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.

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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.

I am a huge F1 racing fan. And I was impressed to see a group of Ontario high school students participating in F1 in Schools at the Ontario Science Centre. It is an amazing concentrated effort to bring together partners and create an educational program for the succession of the people that keep Formula 1 teams building new innovations (that in turn inthrall an audience). The program is a multi-disciplinary challenge for students aged 9 to 19 years to design, build and race gas powered balsa wood F1 cars. What a great opportunity to build the next generation of engineers and designers that are interested in 3-D manufacturing, CAD/CAM, computational fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, engineering, etc. It provides a training ground to ensure that Formula 1 teams have an educated talent pool with practical experience and excitement.

It has started me wondering about the role we play in exciting the next generation of entrepreneurs. I remember reading that career choices are made by Grade 11 (source needed, I think it was in discussion around STEM careers and girls in IT from the Microsoft DigiGirlz program however I  am not able to find the reference). Much of the work and research seems focused on increasing the number of girls that choose Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

• DotDiva partnership from NCWIT, ACM, and NSF
• Microsoft’s DigiGirlz
• Anita Borg Institue

In the US there is the work of the Kauffman Foundation that supports entrepreneurship through education, training, policy development and other activities.

“The Kauffman Foundation is working to further understand the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, to advance entrepreneurship education and training efforts, to promote entrepreneurship-friendly policies, and to better facilitate the commercialization of new technologies by entrepreneurs and others, which have great promise for improving the economic welfare of our nation.”

I really like how the Kauffman Foundation has divided up their Entrepreneurship Track: Youth Entrepreneurship; Minority Entrepreneurship; Higher Education; Capital, Markets and Economics; Knowledge, Training and Networks and Global Entrepreneurship. This division allows for the creation of programs, grants and offerings that support different strategic needs of each group.

I am really impressed with the efforts of the team at Communitech. They are doing a great job building the programs, partnerships, and policy work that supports the efforts of Waterloo Region. They have identified the gap left by many of the University focused programs like UW Velocity and Impact, by building and supporting the activities to attract and engage students before they make their post secondary decision. Communitech delivers programs like:

• Zoom Career Days
• Apps Factory
• The Communitech Hub with Conestoga College, UWaterloo CBET + UW Velocity, Wilfred Laurier University MBA
• Science Superheros
• Entrepreneurship Week
• Canada 3.0

It is great to see that Waterloo Region really has an institution that is dedicated to supporting technology companies and startups. And is developing the necessary programs to interest kids in making STEM education and career choices. It shouldn’t be a surprise given that UWaterloo has a pioneered cooperative education program that revolutionizes the career experiences available to students.

There are other programs available that typically focus on post-secondary students We have programs like the:

• MaRS ENT101
• Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CBYF)
• Impact Entrepreneurship Group
• The Next 36
• ACE Canada/SIFE
• Ontario Science Centre

I wonder who outside of Communitech (and maybe BCIC on the west coast) working on programs that support the development of entrepreneurship careers. Are there good global examples of entrepreneurship education and engagement for middle school or high school kids? Where can find other examples of what is working?

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What programs can startups take advantage to find talent possibly with subsidies (yeah I can’t believe I’m saying that) to help develop the next generation of founders. The Government of Canada – Canada Business has a list of Grants, Contributions & Financial Assistance that is a great starting point for getting access.

• Canada Summer Jobs – Hire a student in the summer, this subsidy could cover up to 50% of their wages.
• Co-operative Development Initiative – Innovative Co-op Projects – Maybe we should apply for a StartupNorth sponsored program to place co-op students with startups.
• Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) - Youth Employment Program
• UofT - Professional Experience Year (PEY)

What would be beneficial to startups is an agency that actively matches students and funding programs with my current business needs and stage of corporate development. Rather than relying on me to change my focus from product development, customer development, sales and marketing to educational program participation. It would be great if there was an member-driven organization like Communitech that was focused on making these programs accessible to me.

I want to see programs like Maker Faire (check out the mini-Maker Faire on May 7-8, 2011), Ace Canada Student Entrepreneur Competition, Ivey Business Plan Competition, Moot Corporation, Extreme University, etc. The hard part is how to increase startup participation in the growth, development and refinement of the talent and ideology without distracting founders from their missions to build successful businesses.

Who, how and what should be done to continue to build a culture starting with middle school and high school students to help encourage entrepreneurship as a career path? What do other startups want to see? I’m interested in hearing from John MacRitchie (@jmacritchie), Anand Agarwala (@anandx), Scott Pelton (@spelton), Brian Sharwood (@bsharwood), Lauren Friese (@LaurenFriese), Danny Robinson (@dannyrobinson) and others.

When I heard about the CIX Technology Accelerator last week I asked the folks at CIX to write a guest post to tell us more about why they decided to partner with a SF based accelerator to put this package together. I’m not sure about the immigration visa issues around this arrangement, but I assume that is taken care of as well? — Jevon

The idea is simple. So many emerging Canadian tech companies – from the most early-stage start-ups to more developed players – have told us that they’re eager to develop stronger connections in Silicon Valley, but haven’t been able to find the right opportunity. Well, here it is: the Accelerator will put three qualified Canadian companies in the Plug and Play Tech Center (PnP) in the heart of the Valley for three months, rent paid, starting in June, 2011.

What makes this program truly unique is that PnP is more than just a fully serviced work space. Selected companies will be working alongside over 150 tech start-ups from more than 20 countries while meeting experienced mentors and advisors who can guide growth and development in the Valley and beyond. The program also offers introductions to local angel networks and VC firms and dedicated access to the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service. Finally, each company will receive a complimentary pass to CIX 2011, taking place next December in Toronto, bringing back the knowledge and experience gained in California and helping to further enrich Canadian connections in the Valley.

The program is open to any Canadian-based tech company working in Digital Media and Information and Communications Technology. Qualified companies are invited to fill out a brief profile on our website before March 11th, 2011. An expert CIX Selection Committee will review submissions, and the three selected companies will be announced in early April.

For more info and to enter, head to our website at www.canadianinnovationexchange.com.

If you are an entrepreneur in Toronto, you are probably familiar with the various coffee shops, co-working spaces and wi-fi zones available to you as pseudo-offices. You might even have a pattern of Foursquare check-ins that run like clockwork throughout the week.Steven Johnson refers to spaces like these (noting England’s transition from pubs to coffee houses) as environments where ideas can have sex. At Jet Cooper, we like that.

While it takes a serious commitment to invent and scale something the size of a CSI (Centre for Social Innovation), it isn’t all that hard to contribute something – even if it’s just a few desks – to the people who might be one good conversation away from a big idea. It’s for that reason that we’ve kept a handful of desks available in our office since day one. Even now, as we plan for our next office furniture re-arrangement, we try to keep in mind the people we haven’t met yet.

Thinking back on it, it has been a wonderful way of attracting a lot of bright people, which on it’s own is a great way to expose any team to a city’s creative pulse. And realistically, all it cost was a few extra desks and chairs.

There are no restrictions on who can drop in. You don’t need to be a client, or a partner, or even have a twitter handle. Just stop by and maybe let us know your coming so we can put a beer on your desk.

Consider this a ringing endorsement for this kind of simple contribution. If you have an office, open the door. The correlation between environments and innovation isn’t a secret and as per usual, more good is gooder.

The joys of starting a company and setting up the basics, you know things like finding a lawyer, getting articles of incorporation, shareholders agreement, business registration, employment agreements and setting up payroll for employees. It turns out that it has been since 2005 since I thought about the logistics of running payroll in Canada in any detail (BTW if some asks if you want to be in charge of running payroll, the answer is “<expletive /> NO”). The great news is that there is a solution for startups in Canada and it’s inexpensive. Well technically it’s free for companies with <5 employees and only $18/month for >6 employees.

The company is PaymentEvolution. It’s run by my friend Sam Vassa (@samvassa) and they were recently featured in the Financial Post. Despite the web presence that looks like it was last updated a decade ago, this is a new startup that is up and running and able to help Canadian small businesses with payroll.

Hallelujah, and it’s inexpensive

This is a great solution for startups. Basically the deal is there are no fees for the service, however, there are electronic banking fees are passed through to you as a user.

PaymentEvolution provides no cost payroll processing for smalls businesses with 5 or fewer employees. We’re serious – we don’t want payroll processing costs to encumber the growth of great small businesses. We’re small-business friendly and just want to provide a great service that allows these businesses to focus on what they do best. Like all our plans, we don’t charge extra for updates, the number of pay runs, or silly things like standard reports. We also give these firms the flexibility to pay their employees how they want – traditional cheques, direct deposit or even electronic funds transfer (fees may be incurred by the company’s financial institution).

This is just what startups need to process payroll and it’s cheap to boot.

Photo by anitakhart

The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario announced a new Investing in Business Innovation program. The program offers matching for early-stage venture funding. This is a $190MM running from 2010-2014.

There are provisions for startups and angel networks. Since we’re StartupNorth, let’s try to deal with the startup side first.

• Startups who receive a termsheet from a qualified angel investor (as defined by the Ontario Securities Commission) or venture capital firm (registered with the Canadian Venture Capital association) are eligible to apply for up $1MM in loan from the federal government.
• Restrictions:
  • Start-up businesses will be eligible for repayable contributions up to $1 million for no more than one third (33? percent) of total eligible and supported project costs.
  • An angel and/or venture capital investor(s) must be committed to provide at least two thirds (66? percent) of the cash contribution toward eligible and supported project costs.
  • In-kind contributions related to mentoring, networking, and other business skills cannot be considered as part of the angel or venture capital investor’s cash contribution.
  • A maximum of one project per eligible start-up SME can be funded under the initiative.
  • Direct eligible costs for start-up businesses may include:
    • Labour, capital and operating expenditures;
    • Materials and supplies;
    • Consulting and/or professional fees (limited to market rate); and,
    • Minor and non-capital acquisitions (e.g., software).
  • All project activities must be completed by March 31, 2014;

Basically there is federal government matching loans up to $1MM for startups that are raising angel or venture funding in Southern Ontario. This is a fantastic start.

It’s great for startups in Southern Ontario, it’s curious that the program is only available in Southern Ontario. Why not all of Canada? How are the repayment terms set? Is this a zero percent interest loan from the Federal Government? Does the term sheet have to be equity investment? Is convertible debt eligible? How do startups “demonstrate they are using business mentoring, counseling, or related services”?

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.

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.

I was reading Eric Reis’ Lessons Learned blog yesterday and he talked about The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development. I begrudgingly read Steve Blank‘s Four Steps to the Epiphany, which is a must read for any entrepreneur (begrudgingly read because it is not the easiest reading). It is a great book, but it’s tough reading.

“And Steve is the first to admit that it’s a “turgid” read, without a great deal of narrative flow. It’s part workbook, part war story compendium, part theoretical treatise, and part manifesto. It’s trying to do way too many things at once. On the plus side, that means it’s a great deal. On the minus side, that has made it a wee bit hard to understand.” Eric Reis

I bought a copy yesterday based on Eric’s recommendation. It is a phenomenal resource for learning Customer Development. Patrick and Brant have done a great job writing an understanable how-to guide for using Customer Development and Agile Development in a Lean Startup. The book includes a shout out to our friends Dan Martell at Flowtown and Sean Ellis at 12in6.  

The book incorporates the wisdom and experience of real world practitioners of Customer Development in the 5 years since the inital publication of The Four Steps. For the first time a lot of entrepreneurs will hopefully begin to understand a technology adoption lifecycle and the marketing of products/services. I wrote a chapter in Cost-Justifying Usability back in 2005 where I had first encountered Steve’s Customer Development Methodology from his course notes in 2004 at Stanford (yeah, I know that’s crazy). In the chapter, titled “Valuing Usability for Startups”, I argued that getting out talking to customers and testing your hypotheses were key to success. However, I proposed using the Bell/Mason Diagnostic for evaluating the stage of corporate development in order to calculate Return-on-Investment of usability. In hindsight, I probably should have instructed entrepreneurs and usability professionals to look at processes like Customer Development to search for a “repeatable and scalable business model”.

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development is a short mandatory introduction to using customer and agile development to search for a  repeatable and scalable business model.

Discount for StartupNorth Readers

A few quick emails to Patrick today, and he offered to provide StartupNorth readers a 25% discount on any version of the book. First ten StartupNorth readers to go to CustDev.com can use the discount code.

Discount code: STARTUPNORTH (limited to the first 10 users)

Good luck!