FOREWORD

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt's experience proves that the hard work of building a company is far more important than the excitement of coming up with The Idea. Until this book, I have yet to see anybody lay out all the details of this extremely difficult and unique job. He started the process on his blog, Only Once, and he brings it to fruition in this wonderful book. Read it and you will get a master class in building companies from someone who's honed that skill for more than a decade.

DICK COSTOLO
CEO of Twitter
April 2013