Year: 2011

Red flags

Some rights reserved by Bob AuBuchon

This is an unfortunate story that entrepreneurs should read and understand.

We start companies for a number of different reasons. We want to change the world. We want to solve problems. We are unemployable. We are crazy. And we stay up at night worrying about taking care of our employees, our customers, our investors.

So it is hard to understand how well regarded funds wind down companies without providing information to employees.

Investor immorality: The strange case of Blue Noodle

Start-ups fail all the time. But there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. This is an example of the wrong way.

On Monday, most employees of social media startup Blue Noodle didn’t get paid. They called their lead venture capital firm, which wouldn’t discuss the situation with them. They called their former CEO, who refused to pick up the phone. They called their lender, who said to call the venture capital firm. And thus the circle began anew.

“In my more than 20 years of working in Silicon Valley, I’ve been involved on more failed companies than I’d like to admit, but there is always an orderly win-down process,” says John Montgomery, chairman of law firm Montgomery & Hansen. “It sounds like the VCs in this case are treating the company like a car they abandon in a parking lot with the keys in the ignition.”

Read on…

August 18, 2011
The Story of Quack.com and How It Changed the Canadian Startup Ecosystem

A few weeks past I posted about the hockey stick growth of exit in Canadian startups. Well, let me give some interesting colour to some of the cause of that growth.

Quack.com is a company that most of you probably know very little about, despite its relative fame in the hey-day of the dot com boom. Back in the day when I was a student at Waterloo, I remembered Quack.com coming on compass and having some great recruitment events at the local pub, The Bomber. That was the last I heard of them. Little did I know that Quack.com would eventually help permanently alter the Canadian eco-system.

Quack.com was a Silicon Valley based company. They built a really cool IVR service, cutting edge stuff in 1998 when they were founded. Steven Woods was co-founder, CTO and Chief Product Officer at Quack.com. Dan Servos later joined quack as its SVP Alliances and Sales. In the year 2000, they sold to AOL for a hefty $200mm price tag. Big exit, even by that era’s standard.

A few years later Steven Woods & Dan Servos were at it again. Classic serial entrepreneurs – Steven started another company, NeoEdge which Dan joined. Not quite as big a success as Quack.com, but not every venture leads to a $200mm sale of your company.

Fast forward to 2008. Dragged from the startup world kicking and screaming, Google steals Steven Woods and hires him as site manager and engineering lead for Google Waterloo. You have to understand how big this is. Steven Woods is a 2x entrepreneur with a big, big exit under his belt, also serving as an advisor & investor to several startups. He is a big deal in Silicon Valley, let alone in Waterloo where he should be recognized as an entrepreneurial god. Only the duo at 295 Philip St hold more entrepreneurial street cred than him in Waterloo. Not only is his startup background a big deal, but he has a fricking phd in computer science. An immense example of reverse brain drain if I’ve seen one. Which is ironic, since Quack.com/Steven Woods was famously ripped as being a big cause of Canadian brain drain when they hired 50 Waterloo grads in 10 months before selling to AOL.

Check out what started to happen shortly after he came to Google Waterloo:

1. Google acquires Toronto-based company BumpTop for $30m.

2. Steven Wood’s old colleague, Dan Servos, ends up as CEO of Social Deck.

3. Shortly thereafter, Toronto-based Social Deck gets acquired by Google.

4. Toronto-based Zetawire gets acquired by Google.

5. Toronto-based Pushlife gets acquired by Google for $25mm.

6. Waterloo-based Postrank gets acquired by Google.

(and now Dan Servos lands as COO of Locationary. Hmmmmm…)

Steven Woods & Dan Servos have been machines, invigorating the Canadian startup ecosystem with new possibilities. Via his role at Google, Steven Woods has provided a real source of opportunity for entrepreneurs in Canada to do something with their company other than “move to the Valley”. 6 exits probably at near $100m in total money in under 2 years. Dan Servos has provided huge leadership to Canadian startups like Social Deck, Locationary, etc. This should be massive motivation to entrepreneurs. If you have success, find ways to be like Steven Woods and Dan Servos and help the ecosystem continue to grow. Don’t be like this.

August 18, 2011
Aaarggh – VC Funds Are Drying Up?

Yesterday and today I’ve been trying to make sense of two different data points that came out on the Canadian business scene.

One data point confirms that we are having a banner year across Canada. Check out the numbers:

* Q2 private equity deals worth C$5.7 bln in Q2
* Total deal value more than in all of 2010
* Deal volumes up 40 percent over Q2 2010

(Side nostalgic note, I love that Berkshire bought Husky, it was actually my first co-op job and I have always had huge respect for Robert Schad – a giant amongst Canadian entrepreneurs)

As you know from several of my posts on exits, this and this, the startup high tech scene are big contributors here.

So, this means that we are returning capital on investments made into companies in Canada, right? Which means, since there is a healthy market for exits, folks should be willing to supply funds to VCs to start companies…. right?

Well, according to CVCA, it looks like VC fundraising fell flat on its face.

Smith said slow fundraising by venture capital funds was undermining deal-making, with new commitments sliding to C$132 million in the quarter, from C$308 million last year.

“VC investment, which has historically been the catalyst for knowledge-based economic growth, cannot effectively do this job until we take determined steps to ensure more stability,” Smith said.

Falling fundraising is part of a continuing trend.

In 2010, new commitments fell 24 percent from the previous year to their lowest level in 16 years. They fell further in the first three months of 2011 against the first quarter last year.

WTF!?!?! Did VCs forget to cut cheques to their LPs? Are the companies getting bought out not VC funded? Something feels out of whack here. Are there simply not enough fund-makers ala Radian6 to make a reliable return on investment? We are doing some digging to get to the bottom of this. It does resonate that entrepreneurs should focus less on VCs for funding and need to be looking towards angels & incu-ellerators for their early stage funding needs.

UPDATE: This article from the Globe really outlines how VC funds have been in long decline.

Year VC invested/Companies Financed
1998 $1,511,000/807
1999 $2,617,000/810
2000 $5,876,000/1,007
2001 $3,747,000/720
2002 $2,583,000/663
2003 $1,613,000/615
2004 $1,677,000/545
2005 $1,699,000/558
2006 $1,701,000/406
2007 $2,051,000/402
2008 $1,406,000/388
2009 $1,039,000/337
2010 $1,129,000/357

These numbers tell something interesting – apparently in Canada its gotten more expensive to start companies??? In 1998 $1.5mm resulted in 807 companies getting financed, while in 2008 $1.4mm results in 388 companies getting invested. What gives?

August 17, 2011
Show me the money
Some rights reserved by Bruce McKay~YSP

I love when entrepreneurs tell me that raising capital in Canada is hard (it is). I love it even more when they tell me that they think “they should move to Silicon Valley” because raising money will be easier (it isn’t). It helps me determine which entrepreneurs are too egotistical, too delusional, too uninformed to really be effective raising money.

There is a venture capital scene in Canada. It’s different than the scene in Silicon Valley or New York City. But there are people making investments in entrepreneurs. According to the CVCA in 2010, there was $484MM invested in IT in Canada (2010 Q4 VC Data Deck from CVCA [PDF]) with $271MM going to software & internet companies. There are issues like US Funds making larger investments than Canadian funds (looks like $2.5MM vs $1.1MM average deal size) or that US companies raise more ($8.2MM vs $3.6MM). But these are just the nature of the game. There are structural issues. It could be better. But to say it is nonexistent, that’s just wrong or lazy. And both are bad qualities in early stage entrepreneurs.

I was asked by an entrepreneur about who where the funders in Canada. Here is my short list of companies that are writing cheques or are in the process of doing diligence on companies, i.e., prepared to write a cheque. There are a lot of companies like OMERS that are stage agnostic, but I’ve put them in the growth side given their deal history (in the case of OMERS it’s $1.5MM in WaveAccounting).

So if you think it’s easier raising money in NYC, Boston or California. My advice is get your ass on a plane and try. Because it isn’t as easy as you might think.

But don’t say that there is no Canadian VCs or venture capital money. Because that just makes you look like a moron.

Suck it up, it’s hard raising money. Maybe you should talk to the Canadian investors and figure out why they don’t want to write you a cheque!

Seed ($25k – $500k)
Growth ($500k – $5MM)
Expansion
- Tandem Expansion Fund
Who else is actively placing money with Canadian startups? No grant money, we’ll do that in a separate post, but who else is actively doing convertible debt or equity placements? How to define active? Either >3 deals in diligence or has deployed more than $50,000 ($25,000/placement * 2 placements). That seems fair.

Who did I miss?

Some rights reserved by tao_zhyn
August 11, 2011
More GrowConf tickets via ShinyAds & Nokia

Need a ticket for the Grow Conference?

The generous sponsors of the Grow Conference are continuing to offer a few free tickets to some starving startups over the next week. We call this Conference Ticket – Ramen Class.

Today’s tickets comes from ShinyAds.com and Nokia. These are two very different companies. One is the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world, the other is a small startup trying to get companies on to their ad serving platform. They see the benefits for startups to attend Grow.

To win these passes tweet the following today:

RT to enter! “Hey @nokia – Please send me to the @growconf #growconf in Vancouver http://www.startupnorth.ca/ .

Tuesday August 9th, Grow Conference organizers will pick the winners who will get a pass for Days 2 and 3 at the 2011 Grow Conference. *Note that travel and accommodations are not included, pay for your own flights and hotels and drinks you cheap and resourceful founders.

The Grow Conference is a unique three-day conference that brings together the top minds in business, entrepreneurship, technology, and capital to inspire and engage the next generation of disruptive entrepreneurs. It doesn’t matter if your business is on or offline, the next-gen entrepreneur knows where their customers are and how to engage them. Today’s entrepreneurs are creating new opportunities, disrupting age-old markets, leveraging technology on their path to being tomorrow’s leaders. The Grow Conference is bringing the best minds of Silicon Valley and Canada together to share lessons learned and inspire action. Be part of this entrepreneurial revolution as we work together to drive innovation for the future. GROW is more than a conference, it’s a movement.

Follow #growconf on Twitter @growconf

August 9, 2011
On becoming Silicon Valley North…
Some rights reserved by Loozrboy

I am a bit of a shrinking violet. And I hate expressing my opinion about things. Like most Canadians I’d rather apologies for things and be polite. But I hate when I get asked by journalists, policy makers and others about how do we make Toronto (or Waterloo, or Ottawa, or where ever), the next Silicon Valley. This is just such an asinine view of how macroeconomics works and the historical development of the ecosystem in Silicon Valley.

We should not try to be the next Silicon Valley or New York City or Shenzen or anything. We are Toronto. We are Montreal. We are Vancouver. We are Waterloo. We are something different. We should reject the label because it makes us look like fools. But we should learn from Silicon Valley as entrepreneurs and policy makers to create an environment that helps stimulate a similar environment.

This is an old conversation. Joey and I have talked about it in the past:
- Harnessing Hogtown’s Hominids for High-Tech Hijinks and Hubs
- Ideas to Steal from Silicon Valley & Seattle
- How to be Silicon Valley: Joey de Villa’s take on Paul Graham’s article, How to be Silicon Valley.
- On “How to be Silicon Valley”, Part 1: Comments on How to be Silicon Valley
- On “How to be Silicon Valley”, Part 2: Even more comments on How to be Silicon Valley.
- On “How to be Silicon Valley”, Part 3: In which Toronto high tech finds common ground with Toronto fashion.
- Silicon Valley Fight Club (or “How to be Silicon Valley, Part 4?): A private fight club made up of developers and engineers in Silicon Valley, and what it says about life there.
- On Becoming Silicon Valley, Part 5: Toronto developer David Janes’ take on How to Become Silicon Valley.
- On Becoming Silicon Valley, Part 6: My comments on Guy Kawasaki’s article, How to Kick Silicon Valley’s Butt.
Debunking the Myth of “The Next Silicon Valley”

Let’s start by removing the first myth that Toronto, and you can substitute in anywhere, can be the next Silicon Valley. Toronto does not exist in a valley. Sure there are valleys, like the Don River Valley in Toronto but the concentration of technology startups in this location is fairly low due in part to the conservation and provincial protections.

Silicon Valley was quoted in 1971 to describe the number of emerging semiconductor companies and the surrounding computing companies that were concentrated in the Santa Clara Valley between San Francisco and San Jose, California. As far as I’m aware there are a few companies in the GTA working in silicon like AMD. Ottawa might have been able to make a claim in the 1990s for the Silicon Valley North with companies like Nortel Networks, JDS Uniphase, Tundra Semiconductor, Newbridge Networks and others. But for Toronto, just not going to happen. Waterloo might also have a claim with Pixstream, Rapid Mind, MKS, Arise Technologies, Research in Motion, and others working in semiconductors, wireless, hardware and software.

Silicon Valley might at best be a concept for the concentration of new economic wealth creation. It is hard to argue about the amount of wealth created in the Silicon Valley region. It has been called “The Greatest Creation of Wealth in the History of the Planet”. The number of companies and the rise of modern venture capital has created a circuitous loop, a self-fulfilling prophecy, of companies and entrepreneurs that can generate more wealth. It has created the Traitorous Eight, the PayPal Mafia, Xooglers, the Facebook Mafia, the Netscape mafia that created Opsware & Andressen/Horowitz, etc. There are lots of reasons that regions should want to emulate the economic development that is present in Silicon Valley.

But the desire to emulate a region, does not mean that we should expropriate a label like “Silicon Valley” when in fact it has very little to do with the people, the environment, the economy that we are trying to build. I’m sure if we personified “Silicon Valley” it would be flattered, but we should be trying to be something different. We are something else.

Zombie Economies

No City has a Lock on Innovation by Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) refers to a great article by Chris Dixon (@cdixon):

“The entire world is now a rival to Silicon Valley. No country, state, region, nor city has a lock on innovation in technology anymore.

The Internet has made this so, and there’s no going back. We will see Apples and Facebooks get built in China, India, Brazil, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and plenty of other places.”

We are competing globally. Don’t believe me, look at the firefight that our most recent billion dollar Canadian technology company is in for customers, brand, and it’s own survival. We need to build global companies. There are a great number of advantages to living in Canada, but we seem to be lead to by organizations that are interested in fighting for government dollars to build innovation clusters rather than creating new entrepreneurs and new wealth. Instead we’re happy to build a zombie-economy of companies around programs like SR&ED that are often used and abused by consultants and companies to sustain companies when there are no markets, no profits, no brains, no future. All things considered, free money is free money and as an entrepreneur in Canada I would/do apply for SR&ED credits and encourage others not to leave this on the table. But from a policy perspective, it drives me crazy! I hear about academics that run mediocre companies with <$2MM in revenue but sustain because of SR&ED. They’d rather raise 50 cents of government tax credits than “pivot” and get to “product-market fit” because that would require getting customers and actually understanding that we’re in this to build successful, sustainable companies.

SR&ED and credits from other programs (OMDC, New Media Funds, etc.) are economic realities of our ecosystem. It is capital that is available to entrepreneurs. It is potentially non-dilutive capital that can be leveraged for growth and operational efficiencies. It should be embraced and explored, but it should be understood in the context that every dollar of customer revenue is infinitely more valuable than any tax credit or government grant. We are in business. The role of a startup is to find a scaleable business model, you might not find it the first time and the freedom/flexibility that programs like SR&ED offer you is the ability to get it wrong, to pivot and to try again. These programs are not a life support system for a bunch of non-businesses (or the people that can’t find a scaleable business model).

The Next Silicon Valley

Who knows where it will be? Fred Wilson assumes that “we will see Apples and Facebooks get built in China, India, Brazil, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and plenty of other places”. This is great news for Canada and Toronto. Toronto is a diverse immigration hub:
- Between 2001 and 2006, Canada received 1,109,980 international immigrants. The City of Toronto welcomed about one quarter of all immigrants (267,855) to Canada during this period of about 55,000 annually.
- Half of Toronto’s population (1,237,720) was born outside of Canada, up from 48 per cent in 1996.
Much of what we think of as innovation, is really just the creative tension between differing viewpoints. Toronto is diverse. We are home to many different cultures, peoples, ideas and ideologies. We have the basis to be a gateway to the rest of the world as we transition out of the American Century into something new. We are an excellent breeding ground for the mashup of culture’s, people, and ideas. The next Silicon Valley might not be in Canada, but we could become the bridge between cultures.

What can you do?

“Fortune favors the connected entrepreneur.” @jcal7 #trueuniversity via @hnshah

There have been some changes to the Canadian startup scene in the past few years that are critical to continuing to help Canadian entrepreneurs:
1. Stop referring to any part of Canada as Silicon Valley North.
2. Set your expectations high! Don’t aim to be the Facebook for Canada. Why? Because the Facebook for Canada is Facebook! You need to be trying to build global companies, and you might validate it locally first. You want to play in the sandbox with the big kids, you need to act like you can play with the big kids.
3. Stop thinking it will be easier if you move to the Valley. If you really feel that your only solution or course of action is to move to the Valley, then go, and show me that you can make it there. Otherwise it is just hot air, and a regurgitation of some rhetoric you read on TechCrunch or VentureBeat. If you can make it Silicon Valley or Hollywood, you should go try and stop telling me that it is easier to make it there than here.
4. Start talking about all of the other great companies in Canada. We can all be coopetition. Help your friends. Make frenemies. The more people talking about activities, startups and people in Canada the better. There are a tonne of great startups and we all need to be ambassadors for the community as a whole. End your pitch deck with: 5 most recent fundings of Canadian companies and 5 other startups in Canada any potential investor might be interested in.
5. Support legislation that makes it easier for entrepreneurs to immigrate to Canada. Support Startup Visa Canada. This can’t and won’t hurt any of your chances of making it. To be protectionary or isolationist is silly. Embrace one of the things that makes Canada great.
August 8, 2011
Can’t make it to GrowConf? Try TechTalksTO

We’re big fans of all of the technical community efforts going on across the country. I have the privilege of going to Vancouver next week for GrowConf, but we want to return the favor to local entrepreneurs and students in the GTA. We have 5 tickets for TechTalksTO.

The effort to encourage participation by local students was led by the team at Uken Games.

Uken is planning on sponsoring tickets for 3-4 students to attend http://underground.techtalksto.com/. We’ll also be sponsoring the event in general. I was wondering if we could promote this giveaway through an article on StartUpNorth. We haven’t figured out the criteria for selection but we’re thinking either a short paragraph of why we should choose you and a short code puzzle.

I have purchased my ticket for the event, but I am unable to attend. We will give away one ticket per day starting today until all 5 tickets are gone. Someone else can figure out when that is.

How to win a ticket TechTalksTO?

To win these passes tweet the following until Thursday:

RT to enter! “Hey @startupnorth @ukengames – Please send me to the @techtalksTO Underground ($INSERT_LINK_TO_YOUR_BLOG/COMPANY).”

This is a great local event. For developers by developers. Must attend, like the venerable events like FutureRuby and RubyFringe. It is great to see Toronto Ruby Brigade, TechTalksTO, TechnologicTO, AndroidTO, HTML5 Web App Developers and others engaging and supporting the community.

August 8, 2011
Need a ticket for the Grow Conference?

The sponsors of the Grow Conference are offering a chance to win one of a few tickets to some starving startups. Each day a new sponsor will give away tickets, the best way to stay on top of the latest opportunity is to follow #growconf on Twitter @growconf.

The first ticket is sponsored by Pagemill Partners, a premier investment bank located Silicon Valley, with with as many as 1/3 of their transactions in a given year occurring on a cross-border basis.

To win these passes tweet the following today:

RT to enter! “Hey #pagemillpartners – Please send me to the @growconf #growconf in Vancouver (LINK TO YOUR BLOG/COMPANY).

At the end of each day, the Grow Conference organizers will pick the winners who will get a pass for Days 2 & 3 at the 2011 Grow Conference. You’ll need to arrange and pay for your own travel and accommodations.

August 6, 2011
Lowered Expectations
I keep wondering about some entrepreneurs living in a bubble.

Not the usual doom and gloom startup bubble or a Incubator Accelerator Bubble but a reality distorting bubble that causes them to completely forget about why people (VCs, angels, banks, others) make investments in early stage companies. They seem to read TechCrunch and think that raising capital is easy. Investors are tripping over each other to make angel and seed investments in any Tom, Dick, or Harriet that can use Keynote and string together enough words to make buzzword bingo. And, of course, with nothing more than a PowerPoint presentation and hired developer these entrepreneurs figure that they should get a $4MM pre-money valuation and be able to raise $500-$1MM, just like any of the companies coming out of YC or Techstars.

I get emails with quotes like:

“I am tour de force, the type of person people want to invest in. Driven, smart, visionary, able to build a tech team and an excellent communicator.”

All I can say is, you need to wake up and smell the sweat. It’s time for me to be the harbinger of brutal honesty. The wrecker of unfettered dreams. The resetter of expectations.
1. Ideas require execution.
2. Your track record may not allow you to raise any capital without demonstrating traction.
Ideas are a Multiplier of Execution

“Same exact idea. Better execution. Big winner.” Fred Wilson.

The section is borrowed from Derek Sivers post. Ideas are part of it, but it’s execution that differentiates. It’s execution that is the massive multiplier. Stop thinking that ideas alone will differentiate. You need to demonstrate your ability to execute on the idea as a scalable business.

Execution = Demonstrate Traction

Before raising money, entrepreneurs must read The Capital Raising Ladder. This article is more than 2 years old but the key principles have not changed. Make a good guess which rung you are at? Do not pass go, do not collect $1MM on a pre of $4MM. You need to figure out where on the proverbial Ladder you fall and then figure out how to demonstrate traction. Just because you observe high tech startups and you think you can do better, this isn’t a reason that anyone should give you capital. You actually need to DO better. Go do the smallest thing to get the most bang for the buck. Call it lean. Call it customer development. Call it something. It doesn’t matter. You need to go do it.

What is traction?

It depends (go read Getting Traction). It can be revenue growth. But since many startups are too early for revenue, or are working on Dave McClure’s Startup Metrics for Pirates gives examples of consumer web applications metrics that can be measure to show growth and serve as a proxy for future revenue. Not building a consumer facing web application? Look at David Skok’s SaaS Metrics or Designing Startup Metrics to drive Successful Behaviour. It is your job to figure out how to demonstrate traction. These are starting points.

It might be as simple as demonstrating that you’re able to hire/build a team of committed developers. If you can’t convince a developer to work for sweaty equity, then you might have a hard time convincing others you are the right person to invest. If your expertise is unique and critical to the success of the venture but you can’t design the product and you can’t write code. And you can’t convince a technical cofounder or others that they should be able to work for sweat equity on the idea. Hmmm, it doesn’t lead me to think that you can convince a sophisticated (probably even an unsophisticated) investor that they should invest in you.

Start kicking butts and taking names

The goal is not to stop entrepreneurs from trying. The goal is to reset expectations about fundraising and to build world-class market changing companies. You want a $4MM pre-money valuation, go earn it! Get users! Get customers! Get big numbers on $0. What are big numbers? In true wishy washy manner, it depends. But I’ll tell you a for a startup aimed at cracking mobile for neighbourhoods in Toronto, the number of users better not be in the 100s. I’ll be impressed if the numbers are in the 10,000s, knocked over in the 100,000s and blown away in the millions. Are these number high? Are they outrageous? Maybe. But if you want a spectacular valuation, go prove to me that you deserve it.

Want to get $150,000 from Yuri Milner? Maybe you should figure out how apply to YCombinator. If you think it is so easy, prove me wrong and go do it. Maybe I’ll start a StartupNorth Fund, that all it does is bet against entrepreneurs. If you loose the bet you owe me a token amount of money, $100-500. If you win we’d invest in the next round at the negotiated price (we don’t actually have a fund to do this, but I’d be willing to stake $10-25k for matching).

Stop trying to get people to lower their expectations. Set you goals high. Figure out ways to hustle and be relentlessly resourceful, and make the metrics happen. I know we can build world-class companies (it was a busy funding week last week for Canadian startups). But we need to stop the charade that funding is flippant, easy, etc. Raising money is hard. Building a great company is hard. But it’s worth the effort. Let’s go show the world that we can build bigger, better, badder startups.
August 3, 2011
Attachments.me Launches Grouping Feature

I met the attachments.me team a while back while they were still up here in Toronto, sharing office space with David Crow (@davidcrow). Unfortunately for all of us, two of Canada’s better tech guys (@jesse_miller,@ryancoe) are now down in the Valley doing their thing.

Attachments are a weird forgotten domain in the tech world. One of the worst user experiences in your life is “hey can you find that document that is attached to that email”. Even in gmail its painful – you try to remember the date, the name, the subject, etc. And attachments.me help solved that problem in a big way by making the attachments themselves searchable. Admittedly I liked attachments.me as a product, but I found it a bit novel. I needed it every once in a while, but not every day, so I sort of forgot about it and went back to my painful way of finding attachments. So I wasn’t super sure where they’d go with the product – would they just integrate with more stuff than gmail? Would they add more context to attachments they sort, etc?

Well, I never really foresaw where they were going next. I just finished using their groups feature, and I think its an awesome replacement for sharepoint and/or google docs! We all have experienced the archaic pain of file servers and sharepoint. Everything is painful about this world. Organizing documents, getting people to put documents into the system and finding them. Its all bad, bad, bad. Its even more unsolved in the family/small office space where user’s don’t have really have any solution (google docs is the closest, but then you have to use google docs and lots of folks still like MS Office). Well, attachments.me has solved this problem with a very easy to use grouping & sharing feature (see the video below for an example).

I actually just finished setting this up to create a group for sharing all the resumes I receive with my colleagues. It was a brilliant solution to the pain of constantly finding and forwarding resumes.

Here’s the attachments.me announcement:

We’ve just released a new feature that we think you’re really going to enjoy. In our continued quest to make email better, we’ve now taken a look at collaboration, and completely reinvented it.

So much collaboration happens in email, and often it’s all around attachments. Your family shares pictures of a trip. Your real estate agent and lawyer send around documents so you can buy that house. Your friends share the latest ridiculous funny dog videos.

Our new Groups feature looks to improve all of that collaboration.

Take a look at our introduction video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDod4vEmzXg

Then login and give it a shot!

As always, we’d love to hear what you think. Feel free to reply to this email and let us know what you love, what you hate, and what you’d like to see next.

August 3, 2011