Last Update: January 30 2006 2PM I’ve blogged before about how I love what I do. And I meant every word of it. Probably because I’m lucky enough to have found a career where I love going to work every day, I’m constantly evangelizing to people—family, friends, employees, and prospective employees, etc.—how important it is to…
Lew Moorman from Rackspace wrote a great article today about Google. He asks an interesting question: can Google continue to snub their customers? I think it’s a great question and one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. As a disclaimer, I try really hard not to be one of those people that hates…
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….
I am flattered to be able to say that entrepreneurs and business executives are contacting me these days seeking business advice. I am always happy to help and frankly, I really enjoy working with ambitious, motivated people. One question that I constantly get is, “when is the right time to raise money for my business…
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…
Inspired by Verne Harnish, we are adopting a quarterly goal system at Webmail. We’re going to put together, and publicize internally, five goals each quarter. We’re also going to ask each employee to come up with three to five personal goals that they would like to achieve. Each goal needs to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and…
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,…
With the launch of our new website, we made the strategic business decision to stop selling email accounts with the @webmail.us domain name extension. The minute we did that, we had a ton of people write in asking if they could still buy one as well as wondering why we made that move. The Email Discussion Forum also…
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…
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…
Spam sucks. Everyone hates it. And unfortunately, when people think of spam, they think of email. I can’t tell you the number of articles I’ve read in the last few years proclaiming that because of spam, email is useless and will soon be replaced by chat, text and instant messaging, wikis, blogs, RSS, social networking, and…
I’ve blogged before about why I believe it’s difficult to keep great people in Southwest Virginia. One of the reasons I believe it’s a challenge is because the social scene isn’t as great for young people outside of college as it is in other parts of the country. That is something we just cannot deny….