Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in December 15, 2011 on MarkEvansTech.com.

 Some rights reserved by Eric Constantineau – www.ericconstantineau.com

In the post I wrote earlier this week about the demise of Thoora, there was a comment suggesting that “Toronto failed Thoora” due to a lack of community support to make it a “winning formula”.

It was a puzzling comment because it suggests a community has an obligation to support a startup so it can thrive. This strikes me as an absurd idea because startups should succeed or fail on their own merits, and the ability to attract an audience near and close.

Sure, it’s good to drink the local flavour of “Kool-Aid” but only if a startup is offering a product or service that meets a need or interest. There are lots of local startups, including some that pitch me directly, that don’t resonate because nothing something interests me or the product/service doesn’t resonate enough to warrant further exploration.

It doesn’t mean I’m not supporting the local community; it just means a startup has a service that didn’t pass the sniff test.

At the same time, I do think Toronto’s startup community is extremely supportive. There’s no lack of enthusiasm, energy and a willingness to share ideas, feedback, resources, real estate and time to provide startups with a boost.

This has been a fact of life for the past five years, even before we started to see a flurry of startups appear on the scene. There has always been a strong, support community that has pulled together in different ways. A great example is tonight’s HoHoTo party, which has become a major fund-raising machine due to tremendous support from the community.

The bottom line is if a startup needs to rely on the community to make it, it also suggests what it’s offering can’t survive  without artificial support.

For startups, the market has to be bigger than its own backyard. It needs people to support it or not based on what’s being sold as opposed to a sense of duty or obligation.

Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in December 15, 2011 on MarkEvansTech.com.

 Some rights reserved by Pedro Vezini

“We are ALL in sales” – Dale Carnegie

I used to think that quota was a dirty word. It struck me as restricting freedom and potentially forced the exploitation of trusted customers and prospects to drive the bottom line results. But I was wrong. In reality, a quota is a number that is useful to incent certain behaviours. The trick is to incent the appropriate behaviours. It is a contract between a sales person and an organization about how to compensate behaviours based on outcomes.

“Quota is a direct path to clarity and accountability.” – Shawn Yeager

So many entrepreneurs can benefit from contracts with defined outcomes. I was chatting with a startup last week about the numbers he agreed to with his VC to unlock the next tranche of funding. He mentioned that he wasn’t going to meet the numbers, but he still expected the VC to unlock the funding. My advice to him was very straight forward, it was to figure out how to achieve the agreed to numbers, or immediately open a conversation with the VC about missing the numbers due to changing market conditions and see if the tranche can be renegotiated. In the case of this entrepreneur, the numbers were in the funding contract, and I fully expected the VC to hold the entrepreneur to deliver on these numbers. The numbers and metrics exist to help assess the risk and the ability of an entrepreneur to deliver.

The secret with an early stage company is to set appropriate metrics, quotas and growth numbers that incent the correct behaviours out of entrepreneurs. The good news is that there are a lot of examples of SaaS, B2B and consumer metrics that can be used.

• David Skok’s Designing Startup Metrics to Drive Successful Behaviour
• Dave McClure’s AARRR: Startup Metrics for Pirates
• Mark MacLeod’s SaaS Math – The Series
• Fred Wilson’s 30/10/10

There are a lot of different sources of metrics and numbers. Each of the numbers needs to be considered in corporate revenue goals, past historical performance, current product development stage, market share, budget, etc. The targets and growth numbers need to be established.

I’ve taken to requiring all of the startups I mentor, to establish 3 metrics that we discuss in our mentorship meetings. Each of the metrics must be clear enough for me to understand, for example:

• Number of paying customers
• Number of registered users
• Churn rate
• Number of pageviews or unique visitors

And each metric should have the current measurement, the predicted growth rate and the actual target number. I try to start each conversation around the metrics. And any issues related to the market conditions, learnings, corrections, etc. Then together we set the targets as part of the planning for the next meeting. This may include a redefinition of the metrics. The trick for me as a mentor is to try to help identify what metrics I think are most useful for the startup and founder to focus on next.

What are the metrics other entrepreneurs track? How do you set your targets and quotas?

What are the metrics and growth rates that investors like ExtremeVP, Real Ventures, iNovia Capital, GrowthWorks, Rho and others want to see from prospective early-stage companies?

 Some rights reserved by splorp

Back in May, Nat Friedman wrote about the tools used in setting up Xamarin. They include a great set of basic tools for getting a startup off the ground with very little investment. We have seen a lot of startups using a similar set of tools and I thought that we’d compile a list of the tools that we’re actively using (and some of the others we evaluated). There are the tools and blogs listed by Steve Blank that include many

Landing Pages

We’re big fans of WordPress at StartupNorth. We’ve powered StartupNorth on WP since the beginning. The combination of WordPress, Premise, and the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin is a pretty powerful combination for creating mutliple sites and landing pages to test your landing pages. But we’ve also developed a sweet spot for Vancouver’s Unbounce, it took us less than 5 minutes to have 2 landing pages and a domain set up. We’re big believers that you can use Adwords and Facebook Ads to quickly create a landing page to test ideas before writing a single line of code.

• Premise
• Unbounce
• LaunchRock
• LaunchEffect

Analytics

We primarily use Google Analytics and WordPress Stats for StartupNorth. We’ve been working with startups and using a KISSmetrics and Mixpanel to measure activity on their web properties and applications. Make sure you read Ash Maurya’s 3 Rules to Actionable Metrics to understand how the analytics can be used in combination with split testing and/or cohort analysis to better track your optimization before product/market fit (What do you measure before product/market fit? – check out Ash’s conversion funnel and metrics).

• Google Analytics
• KISSmetrics
• Mixpanel
• GinzaMetrics
• ChartBeat
• RJMetrics

Mailing Lists

We haven’t been as proactive in building a mailing list for the StartupNorth community as we probably should have been. I’ve used have started using MailChimp because of the quick integration to GravityForms and WooFoo, but have had very positive experiences using both Campaign Monitor and Constant Contact.

• MailChimp
• Campaign Monitor
• Constant Contact
• MadMimi

Billing and Accounting

What is amazing is that both of these companies are local to Toronto. We use WaveAccounting integrated with our bank account and PayPal for tracking expenses, billing, and financial operations. And we use Freshbooks to bill for sponsorships. They are a must have in our back office. What we’re missing is a really easy to use and integrated payroll system (I hear that it might be coming).

• WaveAccounting
• FreshBooks

Human Resources

For full disclosure, I’m an advisor to TribeHR. It doesn’t change the fact that they rock. It is the easiest way to get an HR system in place. And there is no better way to get feedback and help employees improve than Rypple.

• TribeHR
• Rypple

Surveys and Feedback

We are actively using Survey.IO to gather feedback from users about the state of StartupNorth. It helps us figure out the state of our product market-fit, if there is such a thing for a blog about Canadian startups, fill it out and help us be better.

• SurveyMonkey
• Survey.io

Project Tracking

We use Pivotal Tracker. We like them so much, we actively recruited them as a sponsor for StartupNorth. There are lots of other tools from project tools to issue tracking. Curious at what others are using.

• Pivotal Tracker
• Jira
• Webcollaboration
• Asana
• Basecamp

Source Control

We use Github Bronze for our project hosting. Most of the code we work on is PHP against MySQL (see WordPress), though we have additional apps in development like the StartupNorth Index (which will be moving to startupnorth.ca/index shortly) but all are LAMP.

• Github
• Beanstalk
• BitBucket

Hosting

Full disclosure: VMFarms is a sponsor of StartupNorth. However, their hosted VMs that are backed up and hot mirrored coupled with the outrageous “white glove” makes them a dead simple choice. We also use Rackspace Startups and EC2 for access to easy Linux and Windows VMs for development and testing environments.

• VMFarms
• Rackspace Startups
• Amazon EC2
• Joyent
• Heroku
• Google App Engine

Customer Relationship Management

We don’t have any strong recommendations. There are platforms like Salesforce that are fantastic and sales teams are used to. There is Highrise which is broadly supported with a lot of 3rd party tools. But so far, neither of these has been the clear winner for us. There is a great Quora question about “What is the best CRM for startups” that lists SFDC, SugarCRM and Highrise. There are a lot of choices for CRM including Nimble, Insightly, Woosabi, Capsule, Solve360,AppPlane, Batchbook, PipelineDeals, TactileCRM, ZohoCRM and many others.

• Highrise
• Salesforce

Conferencing, Screen Sharing & Telecommunications

I’ve been using Calliflower for conference calling. It’s $5/call for up-to 5 callers, or for $30/month unlimited minutes and >70 participants, it’s a great solution. It is not a replacement for a office phone system.

Google Voice and Skype have been the least expensive way as a Canadian startup to get a US phone number. This is great for me as an individual. However, this does not scale to an enterprise or an organization. I’ve been looking at Grasshopper, RingCentral and Toktumi, but I have yet to settle on a solution.

• Skype
• Google Voice
• GoInstant
• Calliflower

SEO & SEM Tools

This part of the list is pretty much cribbed from Steve Blank’s list of tools for entrepreneurs. Go read it for a more comprehensive list of tools beyond the SEO/SEM listing included below.

• Google Keywords Tool
• SEOBook Tools – Free SEO tools
• AdGrok – Google adwords optimization tool
• SEO Digger – Find the top ten keywords ranking to your websites
• SEMRush – SEO and campaign management tool
• Clickable – Pay per click management
• Spyfu – tells you how much adwords cost
• Market Samurai – SEO Keyword Analysis Tool

What are we missing?

I’m going to cover in the next post: discounted travel, conferences, business cards, design services, and other tricks for being relentless resourceful as a founder.

There are a lot of online tools that startups are using to make or break their business. And there is a lot missing, monitoring like NewRelic, PagerDuty, Pingdom and Blame Stella for example. But I’m curious what are the indispensable tools being used at iStopOver.com, HighScoreHouse, CommunityLend, Idee/Tineye, Massive Damage, Empire Avenue, Indochino, Lymbix, Hootsuite, AdParlor, Locationary, Chango and others. What are you using? What gives you the edge in quickly and effectively gathering feedback to test your hypotheses?

 Some rights reserved by pasukaru76

I am continually amazed at the horror stories I hear from entrepreneurs about finding mentors. About mentors taking large pieces of the company and not providing any value in return. It was great to see David Cohen’s The Mentor Manifesto this morning. It is great to see David take the time from his 11 cohorts at TechStars and try to explain “What does it mean to be a great mentor?”. This is an extension of his tips for entrepreneurs that includes how to Find and Engage Great Mentors as part of his top twelve startup tips.

The Mentor Manifesto

• Be socratic.
• Expect nothing in return (you’ll be delighted with what you do get back).
• Be authentic / practice what you preach.
• Be direct. Tell the truth, however hard.
• Listen too.
• The best mentor relationships eventually become two-way.
• Be responsive.
• Adopt at least one company every single year. Experience counts.
• Clearly separate opinion from fact.
• Hold information in confidence.
• Clearly commit to mentor or do not. Either is fine.
• Know what you don’t know. Say I don’t know when you don’t know. “I don’t know” is preferable to bravado.
• Guide, don’t control. Teams must make their own decisions. Guide but never tell them what to do. Understand that it’s their company, not yours.
• Accept and communicate with other mentors that get involved.
• Be optimistic.
• Provide specific actionable advice, don’t be vague.
• Be challenging/robust but never destructive.
• Have empathy. Remember that startups are hard.

I hope that I can live up to the manifesto for the companies I mentor at UW VeloCity, FounderFuel and those I’ve been working with in Toronto and Waterloo.

Last night, my 1 and half year old didn’t fall asleep sleep until 11pm (normal bed time = 7:30pm) and then woke up at 2am and screamed till 5am. He is cutting his eye teeth. On top of that I have worked 16 hour days almost the entire week, I am on heavy coding deadline(s) and working constantly with guys in Indonesia & China all night long. It sucks, I’m super sleep deprived. But. I will make it all happen and still be there for my family.

You see, there is this weird meme in the startup world that says “families” + “startups” don’t work. Dave McClure doesn’t help with his family life mocking “Don’t do a startup, you will fail”.

I, in fact, also got an up-close look at this “anti-family-ism” recently at a young startup office where the mid-20s founders insinuated that “you can’t have kids and a startup”. It drove me nuts (to the point that I felt obliged to write this article).

First off there is a whole range of great entrepreneurs locally here who have successfully done both. David Crow (@davidcrow), Tara Hunt (@missrogue), Shyam Sheth (@shyamsheth), Michael Garrity (@mgarrity), myself (@dpmorel) and many others manage this struggle. It is definitely difficult but it is do-able. I’m sure lots of them have good tips (like… work after your kids go to bed… also when single folks are out at the bar).

In fact, this week I am here in New York at the Peek office. We split our offices with another startup, who have several young single founders. My new theory is this – YOU SHOULD NOT BE SINGLE AND FOUNDING A COMPANY.

Why?

• Startup founders are not sexy. They constantly look tired (and are constantly tired). Most entrepreneurs who have been in business for a few years have this disheveled, haggard look to them and wear the same clothes near every day (men and women alike). I have not had my hair cut in about 3 months and my sideburns may be a living creature. I am staring at a female founder in the office who has the classic entrepreneur red, weary eyes with giant bags under them.
• Your mind will flick over to some business problem on a dime, which makes you a boring date, and you’ll have a hard time keeping relationships going.
• You likely won’t have much time for other hobbies, so nobody will really be interested in you in the first place. “oh you work 18 hour days, yeah, very exciting”
• Entrepreneurs are basically living Zombies. They have no emotions. You keep hitting them with stuff and they won’t stay down or react. They just get up mindlessly and keep going forward with arms out. They also maybe eat brainz.
• When you have sex, you’ll probably get interrupted constantly by emergencies and “important people”
• You can’t get drunk – you don’t sleep enough for your body to handle it properly, you don’t have time to drink that much, and you probably have an important meeting first thing in the morning. And we all know how hard it is to find a new mate without the social lubricant of drinking.

I could go on. But generally new relationships take so much time… you have to keep this veneer of your “perfect self” and do things for the other person all the time and spend time with them on weeknights. No, no, no… its an impossible work-life balance.

Startup relationships + startup jobs = NO.

It feels like its a lot easier to do a startup with a long standing relationship and understanding partner who will support you emotionally and mentally. Having kids adds to this – all your problems melt away and disappear as you chase your kids around or play some silly game, a wonderful reprieve from the constant stresses and to-dos of your under-resourced, over-leveraged business.

How about the rest of you? How do you find balancing your startup gig + your current life stage? Other family folks – I’d love to hear how you balance your busy family + busy job in the comments?

 Some rights reserved by SteveGarfield

About 5 years ago I was asked to teach a 4th year undergrad software engineering course at the University of Toronto. The course had been previously cancelled due to low enrollment; in an era dubbed the “Software Gold Rush” a cancelled course indicated something was wrong…

Software engineering is difficult to teach
Students are expected to learn how to avoid mistakes they never made. A great divide results from the instructor talking about concepts suitable for a mature organization when students are all about working their ass off and getting things done the night before. We borrowed several lessons from startups, having been personally involved with two startups over a dozen years. The way startups work are much closer to students ways of doing things. Since launch, course enrolment has tripled and two Y Combinator applications have been submitted based on class projects. Here is what we have learned so far:

1. Use a startup software process
Students are all about getting things done the night before; similar to how startups work. Teaching a heavyweight process feels foreign because students haven’t made the mistakes to understand reasons for the overhead!

2. Change the project every year
There is nothing more of a turnoff than a make-work project with antiquated technology. Instructors that use the same project over and over are sleepwalking. A new project each year puts the instructor and students on equal footing, solving problems together. Make the class goal to have someone apply to Y Combinator. Discuss the non-technical issues of software such has how people are going to use the product, how are you going to sell it, what is the competition like, what is the business plan. One big class project brings issues into the classroom better resembling the real world. This also allows non-trivial projects to be developed and students to test-out roles (e.g. project management) that would not otherwise exist.

3. Allow controlled crashes
Let the students make mistakes. For example, let them avoid source control. A student who looses code because of clobbered checkins will be a lesson learned for the entire class. However, when crashes occur, it is the instructor’s responsibility to manage and fix it. After the mistakes have been made, teach them about process. Keep things light and give them references for their future travels. During lectures on process, tie them into the mistakes that were made. Make process real.

4. Demo early and often
Create a culture where the principal deliverable is working software rather than documentation. Use early demos to correct mistakes and give guidance rather than having them worry about their grades.

5. Instructors should code
The instructor-student relationship changes dramatically if the instructor contributes code. Everyone becomes a peer instantly. This improve communication and follows the startup philosophy that even managers should write code.

Next steps
The course has been well received by the students at UofT. I have much more regular contract with students from this class than the other courses I have taught at UofT and UofW. I am interested in hearing from anyone who is interested in providing continuity to the students; a partner that would provide input on the project at the beginning, stay involved with it during the course, and offer a path forward for interested students ready to commit to a startup.

Snow Angel by Syymza

Today, the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) released statistics regarding Canadian Angel group investment activity in the Investment Activity by Canadian Angel Groups: 2010 Report.

This study looked at the ‘visible’ portion of the Angel investor community – those that are members of Angel groups – as it is almost impossible to survey the entire Angel community. Different countries estimate the visible Angel community represents between 3% (US) and 12% (United Kingdom). Understanding this,  the findings presented below represent only a fraction of the actual Angel investment across Canada. They do, however, provide us with the most accurate snapshot of the activity in the community that we have today.

Significant findings of this report include:

• 90% of companies funded by Angel groups in 2010 were new, not follow-on.
• Angel groups collectively received around 1,850 business plans. 14% were considered in detail, 32% received investment.
• Angels groups invested CAN$35.3 million in 88 deals; an underestimate as some groups did not report the amount invested.
• Co-investors were involved in 58% of investments and invested at least a further CAN$29.4 million.
• Angels invested in a wide range of industries but with a strong technology focus: ICT sector (43%), Life Sciences (18%), and Clean Tech (16%).
• 74% of funded businesses had revenue in 2010.

Download a copy of the full report here: http://www.angelinvestor.ca/2010_Investment_Activity_Report.asp

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in January 3, 2010 on RocketWatcher.com.

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Some products and services don’t have a pre-launch phase.  For companies where building a minimum viable product isn’t a months-long effort, it makes sense to just launch a beta and then start talking about it.  For other companies however, the product might take a bit longer to develop and talking about it before it’s been released in some form could be pointless (because you don’t have a call to action yet), risky (competitors position against you or customers get confused because there aren’t enough details) or both.

One of the techniques that I’ve used in the past is to engage with the market by talking about the business problem that your product or service is going to solve, without getting into exactly how you plan on solving it.  At IBM we sometimes referred to this as “market preparation”.

For larger companies this often entails spending a lot of time (and money) with industry analysts and industry leaders sharing your company’s unique point of view on the market and why it is currently being under-served.  If you do this properly you’ll come to a point where your point of view starts to align well with that of the influential folks you’ve been working with.  By the time you launch, these folks will be standing behind you saying that your view of the market is one customers should consider.

Pre-launch startups generally don’t have the time, clout or cash to change the way Gartner Group thinks about a market but that shouldn’t stop you from taking your message out directly to the market you care about.  There’s never been a better time for startups to get the message out.  Here are some considerations:

1. Create a clear message about your market point of view – you will need to create a set of messages that clearly illustrate what the unmet need is the in market and why that need has not been met by existing players.  You can go so far as to talk about the characteristics of the needed solution (without getting into the gorey details of exactly how you plan to solve it).
2. Develop case studies that illustrate the pain you will be solving – Gather a set of real examples of customers you have worked with that have the problem and clearly illustrate the need for a new type of solution on the market.
3. Spread the word – Launch a blog, write guest posts for other blogs, comment on relevant blog posts,  write articles, write an e-book, speak at conferences and events, open a Twitter account and start sharing information that illustrates your point of view.  There’s no end of ways to get your message out there.  Do your homework and find out where your market hangs out.  What forums do they participate in?  What blogs and newsletters do they read?  Get your message in front of them in the places where they already are.
4. Engage and gather feedback – Starting a dialog with your potential customers about how you see the market gives you a chance to test your messages and see what resonates and what doesn’t.  You’ve made a set of assumptions (backed up by customer research hopefully), the more folks in the market you can talk to the more you can fine-tune your market story.
5. Capture where you can – If it makes sense you can start capturing a list of potential beta customers or a mailing list that you can use when you launch.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in January 3, 2010 on RocketWatcher.com.

Nothing like the last minute planning around here. Ian Jeffrey (LinkedIn, @ianmtl) from FounderFuel is planning on being in Toronto today (June 27, 2011) and tomorrow (June 28, 2011). He is planning on meeting with startups and founders to share his experiences launching FounderFuel, the mentorship and incubation/acceleration plan for participating startups and to talk about tech startups generally. If you are interested in talking with one of the emerging technology company incubators/accelerators you should come and talk to Ian and learn about what is being offered in Montreal. There is a lot of choice in the marketplace for entrepreneurs, and the best way to see the differences are to connect with the people behind the scenes like Ian and the FounderFuel team. This is a great way to evaluate the program, get introduced to the people, and connect.

FounderFuel Jam Session

Date:

June 28, 2011

Time:

7 PM EDT – Presentation & Overview
8 PM EDT – Startup 1-on-1s and discussion

Location:

Camaraderie Coworking, 102 Adelaide Street East, Toronto, ON, Canada [map]

Register to attend:

• Count me in on Plancast
• Register Now »

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From the looks of Alexa Clark’s (@alexaclark) photo exposition at Camaraderie, it is a great space to host a startup. I know that Matt (@mattskilly) and Aron (@defrex) at Hipsell have their startup offices there. It is a great space for startups requiring a great work space, a central location, and the benefits of an enabled coworking culture.

Some rights reserved by LexnGer

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and investor Howard Lindzon of StockTwits andSocialLeverage. He was born and raised in Toronto and has a soft spot for his hometown and Canadian entrepreneurs.  You can find this post on Howard’s blog and to stay up to date you can follow him on Twitter @howardlindzon or StockTwits @howardlindzon.

Nobody knows!

Nobody knows what the next 10 minutes will be like, let alone the next 10 years.

It used to be no one cared what the next 10 minutes were going to be like. Twitter has changed that for good at this point.

What we can do is look back for patterns and try to project them into the future or as we do in the stock market all day, spot patterns that are upon us or emerging.

It’s a fantastic business to be in.

William Quigley has a really good post up hypothesizing on the next 10 years in web, tech and VC land. Here is some meat:

Let’s also keep in mind that public companies are generally a lot less risky than private ones. Less work and lower risk. That is how it used to be for public shareholders, but that era has ended for good. Let me give you some perspective on how much things have changed since the last tech cycle.

Amazon.com, the world’s largest Internet retailer, went public at a $440 million valuation. Hard to believe, isn’t it? A company worth $90 billion today was worth just over $400 million when it went public in 1997. That skimpy valuation represented less than one times its forward 12 months of revenues, a multiple more closely associated with a corrugated cardboard manufacturer than the most important innovator in retailing in the past 100 years.

eBay went public at a $650 million valuation, representing less than three times its forward revenues. Amazingly, this valuation was considered adequate even though at the time of its IPO, eBay had already established itself as the pre-eminent auction site on the web. Go back to the earlier part of the 1990s, and it gets even more extreme. Cisco, the most important company in computer networking infrastructure, went public at $225 million, a valuation representing just over one time its annual revenues.

William is talking my book so I totally agree but I always have one foot out the door. I have been called to task often over my years managing money for being too risk averse.

I consider myself ‘liquidity averse‘. I don’t mind paying up for the highest momentum public companies for the liquidity they provide and I won’t pay up for start-ups for the liquidity denied. I assume liquidity is a miracle and need to maximize my upside for that risk. STARTUPS ARE HARD! No matter what happens the next 10 years, you need to read this post and remember the miracle of effort needed to make a start-up succeed.

Not many people I have run across in my 13 years of managing money deploy my strategy or thinking and that emboldens me. I believe the two ends of the investing spectrum are very connected and I am fascinated by the ‘tells’ I see by watching the all-time high list and Angel List.

While I am not sure of the next 10 minutes, let alone the next 10 years, I am confident in my work that thousands of web entrepreneurs will take notice and follow my strategy in the years ahead.