The Next 10 Years…

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.

How to prepare for a C100 Mentoring session

We gearing up for the next 48 Hrs in the Valley here at C100 global HQ. We’ve learned a lot from previous 48 Hrs events so expect a few surprises, to be announced soon.

But in the meantime, a few dates for you to be aware of:

Sept 29: Drop dead deadline for companies to complete the application form
Oct 7: Selected companies will be notified
Oct 13: First draft of mentor deck due
Oct 27-28: 48 Hrs in the Valley

I know what you’re saying, “What the heck is this Oct 13 deadline? We gotta hand in drafts of our presentations??”

Short answer: “Yes!”

The upcoming 48 Hrs will be the C100’s eighth mentoring event and after each one the mentors always told us the same thing, “We wish the companies were more prepared.”

That is a strange coincidence, because the companies always tell us, “Damn, I wish we were more prepared.”

Well, the good thing about the C100 mentoring team is you only have to tell us something seven times before we start to take immediate action.

To make sure everyone feels they are properly prepared, we are asking… nay, demanding… that all companies complete their mentor decks and submit to us by Oct 8 for feedback by our crack team of mentor experts.

To help you out, here are some useful tips on how to prepare you 48 Hrs mentor deck:

Think of the biggest challenge facing your company and talk about it. What exactly do you want to get mentoring on? (In C100, we call this the “challenge statement” meaning, what is the biggest challenge facing your company right now)
Don’t get bogged down in technology: Mentors want to talk about business issues, not about speeds-and-feeds
Don’t talk history: Mentors want to discuss the here and now, the long road you took to reach your current destination probably isn’t relevant
Be specific: generic presentations get generic feedback. Drill down into one aspect of your business, describe what is going on, and ask for specific advice and feedback

Here is a deck template all companies should follow. Your deck shouldn’t be more than nine slides long:

1) Executive Summary: Short bullet points what your company does and what is your “challenge statement”

2) The Market: Give mentors background on the market your company addresses

3) What do you do?: How do you address your chosen market

4) Who are your competitors?

5) Short background on the team (emphasis on short)

6) Financial snapshot including funding, revenues and expenses

7) Challenge statement: This is the most important slide of the deck… what issue do you want mentoring on? Be very clear and specific here

8) Context: How did this challenge come about? How have you addressed similar challenges in the past

9) Importance: Why is addressing this challenge important? What would happen if this challenge was addressed? What would happen if it wasn’t?

Trust us, follow this template and your mentoring session will be way more valuable than if you didn’t.

The goal is always to make the mentoring sessions as useful and impactful as possible. So we at C100 will be asking the companies early and often to provide drafts of their decks so we can help ensure they are prepared for the mentoring session and ready to go.

Going global from day one

Arguably, two of the most important centers of innovation outside of Silicon Valley are in India and Israel. The reasons of why this is are numerous and could form basis of someone’s PhD thesis but for the purpose of brevity I’ll only highlight one: global from day one.

You talk to entrepreneurs from either India or Israel and they’ll surely weave great yarns about their companies (these are also two great storytelling cultures) but one thread that will be consistent is when the entrepreneur founded their company, they were immediately thinking of the global marketplace.

In Israel, it is because the domestic market is too small and there are limited opportunities to sell regionally. The story in India is that while population is huge, it is very poor so the actual local market for technology or technology services.

Faced with these challenges, Indian and Israeli companies would market to the US and Europe and often place key personnel in those geographies. Overseas became their across the street.

In the past year, Canada has been thrust upon the global stage several times. Whether it is praise for our banking system, our brave forces, our Gold-medaled athletes, or our ability to throw a party, Canada as a country has been seen as a global leader.

Will our entrepreneurs follow suit? Sometimes it seems that cross-cultural expansion from a Canadian perspective is an Alberta company selling into Quebec.

Unfortunately, as often as you hear of grand global ambitions from Israeli, Indian (and American!) entrepreneurs, you hear of relatively modest ambitions from Canadian ones.

All too often global expansion = US expansion. That is not the right formula.

Here’s a fact that is sometimes a bit uncomfortable, many American companies consider Canada as part of their domestic market. The effort and planning these companies put into Canada is the same one they put into Wyoming. (OK, maybe I’m overstating the point)

But here’s a suggestion, we should return the favor. Canadian companies shouldn’t think of the US as a “global” market but rather just an extension of the domestic one. When Canadian companies say global, they should mean it and have Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa dead in their sights. These regions all have burgeoning and tech-savvy populations and are eager to get online.

So whether we’re talking about consumer, enterprise, SMB or SP services or products, let’s see Canadian entrepreneurs putting the “world” into their WorldWideWeb plans. Canada’s got the world stage for the moment. Entrepreneurs, make your entrance.