Startup CEO, 2nd Edition

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. Nonetheless, these 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 ...