Jevon MacDonald

co-founder of Startupnorth.ca

The Upside Foundation – Give back a little while you are busy taking over the world

One thing that has really been exciting for me in the last 3 months has been the Salesforce Foundation. When Marc Benioff founded Salesforce he committed 1 percent of stock, 1 percent of employee time and 1 percent of licenses to charity. It’s an incredibly small amount of equity and resources but it has had an amazing impact. Google and others have copied it and it has become a widely used model.

I wish I had done the same thing with my most recent startup. I could have benefitted a charity I am passionate about with very little burden to me or my investors. It’s powerful but it is hard to do. Legal structures, convincing co-founders, convincing investors and then there is all the overhead and work of setting up a foundation and managing it.

The Upside Foundation is launching to make that easier. They are creating a foundation structure which you give options to which convert on an exit and The Upside Foundation then donates the proceeds to charity.

The model is simple and powerful – early-stage companies donate stock options to the Upside Foundation, convertible at exit into a small portion of their equity. When a liquidity event occurs, the Upside Foundation sells its options and donates the proceeds to charities in Canada.

The Upside Foundation board is full of some of the best investors and entreprenurs in Canada, including  Rob Antoniades (ON), Mark Skapinker (ON), Mark Macleod (PQ), Gerry Pond (NB) and Ben Zifkin (ON).

I’m excited. Let’s start giving back while we build amazing companies right here in Canada.

Why The Idea is Bigger Than Everything

I was doing some thinking a few weeks ago about why I am a founder. Everyone has different reasons they look to in order to get through the long grind of being a founder. It’s tough and very thankless, so you need to find the tangible reasons that you can look to both to measure progress and to remind yourself that you are making progress on all fronts.

Those reasons are all important ones, but they pale in comparison to what drives you to go beyond simply being a founder to being an obsessed, irrational and irrepressible builder: The Idea.

When it comes to building a lasting company The Idea is more than just a problem you’ve identified. The idea is some new insight in to the world. When you have an idea then you get a lot of things for free along with it:

  • Vision
  • Strategy
  • Product concept

The entire business will continue to evolve, but truly great ideas are unshaken through constant change. Having an idea that is worthy of spawning a startup is a standard that you should hold yourself to. You’ll know the big one when it comes.

There are things that come up along the way that make you think you’ve had a big idea and those are the reasons that so many startups get started but lose steam quickly: you find a simple problem, you have an idea for a feature but mistake it for a product, or you find a “vision” which is really just a statement.

These things do not last, but ideas do. An idea should be novel, unexpected and impossibly big.

  • Reddit wanted to create a front page for the internet
  • Salesforce wanted to make enterprise software as easy to use and buy as Amazon.com and Ebay.com
  • Google wanted to make search useful (and late went on to aspire to organize the world’s information)
  • Elon Musk thought we should drive in electric cars and fly to space one day.
These are companies who show us the future and promise to take us there. We use them, buy from them and care about them because they aspire to a big idea and when the stumble along the way it makes it far easier for us to be patient with them.
Mine? At GoInstant we thought the web should be a multi-player experience.
What’s your big idea?

Why I’m a Founder

Dave says we can’t all be founders.

He’s probably right. At some point though, I decided that I wanted to be a founder. Lately I’ve been thinking about why it has been so important to me over the last 10+ years to keep at it, even when it didn’t make a lot of sense.

A lot of different things have driven me to be a founder, I’ll try to be as honest about them as I can.

A need for control: Don’t get me wrong on this one. I don’t need to control others. I think you could ask any of my current co-founders and they would tell you that I don’t need to control, I just need results. What I do need control over however is my own life. Every morning I wake up that I am ploughing my own path I am happy and ready to take on the day. The moment I sense I have lost that control I am anxious and ineffective.

A desire to make a lasting difference: There are few things I can do to make a difference, but I feel strongly that providing awesome opportunities for other people to fulfill their own dreams can make a huge difference. I want nothing more than for those who come to work in my startups to see it as a place they can achieve their dreams. Watching people buy homes, raise families and pursue their own passions is probably the most rewarding result of all the work you pour in to your startup.

Watching people grow: The first feeling of failure when a startup is going sideways is always the sense that you are letting these people down. Startups are demanding and gruelling for everyone. It’s inspiring when these early employees suffer through long hours and low wages with you, but it is the never ending belief that you can make their lives truly better in the end that drives you to keep pushing and often asking for more when you know they have little to give.

When a startup is going well you get to give people new opportunities and the great thing about people is that they seem to thrive in new situations. Hard problem? Tough decision? If you’ve hired the right people then you never think twice about letting them dive in to the thick of it.

Working with the best: Simply put: I never have to work with anyone other than those who I think are the smartest, most honest, diligent and incredible people I could meet. Every single one of them amazes me in some way every day and I am a better person because of the example they set.

Constant learning: There are brilliant people everywhere in the startup world. I think they are more varied, interesting and available than any other community I have been a part of. I love it. I leave every coffee meeting, late night drinks and impromptu meetup feeling like I have learned something new. I love that feeling and I love being a part of a community that provides it.

Never knowing what’s next: I have no idea what my future holds. I really don’t. I know I am married to a woman I love dearly and who loves me back. I know I have a family I love and can rely on. Those are just about my only constants. Some people call it “instability”, but the founders I know thrive on it. You aren’t going in to the darkness, you are hurtling towards some future you have dreamt up on your own and which you will achieve for yourself, no matter what. Whatever that might be.

 

We can’t all be founders, but what drives YOU to break out and become one?