Month: December 2009

  • What is being a startup really about?

    Being a startup is definitely a badge of honour these days. It always has been, but it seems to have taken on some whole new meaning. I think part of the reason is that starting a startup is now a more accessible dream than ever. You know the deal: cheap development costs, smarter money, more supportive communities.

    There is a tipping point however. A point of no return where your romanticization of what a startup is goes form constructive to destructive.

    So I am here to say that I have been staying up late, leaving the porch light on.

    First, I have some ideas about what being a startup is not about

    The first thing to remember is that everything you have been told about what startups should or shouldn’t do is all bullshit. Every industry, geography, product, and approach is unique and those are the primary determining factors in how you do business. Depending on the resources and opportunities available to you, you may have to do things completely differently than a startup located somewhere else. The people telling you that it is done “this way” or that way obviously haven’t done it before.

    And then there is the fact that most of the people you are listening to are more successful at getting attention than they are at actually running a business. They are hyper networkers and quite influential, but they are not role models. Being a startup is not about being a personality. It helps, but it isn’t the endgame.

    Don’t forget that partying != networking. It’s ok to go out and have a good time, but please do not tell yourself that it is business, no matter who you are rubbing shoulders with. That goes for conferences and the idea that being involved in “the community” is important to your business. Being in the community is important to you, but being in front of your customers is what is important to your startup. Learn to balance this.

    So, what is being a startup about? I can give you some ideas.

    Creating. More than anything, a startup has to be about creating something new. This is the primary part of the definition that separates Startups from Service Providers. Founders and early employees need to be willing to get their hands dirty in the clay in order to shape something unique.

    Seeing. There is no science to being a startup, so your best bet is to get your paintbrush and play the artist. Anyone who takes a scientific approach to creating a startup may get lucky, but they won’t be able to handle the certain uncertainties of startup life. Being a startup is about designing a future for your product, company, culture and market that you will be able to realize, but the mechanics of which you are able to create as you go.

    Discipline. This is an easy one to forget. Every flaw you have will be magnified under the lens of money, people and uncertainty. Stay focused.

    Ignorance. There is always a reason why what you are doing won’t work. You need to learn to ignore the opinions and objections that don’t matter. Your job is to prove them wrong. Some advice just isn’t worth taking.

  • Student Technopreneurship in Alberta

    What is technopreneurship? I’m guessing that it’s technology entrepreneurship. The Government of Alberta Advanced Education and Technology has a program for “young entrepreneurs” (crap, I guess by the Alberta definition I’m now old). The program is a business plan competition run by post secondary education institutions and non-profit community groups. It’s a pretty cool deal to support the existing institutions.

    The program essentially provides $20,000 to winners ($10,000 for high school students) plus “incubation services” and mentorship. I hope the “incubation services” and mentorship are provided without fees to the winners. Though with it looks like some of these services are financed through the Alberta Innovation Voucher Pilot Program, that offered vouchers of up to $10,000 or $50,000 to cover 75% of services by approved service providers. These programs are not directly related, but it does show a preference to a network of approved providers and funding redirection.

    There’s a lot of great things going on in Alberta. How can you fault an organization that links to DemoCamp (BarCampEdmonton) as part of their networking advise for entrepreneurs?  They are venture programs like AVAC Ltd. that are actively investing $79M in Alberta. You can see deals being done like Tynt Multimedia that included Montreal-based iNovia Capital on their latest $5M round, and Calgary-based CoolIT Systems. There is a lot of work with the Alberta Deal Generator, and the Banff Venture Forum that are driving interest and attention. And there are deep entrepreneur led grassroots efforts with STIRR in Calgary and DemoCamp in Edmonton.

  • KPMG Seminar: Thinking of Going Public?

    kpmgKPMG will be hosting a free seminar tomorrow morning on Going Public.

    Location: Westin Prince Hotel, 900 York Mills Road, North York, Ontario (Map)
    Time: 8:00am – 11:00am

    If your schedule is booked, but you are still interested in receiving a guide on Going Public, register online and a complimentary copy will be mailed to you.

    Gain valuable insights from a TSX representative and CFOs who have taken their companies public as they share their outlooks on current market conditions and their experience on the challenges and successes of the going public process. Together with KPMG professionals in audit, tax, and advisory, they will highlight critical matters to be addressed at each stage of the process.

    Commencing with a short presentation on listing with the TSX, followed by a panel discussion, this session will help you understand what going public means for your business and the key elements you need to consider, including:

    – current market situation,
    – how to know when your company is ready,
    – the main challenges you can expect in preparing to go public and how to address them,
    – critical steps in executing a successful IPO,
    – governance, accounting, and tax reporting considerations to be addressed at each stage of the process, and
    – what to expect after transition to life as a public company.

    This seminar is designed for active audience participation and will provide you the opportunity to ask the questions you want the answers to. Our objective is to help you make a well-informed decision and map out an effective strategy and path to taking your company public. All participants will receive a copy of KPMG’s guide on Going Public.

    Don’t you just love the fact that folks are even thinking about going public again? Oh sunny days!

  • Can't we all get along?

    As anybody involved with a start-up can attest, they are stressful. With constraints on resources and capital and pressures on time, there are many opportunities for disputes & disagreements to arise between the various stakeholders. Professional mediation, which has long been used in other areas such as family counseling and labour relations is becoming an increasingly more popular mechanism to be used for technology business related issues. I recently spoke with Michael Erdle, managing partner at Deeth Williams Wall and director at the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Institute of Ontario to learn more on the subject. Michael is a Chartered Arbitrator and Qualified Mediator who specializes in business and technology disputes. Again, standard disclaimers apply that this is purely meant as an informational discussion and not meant to imply specific legal advice.

    Craig: Thank you for taking the time to speak today. For technology start-ups, what types of disputes would a mediator get involved with?

    Mike: Disputes can be internal or external to the company. For example, founders of the company may disagree on the product strategy the company should pursue. Investors may get into a dispute with the company on whether a company should accept a buy-out offer or continue to let the company grow. The company may get into a disagreement with a supplier over project deliverables due to missed milestones or poor quality.

    Craig: So in these situations, what typically happens and how is professional mediation coming in to play?

    Mike: In any relationship, a small disagreement can easily escalate over time if the two parties stop communicating and lose trust in each other. Often when this happens each party turns to their respective lawyers and things escalate from there. Since start-ups are typically short of money, getting into a protracted legal dispute can be a company killer.

    Craig: We’ve seen many times in business where a larger entity uses its financial position to try crush a smaller entity through its ability to hire better and more numerous lawyers, incur the costs as the legal process works its way through courts, etc. Why would the larger entity be interested in entering mediation?

    Mike: If any party in a dispute is interested in winning at all costs, then there is not much that will compel them to mediate. But in most cases, cooler heads will prevail. At some point in the relationship between parties, both parties entered into an agreement because they felt it could provide benefit. If things have fallen off the rails, both parties should hopefully still see value in the original premise of the engagement and want to work to get things back on track. If things have gotten to the point where one side feels they must win at all costs (i.e. slighted investors feeling wronged and they want to cause the company to fold), if they are willing to spend time and money they can probably achieve this. However, in addition to the original promise of the investment being wiped out, this will have potentially larger implications in terms of reputation, future business relationships, etc.

    Craig: What should companies be doing to better protect themselves?

    Mike: In most disputes I get involved with, a small issue snowballs into a large issue. For example, one party is under the expectation to get something from the other party, this is not delivered to the expectation level of the first party, people do not communicate, and time goes by to the point where both parties lose trust, start to take positions, etc. Something as simple as having a board committee or steering committee structure in place to monitor important projects and ensure regular communication goes a long way to catching issues early and preventing them from escalating.

    Craig: When would a professional mediator be brought in?

    Mike: If a dispute has gotten to the point where the parties cannot find agreement themselves, a neutral third party facilitator or mediator can help find common ground. Building provisions for use of a mediator into contracts is a good practice as it allows either party to step back and suggest mediation as per the contract terms without feeling as if they have ‘backed-down’ by looking for a solution.

    Craig: What happens during mediation?

    Mike: Most mediation sessions are between a half day to a full day. Everything in the mediation is agreed to be confidential so cannot be used in any future legal proceedings. Each party prepares a brief on what they feel the issue is, what their position is, reasons for their position, and what they would like as an outcome. Both sides and the mediator start in the same room and review their briefs. This gives them the chance to express their positions face-to face. It also allows the mediator to develop a better understanding of the underlying issues and interests of each party. There are often big hidden elements beneath the surface. Generally the principles involved in the dispute do the talking and their respective lawyers take a back seat role just to provide legal advice for specific issues like interpretation of a contract.

    After this initial period parties often split into separate rooms and the mediator starts to go back and forth between the parties. This allows for confidential discussions between the mediator and each party over possible options to resolve the issues. The main job for the mediator is to identify the issues where there is deadlock, get parties to look at the problem differently, come up with alternative suggestions on how to approach a problem, and find common ground on which a solution can be achieved.

    Most mediations are resolved within the day with only more complex mediations or mediations where there are many parties involved requiring additional time. Sometimes, the parties need to line up other elements to make the proposed solution work. For example, if the settlement of a shareholder dispute is to have one party buy out the other, the buyer may need some time to arrange financing.

    The outcome of the mediation is a course of action that both sides can accept and more importantly a re-building of the trust between the parties to provide a firm foundation for future interactions.

    Craig: A related discipline is arbitration. Can you talk about this?

    Mike: A mediator or facilitator works interactively with both parties to find a common solution. An arbitration hearing is more like a court case where both parties present evidence, and call witnesses. Based on the evidence, the arbitrator will then pick one side as the winner. Arbitration is used where the situation is more defined in nature (i.e. in the interpretation of a clause in a contract). In this, both parties have a position and just want an impartial entity to provide a decision. By going through an arbitrator, the issue can be settled far quicker and cost effectively than if it went through the courts.

    Arbitration has been quite commonly used in a business context and many contracts have clauses in them calling for arbitration to be used when there is a disagreement. Mediation or facilitation is a newer discipline for use in business situations that gives parties a mechanism to work through more complicated differences in opinion. This is especially useful when it is important to re-build a broken relationship since both parties see the value in continuing the relationship forward.

    Craig: Its been great talking with you today Mike, thank you for taking the time. In my next post I’ll be talking about how to engineer better exits.

    craig at mapleleafangels.com

  • Week in Review

  • Live notes from DemoCamp24 w/ Gary Vaynerchuk

    gary

    DemoCamp24 in Toronto is sold out, for those following at home, some live notes:

    First up: Gary Vaynerchuk:

    Greatest takeaway: big game is patience, way too many ppl give up right before it’s about to happen. If you don’t have the passion, if you’re not bleeding out the eyeballs for it you won’t make it, if it’s about cash you won’t make it. Patience and passion the pp theory. If you talk to ppl in their 90s they never say I wish I made more cash. The people who wake up in the morning who are pissed are losing.

    What you can do is put down the wii, maybe not watch a lost marathon every weekend, you can start a company. That wasn’t true years ago. The fact that the internet, the most underrated thing in our society.

    Question: How do you find your passion? Really hard. People roll up to me and say Gary what’s my passion? What am I fucking Yoda? What I can say you can’t be afraid of having more than one passion. Don’t limit yourself just skiing or rockclimbing, by doing that you limit your audience. We are in the personal brand business now, there are no editors to control who you are.

    I never want to hear from people a 5 year plan? 5 years? 5 years ago there was no twitter, 5 years ago you needed a .edu to get into facebook. I react to what’s out there, I worry about what I can control.

    Stickiness is important. You could get a trillion hits and it wouldn’t matter two foundations: quality content and customer service. Zappos is massively underrated. Zappos was the only competitor Amazon really worried about. Because Zappos wasn’t competing on price with Amazon. People cared more about Zappos. How many of you out there personally email to thank anyone who posts a comment on your blog?

    First pizza, now on to the Demos:


    Jason Roks – founder of guigoog now called zero.in thanking the DemoCamp Community and announcing his Angel funding which he closed thanks to his demo at DemoCamp22. PROTIP: close Angel faster with convertible debentures and avoiding the challenge of valuing your company.


    GridCentric.ca – cluster computing demo. Virtual cluster. Normally when you scale out your cluster, you need to scale out the same machines, with virtual clusters you can add anything, you can even move the virtual machines while running from machine to machine. With GridCentric you can grow the scale the datacenter by instantly cloning running machines. Demo’s drawing a purple elephant on a paint app on one virtual machine, cloning that virtual machine and we see the same drawing app running on the new virtual machine. Idea: if you need a hundred machines you can scale them out to hundred virtual machines then throw them away when done. How does this compare to EC2? This is an EC2 on steroids for people who have their own clusters. Q: It is based on Zen hypervisor, modified with their control stack. Moneyquote: “I don’t want this to sound super nerdy.”


    DataTO. Helps the city of Toronto prioritize and release data. Have a site like a dell ideastorm with digg-like interface for people to submit and vote on requests for the city to open data. Now that the city has opened data, they really need help because they don’t have resources to open everything at once. The whole site was built in a week (wow) with developer time (@thody‘s) donated by his employer Architech Solutions. This is a great cause. Since the launch of this service many other cities Paris, London, Ottawa, Victoria have expressed interest. Intention is to open source the project, contact @remarkk if you want to contribute to the project.


    5BlocksOut solves the “lost in a big city problem”. It’s an online community where you ask questions or create missions like “where do you like going out for a drink?”. So far, looks like a gigpark crossed with digg for super local places and events. It also has a rather cute little hedgehog in the graphics. Other missions: I’m a hairy beast can you suggest a good esthetician? Indoor winter fun for little kidlets? site also let’s you drill down on hundreds of very local neighbourhoods, follow them and follow other “locals” twitter style. Request an invite, and metion DemoCamp to get a beta invite.


    Datamartist is (another) excel killer for desktop data analysis. Let’s you build db queries using a combination of visual drag and drop blocks and excel-like formula expressions. It’s a scratch pad for data, merge sets, cut paste columns from various source, with quick visualizations like distribution or ven diagrams of what data from one set that can join to another. Pretty neat, $750 a license, if you need this, we guess you probably know who you are. Moneyquote “we’re very oldschool (we’re a windows desktop app and,) it has business model: you buy it from us”. bonus points: for non-profits, it’s free.


    Equentia. is a news and, um, tag cloud aggregator of vertical news. Here’s an Eqentia portal for Canada Tech News.


    Cadmus is a neat idea. It answers the question: “what has been talked about on twitter, on rss etc. since the last time I was online”. What it will do is aggregate, crunch down and thread conversations for you. Algorithm works by looking at how important is the source and how important is the content. Moneyquote: “yes you can filter out foursquare updates from twitter”


    That’s all folks. Congrats and thanks to all the brave demoers. Time for beer.

    Follow DemoCamp24 on twitter: #dc24 or #democamp