• Salesforce acquires Radian6 for $326 Million

    This will be all over the news today so I won’t try to keep pace with the commentary, but the news that Salesforce has agreed to acquire Radian6 a Fredericton, New Brunswick company founded in 2006 ,is out.

    I won’t try to keep pace with then endless coverage that will be happening, but here are some thoughts on what is cool about this:

    • Ride the Winners: There is no doubt that Radian6 has had a lot of offers over the years. Competitors such as Techrigy, ScoutLabs and Sysomos likely sold out WAY too early. This is something Roger Chabra has been saying to me for a while: When something is working, stick with it.
    • Canadian made: Radian6 was built and financed entirely in Canada by SummerhillBDC and Brightspark. They funded Radian6 early and they stuck with it. That’s a great and all too rare story.
    • New Brunswick made: When I tell many of you that I have moved to Halifax I sometimes get questions like “is there any startup community there?” or “Is there any talent there?” — Now I have an easy answer to what I have already found out: This region is brimming with talent and with the right leadership great things can be accomplished.

    Congrats to the entire Radian6 team as well as Summerhill, BDC and Brightspark. This is big news and a great story.

  • Ted Livingston is insane in the best sort of way

    A lot of people talked shit about the recent valuation of Kik. It all seemed a bit insane and I admit the numbers I heard seemed wild. That was until word dropped that Union Square Ventures has joined the deal alongside RRE.

    Today Techcrunch is reporting that Ted Livingston is using a chunk of the money that he took off the table in the recent financing in order to further back UWs Velocity dorm/program.

    Say what you want to but Ted Livingston gets it and the moment he had the chance to do it: he gave back. That is all too rare a thing. He obviously did well in the transaction that generated the extra $1million, but not THAT well. He is obviously just an incredibly generous person. I am totally inspired.

    If we can continue to back and inspire entrepreneurs as passionate as Ted then we just might get somewhere.

  • Indochino goes big, raises $4m in capital

    We first covered Indochino when they launched back in 2007. To say I was excited would be an understatement and anyone who knows me knows I have been advertising their stuff to anyone who will listen since then. The news has finally landed that they have closed a $4million round led by Madrona Ventures.

    Indochino is also one of the original Boris Wertz Deals™ and was further backed by Wertz’ Burda Digital relationship.

    More than anything we have seen Kyle and the team remain true to their vision over the years and while I am sure they have hit their share of bumps along the way, they have never wavered in their dedication to their concept.

  • The Tech Bubble IS the Recovery

    I keep hearing nonsense about tech bubbles recently. I think people are losing sight of the opportunity in front of them right now.

    There are something like 500mm broadband customers in the world right now. There are over 5b mobile users in the world right now. Of those only about 500m have 3G (i.e. broadband) access.

    So there is still something like a market of 5b people right now who will over the next 5-10 years start using the internet as part of their daily lives. With new smartphones & new tablets, price points are reaching levels where broadband will be affordable to all these people. And as broadband becomes available, new internet delivered services & products will be used. MASSIVE OPPORTUNITY.

    But thats only part of the story. Basically, still in this day, there are tons of service/industry sectors where the internet is barely used. I’m talking about you health care! There are major major industry changes coming in sectors like government, health care, real estate, law, delivery, etc. Many government services still require paper for submission. Anybody done taxes or applied for a visa – think neither of those two could be done better? Many doctors still rely heavily on pen and paper (prescription pad anybody?). Many legal & financial transactions are still quagmired in a world of yesteryore, completely non-digitized. Anybody bought a house recently? There are multi-billion dollar opportunities here.

    On top of riding disruption in many service & industrial sectors, there are still major changes coming in the way we consumers use the internet. Last year e-commerce accounted for 4% of all commerce, and online advertisting was only 13% of all advertisting. Meanwhile the average person is spending more and more time online and consuming more and more internet services, meaning that commerce, advertising & media production will all explode online. MORE BIG OPPORTUNITY.

    And, more so, most infrastructure still hasn’t even been hooked up to the internet! Can you turn lights on/off over the internet in your house? Is your car on the internet (driving as a service – DaaS??)? Are large buildings on the internet, can we remotely control them? Are local bridges on the internet throwing off readings from sensors, cameras, etc? How many more devices, buildings, cars, etc can be added to the internet? A few billion++?

    And, with 5B people now having access to GSM phones, you think the world of communication isn’t still evolving fast? Want to know why Kik, Color, GroupMe, Beluga, etc are all getting massive amounts of money and its no joke??? When was the last time you sent a text? Was the experience kind of lame (you had to remember a weird 9 digit number that represents that person , type in T9, etc)? Did you pay some stupid amount of money for it – like $20/month for unlimited texting? Were roughly 5 TRILLION texts sent last year globally at revenue of something like 5-7 cents per text – wow a $250B market!!! Has MMS been a total failure with a horrible user experience that nobody outside of Germany ever used to share photos? Did it still generate $31.5B in global revenue last year??? You think its not worth giving a company like Color $41mm to take a crack at that revenue??? If I were a mobile carrier right now I would crap my pants every time I read about one of these companies raising big money. Entrepreneurs & VCs have started a mobile messaging WAR against the carriers – because its a big opportunity, not because they are being stupid.

    And hasn’t it gotten cheaper and less riskier to launch new web products & services, like cheaper by several factors. Shouldn’t people invest in big market/low risk opportunities?

    And doesn’t Silicon Valley have massive leverage and far more competitive advantage over EVERY WHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD (and maybe New York.. and maybe the collective geographical diaspora known as University of Waterloo graduates). Can China, India, Europe, blah, blah, anywhere really, truly come close to competing with Silicon Valley head to head in making money out of the future of the internet?

    So there are BIG massive billion dollar global opportunities. And there are unique advantages in the US globally. And its cheaper and less riskier than ever to invest in these companies.

    Isn’t this EXACTLY the policy the people, the government, the investors, the entrepreneurs, the hackers, the inventors and everybody should be endorsing? Is it bad that easy fed printed money/gov’t stimulus cash has trickled down into the valley and created a surge in investment in high-tech? Don’t Americans want to kick ass and win and have most of the new billion dollar companies built here? And isn’t this a true legitimate chance for the country to recover in the long-run? Isn’t it less risky and a better idea than Friedman telling us to invest in better solar panels every day in the New York Times? Where else would you put this money? Building bridges???

    I’m not even American, I wish you guys would blow this chance so up here in Canada we’d build the best tech companies! But at least some of the funding will flow to the hands of the our University of Waterloo students who will eventually move home when they have babies.

    But in all seriousness, I think every startup who got funded recently, should realize they have a civic responsibility to bust their asses off with HUSTLE AND HACK. These are tough economic times for many, and you have the opportunity to do something about it and make a difference. I don’t want to read articles about the 4 monitors on your desk, or the ipad you got when you joined, blah blah blah. Don’t act like over-privileged, whiny, little bitches spoiled rich kids. Get out there and help re-build.

  • DFAIT Technology Growth Initiative Business Bootcamps

    Departement of Foreign Affairs and International TradeDFAIT is sponsoring the Technology Growth Initiative (TGI) Business Bootcamps Spring 2011 to help Canadian companies go-to-market in specific US markets (BostonDenverLos AngelesNew YorkPalo AltoSan DiegoSan Francisco/Silicon Valley and others). The program provides startups with access to webinars, a one day bootcamp session and direct connections with VCs and local entrepreneurs to share experiences and find funding.

    The one day bootcamps are being help in April and May 2011 from Halifax to London. The bootcamps are interesting, they provide entrepreneurs the opportunity to pitch and get feedback from trusted experts (yeah right I think I served as an “expert” in 2009 ;-). But it is a great opportunity to get a different set of eyes on your pitch. And it plays to the old adage, “how do you know when an entrepreneur is dead? he stops pitching”.

    Registration for One Day Business Bootcamp

    • Halifax: April 27th, 2011 – Cleantech and ICT
    • Quebec City: April 28th, 2011 – ICT
    • London: April 29th, 2011 – Cleantech, ICT, Life Sciences
    • Toronto: May 2nd, 2011 – Cleantech, ICT, Life Sciences
    • Ottawa: May 3rd, 2011 – Cleantech, ICT, Life Sciences

    There is also the upcoming April 6th, 2011 11:30EST seminar with Mike Grandinetti (he’s also a TechStars mentor) focusing on “Lean and Mean Startups”.

    April 6th: 11:30 EST (Upcoming Webinar – Soon)

    1. Lean and Mean Start-ups – Presented by: Mike Grandinetti, Managing Director, Southboro Capital, Boston.
    2. So you think you are ready? – 10 things you need to know before presentation day – A candid talk on presentations gone horribly wrong and how you avoid that – Presented by: Coby Schneider – Miller Thomson & Others.

    These are great opportunities to learn about expanding into specific US markets. The DFAIT team brings key players to local markets and makes it easy to establish relationships that allow companies to grow. There are lots of opportunity to criticize some of the efforts, but the team at DFAIT have run this program for the past few years with varied success. It’s worth the time of startups actively looking to expand their customer base (this means that you’re beyond seed stage, you probably have customers, you have a product, you’re looking for a scalable business model) to explore how DFAIT can help.

    The event is co-hosted by our sponsors and friends at KPMG are corporate partners helping DFAIT and startups. There are a lot of cross-border issues concerning corporate structure, financing, taxation and other where KPMG can leverage their experience to help early and growth stage companies.

  • Web Startup Society Career Fair

    Entering StartupThe Web Startup Society at the University of Toronto is hosting a startup career faire on April 7, 2011.

    This is a great opportunity for local startups looking to hire developers, interns, engineers, designers, and other smart problem solving kids from UofT.

    Startups can apply to recruit, it’s $50 and the deadline is March 25.

    Web Startup Society in partnership with Career Centre invites startups to apply for Startup Job Fair to be held on April 7th, 2011 from 1-4pm at Career Centre, Koffler Student Services Centre, 214 College Street, Toronto, ON

    This application form will help us select which Startups would be eligible. A team of review panel consisting of someone from the career centre, a CS faculty member, and a KMDI member will decide which Startups would qualify based on two simple criteria.

    We’re looking for companies that already have funding and have demonstrated the potential to provide a good level of job experience for student applicants. If you’re one of the companies that get selected, we request a $50 fee to cover the expenses of holding the event. If you have any further inquiries, kindly send an email to [email protected]. For more details, check out

     

    Appy for UofT Startup Job Faire

  • Choking online media growth in Canada

    So let’s review what I did yesterday:

    1. Read about how video and social networks are helping to re-shape the Middle East
    2. Worked a bit on a start-up I’m advising called Shiny Art, which rents video art over the Internet
    3. Watched the amazing UGC documentary Life in a Day on YouTube
    4. Read Canada regulators are allowing ISPs to impose ridiculously low bandwidth caps on consumers and charge extortionary prices on those who exceed those caps

    The first three activities rely on (or at least are vastly improved by) high bandwidth availability. You need bandwidth to connect people, to share images and video, to communicate world-changing ideas, and create economic growth by (hopefully) getting a new business off the ground.

    Every day witness the trend of how social and video based applications are changing the world, but by allowing artificially low bandwidth caps to come into effect, Canada is essentially saying it is not interested in communicating ideas, fostering new media and business models, or growing its own online media industry.

    For an hour and a half yesterday, I watched YouTube’s elegant documentary about that looked at life on a single day on Earth. The documentary was shot  entirely by everyday  people from around the world. Could such an initiative ever be successful in Canada?

    It is laughable for Canada to say it wants to grow online media, and then allow caps bandwidth caps that choke off that very growth. Low bandwidth caps and online media are mutually exclusive ideas, they cannot occupy the same space at the same time. The economics are really simple, if you make bandwidth expensive, bandwidth-hungry applications (read: online media) will not take root.

    Case in point: as mentioned, I’m advising a company that I think has a pretty neat idea, let customers transform their HDTVs into canvases for contemporary art by providing video art rental over the Internet. Last weekend, when I explained the concept to a relative in Canada, he said it would be too expensive for some consumers. At first I didn’t understand what he meant but now I get it. If you only have access to 25GB/ month (or about 12 hours of viewing) would you spend that valuable bandwidth experimenting on a media service you know little about?

    Canada has for years fretted about how to build a cultural industry and in the digital age, it is harder to imagine a policy more damaging to that goal. Bandwidth caps basically say that if you have an idea to build or offer an online media service, do it someplace else, Canada isn’t interested.

  • Going over the falls together in barrel

    Editor’s Note: This post was written by Jesse Rodgers. Jesse is the  CEO of TribeHR, the Director of the VeloCity Residence at the University of Waterloo, organizer of StartupCamp in Waterloo and an allround great guy.

    Jesse stopped by my offices in Toronto to chat about sales, marketing and PR (convenient of @jevon to write about the same topic recently). Jessementioned that the TribeHR team had left Waterloo and were holed up in a hotel room in Niagara Falls. They were living together, working together, writing code and being more productive than they could with the distractions of family, friends and the strong community in Waterloo. I was amazed at the commitment of the team to step away from their personal lives and get the next version of TribeHR built before they head to SxSW for the Small Business Party. You can read the update or watch the caffeine and other stimulant-driven vacation summary. There’s lots startups can learn about improving productivity by going on vacation together.


    Barrel to go over the Falls

    Over the month of February the TribeHR team has been taking advantage of low hotel prices in Niagara Falls and turned a suite at the Hilton into our office (we were at the Marriott, but the Hilton is $20 less a night and has king size beds). The goal for this little retreat to the romantic city of Niagara Falls: get TribeHR polished off, implement our new user interface, get our go to market strategy figured out, and start executing on all cylinders.

    If it works, we will be a stronger team (who can put up with each others snoring) and will have made some awesome progress. If it fails, then we know our team isn’t as good as we thought.

    Other cities we thought about were Montreal and Toronto. Toronto would have far too many distractions for us so we had settled on Montreal (we would have loved to work out of the Knotman house). The problem there was that those of us with young kids would be too far away to head home if we had to. So here we are in Niagara Falls, in a tiny hotel suite, working our asses off.

    Room with a view in Niagara Falls by TribeHRIn terms of work hours put in, when you do this, it’s pretty crazy. While in a hotel room, assuming you ignore the casino across the road, you work from around 8am to 12am, take out eating time, it is around 14 hrs or so of ‘work’ per person. It is a crazy amount of focus and the results are great, at first. Once all the easy stuff is taken on, we then have to address the bigger problems and we start to slow down. But we can work through it and it’s a heck of a lot easier when you have completely removed yourself from your routine.

    At the end of week 2 we have learned the following:

    • It takes 5 min to turn a hotel room into an office but the wifi sucks, the tv can’t use a PS3, and anything but pizza is way overpriced.
    • Not having kids wake you up at 6am doesn’t mean you won’t be awake at 6am.
    • The US side of the falls gets a rainbow in the afternoon.
    • The Starbucks coffee is never hot, Tim Horton’s wins
    • As a team we can take each others grumpy moods and swear it out until everyone is laughing again.
    • Hotel chairs spin really well, and provide a great distraction near the end of the day

    Why have we done this? Because we are still a very much a bootstrapped startup with plenty of distractions (wives, kids, other commitments) in Waterloo, and if we are going to get anything done while things are still so early, we have to immerse ourselves and get to work. It’s uncomfortable and exhausting, but it’s productive, energizing and we love it.

  • Sales, Marketing, PR and Support in Startups

    Fred Wilson wrote a few posts about marketing in startups. He really put his unvarnished opinion out there and circled back with a bug report. Sometimes when you put your opinions on paper your expose your blind spots. Fred had a few (saas, b2b, etc) that he acknowledged in the bug report.

    Howard followed up with a great post about his experience with Stocktwits. Three years in and he is just starting to look at broad acquisition channels. It makes sense because once you have the product in the right place then you can pour some fuel on the fire. Sometimes it takes 3 years, sometimes it takes more.

    A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with Mike McDerment, the co-founder and CEO of Freshbooks. I asked him about their sales operation. I wanted to know about their inside sales operation but his response was “well, our support department is our sales department”. Ok, who is your support department then? — “everyone“.

    In the following days I had similar conversations with Ali at Well.ca and Dan Debow at Rypple. They all have different configurations but the theme was the same: We are doing this ourselves.

    Sales, Marketing, PR and Support are not seperate functions in an early stage startup. Your team DNA has to be created to allow you to execute on all of these disciplines internally and to continually improve related processes. Your developers need to be integrating marketing tools in to your product and they must understand the marketing process to do that. Marketing needs to live and die by the product and in the beginning it needs to BE the product.

    That is where I see the difference between great founder/CEOs and those who misunderstand the role. A great CEO knows that it is more painful to build these skills inside the house rather than outsourcing them, but they understand that the long term benefit is more than worth it.

    In the beginning everyone is a generalist. To some degree everyone must understand everyone elses capabilities. This creates an environment of trust, respect and transparency. Development is necessarily linked to marketing, sales, support and other functions. Making sure that this happens is difficult. It is some of the hardest work you will ever do as a leader because it means exposing your own weaknesses. It means that you too have to learn from those around you. You must become a pupil again.

    Build for speed of execution, the rest will come. Hustle is a big word. A startup with hustle is one that can execute rapidly, find weaknesses, and then execute again.

    At one of my previous startups we had raised a decent amount of capital. We had enough that you could theoretically fix any problem with money. We could have just outsourced a problem and voila— fixed. I had a partner who had been through it before though, and he knew that wasn’t the long term solution. So we built every important competency internally and it was HARD. It caused a lot of frustration and it slowed us down at times, but he put our feet to the fire and made sure we even got a little burned. In the end I believe it paid off in multiples. We got fast and efficient and when we did separate the roles out more clearly it was painless and that was years into it.

    Every startup comes to a point when they need to start separating and segregating some functions, but that should happen when you are done experimenting and you are ready to execute more broadly and deeply. We all grow up but it is dangerous if it happens too soon. The scale and timing is different for every startup. It is what Howard is doing and it is what we all have to do someday.

  • Giveaway – 2 Tickets to Art of Marketing on March 7, 2011

    The Art of Marketing on March 7, 2001 in TorontoStartupNorth and The Art of Marketing are giving away 2 tickets to the March 7, 2011 conference in Toronto. The conference features:

    It’s a great line up of speakers. I’ve seen Guy Kawasaki speak in the past. He hosted a conversation with Steve Ballmer at  Mix08 in Las Vegas. And comedy ensued:

    Guy Kawasaki at Mix08

    Guy has written a number of books that I have enjoyed reading including: Reality Check, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy and The Art of the Start. Very entertaining speaker, and I’ve been told that we should try to organize a startup hockey game for him while he is here.

    I’m most excited about hearing Dr. Sheena Iyengar. I did not know that she was born in Toronto. Her TED Talk about The Art of Choosing and cultural biases is a very engaging and insightful presentation.

    Dr. Sheena Iyengar at TED on The Art of Choosing

    Giveaway

    This is a giveaway. We have 2 tickets. The tickets have no cash value. Someone from StartupNorth will randomly select 2 emails submitted before 11:59:59 EST on Feb 27, 2011. There might be a skill testing question. Please only one entry per person. What’s an entry? Your name and email address. It’s our promise that we will always respect your privacy. From time to time we may email you to inform you about future events, or updates about the giveaway.

    Entries are closed.

    The promo code: LD27 gives you a $50 discount off the regular ticket price, or $100 discount for groups of 3 or more for The Art of Marketing March 7, 2011 event.