October 2010
Beginner
352 pages
6h 11m
English
Content preview from Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
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Chapter 35. Don't Suck at E-Mail
David Cohen
David is a co-founder and the CEO of TechStars.
During orientation each year, we implore the founders who are going through TechStars not to suck at e-mail. Sucking at e-mail is a surefire way to get your mentors, potential investors, and customers to lose interest in you.
There are many ways that new founders can suck at e-mail, but there are a few common ones that can be corrected quickly. First, change your attitude. The most common excuse, "I get too much e-mail," is ridiculous. We all get a ton of e-mail. I explain to the founders during orientation that it's extremely unlikely that they get as much e-mail as I do. Reject and remove this excuse from your vocabulary because e-mail volume is no reason to suck at e-mail. In fact, entrepreneurs should want even more e-mail, especially from your customers.
If you accept the notion that "you can't get too much e-mail," you'll then need a system for dealing with it. We recommend something similar to the Getting Things Done (GTD) system by David Allen, which includes tactics such as "inbox zero." Your goal should be to touch every e-mail only once and either respond to it immediately or put it on a to-do list with a due date to be dealt with later. Then, delete the item from your inbox. Do not use your inbox as your to-do list—this is a guaranteed path to e-mail misery. This simple solution will ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.