessible way ultimately drives more conversions and sales. Emma also allows distributed business or franchised organizations to manage professional email marketing at scale. Delivra: Delivra offers custom email marketing and automation solutions designed to meet the unique needs of every customer. Its service-centric model focuses on building more sophisticated, custom Cody Bender, Chief Product Officer Cody Bender is the Chief Product Officer of Campaign Monitor. Before joining Campaign Monitor in early 2017, Cody led Return Path’s Email Certification program and Product organization for six years, working with some of the largest ISPs, ESPs, and email marketers in the world. Before that, he developed and implemented software solutions and telecom engineering for municipalities and governments across the US.      

Email deliverability rates are impacted by following standard best practices. But adhering to such best practices and industry standards is often not enough. What is email deliverability? Deliverability is “a way to measure the success at which an email marketer gets a campaign into subscribers' inboxes. It involves every facet of email delivery: from the technical stuff like ISPs, MTAs, and throttling, to the aspects that you (and your client) can control, like the cleanliness of a list or an email's content.” – MailChimp “Simply put, successful email deliverability is your message arriving in the inbox of the recipient as intended. Email deliverability failure is when your message is either routed to the junk/bulk folder or blocked by an ISP (Internet Service Provider).” – SendGrid Your email needs to land in the inbox. Your marketing team needs the recipients to engage with those emails. Business owners expect emails to convert to subscribers and ultimately into sales. Did you know…. A lack of email engagement can lead to a decrease in your email deliverability rate? Now is the time to determine: What factors determine and influence the deliverability rate of an email used for marketing. What are the best practices to increase an email deliverability When marketers evaluate their email results, they look at engagement metrics based upon how the recipient engaged with or did not engage with the email they received. However, emails face the Goliath of companies that evaluate such metrics also. Such companies are called email service providers (ESP). These companies include Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. Corporate email servers also have the dreaded IT guy who does not like you either. Email service providers view your email recipient as their customer, not yours. Marketers must pay attention to email deliverability factors and metrics. The positive and negative interactions with email subscribers determine where your incoming email is placed. Viral Solutions recently attended an event sponsored by ReturnPath. ReturnPath conducted a study using global consumer data consisting of over 17,000 commercial senders, 2 million consumer panelists, and over 5.5 billion commercial email messages sent to Microsoft, Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL users between January 1, 2017, and December 31, 2017. ReturnPath has distributed a free report about the hidden metric of email deliverability, and the following article is our notes for our readers. If you would like your own copy, please go to this link at ReturnPath.com. What metrics do email service providers look at?

In this episode of the Marketing Cloudcast we speak with email deliverability experts from Return Path, Julia Peavy, Director of Partner Services, and Tyler Maschger, US Sales Manager, as well as our very own Alex Soto, Director of Deliverability and ISP Relations at Salesforce Marketing Cloud. They’ll share the importance of email deliverability, helpful tips, and best practices that will help you stay off the email naughty list. Tweet @CollinsMeMegan, @crozul, or @marketingcloud with your thoughts on this episode or ideas for a future topic.

Greg Sands is the Founder & Managing Partner @ Costanoa Ventures, one of the leading early stage enterprise funds on the West Coast with their latest $175m fund, raised earlier this year. At Costanoa, Greg has made investments in the likes of Intacct (acquired by Sage for $800m), Quizlet, DemandBase and previous guest, Grovo, just to name a few. Prior to founding Costanoa, Greg was a Managing Director at Sutter Hill, where he was an early investor in the likes of Feedburner, AllBusiness, and Return Path. Before Sutter Hill, Greg was on the other side of the table as the first hire at Netscape after its founding engineering team. As Netscape’s 1st Product Manager, Greg wrote the initial business plan, coined the name Netscape, and created the SuiteSpot Business Unit, which he grew from zero to $150m in revenue. He also served as Manager of Business Development at Cisco where he architected a global channel management plan. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Greg make his way into the world of SaaS as the first non-engineering hire at Netscape and then make his way into the world of SaaS investing, subsequently?   Why does Greg completely disagree with the hailed notion of, “The Rule of 40”? Why does Greg believe it has achieved such status and recognition in market today? Where are the large nuances? If not the rule of 40, what metrics and benchmarks should early stage SaaS founders be focussing on? If we disregard “The Rule of 40”, how does that impact the emphasis that should be placed on profitability? Tom Tunguz stated on the show, ““growth is the largest determinant of value at IPO, not profitability”. What are Greg’s thoughts on this? In that scaling process, Greg has said to me before, “the first hire in every function should be a Swiss army knife hire and most people go wrong”. What does Greg mean when he says a Swiss Army Knife, how does that change in marketing vs sales? Where do most people go wrong within this? How does Greg define the different phases of product market fit? Why does Greg advocate that all founders approach product market fit with a “crawl, walk, run” approach? What examples does Greg have where this has worked and what specifically about this allowed it to work so well? 60 Second SaaStr Logos or expansion? Pros and cons of usage based pricing? What does Greg know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Greg Sands

Casey Swanton, Senior Email Strategist at Return Path, joins hosts Barbara Kahn and Americus Reed to discuss strategic marketing via email campaigns for the upcoming holidays on this special Black Friday Episode of Marketing Matters. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Alan Armstrong is founder and CEO of Eigenworks, a boutique strategy and research firm that services B2B software companies ranging from series-B startups through large public companies. Eigenworks currently employs 10 people and has demonstrated 35% CAGR for the past 5 years. Eigenworks clients include industry giants such as Oracle and Cisco, mid-size companies such as Blackbaud and ReturnPath, and rocket-ship startups including Gainsight and VictorOps. Alan is a regular contributor of articles and expertise to industry publications including Pragmatic Marketing, Gainsight's Pulse series, and the popular blog OnProductManagement, of which Alan is a co-founder. Alan speaks regularly at industry events, including Pulse (San Francisco 2015, 2016, 2017), TSIA (Las Vegas 2016), Strategy & Competitive Intelligence Professionals (Atlanta 2017), and Product Marketing Community (Toronto & San Francisco 2016, Boston 2017). Prior to founding Eigenworks, Alan held senior director and vice president roles in three startups and participated in three successful exits including Fortiva (to Proofpoint, 2008), Wily Technology ($400M to CA in 2006), and Canada's largest self-funded exit of Sitraka to Quest Software, where Alan was Director of New Products and Innovation. Alan's experience includes Vice President-level positions covering Product Management, Business Development, and Sales.

Do you wake up each morning and reach for your smartphone to see how many emails you can instantly delete without reading before starting your day? You are not alone. These are just the emails that make it to your inbox, what about the ones that get caught in the dreaded spam folder. A company called Return Path claims to be the expert in deliverability and is helping businesses get more eyeballs on their emails. Every day, our customers trust our data and insights to help them optimize their email marketing. Partnered with best-in-class email service providers, we help marketers take their email programs to the next level by driving more response and increasing revenue. The path to the inbox is a long winding road, and Return Path has created an infographic to illustrate the steps needed to ensure email marketing programs are as successful as possible, and the pitfalls to avoid if you don’t want to be sent to the spam folder. Anyone that is interested in the path to the inbox can also play a video game on that will test your skills at setting up a successful email marketing program. Once again, the game helps businesses of all sizes understand how they can avoid being banished to the spam folder. Daniel Incandela serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Return Path. As head of marketing, Daniel oversees global brand, content, creative, demand generation, digital, events, marketing automation & operations, product marketing, public relations and sales development. Previously, he served as Senior Director of Brand and Global Digital Marketing at the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, where he drove creative & digital marketing strategy for the company across five continents, overseeing corporate marketing, event branding & experience, and all creative. I invited Incandela onto the show to learn more about how mobile technology has transformed email marketing. We also discuss how emerging technologies and personalization is changing the world of email marketing.  

We talk with Cecy Correa about how to hire and get hired. Cecy Correa Girl Develop It Austin on Rails Why We've Stopped Saying “Culture Fit” — and What We're Saying Instead Jobs at Return Path Jobs at thoughtbot

Conversations with Product Managers on how to get into Product Management. In this episode, I interviewed Dan Corbin , Sr Director of Product Management at Return Path.

Feature interview with TeleTech CISO Sam Masiello. News from Hosting.com, Optiv, Ping Identity, Red Canary, InteliSecure and more! For full show notes: https://www.colorado-security.com/news/2017/3/23/podcast-8-327-show-notes So it's the San Franciscan's fault my rent is so high?! Lots of tech workers (and tech jobs!) coming to Denver from SF. So far our listener survey feedback has been that folks want more of everything (news, job postings, events, and interviews). We'll try to keep you as plugged in with local news as we can, without increasing the length of the weekly shows. We had Alex back for this week's episode, and he didn't miss a beat.   One week left for our listener survey! Sign up for our mailing list on the main site to receive weekly updates - https://www.colorado-security.com/. We're continually working to improve the show, and appreciate the feedback we get from our listeners. If you discover any audio issues, or have suggestions for our format, let us know. This week's episode is available on Soundcloud, iTunes and the Google Play store. Reach out with any questions or comments to info@colorado-security.com Feature interview: Sam Masiello, CISO of TeleTech joined the podcast this week. He told Robb about his career path, including security leadership stops at MX Logic, Return Path, and Groupon. Sam shares how he got into security, what keeps him going, and gives some tips for those looking to break into the industry. Thanks to Sam for joining us. Local security news: Where your last name shows up in the alphabet impacts your likelihood of success Denver luring workers away from SF Cybersecurity industry hopes women will help fill 1.8 million jobs Hosting.com dives into Amazon Web Services, buys Stelligent Systems Optiv Security acquires east-coast cybersecurity firm Comm Solutions Ping announces integration with Azure Active Directory for on premise apps Threat Hunting Is Not a Magical Unicorn A Day In The Life of A CISO - Starring Alex Job Openings: Air Methods - Dir IT Security & Compliance Webroot - Product Manager, Web and Network Security Products Lewis & Fowler - Senior Consultant - GRC Program Manager Akamai - Security Solutions Architect Pearson - Security Architect Nelnet - Security Analyst HP Enterprise - ArcSight Technology Consultant WebRoot - Mac Threat Research Analyst CyberGRX - IT Risk & Security Assessor, Third Party Assessments Town of Castle Rock - Information Security Specialist Upcoming Events: This Week's Events: 4th annual Cyber Focus Day, Colorado Springs - 3/30 SecureSet - Beginner's Intro to Capture The Flag - 3/31 ISSA C.Springs - Security+ Exam Prep Seminar (1 of 2) - 4/1 Notable Upcoming Events: ISSA Denver's Women In Security Kick-Off 4/19 Rocky Mountain Information Security Conference (RMISC) 5/9-11 Denver BSides 5/12-13 7th Annual Cyber Security Training & Technology Forum 8/30-31 View our events page for a full list of upcoming events If you have any questions or comments, or any organizations or events we should highlight, contact Alex and Robb at info@colorado-security.com * Thanks to CJ Adams for our intro and exit! If you need any voiceover work, you can contact him here at carrrladams@gmail.com. Check out his other voice work here. * Intro and exit song: "The Language of Blame" by The Agrarians is licensed under CC BY 2.0

In this episode, Dave interviews David Hauser, a life-long serial entrepreneur. He founded and grew a company called Grasshopper to $30M in sales together with other businesses. David started his serial entrepreneurship way back in highschool when he founded Return Path, an email performance management system. Listen as David walks us through his experiences building and selling his profitable businesses and the core, underlying values that helped them grow. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:33 – Introducing David Hauser 01:28 – David founded and grew Grasshopper to $30M in sales 01:31 – A big part of that $30M in sales was brilliant marketing 02:01 – After 6 years, David sold Grasshopper for a large sum of money 02:30 – He founded Chargify and secured Mark Cuban as an investor 02:35 – He also founded Return Path which was VC funded 02:49 – Other companies he founded were: PopSurvey, Deck Foundry, Temper, io, Package Fox, and National Entrepreneurs Day 03:52 – How David founded the National Entrepreneurs Day: 04:46 – David and his partner Seemac, questioned why there wasn’t any Entrepreneurs Day in the US 05:04 – They looked into what they could do and had Pres. Obama assign temporary days for 4 straight years 05:19 – They lobbied to get their cause to congress and the senate—but, it didn’t go through 05:46 – Grasshopper’s core purpose was to make entrepreneurs succeed so pushing the National Entrepreneurs Day was one way to do this 06:11 – It is also personal for both David and Seemac 06:26 – Dave mentions the video, Entrepreneurs Can Change the World 06:46 – The video went viral with 1.3M views 07:59 – David’s thought process: just do it! 09:15 – When David started Grasshopper, they charged $10/month for users to access their system online 09:40 – Dave shares about David Cummings who sold Pardot for a hundred million 10:01 – He has a blog that talks discusses medicine vs. vitamins 10:11 – Dave relates David Cummings’ blog to Grasshopper 10:56 – Grasshopper repackaged phone services and sold it to the right group of people 11:30 – Grasshopper’s marketing is all in-bound 12:15 – When Grasshopper started, they were buying traffic to get people to their website 12:50 – They were good at getting keywords 13:07 – They did a lot of paid advertising 14:34 – David discusses channel marketing 15:10 – Before Grasshopper, the name was Got V Mail 15:23 – When they decided to rebrand to Grasshopper, they came up with different ideas 15:50 – They thought of getting real grasshoppers and dipping them in chocolate 16:16 – Ideas were internally exchanged 16:25 – They decided to mail chocolate covered grasshoppers to people 17:04 – They used FedEx to send 5000 envelopes 17:52 – They got a phone call from the police or FBI saying they can’t just mail envelopes to different senators 18:13 – They explained and the envelopes were released 18:42 – They created a conversation about Grasshopper 19:03 – Everyone was directed to the video Dave mentioned 19:17 – The total cost of this marketing tactic was between $110-115K 19:23 – The case study is available at Grasshopper’s resource section 20:36 – How they built the 5000 names in their list 22:05 – They used an outsourced platform for discrete tasks 22:43 – They did pretty well and they only spent about $1000 for all the addresses 25:08 – Whether you are born an entrepreneur or not, there are areas you can learn 25:25 – You can train someone to become a business owner, but you cannot create an entrepreneur 26:06 – Return Path is an email performance management tool which David founded in highschool 26:46 – His friend came along with the concept and David made the prototype 27:03 – He was under 18, so his parents were required to sign allowing David to enter into this contract 27:42 – He was deeply involved in the process 28:35 – When David left for college, it was a small business—today, they’re doing probably about $100M/year 29:27 – Culture has been really important 30:01 – David put time into discussing real core values and purposes 30:24 – He challenged everyone who walked into the office to ask any employee what their core values and purposes are 30:52 – Core values were integrated into everything 31:52 – Even though David was the founder of Chargify, it was still different than Grasshopper 32:47 – “Culture is extremely important” 33:06 – The best case for a SaaS business is doubled by Grasshopper 33:55 – Culture is a combination of environment, the people, the values, and the process 36:07 – Dave and David mentions Start with Why by Simon Sinek 37:10 – David realized that his goal is to build and scale a business 37:54 – Connect with David Hauser at com or in Twitter 40:24 – David is happy to help others 40:49 – Dave closes the podcast 3 Key Points: Think like you did when you were a kid – believe in the impossible. If you believe in something, do whatever it takes to promote that vision. Culture is the combination of environment, people, the values, and the process. Resources Mentioned: Entrepreneur's Organization – The EO Network Entrepreneurs Can Change the World – Grasshopper’s viral video Start with Why by Simon Sinek – Book mentioned by Dave in relation to culture

There are no shortage of startup accelerators, innovation spaces and startup community hubs, and sometimes it can be difficult to put your finger on what makes one a success and another a failure. Today, Tim Rowe the CEO of the Cambridge Innovation Center walks us through what he believes will make or break a startup community. The CIC started as a small co-working space for a handful of startups, and now is the biggest facility of its kind on the world. They’ve expanded to several locations and are now int he process of setting up their Tokyo facility. Tim lived in Japan for a few years in the 1990’s and he understands that Japan is different, and that’s a good thing. It’s an interesting interview and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups What makes one startup space succeed and others fail When you need to turn down the money to support the  mission How NGOs and governments can sponsor innovation A blueprint for a successful innovation space What approaches to innovation might be particularly effective in Japan What three things all innovation communities need to succeed What Japanese universities can do to foster innovation Links from the Founder The Cambridge Innovation Center Follow Tim on twitter @rowe WCVB-TV's video on Kendall Square and CIC [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Welcome to Disrupting Japan- straight talk from the CEO’s breaking into Japan. You know, I’ve always been a bit skeptical about co-working spaces, innovation centers, and startup community hubs. Some of them are well intended, but too often, the organizations that put these facilities together have a bit of a field of dreams mindset, where, if they just build the office space, the innovative entrepreneurs will come, and then the organizers will find themselves at the center of a thriving ecosystem. Sometimes that actually happens, but usually not. But when it works, when all the pieces really do come together, amazing things happen. And a community develops that is far greater than the sum of its parts. So what’s the real difference between the innovation spaces that flourish compared to those that stagnate? Well, today we get a chance to sit down and talk to Tim Rowe, CEO of Cambridge Innovation Center, or CIC, the largest innovation center in the world. And we have a conversation about what’s really involved in building an entrepreneurial community, and the CIC's progress on building a very large-scale innovation center right here in Tokyo. It’s a truly insightful conversation, so let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to our interview.     [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411"  info_text="Sponsored by"  font_color="grey"  ] [Interview] Romero: So I’m sitting here with Tim Rowe, CEO of the Cambridge Innovation Center. This is a pretty incredible space that you have been running for 15 years now. So rather than having me explain it, can you tell us a bit about what CIC is and how it came to be? Rowe: Sure. CIC is the world’s largest space for startups, that is our Cambridge Space, specifically. We’re also in Boston, Miami, St. Louis, Rotterdam Netherlands, at the moment and we’ve got some more in the works. We call ourselves a community of startups. So we’re not an accelerator where we’re telling people how to build their business or investing in them. We have brought 15 venture capital funds into our location in Cambridge and some of our other locations, so there is access to money, but it’s more of an open platform. Romero: So the VCs actually have offices there? Rowe: Their entire firm is there. Romero: In terms of business, though, it’s a real estate business. You’re renting office space. You don’t make money by making investments or… Rowe: Yea. So we don’t think about it that way. You could argue that a university is mostly made up of real estate, but that’s not its purpose.

In this episode, Tom Sather, the Senior Director of Research at Return Path, takes us through this election season from the point of view of the inbox. You’ll get an inside peek at what each campaign has been up to by examining their email campaigns. It’s the one piece of election coverage that won’t make you want to put a fork through your own eyeball!

Does PQRS seem like a major headache to you? Just more paperwork without any bump? Let’s look at it a different way. Here I Go With Another Sales Funnel Example Anytime that we are using direct-response marketing or content marketing and we are attracting people in… there is basically a 6 step process that we want to be thinking about our businesses. Step #1 is Lead Magnet. So this is…you have seen me do this where I’m offering a free video or a book or a free report something like that. Very low value, low time commitment, low ask and they get it for free. That just allows us to have an ongoing conversation with that person. Step #2 is Trip Wire. That is something with a little more commitment. Still something that is low-barrier and inexpensive…like a consultation or whatever. It kind of ramps them up…it gives that person a soft landing into our Core Service, it changes our relationship with time from prospect into buyer. Then #3 is Core Service. That is the 97001, 110, 140 if we are billing insurance. Or if we are playing the “cash pay only” deal, then it is whatever we charge per visit. Then Step #4 is Cash Pay, which is back-end services that we have. Step #5 is Return Path and Step #6 is Referrals PQRS Magic: Turning a Pain Into an Opportunity. Something magical happens now with PQRS and new Medicare regulations where we have to go through and track 9 different things. What we have to do on that first Medicare visit is ask the patient to step on the scale. We have the height chart and we look it up and 75% of the time we are saying, “Hey, your BMI is over 30. You need to handle this.” At least for us in the beginning, we were thinking “Wow, this is a really awkward situation. We are Physical Therapists. We are not nutritionists. We don’t have in-house…our 8,000 square feet is packed with PT. We don’t have anybody else in-house, so we need to refer out. This is a real pain in the neck.”

In this episode, Christopher Schmitt is joined by Cecy Correa, who is an Associate Software Engineer at Return Path and is a co-organizer for Refresh Austin, a monthly web and mobile design and development meetup.

In this episode, Christopher Schmitt is joined by Cecy Correa, who is an Associate Software Engineer at Return Path and is a co-organizer for Refresh Austin, a monthly web and mobile design and development meetup.

In this episode, Christopher Schmitt is joined by Cecy Correa, who is an Associate Software Engineer at Return Path and is a co-organizer for Refresh Austin, a monthly web and mobile design and development meetup.

Greg Sands is the Founder and Managing Partner of Costanoa Venture Capital. Prior to founding Costanoa Venture Capital, Greg was a Managing Director at Sutter Hill, where he was an early investor in the likes of Feedburner, AllBusiness, and Return Path just to name a few. Before Sutter Hill, Greg was the first hire at Netscape after its founding engineering team. As Netscape’s 1st Product Manager, Greg wrote the initial business plan, coined the name Netscape, and created the SuiteSpot Business Unit, which he grew from zero to $150m in revenue. He also served as Manager of Business Development at Cisco where he architected a global channel management plan.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Greg made his way into the world of VC from Netscape? Why did Greg see the opportunity for an early stage B2B fund like Costanoa? Why did this fund not exist in B2B but was becoming popularised in B2C? To what extent does Greg agree SaaS investing is ‘traction capital’? When investing pre metrics, what are the signs of promise Greg looks for? How does Greg assess product market fit? Why is customer segmentation and customer archetypes so important? What does Greg make of the ‘full stack CEO’? Is it better to be specialised or jack of all trades? When is the right time to specialise? 60 Second SaaStr Greenfield opportunity in SaaS? Biggest advice to startup founders in SaaS? Easier or harder to raise money now than before? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Greg Sands

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 036 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest: Jeremy Dillingham has a long list of skills and experiences as a seasoned product manager, including leading teams, roadmap planning, portfolio management, Lean Startup, Customer Discovery, Agile Development, and SaaS architectures. He is a mentor at Techstars, an accelerator for technology startups. He currently serves as a Senior VP at Return Path, a company that helps organizations promote and protect their brands. Some favorite product management tools: Discovery – the process of talking with customers and validating what you are learning about the problems and needs. This involves writing a script of interview questions, prioritizing the questions, talking with customers to gain responses, and analyzing the data. Discovery sessions with customers should be done by two interviewers so one can focus on asking questions and the other can focus on taking notes.Experiment – one pass through the build-measure-learn loop (per Lean).Metrics – dashboards, KPIs, another important indicators.Lean Canvas – see TEI 010 episode with the creator of the Lean Canvas.

Jeremy Dillingham has a long list of skills and experiences as a seasoned product manager, including leading teams, roadmap planning, portfolio management, Lean Startup, Customer Discovery, Agile Development, and SaaS architectures. He is a mentor at Techstars, an accelerator for technology startups. He currently serves as a Senior VP at Return Path, a company that […]

It's time to take the mystery out of email marketing because it just might be the most cost-efficient marketing tool for small businesses. For this episode of Power to the Small Business, we've assembled a panel email marketing experts. They will share their advice on email marketing best practices. * How to get started. * How to collect email addresses. * What to say in your email. * What service to use. This podcast is a panel format with three excellent email specialists sitting on the panel: Stephanie Miller of ReturnPath.net, Julie Niehoff of Constant Contact, and Chad White of Smith-Harmon.com You can find links and show notes on The Marketing Spot Blog: http://budurl.com/EmailMktng