John Payne: Eliminating Email Chains

Vince Thompson: Hi. Welcome to Dog and Pony. I'm Vince Thompson. John Payne is a serial entrepreneur and company CEO who's run eight firms in fact, one of them stamps.com. Today, he's tackling this challenge of communicating with large groups of people. His company CircleUp is taking that head on and we're thrilled to have him on Dog and Pony. John, messaging, collaboration, communication, these are big words. Break it all down for us.

John Payne: Your messy, messy inbox. The easiest way to think about communication is you send the message out to a large group of people and you get this blizzard of responses and replies and the dreaded 'Reply To All' button. And you have to spend a ton of times sorting through all that mess in order to get something that you can actually use and share with all the members of the group.

Vince Thompson: You're preaching to the choir. So, your CircleUp is gonna solve this for people?

John Payne: We solve the problem at two different levels. At the top level in your messaging, we allow you to communicate with a large group of people and instead of getting back this blizzard of messages, you get back a single organized result that you can use, you can share, you can view in an RSS feed, all kinds of different things. And then at a lower level we run a communication gateway that let's all of that happen over e-mail, instant messaging, the social networks and even SMS.

Vince Thompson: All of this appears to be about coordinating data and that data has to go into different types of cells and spreadsheets and tools, CircleUp provide that?

John Payne: Absolutely. In fact, it's very interesting. We allow you to send the message out over a whole variety of different networks. So some people reply on Facebook, some people reply through instant messaging, some people reply through e-mail. We bring it all back together in one place where it can be shared on the web, it can be output to an Excel spreadsheet, it can be viewed in just about any form that you need to be able to view it and it's very fast and simple.

Vince Thompson: What questions do you need to answer for yourself before you go ahead along into one of these things?

John Payne: You know as entrepreneurs you really have to answer the same questions that the venture capitalist have to answer which is you know -- is the market large enough eventually for this to be really big opportunity, is the paying point for the customer and the user great enough that there will be adoption of your service. And then, you know the other interesting questions is "are you the right person to be doing that."

Vince Thompson: What are the kind of things were you excited about on the web?

John Payne: A lot of the things that are revolving out of the social networks -- you know I actually think that there's a big comparison with the destination social networks now and AOL 10 years ago. And I think what's happening is people have fun together and then they'll, sort of devolve taking their identities with them and have lots of interesting activities that are equally social that happen everywhere. And I think that's all very exiting. I think the evolution of wireless is extremely exciting and I think some of the things that we're doing which allow you to sort of receive your messages wherever you are, however you want it, whenever you want it, but be able to have just enough structure to it, so that you add some value.

Vince Thompson: What are the most important attributes for a great CEO?

John Payne: You have to be sort of a good storyteller, you have to be able to communicate to people. The long term vision and where the companies heading. I think you have to be very outcome oriented. You have be able to see how things are gonna flow out and then make them happen that way. Strangely enough you have to have a tolerance for ambiguity because a lot of times what you're doing is taking directions and making decisions in an atmosphere where you only have ten percent of the data and you can't wait until you have ninety percent of the data.

Vince Thompson: What advice would you give in aspiring or new CEO?

John Payne: The most important thing is just to be -- to be really sort of intellectually honest with yourself every step of the way and try to keep your bearing and -- either you have tons of people giving you input or you have no one giving you input. And what you really have to do is sort of believe in yourself and understand what it is that's actually going on around you because then you can make decisions and then you can provide leadership. That and hire the very best people that you can.

Vince Thompson: Would you do it all again exactly as you've done it?

John Payne: I would definitely do it all again. I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I love what I do. I enjoy it and I've had a number of good runs that have been great outcome. The biggest risk or the biggest problem I've had on several occasions is being too early, you know. A lot of times when you're innovating, you're innovating ahead of the market and so if I were to change anything it would probably be to be a little bit more realistic about what the state of the market was versus our ability to imagine what it should be.

Vince Thompson: John Payne, founder and CEO of CircleUp. Thanks.

John Payne: Thanks Vince. It's been great to be here.

Vince Thompson: Yes. It's been fantastic having you. As always questions, comments, if you'd like to suggest a guest, we'd love to hear from you. Send us an e-mail info@dogandpony.com. I'm Vince Thompson. Thanks for watching.