John Rizzi (MIT alumni) from e-Dialog talked to us about his experiences as an entrepreneur. e-Dialog provides e-mail marketing services and employs ~300 people. e-Dialog was founded in 1999 and was acquired by GSI Commerce for $157Million back in February. The founding team still works at GSI. To give an idea of how many emails they send, American Airlines has 36 million members in their frequent flyer program and they rely on e-Dialog for their email marketing campaigns!
When John was asked about his hardest moments in entrepreneurship, he ranked them as:
- Layoff the first person
- Layoff the second person
- Firing the founders
- Withoholding bonuses (in exchange of equity)
Then, when he was asked about the smartest moments, he mentioned exactly the same. That was the only way to survive. e-Dialog has gone through price wars where it had to become very efficient.
Some other interesting pieces of advice he mentioned:
- "Optimism is a results multiplier"
- "Go after low hanging fruits"
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