StartupNorth

  • Why YOU Should Be At Next Year’s StartupFest Montreal

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Onboardly blog written by Renee Warren (@renee_warren) & Heather Ritchie (@heatheranne) of Onboardly. Follow them on Twitter @onboardly or Onboardly.com. This post was originally published in July 14, 2012.


    @danmartell of @getmoreclarity presenting – Motivation Trumps Knowledge

    Well, it certainly was a memorable event. With no surprise we heard some excellent speakers and saw the likes of Dave McClure flipping the bird. It wouldn’t be a startup event without such a character. And for the other startups we got the chance to talk to and (finally) meet, it was well worth our time, money and bearing the heat!

    Upon arrival we bumped into the fabulous @Brydon who staggeringly spoke to us about the fun times had on the startup train. Then we quickly sat down to a chat with Caitlin and Neil of @CreamHR. We were wow’d by the projects they are working on. Mixing psychology with real-time job talent hiring, their product quickly allows you to determine if a candidate is in the top 15% of people qualified for a particular position.

    Off to the festival we went meeting brilliant startup after startup, and of course reconnecting with some of our favorite people from events past including the always entertaining/stylish @davidcrow, the lovable gang from @bnotions, and a huge cohort from @launch36, et al.)


    East Coast represent! @launch36 and more startups in attendance.

    On Thursday night, we hosted a founders dinner at Holder – one of Montreal’s finest restaurants. Thanks to everyone who joined us to make the dinner conversation spectacular. We were outnumbered 16-2 guys/gals so considered ourselves very lucky ladies indeed.


    @startupCFO, @DavidCrow, @heatherAnne, @renee_warren, @kenseto, @mattskilly, @zakhomuth, @andrewsider and many more at dinner.

    Also a ton of fun was the Wavo launch party, where they turned l’Augerge Saint-Gabriel into a booming hotspot, DJ’ed by none other than Real Ventures Mark MacLeod (@StartupCFO) & FounderFuel’s Ian Jeffery (@ianmtl). True (semi-hidden) talent exposed!

    We could go on to mention every single person we met (all amazing!), but this post would go on for years. Instead, we’ll do our best to explain how awesome it was in a few key points in hopes of enticing you to do next year (or go again!).

    Why You Should Attend @StartupFest Montreal:

    1. It’s a mini SXSW without the pressure to attend every open bar party
    2. There is less swag than SXSW, which means you aren’t paying for extra weight for your suitcase with all the new T-shirts you’ve accumulated
    3. You get to see the same people more than once and actually get to know them (smaller groups = more meaningful conversations)
    4. The caliber of attendees is amazing – no fluff; just good people/good ideas
    5. You get the chance to pitch your startup to grandmothers and teenagers
    6. Investors galore throughout the mix of attendees; lots of opportunity for 1-on-1’s
    7. It is in one of Canada’s most amazing cities: Montreal
    8. The speakers are amazing; short 20-minute talks keep things moving swiftly
    9. The organizers ride around on scooters. Catch them if you can
    10. $50k Startup Prize! (Congrats @Jintronix!; and runner-up @openera on the @founderfuel prize.)
    11. Local food vendors in lieu of cafeteria fare; crepes, pasta, international delights
    12. Ice cream truck. Enough said
    13. Mentor tents, live TV interviews, and cold beer

    While we’re just now coming down from our conference high (and catching up on our sleep), we wanted to take this opportunity to sincerely thank organizers for a great time. Philipe Telio, (@ptelio) you have done it again!  You guys killed it. And you can guarantee we’ll be there next year.

    Au revoir Montreal. A bientot!

    Renee & Heather

  • Meet StartupNorth’s Rich New Benefactor…

    Yes, that’s right. Our very own Jevon Macdonald reportedly has sold GoInstant to Salesforce for $70mm big smackers.

    Forbes – http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/07/09/salesforce-com-reportedly-to-buy-goinstant-for-70m-plus/

    Tech Crunch – http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/salesforce-com-reported-to-buy-goinstant-for-70-million/

    Somehow missing from the GoInstant story is that they had picked up an extremely impressive list of customers, including several of the top ecommerce brands for whom I’m sure salesforce.com wanted deeper presence.

    In fact its a double pay day for startupnorth. Jonas Brandon also was one of the super early investors in GoInstant and I’m sure is taking home a nice chunk of change.

    Big Congrats to Jevon and the GoInstant Team, its not every day a small startup based out of Halifax builds $70mm of value in a short 2 year period and gets acquired by one the most successful technology companies.

  • June 2012 in Review

    Market Analysis & Industry News

    “2.3 billion people are now globally connected by the Internet. There are 1.1 billion mobile 3G subscribers. Almost 30 percent of all US adults now own a tablet. Mobile is cited as source of 8% of all e-commerce.” from Forbes citing Mary Meeker’s 2012 Internet Trends

    A must read post by Rick Segal on the Secret VC Handbook. If you are considering raising institutional money, you should read Rick Segal’s (@ricksegal) The Secret VC Handbook:

    “The debate between building native applications vs. mobile web sites has raged.” from Adam Nash’s (@adamnash) User Acquisition: Mobile applications and the Mobile Web

    “Global population 7 billion. Mobile phone subscriptions 6 billion. Internet users 2.3 billion.” from The App Generation

    What are the typical top sources of customers for early-stage SaaS companies?

    Company Announcements

    Mike Beltzner joined Wattpad as Head of Product.

    Extreme Startups Demo Day featured keynotes from 500 Startups Paul Singh (@paulsingh) and Mayfield Fund’s Tim Chang (@timechange), with launch of Shoplocket, Granify, Gijit, and SimplyUs and Verelo.

    Plug and Play Tech Center announces cohort of Canadian startups for StartupCamp that includes Pinerly and Willet.

    Ryerson’s Digital Media Zone announced four new tech startups moving in including: Komodo OpenLab, YC grad KytePhone, Electric Courage and Virtual Next.

    Financings

    Company Description Amount Investors
    Wattpad Wattpad is the world’s largest online community of readers and writers. $17.3MM Khosla Ventures, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Union Square Ventures, Golden Venture Partners
    Lightspeed LightSpeed’s technology provides retailers with powerful tools that reinvent the shopping experience using Mac computers, iPads, and iPhones for retail management tools $30MM Accel Partners
    BuildDirect BuildDirect is North America’s largest online destination for heavy weight building materials $16MM OMERS Ventures
    Blacksquare BlackSquare is a leading market innovation for direct to consumer wine ecommerce globally. Seed Undisclosed
    CommunityLend $3MM non-brokered private placement from a single investor
    Novidev Santé Active Novidev Santé Active is a Québec agri-food business that has developed Vegetal IntelligenceTM, a unique process that preserves all the fruit’s natural bioactive compounds, and will be marketing its first ’super fruit juices’ under the Anti+ brand. $1.3MM 15 private Anges Québec investors including Charles Boulanger and Desjardins Innovatech

  • Thoughts about accelerators

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    Most people love to just give advice as if it’s set in stone. These thoughts cannot be applied to every startup, use your own judgement and do you own due diligence.

    Rewind to 2009, we had a stellar year. We had created Tether.com from a simple idea to millions of dollars in revenue. I evaluated various aspects of this success and realized we were paid huge dividends because we made a significant difference in the way people were able to work. At the young age of 21, I faced two options:

    • Retire
    • Continue creating disruptive products and change the world

    Luckily (or unfortunately) I took the second option, creating products that would hopefully disrupt markets. I decided the market I wanted to disrupt was computer programming.

    CC-BY-SA-20 Some rights reserved by archer10 (Dennis)
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    Being from Nova Scotia, a small province not really known for its stellar technology, I was faced with two options:

    1. Fund my own startup out of pocket, or
    2. try to raise money.

    We’re known for lobsters, which is a far stretch from computer programming.  Raising cash locally was a stretch, particularly given the very early stage of the business. And while it feels like a feeding frenzy in the Bay area, most US-based investors wouldn’t know where Nova Scotia is on the map (while Jevon [LinkedIn, @jevon] is trying to change that, outside of Boston many might still have a hard time finding us) and putting capital into an early company in a location they don’t know felt very unlikely.

    The best option was to self-fund Compilr with the expection to go from initial idea through to revenue much like we had previously done with Tether.com. We had an idea,  we had a team that was capable of building, we had users signing up to use the service (our user base had grown 13x in a 3 month period), but we had no revenue. And we were running out of cash. Getting people to pay turned out to be very challenging. More challenging than it was with Tether.com.

    At some point, I realized that I needed help. The help probably wasn’t cash. Raising millions of dollars in funding, wouldn’t solve our problem. The money could extend our runway, give us more time to increase our output on features, bug fixes, but if no one would pay for the product – it didn’t matter.

    If money alone wasn’t the answer, maybe it was accelerators that could help (I hear there might be an incubator/accelerator bubble or something). I applied to Y-Combinator with a video from my beautiful rented apartment in Dominican Republic, but ultimately was turned down. I applied to a local entrepreneur competition, Compilr placed 3rd  but sadly there was no financial benefit. At this stage the product went to the back-burner, the development team focused on other projects, the question was: what to do next?

    “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” – Wayne Gretzky

    SeedCamp logoAn angel investor introduced me to Seedcamp. And while Seedcamp was Europe focused, they had a strong portfolio of very early stage software companies. Long story short: I applied, invited to pitch in New York, and was accepted to the program. Going to an incubator was a big decision. I was getting mixed advice from my mentors, with some mentors telling me “you are an idiot for valuing your company so low” and others saying “Seedcamp had over-valued the company given the traction”.

    It’s a hard decision, but ultimately I decided that the small percentage I was giving up Seedcamp was a good fit for Compilr and me. Seedcamp was providing value to help Compilr, and if I was successful we could return the favor so they can invest in other entrepreneurs. It felt good, like a fair trade.

    I’ve determined that startup accelerators can provide returns even beyond the bottom line (or the post-money valuations). Here is what entrepreneurs should expect from an incubator:

    Validation
    When an accelerator says, we like your idea and your team and want to give you a small bit of cash, this is significant validation. I think this is the death row for most startups. If your team doesn’t get any validation, will it just become a “back-burner” project. Accelerators can help provide entrepreneurs early, meaningful validation.
    Exposure
    Always insure that your accelerator is able to provide you with adequate exposure. Every time we were involved in a Seeedcamp event we saw about a 30% increase in traffic, which was easily identifiable from those particular events. Accelerators are press whores, they want just as much exposure as you. Weasel your way into anything that could be related to you.
    Accountability/Focus
    Being a single-founder with a crazy idea, accountability sometimes goes on the back-burner. As a founder/CEO sometimes you have ideas that are completely inaccurate and have no foundation. Having a team that can slap you around a bit, when you decide you want to pivot from an online IDE to an online garden center is a great asset.
    They don’t solve your problems.
    My reason for joining an accelerator was simply, if I get enough smart people looking at my business, I’d get to revenue faster. The fact is you could have the most brilliant advisers or mentors helping you, but they still can’t solve your problems. They just aren’t connected into the industry like you.  In the end you need to make strategic decisions on where you want to go.
    Competitiveness
    Joining an accelerator, is always competitive. Being apart of an accelerator provides a degree of competitiveness. When your teammate just raised $910k from top US investors and you haven’t done shit, you instantly feel like you want to go out and raise $2m.
    Prepare to insult everyone
    The worse part of having really great mentors, is when you are in a rut, they’ll tell you “they told you so”. If you didn’t follow a mentor’s advice they may shun you, they may refuse to give you advice on the “basis that you don’t follow it”. The biggest problem if you take one mentors advice, you will insult another.

    Can I help? If you think I can help, shoot me an email: [email protected]

  • Why The Idea is Bigger Than Everything

    I was doing some thinking a few weeks ago about why I am a founder. Everyone has different reasons they look to in order to get through the long grind of being a founder. It’s tough and very thankless, so you need to find the tangible reasons that you can look to both to measure progress and to remind yourself that you are making progress on all fronts.

    Those reasons are all important ones, but they pale in comparison to what drives you to go beyond simply being a founder to being an obsessed, irrational and irrepressible builder: The Idea.

    When it comes to building a lasting company The Idea is more than just a problem you’ve identified. The idea is some new insight in to the world. When you have an idea then you get a lot of things for free along with it:

    • Vision
    • Strategy
    • Product concept

    The entire business will continue to evolve, but truly great ideas are unshaken through constant change. Having an idea that is worthy of spawning a startup is a standard that you should hold yourself to. You’ll know the big one when it comes.

    There are things that come up along the way that make you think you’ve had a big idea and those are the reasons that so many startups get started but lose steam quickly: you find a simple problem, you have an idea for a feature but mistake it for a product, or you find a “vision” which is really just a statement.

    These things do not last, but ideas do. An idea should be novel, unexpected and impossibly big.

    • Reddit wanted to create a front page for the internet
    • Salesforce wanted to make enterprise software as easy to use and buy as Amazon.com and Ebay.com
    • Google wanted to make search useful (and late went on to aspire to organize the world’s information)
    • Elon Musk thought we should drive in electric cars and fly to space one day.
    These are companies who show us the future and promise to take us there. We use them, buy from them and care about them because they aspire to a big idea and when the stumble along the way it makes it far easier for us to be patient with them.
    Mine? At GoInstant we thought the web should be a multi-player experience.
    What’s your big idea?

  • A few slides for every Canadian startup

    With a little help from my friends

    I think that every Canadian startup could throw a couple of slides in their presentations and pitch decks that could help themselves and help build a stronger ecosystem in Canada. I was struck by the story of Jon Medved in Startup Nation including other startups in his pitch deck. It’s a simple thing. It demonstrates entrepreneurial density, provides social proof, and potentially helps create some FOMO in foreign investors. All from including 2 or 3 slides at the end of your presentation or pitch deck, particularly when you are travelling.

    At StartupNorth, we’ve always believed that we as entrepreneurs should help each other out. The goal here is to raise the noise around Canadian startups and your friends and colleagues when you are travelling. There is a lot of amazing stuff going on in Canada. We don’t need public sector programs and not-for-profits to support us, we already do the things to grow our companies. And a little bit of extra effort to raise the attention of those around us. It won’t hurt, it will help.

    Here are basic un-styled PowerPoint slides that include a set of recent fundings in Canada by US VCs and a second slide that lists a set of other local companies that the audience might find interesting. (I have added 24 companies I think are interesting).

    Help us. Add the following slides to your presentations.

    StartupNorth.ca Slides for Canadian Startups

    View more PowerPoint from David Crow

  • Microsoft, WPC and Entrepreneurs in Toronto

    Microsoft <3 Entrepreneurs - WPC Party

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

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

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

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

     

  • Why I’m a Founder

    Dave says we can’t all be founders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

  • Is Code Written To Be Read?

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

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

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

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

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

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

    No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • We can’t all be founders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    More reading on starting your own vs joining a startup: