Startup Life
Technology. Startups. Venture Capital. My Life.
TEDxToronto 2010 Coming Soon
Jul 8th
This year I got involved with TEDxToronto2010, an independently organized TED event held in the great city of Toronto. If you’ve never seen a TED event, go watch a few talks online. You’ll be inspired.
The theme for Toronto’s 2nd annual TEDx conference is “A Call to Action”. We, the organizers, want to see real change come out of the event. We want speakers to challenge attendees and we want attendees to challenge themselves and each other. A Call to Action is our challenge to everyone who comes across TEDxToronto to be passionate, excited and driven to make positive change happen.
So far, we’ve got an extremely good lineup of inspirational speakers who are doing magnificent things. The line-up (so far) includes:
- Bruce Poon Tip, Founder of GAP Adventures
- Tonya Surman, Founding Executive Director of the Centre for Social Innovation
- Dr. Catherine Zahn, President and CEO of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)
- Trey Anthony, Creator and Star of Global TV’s “Da Kink In My Hair”
My role in this event is to help drum-up some sponsorship activity. After all, what company or organization doesn’t want to be affiliated with thought leadership, passionate and driven individuals and folks that change the world?
We are currently seeking sponsors for the following categories:
- Innovation Sponsor: $10,000+
- Inspiration Sponsor: $6,000+
- Conversation Sponsor: $4,000+
- After-Party Sponsor: $2,000+
Most companies and organizations choose to sponsor TED events because they want to leverage ideas, technologies, design, and education to help create a better future; because they will be investing in the creation of a community who believe in the power of ideas worth spreading; and because they believe in bringing together corporations and individuals who want to be change agents surrounding remarkable thinking and ideas.
Please contact me or leave a comment below with your contact details if you’re interested in sponsoring this year’s TEDxToronto event. I’ll make myself available to answer any questions, concerns or comments that you have and make sure that your organization gets the spotlight it deserves at the conference!
More info @ TEDxToronto 2010 Announcement
The Five Whys and Three-Minute Rule for Startups
Jun 15th
Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve come across some great “rules” and “methodologies” for customer development and understanding your customers.
The Five Whys
The Five Whys, which has its origins in the Toyota Production System, believes that the root of every problem (including technical problems) is actually a human problem. As demonstrated by Eric Reis on the HBR Blog, here is The Five Whys applied to a startup:
- A new release broke a key feature for customers. Why? Because a particular server failed.
- Why did the server fail? Because an obscure subsystem was used in the wrong way.
- Why was it used in the wrong way? The engineer who used it didn’t know how to use it properly.
- Why didn’t he know? Because he was never trained.
- Why wasn’t he trained? Because his manager doesn’t believe in training new engineers, because they are “too busy.”
The Three-Minute Rule
This rule can and should be used to better understand your customers. The Three-Minute Rule should be used to better understand the broader context around how your customers are using your product (and what other features may make sense, given their typical use cases). If you’re a CEO or a Product Manager, chances are you are living and breathing the product. Typically, surveys and focus groups can tell you a lot about your customers, but sometimes other approaches can be much more valuable. Enter, the Three-Minute Rule: call up a customer and ask them what they are generally doing three minutes immediately before using your product and three minutes immediately after using your product. Having them run through this scenario allows you to better understand their challenges and complexities; you may learn new sales techniques, develop new insights for potential product features or identify a cross-selling opportunity with another product/service that your company already offers. Anthony Tjan offers some additional insights on this at HBR.
Explaining the ‘lack of’ Venture Capital in Toronto
Apr 30th
I figured it would be appropriate to write about the lack of a growing and robust venture capital community in Toronto since it cropped up in three places over the last 2 days – once with several folks at Startup Drinks last night, today over coffee with Jeremy Laurin of OCE’s Investment Accelerator Fund and on Quora (the new social network launched by the ex-CTO of Facebook). On a side note, Quora is actually pretty snazzy with super-high-quality people.
Back to the main point of this thread — I’ve been talking about this situation for roughly 3.5 years now — first in the biotech/life science VC community in Toronto and now with the ICT community. I believe there is one problem at the root of both sectors — we need a kick-start in Canada.
What does that mean, a kick-start? Well, most people believe that there is a fundamental funding gap in Toronto’s venture community between pioneering research (in universities, by startups, etc…) and venture capital finance-able deals. That may be the case, but that is a different argument for a different day. I believe there is a more substantial funding gap that exists once a ’successful Canadian company’ reaches the point of raising a round of capital greater than $15 million. The existing VCs in the community (generally) just can’t get those kinds of deals done. It’s not in our Canadian cards (given the average fund size, risk thresholds, etc…). Canadians need later-stage financing options (or Government money) to back those deals and to create a better later-stage ecosystem.
So, what happens instead? Great Canadian companies knock on the doors of VCs South of the border who are flushed with cash and willing to invest larger amounts in later rounds. For the record, I love US VCs. However, for the purpose of this discussion, or monologue rather, they have tended to bring companies close to home to minimize their geographical risk with the investment. Now, as companies continue to grow and are eventually sold, the successful founders and key employees of those companies often (not always) stay South of the border to further progress their careers — joining US companies, or launching other companies in those locales. Worse for Canada, those successful folks often reinvest in US VC funds or Angel invest in other local US companies rather than Canadian startups.
Envision that cycle reoccurring over and over for the last 30 years. The trend becomes large enough that a substantial amount of capital, and human capital for that matter, gets lost from the Canadian startup ecosystem.
Some say that there is a lack of venture capital in Toronto because there just aren’t great deals. I disagree. I think that there is a lot of talent in Toronto and in the surrounding areas, like Waterloo for example.
Now, the scenario I’ve described may not be the only reason for the lack of capital in Toronto (or Canada), but I feel that it is a significant part of the problem. What are your thoughts?
Choosing Product Features
Apr 29th
Today I came across the question of how to best choose product features throughout the course of development of a product.
Of course, there are several approaches that you can take to figure this out. In fact, I’d love to hear feedback from others below. At the onset of determining your feature set, it helps to have a good understanding of what your users want. However, please keep in-mind that the features your business chooses to develop must also fit the long-term vision for your product. If you stay short-sighted for too long (i.e. fulfill immediate needs of your customers), you may fall into a habit of being reactive as opposed to proactive in developing new and innovative feature sets.
One method that I like to use is taking a holistic view of each feature that would be under consideration for development and figure out its net business value ROI, where [Return = (measured) Business Value] and [Investment = Development Time spent (on a given feature)]:
Step 1. Approximate how long it would take to develop/integrate each feature into your product.
Step 2. Measure the Business Value that each feature would add. Business Value could be things like increase user retention, increase monetization, increase viral or other distribution, increase engagement or any other metric that you find adds value to your business. You may need to approximate a business value here. Choose a scale that works for your metrics and try to stick to it.
Step 3. Work our your ROI = (Business Value / Development Time) for each feature. You will begin to see which features are going to be big payoffs in the long-run.
Most recently, I have been using SCRUM processes to manage products. Do you use SCRUM? If so, what tweaks have you made to the SCRUM process that you’ve found improved teamwork, decreased iteration time and led to better product-wide planning?