StartupNorth

Category: Resources

  • FedDev steps up with $190MM for S. Ontario

    Photo by anitakhart http://www.flickr.com/photos/anitakhart/2737188217/in/photostream/
    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”?

  • 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.

  • The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development

    The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer DevelopmentI 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!

  • Can you pitch in 6 slides?

    Can you pitch your company in six slides? I can’t believe that Fred and Brad raised the first USV fund with only six (6) slides.

    “We learned to simplify our story and we learned how to create six killer slides. And killer slides are not slides with a dozen bullets each. They are six powerful points that combine to tell the meat of the story.

    So when you sit down and build your pitch deck, think of six slides that will inspire and leave something for the imagination. The best part of six slides is that you will get through them in time to have a real substantive conversation face to face about your business. Imagine that.” – Fred Wilson

    Constraints are a great thing. They help entrepreneurs filter and focus their presentations and messages. Getting your pitch down to six slides is going to be a challenge, and challenges are fun. I’m a big fan of the sequence of slides recommended by David Rose’s, chairman of the New York Angels, but even this sequence is 15 slides.

    1. Company Title Page
      Start with the name and logo of the company, the name and title of your presenter, a one-line description or tagline about the company, and the dollar amount of the round you are raising.
    2. Business Overview
      Boil down your elevator pitch to one sentence. Tell us what you sell or do in very concrete language. This sets the context for the rest of your presentation.
    3. Management Team
      Show us your talent and experience, with one line of background (two lines max!) on each member.
    4. Market
      What’s the environment in which you operate, how big are the segments, what are the pain points?
    5. Product
      How do you solve a customer’s pain? What exactly do you do? This can be illustrated with a clear product or screen shot, or a simple process diagram, but if we don’t know what you do, we won’t know why we should fund you. (But don’t spend too much time on this, since you’re pitching the company here, not the product.)
    6. Business Model
      Who pays whom, how much, for what and from where. What does this mean for annualized revenue streams?
    7. Customers
      Who are they, how many are there, how do you distribute to them, and how are they attracted and retained?
    8. Strategic Relationships
      If you have any, make sure we know about them.
    9. Competition
      Who and how threatening are they? What are the differentiation factors? Include both direct and indirect competitors. Remember that everyone has competition, even if it is just “the old way” of doing something.
    10. Barriers to Entry
      How will other potential competitors be kept at bay?
    11. Financial Overview
      Show us your top-line revenues and expenses, and EBITDA two years back and four years out.
    12. Use of Proceeds
      Where will our money take you?
    13. Capital & Valuation
      How much have you raised previously, who are your current investors, what are you looking for in this round, and how do you come to your suggested valuation?
    14. Review
      Provide a brief summary of what you said, in this same order, narrowed to the five or six most important points.
    15. Contact Info/Next Steps
      Lead us into the next step, such as a follow-up meeting for due diligence…and include your contact info!

    I can immediately reduce this to 7 slides, it’s not 6 but it’s close. The goal here is not to provide all of the information in these slides but to boil down the critical information to the salient points. I have been using Business Model Generation and the work of Alex Osterwalder to help build a better understanding of business model, value proposition, key partners and revenue streams. This combined with the slide sequence is a really effective way to model your business, customers, partners, costs and revenues.

    Business Model Canvas Poster V.1.0

  • Mentoring Virtually in Toronto

    C100 is hitting the road (virtually) and will be bringing the next C100 mentoring session to Toronto. We’re working with our partners Extreme Venture Partners and are looking for three companies to participate.

    Interested? Please apply via our application process.

    Finalists will be notified week of July 12.

  • C100 sees the SUN

    The C100 is now coming at you live and in 3D right here on Startup North.

    What does that mean for you? Well, as if Startup North wasn’t already an indispensible source of news, insights and opinions on the rapidly expanding  Canadian start-up and venture capital scene, you can now check this space for regular news and views on innovation from the unique perspective of the successful Canadian tech entrepreneurs, company execs and VCs in Silicon Valley who make up the C100.

    What is the C100 you ask? Remember in Pulp Fiction when Jules Winnfeld (Samuel L. Jackson) refers to Vinnie Vega (John Travolta) as “my man in Amsterdam?” Well, that’s us. We’re your man in Amsterdam.

    Except we’re a group of men and women… and we’re in Silicon Valley.

    But more importantly, C100 is a huge fan of both technology and of Canada and we’re here to share our thoughts, insights and contacts with the established and the up-and-coming, with the best dreamers, entrepreneurs and innovators Canada has to offer.

    So check us out online, visit our blog, get mentored, but most importantly stay tuned to StartUp North where we’ll be looking for new ways to increase the connections and communications between Silicon Valley and Canada.

  • Be the next Bumptop

    Too bad Bumptop wasn’t actually an ExtremeU company. However, the recent acquisition of Bumptop should help raise the profile of the 2010 Extreme University.

    If you’re a student, a founder or just thinking about starting something you should apply to Extreme University. This is a world-class program, from an up-and-coming venture capital firm in Canada. They have a track record of selling companies to big players (Bumptop to Google, J2Play to EA). The Extreme Ventures, XtremeLabs, and Extreme University programs are building into a fantastic training and breading ground for a new generation of mobile and Internet startups. It feels like something big is happening inside the walls of Extreme Ventures.

    Extreme University 2010

    Who?

    We are looking for four smart and fast moving teams to participate. Typically all members of the two-three person team will be deep technically, but at least one of the founders should have a technical background.

    What?

    • Get an initial $5000 + $5,000 (US) per founder in exchange for a 10% ownership stake in your company
    • Move your team to our shared ExtremeU office space at Yonge & King (downtown Toronto)
    • Have weekly mentoring sessions by industry experts in technology, funding, legal, PR, marketing and HR
    • Meet a who’s who of experts at our weekly socials and have an opportunity to practice your pitch and demo your in-progress prototype
    • Have access to local shared resources to accelerate product development (mentors, servers)

    When?

    Applications are due by June 4th, 2010. The program starts Monday June 14th, 2010 to Thursday September 10th, 2010 at the ExtremeU offices in Toronto at Yonge and King. The final demo day will be Tuesday September 16th, 2010 at DemoCamp

    How?

    It’s a great program located in downtown Toronto for early-stage entrepreneurs and founders. The Xtreme Labs has a great track record. If you’re interested, make sure you apply before the June 4, 2010 deadline.

    Alumni – The Class of 2009

    UkenUken Games
    Uken Games makes highly addictive games for social and mobile platforms.

    Uken Games was born in March of 2009 when two normal guys decided they wanted to have super powers. Given real world limitation, they turned to the virtual world to make their dreams a reality. They built Superheroes Alliance, their first game, which eventually grew to over 150,000 monthly active users. Since then, they’ve launched 2 other games: Villains and Twisted Treasure have amassed over 300,000 total users. Going forward, they are committed to building a strong community around each of their games, expanding across other both social (Facebook) and mobile (iPhone, Blackberry) platforms. Uken Games has received a follow on investment and are driving hard towards this goal.

    AssetizeAssetize
    Assetize is a Twitter ad network that enables publishers to monetize their social content. Publishers within the Assetize network range from large news and media organizations to individual users. The company has also partnered with a premiere sports agency to launch FanWaves – a Twitter monetization network exclusively for the sports world. The growing list of FanWaves publishers includes the NHL, NY Knicks, Phoenix Suns, Washington Capitals, as well as several professional athletes.

    Next, the company plans to extend their monetization solution to other social networks, as well as other links stemming from media websites and blogs. Given the nascency of this space and lack of history, one of the challenges Assetize has faced is partnering with advertisers willing to market through social channels – a difficulty that is expected to decrease as brands realize the immense potential of social networks. Following Extreme University, Assetize is generating revenue and has secured a seed round of financing. The company is also currently in the process of syndicating a larger round from local and US-based VCs.

    LocationaryLocationary
    Locationary is changing the way that data on local businesses and other places is collected and verified.

    This data is fundamental to the local search and local advertising markets which have revenues approaching $50 billion a year. Google and other local search engines currently buy the bulk of their local business data from aggregators that have employees copy the printed yellow page directories. The current process can’t scale and results in expensive, stale and outdated information typically 1 to 2 years old. Locationary has created a patent-pending, crowd-sourced solution to collect and verify this information across the globe.

    Locationary is growing quickly and now has users in over 70 countries. They’ve collected data on over 20 million places and are now updating over 100,000 places a day. In this business, the fresher the data, the more valuable it is; and that’s what makes them special. Locationary has raised a Series-A investment through the connections made at ExtremeU.

    Extreme Labs has a history of bringing great mentors and presenters to interact and engage with ExtremeU participants. In 2009, participants met some of the best lawyers, founders, VCs and others in Canada.

    Albert Lai Kontagent Startup Lifecycle
    Ali Asaria Well.ca How to get funding
    Colin Ground Cassels Brock & Blackwell Setting up a VC friendly structure
    Dan Debow Rypple Sales & Marketing
    Leila Boujnane Idee Business Development
    Mike McDerment Freshbooks Product Management
    Rick Segal JLA Why do a startup now?
    Rick Yazwinski Tucows Agile Development
    Sal Rocco Stonewood Group How to hire superstars

    The list of already confirmed speakers in 2010 is amazing:

  • C100 – 48 hours in the Valley

    The C100C100 - 48 hours in the Valley

    Our friends at the C100 have issued the reminder that the submission deadline is April 29, 2010 for their 48 hours In the Valley. Did you wonder what entrepreneurs thought about the last mentoring session? Check out the comments from both the entrepreneurs and a mentor below.

    The C100 has an impressive list of members. And continues to participate in events like the DFAIT Entrepreneur Bootcamps and through tele-mentoring sessions which ran most recently in Ottawa (I’m assuming with folks at OCRI).

    Maryam Mahdaviani & Jan Ulrich, Optemo

    Trevor Doerksen, Mobovio

    Sanjay Beri, Juniper Networks – C100 Mentor

  • On hired guns

    Dear Startups,

    Please do not hire PR firms or marketers to contact us (or anyone else for that matter). It gives us a sinking feeling that your priorities are totally out of whack if you are willing to pay someone to send a few emails. That stuff is for big companies. Most of them just use the same form that you can use, because they don’t know our email addresses either.

    Yours,

    The Management