- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
You're only a startup CEO once. Do it well with Startup CEO, a "master class in building a business."
âDick Costolo, Former CEO, Twitter
Being a startup CEO is a job like no other: it's difficult, risky, stressful, lonely, and often learned through trial and error. As a startup CEO seeing things for the first time, you're likely to make mistakes, fail, get things wrong, and feel like you don't have any control over outcomes.
Author Matt Blumberg has been there, and in Startup CEO he shares his experience, mistakes, and lessons learned as he guided Return Path from a handful of employees and no revenues to over $100 million in revenues and 500 employees.
Startup CEO is not a memoir of Return Path's 20-year journey but a thoughtful CEO-focused book that provides first-time CEOs with advice, tools, and approaches for the situations that startup CEOs will face.
You'll learn:
- How to tell your story to new hires, investors, and customers for greater alignment
- How to create a values-based culture for speed and engagement
- How to create business and personal operating systems so that you can balance your life and grow your company at the same time
- How to develop, lead, and leverage your board of directors for greater impact
- How to ensure that your company is bought, not sold, when you exit
Startup CEO is the field guide every CEO needs throughout the growth of their company.
Frequently asked questions
Chapter 1
The Importance of Authentic Leadership in Changing Times
What Is Authentic Leadership?
Why Now?
Think of It as an Opportunity
Mind the Gap
- Having a policy that says no one in the company can fly business class, then traveling in business class or first class
- Having a value of humility, but bragging to employees about how much money you have, or taking credit for their work
- Giving employees a hard time about coming in late for work and showing up late yourself
- Giving yourself 100 percent of your bonus in a year when the company misses its financial targets while you ding everyone else's bonus for that reason
Diversity and Inclusion and Unconscious Bias
- We added a new value to our list of company values, which I drafted personally (the first version and the final version) and which I unveiled to the company personally with anecdotes of why it was important at our annual meeting where we rolled out the company's plan for the coming year. For us, that value was called Opportunity of Equality, and the language behind the value read:
- Differences in background, experience, and thought in our employee population contribute to the best business outcomes for us as a company. We have a strong commitment to being a welcoming environment for candidates and employees that appreciates and maximizes the talents of all employees. We value our employees' different backgrounds, including differences in gender, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious and political views, nationality, age, and socioeconomic status.
- Through our partnership with NCWIT (National Center for Women and Information Technology), we developed and facilitated unconscious bias and âbias bustingâ training courses and workshops and had hundreds of employees and all managers and leaders participate, including additional deeper workshops for my executive team.
- We changed all aspects of our recruiting process to reduce unconscious bias and build inclusion. We expanded our recruiting funnel as wide as possible by expanding our networks, looked for candidates from nontraditional backgrounds, reworded our job descriptions, used blind auditioning technology (Gapjumpers), analyzed candidate data to understand where our biases were showing up and used that data to change interview practices and processes, and trained hiring teams to understand their biases and select the best candidate for the role.
- We changed our compensation practices by mandating a specific starting salary for firstâ and secondâlevel roles and analyzing all compensation data each cycle to eliminate gender or race disparities. We modified our promotion processes to ensure inclusion by posting all roles and ensuring broad funnels of candidates for internal promotions. We also ensured that our training programs were available to all, and when we didn't have diverse trainees in highâimpact programs, we encouraged qualified people in underrepresented groups to attend.
- We modified our performance management practices on a regular basis, and trained managers, teams, and employees to give one another feedback inâtheâmoment. We also had four formal feedback cycles a year â two manager and employee feedback conversations, and two that were live peer feedback with intact teams. For the first, we gave managers guidelines and spotâchecked reviews for biased language or intent. The peer review sessions were facilitated by a trained facilitator who could identify and correct bias in the moment, and also address it with the manager or team in debriefs.
- We also had a strong focus on leadership development across the organization. Our impactful courses really helped employees to have a stronger voice, and leaders to better connect and engage with everyone on their team â not just the team members with whom they had more in common (more on that below).
- We were very transparent and public internally about this work, creating an internal committee to run it, annual company goals around the topic, and a periodic newsletter and slides in our quarterly allâhands meetings to report out on progress against those goals to the company.
Leadership Development
Table of contents
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: The Importance of Authentic Leadership in Changing Times
- Part One: Storytelling
- Part Two: Building the Company's Human Capital
- Part Three: Execution
- Part Four: Building and Leading a Board of Directors
- Part Five: Managing Yourself So You Can Manage Others
- Part Six: Selling Your Company
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- What's Next?
- Index
- End User License Agreement