Things have been going great at Webmail for quite some time now. We’re experiencing healthy growth on a month-to-month basis and things continue to get more exciting every day. But while things are going great at work, things haven’t always been so rosy. Likewise, there are other aspects of my life and side projects I’ve taken on where I haven’t had as much success. In other words, I’ve failed. After getting some inspiration from a blog post titled Talking About Failure by Brad Feld, a venture capitalist blogger I follow, I’ve decided to blog about some of the failures I’ve experienced over the last few years. I don’t mean to be negative or dwell on my mistakes, but I think it’s important to talk openly about those mistakes, learn something from them, and who knows, maybe someone else will learn something too.
Ironically, I was giving a talk to a grad school class at Virginia Tech this morning and one of the students asked me about dealing with failure. He mentioned that he’s heard people talk about failure and that to be successful you have to fail, first. I couldn’t agree more with that statement. In fact, I think it’s important to remember that failure isn’t bad. Whether you’re starting a business, making a sales call, chasing a dream, or asking someone out on a date, it’s okay to fail. If you don’t put yourself out there, you’ll never have the chance to succeed in the first place.
I plan to write about some of the failures I’ve experienced in different areas of my life. Some will be recent, some not so recent. Some will be about business and some will be more on the personal side of my life. Some will be easy to write about, some won’t be. They won’t necessarily be in chronological order either. I plan to just write about them as they come to me. Stay tuned…
Several people this week have asked me, “Why did you all redesign your website? The old one was perfect.” Well, most everyone who asks this question doesn’t really go past the homepage and for the most part, doesn’t grasp how powerful of a marketing tool a website can be. For us, it’s our bread and…
Joel Spolsky has a great post about the subject of Simplicity as it relates to software development. Building simple software applications is one of the Web 2.0 mantras as small companies take on their larger counterparts, trying to compete by doing less. Many of these companies seem to believe that if you build less features into a…
When we relocated Webmail in August 2004, I immediately realized how fragmented the professional community was here in Blacksburg. There are a lot of really smart, motivated people down here but there just really isn’t a place where professionals conglomerate, hang out, and network. So I decided to start a group called the New River…
After my blog post yesterday in reference to the recruiting article in the Roanoke Times, an employee sent me the following email: This confuses me a little bit. It almost seems like this “check everything you have out there and judge you by it” stuff doesn’t really match our actual attitude. If you take 50% of the…
Q1 is over and Q2 is off to the races. Let’s see how I did against my Q1 goals: My top five Q1 goals were: 1. Eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner, at least once, with every employee– No, I didn’t quite achieve this one. I was pretty aggressive but nevertheless, I didn’t each with everyone. 2….
Zimbra announced via TechCrunch this morning that they now have 6 million paid mailboxes. My first reaction to this was pretty much the same reaction that I had when they announced that they had 4 million paid mailboxes just three short months ago. That reaction goes a little something like this: “BULL-sh*t!” After doing some further thinking,…
