StartupNorth

Author: borismann

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • Canada is THE Best Place to do a Startup

    Last night was Five Mobile’s big Zynga acquisition celebration party at Cheval’s rooftop patio. Great event, lots of Toronto’s startup community were hanging out. Lots of cool conversations and introductions.

    It had a few of us talking about the current state of the startup eco-system right now.

    Before your eyes scan down, I think its best to make sure you are sitting, with a glass of ice cold water.

    Here’s the exit count by annum (source: techvibes list of acquisitions):
    2007 – 6 exits
    2008 – 8 exits
    2009 – 14 exits
    2010 – 27 exits
    2011 – on track for 35 exits (about 17 to date)


    Yes, that’s right, the startup eco-system is actually on a hockey stick growth curve – phenomenal!!!

    The vibe from many folks in the room – “Canada is back, this is awesome, lets go start more companies, why are dumb new grads going to Facebook when they can make it BIG with their own thing”!

    In fact, I’m so jazzed up after last night that it makes me want to say something bold. Something crazy.

    Canada is THE place to start a company right now – better than Boston, better than New York, better than the f’n Valley.

    Look, I know it sounds crazy. I know that you could show many sets of stats about the Valley and deal flow and billion dollar companies and exits and all sorts of numbers. Yes, the Valley is bigger – MUCH bigger.

    Bigger <> Better

    I’m NOT going to compare quantitatively. Let me instead give you an interesting parallel – the Montreal music scene of a few years back. By any set of numbers, Montreal was and is NOT the heart of the global music scene. Clearly LA, Tokyo, Nashville, New York, etc are all MUCH MUCH bigger and more influential.

    Check out this list of amazing bands that came out of Montreal from that period – Arcade Fire, The Dears, God Speed! You Black Emperor, Tegan and Sara, Broken Social Scene… the list is awesome. So, would you rather listen to some churned out robo pop song from LA or would you rather listen to say, The Stars. Montreal had massive influence globally and re-shaped the entire indie rock world.

    Seriously, if you were starting a band in say 2003, would you rather be anywhere than in Montreal? Could you imagine doing gigs with Arcade Fire & Broken Social Scene? Can you imagine the community and camaraderie? Would you trade that to go live in LA so you could get a monster recording deal and be hanging with record execs all day? And that’s what I think the Canadian startup scene feels like right now – great companies, great people, great community building cool stuff – everybody is jazzed because something special is happening right here, right now. We’re not the biggest, but it is good here.

    The Control Factor

    The automatic first whine I’ll hear from so many of you – “but there’s no money here”. Bull poopy. Yes, there aren’t VCs up north. That doesn’t mean we don’t have money up here. Did you read the angel investing report by Bryan Watson. 88 deals, $35mm, 90% net new in 2010. Last night I talked to three different companies who had raised major rounds from angels around the $1mm mark. The angel scene up here is the VERY REAL DEAL.

    Entrepreneurs need to understand that the early stage funding scene in Canada does not look and feel like what they read about in tech crunch and from Mark Suster, Brad Feld, Fred Wilson. There’s no Sand Hill Road equivalent. Its just different. You need to find the angels. That means networking. That means contacting guys like Bryan Watson (@bwat) who posts here regularly, or emailing us folks at startupnorth for contacts or hitting up angel investing groups, or applying to local accelerators who will have great angel networks like Year 1 Labs, Mantella, Extreme U, Grow Labs and so on.

    This is more important than you think. Angel deals “tend” not to have control issues & board seats or deal vetos and all those fun big clauses you spend thousands of dollars in legal fees haggling over. It means you’ll be less likely to have “Asshole VC” stories, extravagant liquidity preferences, management cram downs, and so on. It probably makes “operating” your startup a lot easier. A very good reason to start a business here.

    We Are Building Cool Stuff

    I met Ken Seto, one of the founders of Massive Damage. Location based games and check out that art work! Did you guys see what Anish and Jeson were doing with Social Deck before Google bought them? Or Anand Agarawal with BumpTop before Google bought them… the BumpTop GUI was one of the best I’ve ever used. Have you used Kik, its one of the best user experiences on my Android phone. Freshbooks, another great product. Or check out the list of projects that Xtreme Labs is working on. I love having folks building awesome stuff in the community.

    Canadian Engineering Talent is Second to None AND Available

    Waterloo, U of T, Montreal & Ottawa, there are great, great engineers coming out of these schools. We all know the stories of Facebook, Microsoft, Google fighting over the top grads from the big engineering schools. I could iterate through tons of my ex-Waterloo classmates who are senior product managers or senior devs at these companies. Not only are the engineers great, they are available and affordable. The engineering crunch felt in New York and California just isn’t as bad as it is in parts of Canada. And to be honest, developers are more affordable up north. Probably by a factor of 20-30% versus NYC or the Valley.

    I could go on and on about why I think right now is the BEST moment to start a company in Canada. Sure, the VCs, Angels and Incubators in the US are far better marketers and easier to find so in theory its easier to get funded. And I’m sure living in Man Jose or in the large suburban neighbourhoods of Palo Alto is really cool – suburbs are great. And of course, if you’re ugly, you SHOULD go live in San Francisco with the other non-beautiful people anyways.

    Or, you could be like one of the awesome bands in Montreal in the early 2000s who got to be part of a great community that did something special and had the time of their life doing it.

  • Baby Steps

    Baby Steps By San Diego Shooter

    Once upon a time @jevon wrote a vision on how to rebuild the startup scene in Canada (below). Its relatively amazing how spot-on Jevon proved to be in hindsight, and how much the Canadian eco-system moved in that direction – more smaller funds with a incubator/accelerator look and feel, and lots more community.

    How Startups will save Canadian Venture Capital

    View more presentations from jevon

    For instance, check out David’s post on the explosion of incubators in Incubators, Incubators Everywhere. 18 new ones!

    But, anecdotaly, despite some great new sources of funding, we aren’t quite there yet. When I get asked about the latest, greatest startups in Toronto (here or abroad) I end up pointing at a lot of companies that are yesterday’s news, 1-2 year old companies now. Partly my fault as I need to get out and network a bit more, but regardless – we need more. More companies being founded. I know some great folks who are still sitting on their asses getting underpaid at their shit job full of bad office politics. Well the time is NOW. You gots to do what the late Michael Ignatieff told you to do – RISE UP:

    Great – you are motivated. Watching Michael Ignatieff will do that to you. So now what? How do you approach the super early days of starting a company?

    I’d like to pass on a framework that I picked up from founders I’ve worked with over the years. Its not quite as thorough as anything Steve Blank has written on the topic. But it also doesn’t need a 2 hour lecture and/or a $50 purchase of his (very good) book – Four Steps To the Epiphany.

    Basically divide your idea into 4 big areas – product, people, market, financing. Each of these has a burden of proof for you to iteratively solve as the founder. You keep iterating, from baby steps, through to giant steps. Ta da – that is it, the whole framework in two sentences! Taking that framework, the below is how I’d start to tackle the first 90 days of my brand new idea.

    The Baby Steps – Day 1 through 90

    Things will feel messy, you won’t even have realized that you took the heroic step to do a startup. If you’re a coder, you’ll start hacking away at something new at night. If you are not, you’re probably talking to folks and sussing out how to get it done. The biggest goal here is taking the big emotional leap of “doing a startup”. You have to start telling people you are doing a startup, even if you haven’t quite left your current job. And you need to get yourself personally ready for the leap.

    In the four areas I mentioned above, here is what you need to get done:

    1. (Finance/Product/Market) Start putting a pitch deck together – principally put together three things:
    -The Problem Statement: what is the problem you are trying to solve?
    -The Customer: who has this problem and needs it solved?
    -The Market Size: try and take an approximate guess at the size of the market you are chasing.

    2. (Product) Start on a very raw prototype. For a web app I’d usually get the single core feature done + some lightweight graphic design. For hardware, I’d buy a MakerBot and get a 3D printing done. NOTE – if you are a not a technical co-founder, pay somebody to build the prototype. You don’t need to have a full engineering team in place to get a prototype built.

    3. (Finance) Figure out if you need financing, how much financing you need to get to a certain stage ($50k to build a prototype, $400k to launch for instance), and then list who can finance this idea. Light manufacturing & SaaS web businesses are going to have very different funders. Figure out that list, do some deep digging and find out who the angels are for a given category.

    4. (Finance) Get your personal financial situation under wraps. Most of your initial costs are going to be the cost of your own time, so make that time cheap. Also, make sure you have ample time. If you are getting married, renovating a house, planning to climb Everest… you probably shouldn’t do a startup.

    5. (Market) Think about who your customer will be and talk to some of them. Email them a survey and get some quantative feedback. Hang out with them and ask them to use your newly awesome prototype (which probably sucks, but don’t worry, get them to use it anyways). Ask them how they solve “problem x” and get some qualitative feedback/notes.

    6. (Market) Do some really quick tests of the idea in the market. This is called Minimum Viable Product. Setup a Google Adwords and a landing page website. See how much click through you get for a given idea/wording and see how many get to some sort of “commitment form”. You could go as far as letting folks sign up for beta access for your product.

    7. (PEOPLE) THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE – network, network, network. Email anybody at startupnorth, we have good networks, especially David Crow, (@davidcrow). Go to every startup event possible in your area. If you live in Moose Jaw and there is no Startup Drinks event, create one. You may have to drink alone for a few weeks, but drinking alone is GREAT PRACTICE for your upcoming startup.

    8. (People) From the above, you need to build a solid list of mentors, advisors and folks you can talk to about building your own business. Meet with them as often as you need.

    This is the list. I’m not even telling you “go get a co-founder, go get $20k in funding, hire a great engineering team, etc”. No, start with baby steps. Get yourself motivated, get networked, prove to yourself that you can build something and meet influential people… these are the baby steps to get over the emotional hurdle.

    Let us know what your first steps were and how you got your business going.

    PS This note is doubly intended for all the RIM employees who just got laid off. Please go start something new, don’t join Manulife.

  • Single People Should NOT Do Startups

    Last night, my 1 and half year old didn’t fall asleep sleep until 11pm (normal bed time = 7:30pm) and then woke up at 2am and screamed till 5am. He is cutting his eye teeth. On top of that I have worked 16 hour days almost the entire week, I am on heavy coding deadline(s) and working constantly with guys in Indonesia & China all night long. It sucks, I’m super sleep deprived. But. I will make it all happen and still be there for my family.

    You see, there is this weird meme in the startup world that says “families” + “startups” don’t work. Dave McClure doesn’t help with his family life mocking “Don’t do a startup, you will fail”.

    Why Not to Do a Startup Dave McClure

    View more presentations from Seattle 2.0

    I, in fact, also got an up-close look at this “anti-family-ism” recently at a young startup office where the mid-20s founders insinuated that “you can’t have kids and a startup”. It drove me nuts (to the point that I felt obliged to write this article).

    First off there is a whole range of great entrepreneurs locally here who have successfully done both. David Crow (@davidcrow), Tara Hunt (@missrogue), Shyam Sheth (@shyamsheth), Michael Garrity (@mgarrity), myself (@dpmorel) and many others manage this struggle. It is definitely difficult but it is do-able. I’m sure lots of them have good tips (like… work after your kids go to bed… also when single folks are out at the bar).

    In fact, this week I am here in New York at the Peek office. We split our offices with another startup, who have several young single founders. My new theory is this – YOU SHOULD NOT BE SINGLE AND FOUNDING A COMPANY.

    Why?

    • Startup founders are not sexy. They constantly look tired (and are constantly tired). Most entrepreneurs who have been in business for a few years have this disheveled, haggard look to them and wear the same clothes near every day (men and women alike). I have not had my hair cut in about 3 months and my sideburns may be a living creature. I am staring at a female founder in the office who has the classic entrepreneur red, weary eyes with giant bags under them.
    • Your mind will flick over to some business problem on a dime, which makes you a boring date, and you’ll have a hard time keeping relationships going.
    • You likely won’t have much time for other hobbies, so nobody will really be interested in you in the first place. “oh you work 18 hour days, yeah, very exciting”
    • Entrepreneurs are basically living Zombies. They have no emotions. You keep hitting them with stuff and they won’t stay down or react. They just get up mindlessly and keep going forward with arms out. They also maybe eat brainz.
    • When you have sex, you’ll probably get interrupted constantly by emergencies and “important people”
    • You can’t get drunk – you don’t sleep enough for your body to handle it properly, you don’t have time to drink that much, and you probably have an important meeting first thing in the morning. And we all know how hard it is to find a new mate without the social lubricant of drinking.

    I could go on. But generally new relationships take so much time… you have to keep this veneer of your “perfect self” and do things for the other person all the time and spend time with them on weeknights. No, no, no… its an impossible work-life balance.

    Startup relationships + startup jobs = NO.

    It feels like its a lot easier to do a startup with a long standing relationship and understanding partner who will support you emotionally and mentally. Having kids adds to this – all your problems melt away and disappear as you chase your kids around or play some silly game, a wonderful reprieve from the constant stresses and to-dos of your under-resourced, over-leveraged business.

    How about the rest of you? How do you find balancing your startup gig + your current life stage? Other family folks – I’d love to hear how you balance your busy family + busy job in the comments?

  • How to Hire Me, A Technical Co-Founder

    There has been a lot of buzz the past 6-8 months about hiring great technical co-founders. The implication seems to be that being a non-technical co-founder is a handicap of sorts and that CEOs buy sandwiches before the product is finished. Apparently coding & building great products is hard, but running the business is easy. Here are some articles:

    Why You Can’t Recruit a Technical Cofounder
    Quora – Technical Co-Founders
    Please, please, please Stop Asking How To Find a Technical Co-Founder
    Thoughts On Hiring a Technical Co-Founder

    I am a “technical co-founder” at Peek – I code, keep big scale systems up, hire & fire, set dev processes, and all that other technical stuff. So let me tell you about how I got recruited into Peek by Amol Sarva, @amolsarva.

    Sell Vaporware

    Amol had one VC committed to Peek in our A, and had a letter of intent from Target (yes – www.target.com – that Target) to sell Peeks nation-wide, in-store in the US. The status of the “product” – he had a carved out a wooden model of the Peek (ala Palm)!! And these deals were huge – a $15mm A round with half committed. Target – nation-wide for Christmas 2008!! These days I hear too much crap from “deal guy” founders about finishing product before doing deals. Lame. Be a stud – go sell vaporware. Go get real customers who pay you real money. Go find partners and distributors. I have seen countless, great sales guys in my life sell smoke and mirrors. Why can’t you?

    This guy hired me

    Hire Other Studs

    Amol had recruited John Tantum, former President of Virgin Mobile USA, as our chairman. He had an all-star marketing & retail guru lined up. Our advisory team was the president of BlackBoard, SVP strategy at Intuit, and the former head of the FCC. No matter what, I knew I was going to learn and have an awesome experience working with some great folks.

    Be Generally Awesome

    Amol was an interesting guy in general. He had a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford. He was/is building a new property in Queens. He took a photo that hangs in MoMA. The blog I write on is startupnorth, the “blogs” he writes on are Salon & Business Insider. Being generally impressive is important. The important question here is the Peter Thiel question, why is employee #20 going to come work for you? The weight of the CEO’s personality and accomplishments matter here. Senior guys will want to know the accomplishments of your business as well as the accomplishments of your management team. You have to be generally awesome enough to bring people in if you aren’t one of those super red hot, Twitter-esque companies.

    Be Top Amongst Your Peers

    Amol, while starting Peek, was mentoring other founders. He was one of the original members of Founders Roundtable. His peers looked to him for advice on starting a company.

    Now, I know this is a bit of a love-in of Amol. And it also probably feels like a pretty high bar. All you have to do is go get a PhD, raise $15mm and get a distro deal done with the second largest retailer in the US before you can hire great technical co-founders.

    Not quite. The main lesson is this. Forget your technical co-founder and realize that the “product” is one aspect of your business. Potentially an important one (also potentially a complete waste of time you need to pivot off of). You need to start consistently proving that you can make this business successful without having a “heroic engineering, product only” mindset. Can you on a day-in, day-out basis creatively solve the problems of the business such as acquiring customers faster/cheaper, reducing churn, recruiting great folks, financing the company’s goals, having great customer service, delivering everything on-time, getting great advice, navigating treacherous competitive waters, and so on and so forth. Can you relentlessly out-execute with or without the crutch of great product and fabulous engineering? The way you have built the business pre-launch tells me a lot about how you will run the business post-launch.

    If you can do stuff like Amol did, you’ll be fine. If you are buying sandwiches… sorry, go find someone else.

    I’d love to hear from other founders (technical or not) on how they both built their company pre-launch and how they found their technical co-founder.

  • Zynga Acquires Toronto’s Five Mobile – And I am Going To Embarrass My Now Rich Friend

    I know we re-tweeted this story from another source already, but I have a good personal connection to this company and I wanted to use this forum for something.

    To start, here is the post from Zynga:

    “Zynga is crossing the border! Today we are excited to announce a new addition to the Zynga family, the Toronto-based Five Mobile team. In addition to the team, Zynga is also acquiring certain assets and Intellectual Property developed by Five Mobile. Five Mobile, now Zynga Toronto, creates compelling, robust and scalable mobile applications. The team has worked closely with some of the largest media and technology companies in North America across a multitude of platforms and handsets. This talented group will focus on advancing multiple initiatives within Zynga mobile. Mobile industry veterans and Five Mobile founders Ameet Shah, Jeff Zakrzewski, Oliver Tabay, and Troy Hubman will all join the Zynga team. Ameet Shah will head up our Zynga Toronto studio and report up through our Zynga mobile team, led by David Ko.”

    Five Mobile was totally bootstrapped, no investment… making money from day one. So whatever money or stocks they are getting from Zynga, it is all theirs!!!

    And now for my startup lesson of the day. There is a downside of getting bought by a big company like Zynga who are going public and getting rich while all your start-up friends struggle in their daily survival. Your petty friends, former classmates & colleagues who write on blogs will get you back by posting embarrassing pictures.

    The Guy To The Left Of Me Is Now Rich

    I’m the guy holding the log in the air in the picture. Jeff Zakrzewski, Managing Partner at Five Mobile, is to the left to me. Us CS nerds were always mad that the pink tie somehow became our symbol (and possibly we were a bit jealous that engineers had a much cooler tool and hard hat). So we, the graduating class of 2002, decided to replace the pink tie with the Math faculty’s lesser known symbol, The Natural Log. (I still wonder if graduating classes followed our lead after that night). That is Jeff proudly wearing his “%100 Natural Log” t-shirt. We were on our 4th or 5th pub and perhaps 40th or 50th beer.

    So big congrats to Jeff (@jeffz), Ameet (@ameetshah) and everybody at Five Mobile. It does seem to be a magical year for Canadian companies, and I’m happy to know some of them personally. One day I hope Jeff tells the full story of Five Mobile because it is a model example on how to build a service business – rising out of the ashes that was Tira Wireless shutting down, creating a company that made great mobile apps with great service (Peek and I were one of Five Mobile’s first customers), going bootstrap the whole way, and selling it to a big hot company like Zynga. Congrats guys!

  • Win $5000 – Kik Launches In-Phone SDK and Competition

    In February this year, Fred Wilson wrote a great piece about the need for mobile app “glue” (my words). Here is the exact phrasing:

    “When I was at the music hackday a few weekends ago, I noticed that it was easy to build something interesting by simply snapping together a few web apps and then building some light glue between them. I suspect it will be even easier to do that on mobile and the era of “meta apps” that deliver functionality across multiple apps is upon us. And I think that has the potential to create some new startup opportunities.”

    Well, Kik has become one of the first gluemakers. Read their blog post – The Kik SDK: Build Real-Time Sharing into Your App in 10 Minutes.

    Kik has provided a device resident SDK so that application developers can build sharing into their apps. It is such a powerful idea – sharing done on the device. Until now, if a mobile app developer wanted to do sharing, that capability had to be basically hosted “in the cloud”. Think about picplz & instagram. They have had to use Facebook, Twitter and other “web” platforms, and connect to them via some cloud servers. Well, with Kik’s SDK, mobile apps can now share “natively” on their mobile platform. No more cloud – huzzah!

    ‘Everything is better with friends’ By giving your users the ability to share with each other in real time, your app will be that much more fun and compelling (see the Sketchee story below). Sharing can also give a big boost in adoption – when a user who doesn’t have your app receives a Kik content message from it, Kik offers to take them directly to your download page where they can install it. All of a sudden you aren’t asking your users to share your app with their friends, but to share content from your app with their friends – content that requires them to get your app to view and interact with it. It’s the difference between inviting someone to join a social network vs. tagging a photo of them that requires them to join the social network to view it. And best of all, it will only take you 10 minutes to add this kind of functionality to your app.

    On top of all that, Kik is giving away $5000 to each of the top three applications built on their SDK. Finish your app by August 8th and you can get in on that.

  • Supersize Your Startup Dev Productivity


    AttributionNoncommercialShare Alike Some rights reserved by Dav

    Since I wrote the interview with Farhan of Xtreme Labs on Pair Programming, I have exchanged a number of emails on pair programming & developer productivity with some of Canada’s best developers. Most of them are pure gold that I am posting raw and unedited.

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    “The main thing we like to stress on development is Test Driven development. We just find that it both ensures all the code is well tested, but also guides the architecture in a way that really improves maintainability. We use pairing in our interview process and also like to pair for the first couple of weeks to get developers up to speed, but after that we tend to split up work for the day and then attack separately.” – Jesse Miller, CEO of attachments.me

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    “Whether to use pair programming or alone model really depends on the team personality and the kind of culture the leaders want to shape up. Some people do work better alone, and some prefer more teamwork.

    Personally, I usually value teamwork more than individual results. At the end of the day, individual work will have to be integrated to form the end product, which is what really matters. There are too many examples where people think they got great ideas, but end up in epic failure during implementation. It is a result of not doing deep enough design validation. Coding alone is definitely more effective when you got the design details flushed out. Personally, when I am coding alone, I still ask for 2nd or 3rd opinions on a day to day basis. It forces me to think through the design again and again, which helps to refine my idea further. It is all about attitude. Never believe that you got it right until see the end product.

    Another interesting thing is “pair troubleshooting” is more effective. When you’re trying to debug in an extremely stressed environment, it is always good to have some mental support and another pair of eyes.” – John Yuen, heads up dev for Fixmo

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    “I think that pair programming does actually increase productivity, in most cases, and there are two reasons for this:

    1. It keeps programmers from doing other things:private email, browsing, day dreaming, etc. I doubt that the average programmer actually spends even 50% of their time doing their job. If you can hire two developers, and get the work of one full programmer out of them, then I think, in a lot of cases, that would be an improvement. However, you could get almost the same result by pairing each
    programmer with their own full-time low-cost supervisor who sits beside them to make sure that they’re actually working. This would be a lot cheaper and almost as productive, but the developers would find it insulting. This isn’t always the case of course; there are certainly many self-motivated, disciplined, highly-focused and productive developers who don’t need supervision.

    2. Studies have shown that programmer productivity is limited, not by the time it takes developers to write code, but by the time it takes them to detect and correct errors. The limiting metric isn’t lines-of-code-per-hour, but rather, errors-debugged-per-hour. This is why Java is more productive than C++, despite the two languages being of similar expressive levels, Java’s runtime exceptions make it quicker to detect and recover from many times of errors, and garbage collection completely eliminates many other types. This is where pair-programming comes into play, if someone looking over your shoulder can spot an error as soon as it’s created, then that can lead to a lot of time savings. Maybe it would have only taken you two minutes longer to detect and fix a particular bug, but then gain, maybe it would have taken a week. Your partner wouldn’t need to early-detect very many problems in order to justify the overhead.

    Maybe one developer sitting in a control booth, like a security guard, monitoring the work of half-a-dozen developers all at once, would be a good compromise between pair and pair-less programming.

    Yes, it’s true that ACM programming contests are performed on only one computer, but you rarely have more than one person working on the same problem. While one is typing in and debugging their solution, the other programmers are working with pencil and paper solving their own problems (with occasional help from their team mates as required).

    People are more important than any process or any tool. The best process is to hire the best people and a better developer is the best tool.

    I half agree with what the original article says about hero developers. They say that you don’t need them, and that you’re better off with the a consistently productive 9-to-5’er. I think they’re
    confusing heroes with heroics. I think that you do need heroes, but you don’t need the heroics of pulling all-nighters. Instead, you need the heroics of consistently creative and proactive problem solving which keeps you efficient, effective, and ahead of the game, day in, and day out. Effort should not be confused with results. I think they have the wrong definition of heroics, which leads to the wrong definition for heroes.” – Kevin Greer, Framework Lead at Redknee.

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    Point #2 from Kevin Greer’s comments is widely unappreciated. Most people judge productivity by features and the “to do” list – when in reality it is not the to do list of features that usually makes projects late, it is the killer game of bug squashing, especially as you get to the stressful end of project delivery. Processes that reduce the upfront bug rate or increase the bug solving rate, even at the expense of adding features pay off quickly. This is were pair programming, test driven development, code reviews, architecture chats, etc all come into play. And why “pair troubleshooting” or other tools to debug problems fast are important. And also, use the damn debugger, it is there to make solving bugs faster.

    I’d love to hear from more of the programming community in the comments. Tell us how you supersize your development productivity.