StartupNorth

Year: 2012

  • Microsoft, WPC and Entrepreneurs in Toronto

    Microsoft <3 Entrepreneurs - WPC Party

    Did you know that 15,000 global players in the Microsoft ecosystem are descending on Toronto in July? Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) is happening July 8-12, 2012 at the ACC and the MTCC. That’s a lot of people building on the stack. The BizSpark One program was one that I championed during my time at the Microsoft, and there are a lot of Canadian companies that are building on the Microsoft stack:

    Mark Relph (LinkedIn, @mrelph) and the Redmond and Silicon Valley crews will be in Toronto. Mark used to be my boss at Microsoft Canada, and has subsequently caught the startup bug. He’s helping startups through BizSpark and BizSpark One programs. Along with the folks from a far, Christian Beauclair (LinkedIn, @cbeauclair) and Shane Davies (LinkedIn) will also be around to support Canadian startups.

    And whether you love or hate the Microsoft stack, they are trying to move to greater independence to enable developers. Microsoft is looking for ways to help startups, BizSpark, Azure and other programs like Kinect Accelerator make it easier to understand why.

    Why not join WPC attendees and other startups on July 10 at MaRS?

     

  • Why I’m a Founder

    Dave says we can’t all be founders.

    He’s probably right. At some point though, I decided that I wanted to be a founder. Lately I’ve been thinking about why it has been so important to me over the last 10+ years to keep at it, even when it didn’t make a lot of sense.

    A lot of different things have driven me to be a founder, I’ll try to be as honest about them as I can.

    A need for control: Don’t get me wrong on this one. I don’t need to control others. I think you could ask any of my current co-founders and they would tell you that I don’t need to control, I just need results. What I do need control over however is my own life. Every morning I wake up that I am ploughing my own path I am happy and ready to take on the day. The moment I sense I have lost that control I am anxious and ineffective.

    A desire to make a lasting difference: There are few things I can do to make a difference, but I feel strongly that providing awesome opportunities for other people to fulfill their own dreams can make a huge difference. I want nothing more than for those who come to work in my startups to see it as a place they can achieve their dreams. Watching people buy homes, raise families and pursue their own passions is probably the most rewarding result of all the work you pour in to your startup.

    Watching people grow: The first feeling of failure when a startup is going sideways is always the sense that you are letting these people down. Startups are demanding and gruelling for everyone. It’s inspiring when these early employees suffer through long hours and low wages with you, but it is the never ending belief that you can make their lives truly better in the end that drives you to keep pushing and often asking for more when you know they have little to give.

    When a startup is going well you get to give people new opportunities and the great thing about people is that they seem to thrive in new situations. Hard problem? Tough decision? If you’ve hired the right people then you never think twice about letting them dive in to the thick of it.

    Working with the best: Simply put: I never have to work with anyone other than those who I think are the smartest, most honest, diligent and incredible people I could meet. Every single one of them amazes me in some way every day and I am a better person because of the example they set.

    Constant learning: There are brilliant people everywhere in the startup world. I think they are more varied, interesting and available than any other community I have been a part of. I love it. I leave every coffee meeting, late night drinks and impromptu meetup feeling like I have learned something new. I love that feeling and I love being a part of a community that provides it.

    Never knowing what’s next: I have no idea what my future holds. I really don’t. I know I am married to a woman I love dearly and who loves me back. I know I have a family I love and can rely on. Those are just about my only constants. Some people call it “instability”, but the founders I know thrive on it. You aren’t going in to the darkness, you are hurtling towards some future you have dreamt up on your own and which you will achieve for yourself, no matter what. Whatever that might be.

     

    We can’t all be founders, but what drives YOU to break out and become one?

  • Is Code Written To Be Read?

    The other day I attended a tech talk hosted by Facebook. Their internal platform team was talking about how they manage the Facebook framework and code base.

    The presentation was titled “Code Is Written To Be Read”.

    Immediately my gag reflex kicked in. Code is written to be read??? Really??? I literally can’t remember the last time I sat there and thought “hmmm, how readable is this code, I wonder if so and so will be able to understand this”. Having said that, I think I was the only person from a startup in attendance, most were from Google, Zynga, and other larger tech firms. So perhaps I was the wrong audience for this topic.

    Whatever their problem is, it is not mine. In my world I have one reason to write code – TO SHIP.

    “Code is Written for Users to Use It” (i.e. just ship or shipping is a feature) – that is the startup equivalent mission statement.

    And this is where all the “maintainability” coding trolls come in and leave comments like “yeah, but it’ll be huge advantage if we can iterate quickly and get a v2 out and so on and so forth, thus we need code thats easy to maintain”.

    No.

    Here’s the reality – your product is likely going to fail, so if you wasted time and money making fancy abstractions, doing code golf, and focusing on elite coding craftsmanship… you blew it. You failed. You should have finished it 2-4 weeks earlier instead.

    You have to EARN maintenance as a problem. You have to EARN v2. You have to EARN the right to practice expert craftsmanship. If you get there, if you really get to the point where maintaining your code base is a problem for you where many other developers are reading your code… congrats! You’ve succeeded. Go nuts, rewrite everything. You deserve it!! Forget every word I am writing, and go attend the Facebook tech talk and take diligent notes.

    But for most of us, we are not going to earn that right. We are going to fail or pivot or leave or get acqui-hired or whatever. That code is going to get thrown in the trash never to be touched again. So how’s that clever FactoryOfTaskFactories abstraction feel now?

    And that’s why you probably don’t want to hire Facebook or Google engineers for your startup. And more so, if you are a new grad engineer who aspires to be a startup founder one day, that’s why you don’t want to join Facebook or Google.

    Look, it’s not that there is something wrong with those developers. I’m sure working at Facebook or Google is fantastic. It is the closest thing to a tenured prof position you can get in this field. The problem is that they operate under significantly different operating conditions than you do (unlimited money, unlimited time, lots of technical resources, working across massive teams, etc + MASSIVE scale problems, huge performance requirements,petabytes of data, etc). They learn a very different craft than you do.

    Your craft, the startup developer craft, is simple – “get things done”. The other parts of the craft, you have to earn.

    (caveat – if you are building a startup focused on platform or tools being used by other developers, your craftsmanship should be excellent)
    (disclaimer – I have nothing against facebook or google, they are full of friends of mine and other wonderful and smart ppl)

  • We can’t all be founders

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    AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by Swamibu

    “We can’t all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.” – Will Rogers

    It’s true now even more than when Joe Kraus (@jkraus) wrote in 2005 (original post), “it’s a great time to be an entrepreneur” (see Mark Suster’s brillant post on the startup explosion and on changes in the software industry). But is there too much of a good thing? Mark Evans asks if there “are too many startups?”. I think the question that Mark is really asking is not are there too many startups, but is it too easy to become a founder.

    We put a lot of focus on the founders of early stage ventures. But let’s face it, not everyone is or should be a founder (See: Founders versus Early Employees). We need to start and grow companies. This is more than just a whole bunch of 1 and 2 person pre-seed startups. We need people to want to cut their chops at Wattpad, Wave Accounting, Well.ca, Lightspeed Retail, Fixmo, Shopify, Kik, Hootsuite and other startups. People that can grow a company to 500 million users and beyond.

    “Being an early hire at a startup gives an individual the ability to make tremendous impact on an organization as it grows – and both the founders and those hires should know it.” David Beisel

    We need to create companies that create opportunities for employees to become their Chamath Palihapitiya and Andy Johns or Adam Nash. There are a number of Canadian startups that are poised to break out. All they need is a few key people to make a huge difference. I tried to highlight a mix of founders and the people behind the scenes on the Hot Sh!t List (2011, 2012). There are the founders that we always talk about, but there are people behind the scenes that are driving.

    “Cross-pollination among companies is what drives so much of innovation, so I would not project a lot onto this event” – Brett Taylor (@btaylor)

    We’ve seen a number of young founders build brillant products and then move to new roles. Josh Davey (@joshdavey, LinkedIn) founded BurstN and is now killing it at Chango. Daniel Patricio (LinkedIn, @danielparticio) founded Pinpoint Social and is building products at Jet Cooper. Ben Yoskovitz (LinkedIn, @byosko) founded StandoutJobs and NextMontreal, is now the VP Product at GoInstant. There are lots of opportunities at Canadian startups for entrepreneurial employees to make a huge impact!

    Looking for a gig at a Canadian startup? Check out the StartupNorth Job board which features jobs like:

    More reading on starting your own vs joining a startup:

     

  • Round13 Capital puts founders first

    Scott Pelton, Bruce Croxon and John Eckert - Round13 Capital

    Round 13 CapitalWhat’s interesting about the Round13 Capital announcement today isn’t the size of the fund – they are targeting $100MM. It isn’t the people who are involved – they are amazing. It isn’t the LPs – they are different. The team, Bruce Croxon, John Eckert and Scott Pelton, are bringing together a group of entrepreneurs to serve as mentors. This is not uncommon in the US with a number of funds like SoftTech VC, Felicis Ventures, Founders Fund and similar to Founder Collective (if you are interested read the Kauffman Foundation’s Do Entrepreneurs Make Good VCs? [PDF]).

    “Venture capital firms with a greater fraction of entrepreneur VCs have better firm performance. The positive relation between entrepreneur VCs and performance is stronger for venture capital firms specializing in high-tech industries and in early-stage investment.”
    — Do Entrepreneurs Make Good VCs – Entrepreneurial Finance and Innovation Conference – The Kauffman Foundation

    The Round13 Capital team has done an amazing job of bring together founders with exits as both LPs in the fund, and more importantly as mentors for their portfolio companies. This is a critical differentiator for Canadian entrepreneurs. Hopefully the Round13 fund will close and they can start funding Canadian entrepreneurs soon.

    Round13 Investors/Founders

    This is great new for Canadian entrepreneurs!

  • Extreme Demo Day

    CC-BY-20 Some rights reserved by szeke
    Attribution Some rights reserved by szeke

    Extreme Startups has announced the Demo Day for the first cohort of companies. We’ve written about Extreme Startups in the past, we’ve covered some of the cohort including Shoplocket, and we think a number of cohort qualifies as Hot Sh!t (Jeff Lawrence (LinkedIn, @datajeff) of Granify; Michael Curry (LinkedIn, @mikecurry) of Verelo and Andrew Louis (LinkedIn, @hyfen) of ShopLocket).

    Extreme Startups

    Companies presenting at Demo Day are:

    Get a ticket or an invite

    There are no shortage of events for startups in Toronto, ranging from the originator but currently offline DemoCamp to the reinvigorated SproutUpTO. But DemoDay is shaping up to be an exciting event, with a full house, I heard that there were over 400 confirmed attendees with a large number coming in from Montreal, New York, Boston and the Bay area.

    The demos are happening on June 19, 2012 from 1-4pm. There is a post demo social happening starting at 8pm. StartupNorth is proud to be supporting both the demo event and the evening social.

    [gravityform id=”8″ name=”Extreme Startups Demo Day” title=”false”]

  • Crazy train

    On the trip home from a conference last year, it struck me how lonely it was. Yes I talked with people on the train. I had wifi and a phone but I didn’t have anyone who had shared the awesome conference experience I’d just been through, I wanted to keep it going. Returning to my city, I wanted to keep it the momentum rolling there as well.

    I happened to have attended an amazing conference named BitNorth. In the case of the crap conferences, the travel back and forth is even more torturous. BitNorth is unique in that it really attempts to leverage what are typically considered the fringe elements of conferences.

    All this left me wondering if we could make crappy conferences better and great conferences awesome by explicitly building up the fringes. We, at ThreeFortyNine, are taking our first shot at it this July. We’re cheating by starting with an amazing conference with The International Startup Festival in Montreal. We’re getting ourselves our own first class car on a Via train to travel to the conference and back from Toronto, Guelph, or Kitchener-Waterloo. We’re filling the car with founders, funders and startup junkies. For us this experience starts when we hop on the train and it doesn’t end when the conference ends. It won’t even end when we get off the train since you’ll be returning to your city with a group of friends who’ve shared this experience with you. We’ll conspire, plan, meet and keep the momentum going.

    In the case of the best roadtrips of my youth, I can hardly recall what our destination was. It’s the getting there I remember. It’s the getting there that was the starting point of something bigger.

    Join us this July as we bring the Ontario startup scene to Montreal and give them a peek at who we are and what we’re building. Clearly we have limited seats on our train car so when we sell out, we’re sold out for realz.

  • Go big and stay home

    CC-BY-NC-20 Some rights reserved by Darwin Bell
    AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by Darwin Bell

    Wattpad announced today a $17.3MM raise from Khosla Ventures, Golden Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures and Jerry Yang. This is huge.

    “It has been recognized as highly significant due to having two top-tier US funds investing at this level in a Canadian-based consumer internet company.”

    We are seeing Canadian entrepreneurs build companies and demonstrate global traction. The changes to foreign investment related to Section 116 changes in the Tax Act, have allowed Canadian companies to go big and stay home.  The changes to Section 116, coupled with the desire of Canadian entrepreneurs to go big and stay home. Evidenced by Wattpad’s big raise, Wave Accounting’s $12MM series B from Social+Capital, Hootsuite’s $20MM round from OMERS (sure they’re not foreign capital but its a big round), Shopify’s $22MM ($7M series A + $15M series B from Bessemer), Beyond The Rack’s $36MM raise, Fixmo’s $23.4MM Series C from KPCB, Achievers’ $24.5MM Series C from Sequoia, and others. There are startups and there is capital. It’s possible to build a growth company in Canada and raise foreign capital. The game has changed for Canadian VCs, geography limitations can help these funds identify early but it potentially will relegate many to second tier status if they can not enable their startups beyond their geographies.

    The great thing in talking with many of these entrepreneurs is that they want to build successful companies in Canada. Allen Lau, CEO of Wattpad, mentioned that his desire was to grow a large successful company in Toronto. He is not looking to move the company. The same is true of my conversations with Kirk Simpson at Wave Accounting, Tobi at Shopify, Mike at Freshbooks, etc. There are a lot of reasons to want to be way from the tensions and pulls the exist in the Bay Area. Canadian startups have access to great talent. While there is some pull between the different startups, many of these companies aren’t competing with each other for employees or mindshare. Just check out Shopify’s recruiting video and tell me why you wouldn’t choose to work for Harley and Tobi instead of a financial institution or a government organization.

    It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur in Canada. It’s a great time to work for a startup. You should check out the opportunities on the StartupNorth job board.

  • Meaningful metrics for incubators and accelerators

    Editor’s Note: This is cross posted from WhoYouCallingAJesse.com by Jesse Rodgers, who is a cofounder of TribeHR. He has been a key member of the Waterloo startup community hosting StartupCampWaterloo and other events to bring together and engage local entrepreneurs. Follow him on Twitter @jrodgers or WhoYouCallingAJesse.com.

    CC-BY-20 Some rights reserved by Nathan E Photography
    Attribution Some rights reserved by Nathan E Photography

    Incubators and accelerators are businesses just like the businesses they intend to help develop as they travel through the startup lifecycle. As with any business, there are indicators that they can measure to give them a better idea of how they are performing besides the big public relations buzz around a company being funded.

    You need to measure these numbers so that when a success happens you can hopefully gain some insights on how to help the other companies better. The problem is that even though the model of an incubator or accelerator is generally known, how to take 10 companies and have 10 successful growth companies come out the other side of the program is not.

    The issue of what metrics to use is an important but complicated problem to solve.

    Set the baseline at the application process (pre-program)

    There are far more applicants than slots offered in an incubator or accelerator program. However, it is at this point that a program is gathering it’s best intelligence. You need a baseline measurement at the start of the program that you can measure every team against. What you should be tracking:

    • Who applied to the program that you didn’taccept (this is your control sample)
      • Track their progress on Angellist, Crunchbase, and/or go back to their web site in 3, 6, 12 months.
      • Keep a ratio of who is still in business and what their status is.
    • Maintain, in a CRM system, information on the applicant founders and their team members.

    Measure the incubator/accelerator clients (in-program)

    At this point there are X number of startups with Y number of founders and maybe Z employees. What you want to measure are things that demonstrate they have improved (or not) and which are things you would expect to see improve as a result of the services provided by any incubator or accelerator:

    • Current customers and revenue per customer (for most that will be 0 at the start) that will work across revenue models: CAC, ARPU, churn rate.
    • Sales funnel – do they have leads? How many? Are they qualified leads? What are they worth?
    • Average user growth in the last month.
    • What mentors or advisors did they meet through the program? What role did they take with the company?

    Run these numbers at the start and at the end of the program. If you are a pure research focused incubator, ignore this section. You have a much longer time to see success – but few are truly research focused.

    Monitor the graduates: Alumni (post-program)

    This is a very important thing an incubator/accelerator can do — build and maintain its alumni connections. These folks not only help at every stage of running future programs but their success lifts the profile of the program, just like how alumni of prestigious business schools make the business schools prestigious.

    There should be reporting milestones at a set interval (probably financial quarter based) where you gain the following insights on the company:

    • Customer growth percentage: CAC, ARPU, and churn rate all expressed as percentage growth.
    • Sales funnel growth expressed as a percentage.
    • Average user growth in the last month.
    • What mentors or advisors are currently active with the company?

    Ideally you should have a position that is equivalent to a close advisor or board observer with the company once it graduates from the program.

    Defining success

    If an incubator or accelerator program is successful, the graphs should be heading up and to the right at a much faster pace than they would have been had startups not entered the program.

    The only baseline data I know of is from the Startup Genome. In their report they explain the stages and the average length of time it takes a company to go through them. For an incubator or accelerator to demonstrate that they work, I would expect a successful company to move through the stages faster than the average. I would also expect them to fail faster than the average.

    Tracking metrics puts a lot more overhead on an accelerator. It is likely more than they budgeted for to start. However, if you want to know if the program is successful it is worth the investment of an admin salary to track and crunch data. This is just a baseline, track more and figure out what the indicators of success are for you.

  • Entrepreneurs can achieve anything

    Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Chris Arsenault, Managing Partner, iNovia Capital.

    3 hours - trioomph - driving your successWhat would happen if you decided to take action by putting 100% of your focus on achieving your goals, or better yet, start with a specific goal? Is that a scary thought? Well if you haven’t seen the video below of my good friend and great entrepreneur – Francois-Charles Sirois, then you are missing out on the number one most important success factor for any entrepreneur – the willingness to take action.

    I think there are many critical factors that make an entrepreneur become successful: knowledge, creativity, self-confidence, attention to detail, experience, intelligence, patience, perseverance, team building, risk management, customer centricity, connections, timing and luck. But the number one and most important factor is by far, the Willingness to take action. When combining willingness to take action with focus, only then, can one succeed, because every other factor doesn’t have any importance unless action is taken.

    Yes, I’m an optimist. I don’t disregard what isn’t working, how hard it is, how little chance I have in succeeding each time I take on the creation of a new Fund, the backing of a new startup or the planning of a new ambitious project. Instead I focus my attention at looking at the bright side of every situation and I then pull all my energy to make it happen. Positive energy attracts positive energy, and it is also right the other way around. It’s not easy, mostly because too many people tend to, purposely or not, pull you down, discourage you by highlighting every possible reason why it “just won’t work”. It is no different when setting out to build a new VC fund, a local business or an international tech company, it requires the same set of criteria for an entrepreneur to succeed, and when you willingly decide to take action, there actually is nothing stopping you. So when I can share concrete examples of what it means to set your mind to something, I share it with my friends and hope they will share it with there friends, helping getting the message out. So this is the most recent Willingness to take action example I want to share with you:

    In early January, I met Francois-Charles for dinner and he tells me that he wants to learn how to play the guitar. No, he rectified, his dream is not to learn how to play the guitar, it’s actually to learn and play the best guitar solo in history! “Why just learn guitar, when you can do so much more, and I want to do this before summer” he said.

    So the below video, is of Francois-Charles, on his mission tagged: 3 hours a day to succeed. He is playing the guitar solo: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” with extreme perfection. Driven, focused and enjoying his moment like any successful entrepreneur should be when they take action and achieve their goals.

    I hope some of you will be, not impressed but rather, motivated to go out a take action with the same amount of focus and determination. Or at the least, share this video link with a friend.

    3 hours a day to succeed

    François-Charles Sirois
    President and Chief Executive Officer, Telesystem
    Founder, TRIOOMPH Foundation
    Dream:
    For many years, he wanted to learn how to play a great guitar solo: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”
    Coach:
    When you’re working toward your dream, it helps to have an experienced mentor to guide you along the way. His “guitar hero” was François Lamoureux.
    The three-hour-a-day rule
    It takes time and hard work to make a dream come true. In his case, he practiced three hours a day, three days a week; two hours a day, two days a week; and one hour a day, two days a week. A minimum of one hour every day is essential to making steady progress.
    Official video: April 27, 2012
    http://www.trioomph.com/0-3h-per-day.html3 hours a day to succeed

    3 heures par jour vers le succès

    François-Charles Sirois
    Président et chef de la direction, Telesystem
    Fondateur, Fondation TRIOOMPH
    Rêve:
    Depuis plusieurs années , il souhaite jouer un des meilleurs solos de guitare ; « Free Bird » de Lynyrd Skynyrd.
    Coach:
    Pour réaliser un rêve, on doit trouver quelqu’un qui s’y connaît pour nous aider. Dans son cas, il a trouvé un super coach; François Lamoureux qui a accepté le défi.
    La règle du 3 heures par jour:
    Pour réaliser un rêve, il faut investir du temps. Pour le sien, il a pratiqué 3 heures par jour, 3 jours par semaine; 2 heures par jour, 2 fois par semaine et 1 heure par jour, 2 fois par semaine. Un minimum d’une heure par jour est essentiel pour s’améliorer et continuer à progresser.
    Vidéo officielle: 27 avril 2012
    http://www.trioomph.com/0-3h-par-jour.html