Category: Startups

  • 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.

  • Under the Hood – Lymbix

    We continue the Under the Hood series with a Q&A with Lymbix CTO and Hot Sh!t List member Josh Merchant (@joshmerchantLinkedIn). (Disclosure: I sit on the Board of Directors for Lymbix and helped them with their application/acceptance to the Microsoft BizSpark One program). Lymbix has raised approximately $3.8MM in funding from GrowthWorks and other angel investors. The Lymbix team is 18 people based in Moncton, NB and continues to grow.

    Lymbix

    Lymbix Sentiment Intelligence measures the tone and emotional impact of words in everyday written language. As a global leader in sentiment analysis technology, applications powered by Lymbix provide a more definitive look at specific emotions like friendliness, enjoyment, amusement, contentment, sadness, anger, fear, and shame and give insight to the true meaning of what brings positive and negative results. In short, Lymbix delivers incredibly fast sentiment analysis and can identify the real emotion in any domain of text exposing clarity and confidence on an individual message level.

    Product Breakdown

    An engine that analyzes emotion in text. Simply put, we’ve built an emotional spell check that we call ToneCheck, which looks into the emotions written in email communications, lifting out how someone may feel – or rather, the “tone”, they’ll perceive when they read the message. This technology is built off our core engine, which is available as an API for partners to understand more user expression style sentiment analysis. As a business, Lymbix is building better business communication tools and reporting for companies to analyze communication in sales, human resources, customer support. Think of it like an insurance package fitting nicely into your risk management profile.

    How the Technology works

    We use an array of techniques to training our systems to better understand the emotional interactions in common day communication. We analyze streams of data, whether it be from Facebook, Twitter, emails, blogs, or the news, and dissect elements of “emotive context”, meaning a snippet of text that can cause an emotional arousal in an individual. This is our linguistics component of our system. We believe in human powered insight, so we then take a slew of emotive context, and blast it through our own crowd-sourced network called ToneADay.com. We have just shy of 10k raters who give us their opinions of both “real” and “fake” emotive context to gauge the levels of emotion that can occur based on parameters such as frequencies, demographics, 8 primary emotions and so forth. We then build emotional lexicons which give us the power to test any incoming queries to detect emotional relevancy. We then apply our “emotional reaction algorithms” to come up with how different emotions play a part in determining the degrees of emotion in the query. When the system ever detects something that it has never heard of it, it quickly takes action and tries to learn it. In effect, the system gets smarter the more that its used.

    Technical Details

    We’re hosted on Rackspace, as well as Azure. With Rackspace we have a cloud and private hosted solution giving us the elastic scalability that we need to service this type of NLP on a massive scale. We’re a nice blend of Ruby, Java, and C#. Sounds gross, but for us, the solution fits quite nicely.

    For horizontal scaling efforts (our API, and freemium ToneCheck users) we use multiple nodes replicated as our “workers”, sitting on Redhat using served by apache. Sinatra is used to handle the REST calls (essentially the wrapper) harnessing java – linking through sockets to provide really fast linguistic calculations on requests. We persist resident data through redis, and pull sync jobs to migrate up to the master datastore. These ‘nodes’ effectively are spawned up and down as we predict traffic congestion. We take full advantage of Rackspace load balancers to handle distribution of these requests. We monitor this bad boy with CloudKick – probably the best monitoring and performance analytics tool we’ve come across.

    For ToneCheck (pro/business), we’re deployed on Azure. Works well for our business customers to give better piece of mind of no data persistence, enterprise integration (on a domain level), and security. Essentially we’ve built a RESTful service on a Web role that wraps the same Java logic as in our cloud. We have worker roles to do some of the heavy lifting, but we try to keep things in the Web Role for high priority, super fast response times.

    As our system is ever evolving, in terms of understanding new emotive context, we use our own sync services to deploy lexicons across all our worker nodes (Azure & Rackspace). To build the lexicons, we need massive power, so we use a big hypervisor that performs all our “secret sauce” algorithms from our datastore. We have 3 layers of databases in our system, which seems crazy, but each has a niche. MySQL is basic user data for our apps and all the boring data to keep. Mongo is our dynamic datastore thats used for all our linguistic data and everything we need to build our lexicons, which is sharded for optimization and running our Map Reduce jobs. We also keep a Hadoop datastore for all the new language we’re processing for reporting and running massive queries on for some of our “in the making” linguistic calculations/improvements.

    Our development practises are pretty neat. We use continuous integration to achieve higher standards of quality for all our apps. We’re a little old school, still using some SVN repos to manage our data (Beanstalk rocks), but now we’re starting to migrate more to the Git. The team is divided up into sub teams, which are all managed independently, and constantly on two week (global) dev cycles. We do all our project management through Pivotal Tracker, and have wicked fun demo days at the end of every cycle showcasing each teams improvements and brainiac innovations to everyone (while consuming beer and pizza). Our team is very passionate about the problem we’re trying to solve, technology, and code. We’re split about 50/50 Android & iPhone, so that pretty much says it all!

    If you’re running a mail client (Outlook or GMail or Lotus Notes) you can try ToneCheck and to minimize the “cost” of dealing with misunderstandings.


    Interested in being profiled in our Under the Hood series, we are actively looking for Canadian startups building “interesting” technologies and solving “interesting” problems. Contact me by completing your initial Under the Hood submission.

  • Hacker House in Waterloo

    HackerHouse.caLooks like Waterloo is about to get an addition to the already existing hacker houses and VeloCity residence that are happening around campus.

    Does anyone remember Plurk? Plurk was the site that MSN China copied over 80% of the user experience and code for Juku (see the official Microsoft statement).  Plurk is a place where people lurk. It has been compared to Twitter. It generates most of its traffic from Taiwan.

    And now it looks like they are opening a more “mercenary/hustler driven” approach to a student dorm. Hopefully, this is the compensation they received from a Microsoft settlement, maybe it is a recruiting tactic – hiring developer talent is a challenge and finding entrepreneurial hackers for the cost of a mortgage payment + utilities is actually a really cheap acquisition tactic. With none of the overhead of the coop program and you’ve already skirted any labour laws by making them work for their own companies. Nice.

    The program aims to bring in 3-5 students and run them through the gauntlet.  Here is one of the welcome letters:

    I’m Kan [looks like Kan Kan (LinkedIn)], and I’m one of the founders of Plurk. We’re a Twitter type service and the largest microblogging service in many parts of Asia and one of Canada’s most innovative startups (heck, even Microsoft copied us in China!).  Me and two other very successful under-30Southern Ontario area entrepreneurs just recently (earlier this month) announced the launch of our Hacker House (www.hackerhouse.ca) program, inspired by the very cool Grotto (www.sfgrotto.org) and Y Combinator programs in San Francisco.

    Basically, we plan to find 3-5 of the best and brightest entrepreneurially minded, technology focused students from the Universities of Laurier and Waterloo, bring them together in a collaborative environment, and then let the magic with the support of a team of guys (us) who have fostered and executed on some of the most successful startups on the web.

    While we’re not affiliated with the university in any way, we offer a couple of BIG benefits over Velocity:

    1. If you’re accepted, we provide your living accommodations  absolutely free in a sweet pad just steps from the university for the term/year.

    2. We take more of a cooperative mercenary/hustler driven approach, providing access to server space, mentorship, capital (in exchange for the option to buy equity into your venture) and other resources necessary to launch either (a) your own venture, (b) collaborate and percolate on ideas with other participants in the program during the term or (c) get hands on experience working on cutting edge projects (particularly in the social, mobile, geo-local, gaming, data mining & search spaces) in various stages of development.

    3. While we may not have the visibility of Velocity, I can unequivocally say that the upside and quality of the experience would be far superior for those who want to execute and iterate on ideas at breakneck speed in a constantly changing market and shoot for the moon.

    Our first cycle commences at the start of the Fall ’11 school term (September 2011) and we plan to take in 3-5 students and finalize our selection process by the middle of August.  If you haven’t already finalized your living accommodations for the Fall term and like what you hear so far, I’d encourage you to check us out on www.hackerhouse.ca for more details or get in touch with me directly.

    It is a very different approach to residence during the school year. Their focus seems to be very much competitive to UW VeloCity (full disclosure: I am the EiR at UW VeloCity and will be helping the students at UW get access, build products, etc.), but it is a very different approach. The UW VeloCity program houses 70 students, provides access to University and community resources, and for all intensive purposes is opt-in. Many students get into the residence looking for a place to live and learn about entrepreneurship and high tech startups as a career path. The goal is to provide a familiarization to hands-on entrepreneurship.

    Hacker House

    It is great to see others dedicated to continuing to build the community in Waterloo.

  • 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”.

    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?

  • 11 Lessons for Early Stage CEOs

    Editor’s Note: Daniel Klass (LinkedIn, @klasscapital) is an experienced private equity investor having spent time at TD Capital and EdgeStone Capital Partners before raising his fund Klass Capital. Daniel and the team at Klass Capital focus on small to mid sized web-enabled businesses seeking to invest $500,000 to $5,000,000 of growth capital. While none of the entrepreneurs or CEOs are named in Daniel’s post, you can be assured some of these stories are direct lessons from portfolio companies like Firmex and Nulogy. You can follow Daniel on twitter @klasscapital and read his additional early-stage tips for entrepreneurs.

    CC-BY-NC-SA Some rights reserved by Stéfan http://www.flickr.com/photos/st3f4n/4193370268/in/photostream/
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    Some rights reserved by Stéfan

    Klass Capital’s 11 Lessons for Early Stage CEOs

    1. Don’t overbuild your product or build your product in a vacuum.
      We learned one of our best lessons from a CEO that told us that he was going to “sell the shit” out of his product and build a great product later. Five years later, the business does in excess of $30mm SaaS revenues. The best products are built with customers and not for customers.
    2. Understand your cost of customer acquisition.
      We often gravitate towards build an external sales team, spending money on expensive tradeshows and not understanding the cost and pay back of these initiatives. Our best in class online businesses all started out that way and have moved to an online and inside sales and marketing engine. The metric we live by is a ratio of life-time value of a customer to cost of acquiring the customer of no less than 3:1.
    3. Religiously measure your churn by cohort.
      Early stage CEOs are fixated on sales and do not fully understand monthly churn. Service, support and innovate. You will learn a lot from your customers and lowering churn will significantly reduce CAC. To truly understand your churn and see if you are making progress, start measuring churn by cohort. Once your company matures, churn should not exceed 10% and upselling existing customers should significantly eat into this churn.
    4. Too many CEOs rely on the success of channel partners.
      We rarely see channel partners work and at least from our perspective the risk and time commitment invested in these partnerships rarely makes sense.
    5. Raise more money than you need.
      The fund raising markets are not always open and raising capital is a distraction. Choose the right partner, the right structure and raise 1.5x-2x the capital you need. Build a strong advisory board that can help guide you through this process and use the board to lever off their relationships.
    6. Learn from your competitors, learn from your customers and don’t be defensive.
      Almost every portfolio Company we have has significantly evolved and only slightly resembles its initial existence.
    7. Define and redefine roles when looking for people.
      Hire managers who are player-coaches and not scared to roll up their sleeves.
    8. Build a financial plan that you can measure yourself against on a monthly basis.
      Record and measure your key metrics monthly. Constantly refine these metrics and keep your feet to the fire. For all our businesses we use monthly, if not weekly, flash reports. We measure everything from churn, usage, MRR, new customers, renewals, average revenue by customer, etc. Share these metrics with your advisors and make yourself accountable.
    9. Make sure that all your heated discussions with team members, board members, and advisors are constructive.
      Do not be defensive and take your time to respond. These discussions, even if you are correct, almost always result in a better outcome.
    10. Choose your target markets carefully.
      It’s easier to have customers with deep pockets and large markets. This will significantly increase your exit value.
    11. Build businesses where you can take advantage of the network effect. Lots of good things happen with scale. Best in class businesses find you to launch their products, data mining opportunities become available, and you gain domain expertise.

    Editor’s Note: Daniel Klass (LinkedIn, @klasscapital) is an experienced private equity investor having spent time at TD Capital and EdgeStone Capital Partners before raising his fund Klass Capital. Daniel and the team at Klass Capital focus on small to mid sized web-enabled businesses seeking to invest $500,000 to $5,000,000 of growth capital. While none of the entrepreneurs or CEOs are named in Daniel’s post, you can be assured some of these stories are direct lessons from portfolio companies like Firmex and Nulogy. You can follow Daniel on twitter @klasscapital and read his additional early-stage tips for entrepreneurs.

  • TechTalksTO Underground

    Tech Talks TOAlong with the team at FreshBooks, StartupNorth is proud to support TechTalksTO. TechTalksTO previous put together a series of speakers at the Gladstone Hotel on West Queen West that feature some great talks about technology for Toronto developer community. We’re very happy to be a Sponsor and Media Sponsor of their upcoming conference event on August 13, 2011. It’s a great group of front-end, back-end and devops focused entrepreneurial technologists.

    What a great way to spend a Saturday before flying out to GrowConf later in the week.

    The Details

    When: Saturday, August 13, 2011
    Where:  Toronto Underground Cinema, Spadina Avenue.
    What:  All-day conference + After-Party


    Speaker Lineup

    After Party

    One of the best parts about our previous TechTalksTO events were the unofficial gatherings afterward. They were always a great opportunity to network and have some great conversations. We enjoy it so much, we figured for this event, we’d make it an official part of the day so your ticket will include admission, food, and drinks at the exclusive after-party Saturday evening to be held at a nearby establishment.

    Tickets

    Tickets are available NOW! Alas, due to the size and scope of this undertaking, we have to charge actual money for tickets for this one but we think you’ll totally get your money’s worth. Tickets will be priced at $150, including admission to the after-party, which will also get you a couple of drinks and some food. We also plan to have some food and drinks available throughout the day at the conference venue.

  • Teaching Software Engineering and Startups at UofT


    AttributionNoncommercialNo Derivative Works Some rights reserved by SteveGarfield

    About 5 years ago I was asked to teach a 4th year undergrad software engineering course at the University of Toronto. The course had been previously cancelled due to low enrollment; in an era dubbed the “Software Gold Rush” a cancelled course indicated something was wrong…

    Software engineering is difficult to teach
    Students are expected to learn how to avoid mistakes they never made. A great divide results from the instructor talking about concepts suitable for a mature organization when students are all about working their ass off and getting things done the night before. We borrowed several lessons from startups, having been personally involved with two startups over a dozen years. The way startups work are much closer to students ways of doing things. Since launch, course enrolment has tripled and two Y Combinator applications have been submitted based on class projects. Here is what we have learned so far:

    1. Use a startup software process
    Students are all about getting things done the night before; similar to how startups work. Teaching a heavyweight process feels foreign because students haven’t made the mistakes to understand reasons for the overhead!

    2. Change the project every year
    There is nothing more of a turnoff than a make-work project with antiquated technology. Instructors that use the same project over and over are sleepwalking. A new project each year puts the instructor and students on equal footing, solving problems together. Make the class goal to have someone apply to Y Combinator. Discuss the non-technical issues of software such has how people are going to use the product, how are you going to sell it, what is the competition like, what is the business plan. One big class project brings issues into the classroom better resembling the real world. This also allows non-trivial projects to be developed and students to test-out roles (e.g. project management) that would not otherwise exist.

    3. Allow controlled crashes
    Let the students make mistakes. For example, let them avoid source control. A student who looses code because of clobbered checkins will be a lesson learned for the entire class. However, when crashes occur, it is the instructor’s responsibility to manage and fix it. After the mistakes have been made, teach them about process. Keep things light and give them references for their future travels. During lectures on process, tie them into the mistakes that were made. Make process real.

    4. Demo early and often
    Create a culture where the principal deliverable is working software rather than documentation. Use early demos to correct mistakes and give guidance rather than having them worry about their grades.

    5. Instructors should code
    The instructor-student relationship changes dramatically if the instructor contributes code. Everyone becomes a peer instantly. This improve communication and follows the startup philosophy that even managers should write code.

    Next steps
    The course has been well received by the students at UofT. I have much more regular contract with students from this class than the other courses I have taught at UofT and UofW. I am interested in hearing from anyone who is interested in providing continuity to the students; a partner that would provide input on the project at the beginning, stay involved with it during the course, and offer a path forward for interested students ready to commit to a startup.

  • 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!