Category: Big Ideas

  • Lowered Expectations

    Lowered Expectations on MadTV featuring Keanu Reeves

    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.

  • 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.

    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.

  • Let’s remove “entrepreneur” from the dictionary

    Editors Note: This is a guest post by Brian Sharwood (LinkedIn, @bsharwood). Brian is the President of Homestars (@homestars), the leading online free listing and rating company for Home Improvement specialists. Prior to HomeStars, he was a research analyst and principal of SeaBoard Group. Brian holds an MBA from Babson College in Boston and a bachelor of Arts from the University of British Columbia.

    CC BY-NC-ND Some rights reserved by ohmann alianne
    AttributionNoncommercialNo Derivative Works Some rights reserved by ohmann alianne

    I hate the word entrepreneur. It is overused. It has lost all meaning. Everyone is an entrepreneur these days. From the increasing attendance at DemoCampStartup Drinks, and Sprouter events around Toronto and across Canada you can find “entrepreneurs” that are people with ideas, corporate PR folks, lawyers, wedding businesses, etc. It ranges from founders of tech ventures to people looking for get rich quick schemes. In short who is an entrepreneur? Well just about everyone.

    The term entrepreneur is meaningless.

    I propose we split the people who live under the current word “entrepreneur” into three new words (which I won’t attempt to coin) which help us understand who these so-called “entrepreneurs” really are.

    The Entrepreneur as Artist

    These are the people with the great ideas. They are ones that are trying to change the world with something that’s never been done or seen before. In the tech world, they are often the hackers, who build a new web application with a vague idea of how they might make money for it. They might be the business person who sees a better process and sets it up, either on their own or within an existing enterprise. They are building something not for the money because it’s satisfying for them to create something that others love.  I constantly run across great ideas and great web apps that I say ‘that’s great, but I wouldn’t pay for it’, or I might just appreciate it for the sheer ingenuity of it, or it might be something to purchase to incorporate into another larger product. These are the creators of the ideas for the new economy.

    The Entrepreneur as Small Business Owner

    This is probably the group of people that encompass most of the people we encounter who label themselves entrepreneurs. They build businesses and run from from the consultants like April Dunford, bringing marketing insights and analysis to growing tech companies, to Jarrett Jastal, one of our clients, who runs StoneCote, a stone flooring company out of Hamilton. Running a small business is tough, and these people deserve to be lauded for taking risks and building companies. Often scrambling to meet payroll, watching a bank account dwindle, and trying to solve the many problems of operations. But many, if not most of these businesses are relatively small and non-scalable. They often rely on the skills and expertise of the founders and operators of the company rather than a product or brand. Another key ingredient to growth is risk, and these are our risk-takers.

    The Entrepreneur as Visionary Executor.

    The last group are the visionary executors. These are the people that the venture capitalists are looking for. The people who see the great idea, and know how to turn that idea into a business. They don’t necessarily need to be the founders, or even the people with the idea, although they often are. They are the ones who take that idea and make it into a business. Ted Rogers didn’t invent the products he sells, but he is the business visionary and executor who took a lot of great products and made them into a business through vision, foresight and understanding the market. Our innovation economy is driven by these people who take ideas, see opportunities and make businesses.

    It’s the visionary executor that we want in this country, building world leading businesses, taking great products and building businesses out of them. The small business people, and the artists are the required support. They provide the ingredients for the visionary to work with.

    So let’s forget the word entrepreneur or even founder, and define the term so we can understand who really changes the economy of this country.

    Editors Note: This is a guest post by Brian Sharwood (LinkedIn, @bsharwood). Brian is the President of Homestars (@homestars), the leading online free listing and rating company for Home Improvement specialists. Prior to HomeStars, he was a research analyst and principal of SeaBoard Group. Brian holds an MBA from Babson College in Boston and a bachelor of Arts from the University of British Columbia.