Tag: Startups

Baby Steps

Baby Steps By San Diego Shooter

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

How Startups will save Canadian Venture Capital

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

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

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

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

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

The Baby Steps – Day 1 through 90

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 25, 2011
Single People Should NOT Do Startups
Last night, my 1 and half year old didn’t fall asleep sleep until 11pm (normal bed time = 7:30pm) and then woke up at 2am and screamed till 5am. He is cutting his eye teeth. On top of that I have worked 16 hour days almost the entire week, I am on heavy coding deadline(s) and working constantly with guys in Indonesia & China all night long. It sucks, I’m super sleep deprived. But. I will make it all happen and still be there for my family.

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

Why Not to Do a Startup Dave McClure

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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?
July 21, 2011
Founder Fuel Jam Session in TO
Nothing like the last minute planning around here. Ian Jeffrey (LinkedIn, @ianmtl) from FounderFuel is planning on being in Toronto today (June 27, 2011) and tomorrow (June 28, 2011). He is planning on meeting with startups and founders to share his experiences launching FounderFuel, the mentorship and incubation/acceleration plan for participating startups and to talk about tech startups generally. If you are interested in talking with one of the emerging technology company incubators/accelerators you should come and talk to Ian and learn about what is being offered in Montreal. There is a lot of choice in the marketplace for entrepreneurs, and the best way to see the differences are to connect with the people behind the scenes like Ian and the FounderFuel team. This is a great way to evaluate the program, get introduced to the people, and connect.

FounderFuel Jam Session
Date:

June 28, 2011

Time:

7 PM EDT – Presentation & Overview
8 PM EDT – Startup 1-on-1s and discussion

Location:

Camaraderie Coworking, 102 Adelaide Street East, Toronto, ON, Canada [map]

Register to attend:
Count me in on Plancast

Register Now »
From the looks of Alexa Clark’s (@alexaclark) photo exposition at Camaraderie, it is a great space to host a startup. I know that Matt (@mattskilly) and Aron (@defrex) at Hipsell have their startup offices there. It is a great space for startups requiring a great work space, a central location, and the benefits of an enabled coworking culture.

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June 27, 2011
Does RIM Matter to Startups?
If you haven’t heard by now, RIM is having a horrible year. Their earnings meeting yesterday was chock full of bad news:

Q1 revenue: $4.9 billion vs. $5.15 billion consensus
Q1 EPS: $1.33 vs. $1.32 consensus
Q1 shipments: 13.2 million vs. 13.5 million units expected
Q2 revenue: $4.2-$4.8 billion vs. $5.46 billion consensus
Q2 EPS: $0.75-$1.05 vs. $1.40 consensus
Q2 shipments: None given vs. 13.5-14 million units expectation

One caption I read put it best – RIIMMMMMBEEEERRRRRRR.

Out of the downfall the Globe and Mail was hypothesizing that the fall of RIM was catastrophic for Canada’s tech eco-system. The article was a bit light on fact as to why it would rip apart the Canadian eco-system, and my initial gut reaction was “RIM has almost no impact on any of the startups I know.” But then I decided to go and look at the facts.

Since roughly 2008 RIM has bought the following Canadian startups:
So they’ve probably flushed about $60mm-$80mm into the Toronto ecosystem over 3 years in exits. On top of that they have the BlackBerry Partners Fund (with about $150mm in cash) which has invested in several Canadian startups. Lets also not forget that the eco-system around their partners. BlackBerry’s platform has created opportunity for mobile dev shop’s like Fivemobile and Xtremelabs to exist. But it feels like those guys do most of their business in iPhone and Android.

So between exits and investment via BB partner funds they have probably kicked in about $100mm to the Canadian startup eco-system over the past 2-3 years. Which is not something to sneeze at. Having said that, Google (not HQ’d in Canada) has kicked in probably close to $100mm in the past 12 months… just in exits. So maybe its also not something to brag about either.

Putting these numbers together, makes me feel more ambivalent about RIM’s impact on the tech eco-system in Canada. Lets be clear, we’re talking about a decline in the short to medium term, not a total shutdown. In that decline I expect RIM to take an even lesser role in the eco-system than before. And I’m not sure it matters.

(Small end note as a UW alumnus. I’m not sure RIM’s downfall will have that big an impact on the school either. Big companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook are still going to fight over UW’s top talent – their won’t a shortage of jobs for UW’s engineering community anytime soon. Maybe Laurier’s business & marketing grads… oh low blow).
June 17, 2011
2011, The 1 Billion Dollar Year??

Edit 1 – Techvibe just put together a more comprehensive list than mine – http://www.techvibes.com/blog/techvibes-comprehensive-list-of-canadian-tech-acquisitions-50-and-counting-2011-06-08. It is an even a bigger year than I thought!

Edit 2 – I have been corrected that the Coradiant acquisition was more likely $100m-$150m. Updated below. Bigger than I thought! Glad to see I was “under-reporting”

Interesting first 6 months to 2011. Check out this list of exits:

Radian6 – $326mm
Coradiant – $100mm (guess – this one has been tougher to size, some searching shows them to be around 100 employees with 10mm revenue?? That Akamai partnership feels pretty strategic though…)
Pushlife – $25mm
Tungle – $20mm (guess off of last raise/valuation)
PostRank – $15mm (consensus guess from asking around)
CoverItLive – $10mm (big guess)
tinyHippos – < $1mm (4 employees)
———————————-
About $495mm. Give or take $25mm depending on my math.

Firstly, this is a perfect example of how VC exit math works and the power of a fundmaker like Radian6.

But get this, we are exactly 6 months in and almost half way to…. well… July/August/December all kind of suck for doing deals… buuuutttt… maybe… maybe if I utter the amount… people will dream and we could maybe dreamily hit 1 BILLION DOLLARS in returns this year. Wow, 1 BILLION. Thats nine 0’s.

The Net Value of All Exits for 2011?? (by Adam Crowe, some rights reserved)

We’d need another big mama ala Radian6, and another 4 $20-$30mm exits. I could hazard a guess at a few companies that could exit for $20mm+ today and now, but the big, big question is, where will the big exit come from?

Kobo Books (@kobo)

They just raised $50mm. Not sure about the valuation, but we could size it at say $150mm – $300mm (I’d go higher because they are very young and having a $50mm raise means they have a vertigo inducing growth/revenue curve). And lets not forget the mainstream press chatting about an Apple acquisition. This could be a high 9 figure to billion dollar plus exit if something happens.

Freshbooks (@freshbooks)

They state over 2mm users on their home page. Lets say 10% are paying customers and they pay on average $30/month (looking at their pricing plans). 200k * $30/month * 12 months = $72mm in annual revenue. Even at 5% freemium conversion they are at $36mm. Thats a big customer base and a big chunky, sticky subscription revenue base.

Would love to hear from folks. What other startups do we have hanging about that could do a big exit? Am I missing any of the 2011 exits to date?

June 7, 2011
A Startup Marketing Framework (Version 2)

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in January 4, 2011 on RocketWatcher.com.

Back when I was running my consulting business I published a marketing framework that I used as a tool to explain to startups the types of things that I could help them with. I thought it would be useful for startup marketing folks as a guide and I think it has been – it continues to be one of the most popular posts on this site.

Since then, I’ve gotten a lot of smart feedback on the framework and I’m also back to working inside a company again so I thought it would be interesting to revisit the framework.

Assumptions

As I explained earlier, this framework doesn’t intend to cover Product Management (thePragmatic Marketing Framework does a good job of that) but rather the intention was to look at it from a purely marketing point of view. This Framework makes the assumption that you have a product in market, you feel fairly confident that you have a good fit between your market and your offering and you are ready to invest in lead generation. If you aren’t there yet, there is a lot here that you won’t need to (and more importantly, shouldn’t) worry about yet. Lastly, my background is more Business to Business marketing so like everything else on this site, this has a B2B slant to it. That said, I think most of it is very applicable to a B2C startup.

Market Knowledge

Segments – Based on your interaction with early customers, these are the segments that have the most affinity for your offering and are the target of your marketing efforts. These need to be well defined and very specific. I’ve had folks ask me where buyer/influencer personas fit and I include those here as part of what you need to understand about your segments.

Market Needs – From your experience with early customers you will be able to articulate the unmet needs in the market related to your segments (and beyond).

Key Points of Value – These are the most critical key differentiated points of value that your product offers. This is not a long list of features but rather small number of key attributes that customers in your segment love about your product. This is important for startups in particular to understand the real essence of why people buy your solution and it has a big impact on messaging, campaigns, sales strategy, etc.

Competitive Alternatives – These are the alternative ways that prospects in your segments can attempt to address their needs without your product/service. These may be competitive offerings, features or pieces of solutions in other spaces or the always fearsome “do nothing”.

Business Strategy

Business Model – This describes how the company makes money from the offering.

Sales Process and Strategy – The sales strategy is how the company will sell the product (including the channels if applicable). The Sales Process is the detailed step by step process that a prospect goes through on the way to becoming a customer. It’s important to note that this process starts long before a prospect interacts with a sales person and starts in the information gathering phase.

Market Strategy – The market strategy is a higher level view of how the company plans to scale in the market from early adopters to a broader market, including the segments to be targeted and in what order. (in Crossing the Chasm, this would be the description of your lead pin and the adjacent pins)

Partner Strategy – This box is new from the last version of the framework. I had previously included indirect sales channels in “Sales Strategy” but there are more reasons to partner than just sales (sometimes it’s for marketing purposes, or to provide services for example) and since Marketing is usually responsible for this at a startup I thought it needed to be included.

Tactics

Outbound Lead Generation – On the original Framework I simply had one box for “Lead Generation”. I’m deeply involved in Lead Generation with my current role (something I was less focused on as a consultant) and I started to think that such an important set of tasks deserved to be dissected a bit. Onbound Lead Generation in this framework is the plan including budgeting and task execution for lead generation tactics that involve “pushing” marketing messages out to an audience. This includes traditional marketing tactics such as events, advertising, telemarketing and traditional email marketing.

Inbound Lead Generation – This box is similar to the above box except that it includes that set of tactics that you are running that are focused on attracting prospects to you (rather than pushing messages out to prospects). This includes blogging, social media marketing, content marketing, and organic search tactics.

Retention and Engagement – The plan and budget for tactics aimed at retaining existing customers (really important for SaaS offerings) and engaging existing customers both for retention but also for improving customer satisfaction, cross-selling and up-selling.

Visibility – This is the bucket for all tactics related to ensuring that non-users of the product can observe that others are using it. This includes product features that encourage people invite their friends or display to a person’s network some facet of using the product, referral incentives, website badges, shareable content, reviews and awards, customer testimonials and success marketing, etc. (I talk about this in Startup Marketing 101)

Content

Messaging – This includes the company messaging, product value proposition, company and offering stories, responses to common questions, objection handling and reassurances for perceived risks.

Marketing Content – In the original version of the Framework, I had a single box called “Content Strategy”. I believe that the importance of content is growing to the extent that I think this deserves more attention. Marketing Content should still be planned out in a content strategy that will lay out what content will get created and for which purposes. This will include blogs, video, podcasts, whitepapers and ebooks, research and data analysis, press releases, shared presentations, and anything else that is informative and helpful to prospects.

Customer Content – This is a new box I added that is specifically focused on building a plan for content for customers (as opposed to prospects). The purpose of this content is customer retention and engagement (and it’s not an accident that this box sits next to that one in the Framework). Again, for SaaS type businesses, I believe that retention is increasingly important and marketing should be putting more energy and effort into “marketing” to their existing customer base.

Media/Influencer Outreach – Actions, programs and tactics related to working with reporters, analysts, writers, bloggers and other influencers.

Optimization & Market Learning

Funnel Optimization – The ongoing process of tracking and analyzing each stage of the sales funnel with the goal of making incremental improvements. (I did a post on some B2B metrics that I track to look at funnel)

Results Tracking – This was ROI Tracking in the last version but I broadened it out to Results Tracking. Obviously for each item of marketing spend, tracking the return on that investment with the goal of doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t is still something every startup marketer needs to do but there are other metrics that you will be tracking as well that aren’t necessarily “ROI” numbers per se so I broadened this one.

Customer Learning – The ongoing process of meeting with customers and testing the assumptions you have about their needs, environment, information sources and influencers, competitive alternatives, market trends, etc., capturing that information and feeding it back to the rest of the organization.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in January 4, 2011 on RocketWatcher.com.

June 3, 2011
DemoCamp with Howard Lindzon – June 9, 2011
Some rights reserved photo by Andrew Louis (@hyfen)

DemoCampToronto # 29 – The Dirty Details #dct
Date:

June 9, 2011

Time:

6:30 – 9 PM EST

Location:

Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, 55 Dundas St W, Toronto, ON

Register to attend:
Count me in on Plancast

Apply to Demo

Register Now »
Keynote Speaker – Howard Lindzon

Howard Lindzon is co-founder and CEO of StockTwits® – a social network for traders and investors to share real-time ideas and information. StockTwits was recently named “one of the top 10 most innovative companies in web” by FastCompany and one of the “50 best websites” by Time magazine.

Mr. Lindzon has more than twenty years experience in the financial community acting in both an entrepreneurial and investing capacity. With a unique vision for starting and successfully managing innovative companies, he is the Managing Partner of Social Leverage, a holding company that invests in early stage web businesses. Howard continues to manage a hedge fund he started in 1998.

He created Wallstrip, and more than 400 original web video shows, which was purchased by CBS Corp. in 2007. He is an active angel with many success angel investments including: Rent.com, (purchased by Ebay in 2005 for $415 million), Golfnow.com (purchased by Comcast in June 2008), and Lifelock (lead investors include Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers). Mr. Lindzon’s new media and internet business investments also include: Limos.com, Blogtalkradio.com, Buddy Media, Ticketfly, Assistly, Bit.ly and Tweetdeck.

Mr. Lindzon received an MBA at Arizona State University and an MIM from The American Graduate School of International Management.

We are looking for amazing entrepreneurs & demos

The goal at DemoCamp has been to provide a platform for local companies to launch, get product or pitch feedback, to establish a presence for recruiting, to help with PR and social media awareness. We try to get a group of highly connected and apparently highly cynical entrepreneurs, developers, designers, marketers, investors and others in a room to watch entrepreneurs in a safe environment. It’s something between a graduate seminar and a show. The goal is to demo your product and get feedback about your demo, your design, your market, etc. You decide. (It’s a work in progress, but it’s a social event).

We’re also looking for up to 5 startups or entrepreneurs to demo a new technology. Selected presenters get 5 minutes to show us the best of their application and then ask the audience for feedback, coaching, and insight from a highly connected cynical crowd. You get market advice, technology advice, pitch/presentation advice. Startups seeking advice should apply to demo.

Apply to Demo »

Sponsors

We need a few sponsors to help cover the cost of food and travel. If you are looking for coverage in the newsletter, blog and at the event ping me at david at davidcrow dot ca for details. Sponsorships start at $500.
May 30, 2011
Startup Weekend Toronto

Some rights reserved photo by Seattle Municipal Archives

Startup Weekend Toronto, which kicks off June 3, is almost sold out; if you’re on the fence, don’t wait much longer, StartupNorth readers can save 20% by using discount code: STARTUPNORTHSW

This June’s event will have a strong focus on lean startup principles. A fantastic set of speakers are lined up to provide practical advice so you can take what you learn well beyond the weekend itself. While there is no “right” way to start a company, Startup Weekend is here to help provide you with as many tools and connections as possible to help you succeed.

A great set of speakers for Friday night will kick things off and prepare you for what’s ahead. Throughout the weekend there will be mentors dropping in helping teams with their projects. Saturday night, founders will share war stories. The judging panel includes experienced investors and entrepreneurs who you will have a chance to connect with. Startup Weekend will round up with dinner and awards at an awesome venue to be announced shortly.

The winner of Startup Weekend will enjoy more than just street cred, in addition there will be a cash award to help move the project forward, entry into the Ryerson DMZ for 4 months, video production to help on the marketing front, pro bono legal services, a chance to demo at the next Democamp Toronto (June 9), and more.

May 23, 2011
Hustle & Flow

Once upon a time in my startup life, we stumbled across the deal of a lifetime. A large company was spinning off a subsidiary, and they were paying someone a few million bucks to take it off their hands.

Most folks looked at the numbers and said “no thanks” – $7mm in revenue and spending about $20mm… yuck. But these guys were running the exact same business as us, similar subscriber counts and all, and we knew they could be run spending $3-$5mm per annum (which is what we were spending). For instance their CEO was getting $4mm/annum and ours was making $1/annum (perfect example of why big companies can be bad at launching new products). So we put in a bid for -$2mm (yes thats a minus in front). I.e. pay us $2mm to take your company, and have it generate $2-$4mm a year in cash for us. Booya. You could imagine how excited we were. We basically re-enacted this Monty Pyton scene every day in the office for 2 weeks (word of caution – this is 10 minute video and there’s a part 2):

Yaaaaar, corporate raiders be we.

Until, sadly, of course, somebody outbid our -$2mm offer. Damn. I suppose -2mm isn’t that hard to outbid.

I’m telling this story to give another “meme” to startupdom. Lean product development, social marketing, customer development, iterations, pivots, etc – these are the more popular memes of today. Well there’s another one thats not mentioned enough – Hustle and Flow – doing deals, business development, partnerships, strategics, m&a, etc. There are many big famous startups who had deals with a big elephant: Google powering Yahoo, Amazon powering Target, the Microsoft/Apple/IBM/Xerox tangle, RIM’s pager deal with Ericsson. Its a crucial part of growing your startup, you gotta be able to do deals.

One of the current killer “deal-oriented” startups in Toronto right now is Kobo Books (@mserbinis). Kobo got frickin’ Li Ka Shing to back them, the guy is a business legend! Why waste time with tiny business punks like Paul Graham and Dave McClure (I joke) when you can have a business God invest in you. Plus Kobo has done huge, killer deals from top to bottom in every category of their business – checkout their partner list in here. That my friends is big pimpin’ Canadian startup style.

Here’s another one, check out the list of deals Fixmo (@ricksegal, @shyamsheth) has done. They acquired a company (Conceivium) as a year and a half old startup! How many of you entrepreneurs in your first year or so wake up and say “lets buy a company”. On top of that, as an unknown one year old startup they walked into the Department of Defense in the US and nailed a massive deal. That is pure brass-balled, biz dev game.

Would love to hear some other great Canadian business hustler success stories from folks (or near misses, or disasters), or give us your favourite links/resources for networking, bd, m&a, hustling, pimping, whatever. We’ll be following up with some resources and tips to help your biz dev game.

May 20, 2011
The Next 10 Years…

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and investor Howard Lindzon of StockTwits andSocialLeverage. He was born and raised in Toronto and has a soft spot for his hometown and Canadian entrepreneurs. You can find this post on Howard’s blog and to stay up to date you can follow him on Twitter @howardlindzon or StockTwits @howardlindzon.

Nobody knows!

Nobody knows what the next 10 minutes will be like, let alone the next 10 years.

It used to be no one cared what the next 10 minutes were going to be like. Twitter has changed that for good at this point.

What we can do is look back for patterns and try to project them into the future or as we do in the stock market all day, spot patterns that are upon us or emerging.

It’s a fantastic business to be in.

William Quigley has a really good post up hypothesizing on the next 10 years in web, tech and VC land. Here is some meat:

Let’s also keep in mind that public companies are generally a lot less risky than private ones. Less work and lower risk. That is how it used to be for public shareholders, but that era has ended for good. Let me give you some perspective on how much things have changed since the last tech cycle.

Amazon.com, the world’s largest Internet retailer, went public at a $440 million valuation. Hard to believe, isn’t it? A company worth $90 billion today was worth just over $400 million when it went public in 1997. That skimpy valuation represented less than one times its forward 12 months of revenues, a multiple more closely associated with a corrugated cardboard manufacturer than the most important innovator in retailing in the past 100 years.

eBay went public at a $650 million valuation, representing less than three times its forward revenues. Amazingly, this valuation was considered adequate even though at the time of its IPO, eBay had already established itself as the pre-eminent auction site on the web. Go back to the earlier part of the 1990s, and it gets even more extreme. Cisco, the most important company in computer networking infrastructure, went public at $225 million, a valuation representing just over one time its annual revenues.

William is talking my book so I totally agree but I always have one foot out the door. I have been called to task often over my years managing money for being too risk averse.

I consider myself ‘liquidity averse‘. I don’t mind paying up for the highest momentum public companies for the liquidity they provide and I won’t pay up for start-ups for the liquidity denied. I assume liquidity is a miracle and need to maximize my upside for that risk. STARTUPS ARE HARD! No matter what happens the next 10 years, you need to read this post and remember the miracle of effort needed to make a start-up succeed.

Not many people I have run across in my 13 years of managing money deploy my strategy or thinking and that emboldens me. I believe the two ends of the investing spectrum are very connected and I am fascinated by the ‘tells’ I see by watching the all-time high list and Angel List.

While I am not sure of the next 10 minutes, let alone the next 10 years, I am confident in my work that thousands of web entrepreneurs will take notice and follow my strategy in the years ahead.

May 10, 2011