Building on the public announcement of NextUp Labs in February, I am going to be sharing a lot more content about the lessons learned working with so many startups.  I have a new post on NextupLabs today outlining our pivot and the rationale behind the changes.  I can’t say that we are done pivoting but it hopefully provides some insight into the concept of the model and some of its flaws to date.

 http://www.nextuplabs.com/blog/2012/03/lessons-learned-our-pivot/

NextUp Labs helps people turn their ideas into great businesses.

For the past three months, I have been speaking with entrepreneurs all over North America who were looking for advice about their mobile and consumer web start-ups/businesses. These are smart, talented people with great ideas. However, many of them had a common problem. They were missing a key skill that was holding them back from the next level of success. For some it was a technical expert that could help build a more robust prototype, for others it was someone with business development and financing knowledge to compliment a technical team.

Traditionally, these entrepreneurs would engage a consultant who could complement the start-up’s existing expertise (eg. a custom software development firm, a marketing agency, etc). The challenge for start-ups is to ensure that the consultant is aligned with the overall vision for the business. I heard too many horror stories about delayed projects and challenges working with vendors.

I believe entrepreneurs can use a partner who is directly aligned with their interests every step of the way. So, I created NextUp Labs to fill that role. Instead of accepting a fee for service, we want to help companies by sharing in their success through revenue share and equity.

As part of our model, I want to write about NextUp Labs’ experiences on this blog as we work with a variety of start-ups seeing their challenges and successes.  It is an incredibly exciting time to be part of the start-up ecosystem and I couldn’t be happier to contribute my time and skills to making it better.

I am very excited to announce that I’ll be leading the VeloCity program at the University of Waterloo in the new year. After leaving RIM three months ago, I immersed myself in the local startup community. I believe that Kitchener-Waterloo can be the hub for innovation in mobile technology in Canada (if not North America) and I wanted to help in any way possible. As Director of the VeloCity program, I have an opportunity work with an established team to help students and alumni create successful companies. On top of that, I can give back to the university that contributed so much to my success.

I’m looking forward to working with the great team who have been building VeloCity into what it is today. I’m also excited that Brett Shellhammer is joining us as Executive-in-Residence. Brett’s experience ranges from Silicon Valley to Toronto, from leading startups to leading big corporate business units. Brett has had a big influence on my startup, and I know he’ll have a similar impact on the students in the program.

Speaking of my startup: I am still building my company. I know I have been vague on my blog but I’ll have some announcements on that front in January. For now, I can’t think of a better way to cap off my 2011!

Here’s the official announcement: [New Leadership Team for Velocity]

I am starting my own company, as you’ve probably guessed by now. While I’m sure that you’re interested to hear what I plan on doing I need to save that for a future post. In the interim, I’m going to share some of my lessons learned from kicking off a new company.

When I first heard of the Lean Startup methodology that Eric Ries developed, I found it incredibly appealing because it provided a structured approach to creating a successful startup. Reis argues that you should be building the smallest possible product that attracts paying customers, listening to their feedback, then quickly and continuously improve the product. The methodology relies on measurement, experimentation and adaptation based on the real feedback from your customers.

Running a Lean Startup encourages you to think differently about the value of your company, and to understand how you can create that value in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of effort. In addition to ideas taken from lean manufacturing, developments such as agile software development and the emergence of cloud computing paved the way for lean startups.

Over the past two months, I have spent a lot of time speaking with startups, serial entrepreneurs, advisors, and everything in between. I found it very easy to apply the lean startup methodology to someone else’s business. Without being emotionally attached to their idea, staff or operation it was easy to hand out advice that aligned nicely with the concepts of Lean Startup.

At the same time, I was oblivious to this oversight in my own company. In the first iteration of my business plan I completely ignored the Lean Startup concepts. I was planning on making a huge gamble by hiring a big team and kick-starting the business without customers in the pipeline. I attribute part of my mentality to coming from a big company where everyone has specialized skills and roles. However, I was also emotionally vested which prevented me from taking a hard look at my plans through the Lean Startup lens.

Thankfully, I eventually noticed the oversight and fixed it. Or at least I thought I fixed it. Two weeks later I realized I had only applied the lean startup methodology to the technical side of the business. I needed to make some more mistakes before I came to that realization.

The Lean Startup methodology is very easy to read, understand and appreciate. The hard part is trying to take the emotion out of it. Eric talks about this a lot in his book and interviews but it took me learning it the hard way for the lesson to stick. Hopefully someone else can learn from my mistakes. Anyone else struggled with this one?

If you are a student at the University of Waterloo (or considering becoming one), you have to take a look at the the VeloCity program. For those not familiar with the University of Waterloo it is consistently ranked one of the best schools in Canada by Maclean’s magazine. I wish VeloCity was available when I was there.

VeloCity launched in the Fall of 2008 as a startup incubator based in a student residence. Participants live in the Minota Hagey residence on campus and have access to working space at the Communitech Hub. Students are expected to attend classes during the day and work on their startups during evenings and weekends. Similar to the AC and the Hub, students need to apply to the VeloCity program.

One of the most valuable aspects of VeloCity is being surrounded by like-minded people who are innovative, passionate and energetic. When you add access to thought leaders, established entrepreneurs, and professors, you get a unique mix designed to kick-start successful new companies.

VeloCity has already attracted the support of some successful early stage companies. In the mix of companies working in the VeloCity space is Y Combinator graduate Vidyard, who recently secured $1.65 million in funding.

If that isn’t exciting enough, VeloCity alumnus Ted Livingston donated $1 million to establish the VeloCity Venture Fund. The VeloCity Venture Fund provides winning startups with seed capital of $25,000 to help further accelerate their growth.

(Congratulations to the four winners in the Fall 2011 selection – MappedIn, Exquisine, Maluuba and Bookkite.)

The VeloCity program received the Communitech Tech Impact Award at the Communitech AGM last week recognizing their contribution to the local startup community in the Kitchener-Waterloo region. A fitting award for an exciting institution.

Learning to leverage the Accelerator Centre and Communitech Hub in Kitchener-Waterloo (KW) can provide you with unique opportunities to springboard your company to success. Miovision, ClevrU, and Client Outlook are all local success stories that have graduated from these facilities.

In my conversations about the Accelerator Center (AC) and Communitech Hub, I continue to hear a lot of confusion between the the two. This post is for everyone who isn’t already involved in KW’s local startup community. If you are, you probably learned these lessons on your own.

The AC is a Waterloo-based, not-for-profit incubator funded by the Provincial and Federal governments. The centre is focused on growing sustainable technology businesses. The biggest advantage of participating in the AC is learning from companies who are facing similar challenges. The centre provides a variety of services to improve the chances of success. Services include office space (in return for rent), mentoring, onsite partners (legal, accounting, etc), and of course lots of networking. Arguably, the most important service they provide is access to in-house mentors who have broad startup experience. All startups must apply for acceptance into the AC.

The Hub is a Communitech-run incubator facility focused on digital media companies and is a member of the Canadian Digital Media Network. I find that the confusion between Communitech and the AC stems from the Hub itself. While Communitech runs (and brands) the Hub, the facility includes acceleration services provided by the Accelerator Center. If you apply you will notice that the information requested on both this application form and the AC application form are identical—word for word. As part of the application process you can indicate a preference for one facility or the other, if you want. When the Hub was built in 2010, the Accelerator Centre was already operating in the region and Communitech did the smart thing by asking the AC to run the acceleration services for the Hub as well.

Communitech uses the Hub as a central location for many of its own programs including encouraging startups to leverage local partners and sponsors. For example, RIM and a handful of other local companies have space within the Hub to meet with startups. When I was leading Developer Relations, I had someone from my team at the Hub every Tuesday in addition to running events at the facility.

The Hub also houses the Velocity program run by the University of Waterloo which provides incubation facilities aimed exclusively at students of the university. Next time, I’ll write more about Velocity.

1. Forced password reset policies every 60 days – I understand the corporate security policy directive around changing your password every 60 days but as a user I certainly won’t miss it.
2. Password entry before installing an application – By default, RIM corporate devices require the device password to be entered before an application can be installed.  I understand that malicious applications can be installed on a device but in the current set up applications installed through App World require two passwords to be entered – the BlackBerry ID password to download the app from App World and the device password to allow it to be installed.
3. Constant Software Updates – One of the implied requirements of being a RIM employee is that you are always upgrading your device software to match the latest internal beta software to ensure what is released to customers is a solid build.  The biggest downside, especially for someone with hundreds of 3rd party apps, is that most developers do not implement the backup/restore capabilities in BlackBerry today.  During a software upgrade all of your data is wiped off the device (after being backed up), the software update is applied and then your data is restored.  For the 3rd party apps that do not implement backup and restore functionality it requires the user to go back into the application and set it up again.  I found this incredibly frustrating!  Thankfully, this problem doesn’t exist on QNX as the software updates are simply applied to the critical files in the OS rather than requiring a wipe of the device.

I have used every BlackBerry RIM has made over the past 10 years. So, when I set off to buy my very first BlackBerry I was prepared for the challenges and frustrations that I would experience with the carriers on my own. However, I wasn’t prepared for the completely different BlackBerry experience as a consumer versus a business user.  Here are the three things I miss the most about my “work” BlackBerry:

1. Email Delivery and Synchronization – I use Outlook on my PC, which is connected to a POP3 mailbox from my email provider.  At RIM, emails would routinely arrive on my “work” BlackBerry before arriving in Outlook.  Now, my computer is always the first to pick up email and in some cases by several minutes.

On top of that, I desperately miss the email synchronization between my mailbox and my BlackBerry. It drives me nuts that I have to go back through one mailbox or the other to mark items as read.  When I tried explaining this to my family (who all have BlackBerry smartphones) and they looked at me in wonder that this functionality even existed at all.  It makes me wonder if RIM’s customer base truly understands what the product is capable of.  Perhaps more importantly it also signals that as a RIM employee I had no idea about some of the basic missing functionality for our end users.  RIM employees don’t use the same solution as our consumer customers in the market.

It took quite a bit of effort to replicate the email synchronization that I enjoyed at work. At first, I attempted to use the BlackBerry Desktop Manager, which supports synchronization with Outlook, but it doesn’t provide any email sync at all.  Second, I investigated moving back to a hosted exchange mailbox and BES hosted by GoDaddy ($11.80 per month for anyone who is interested) but ultimately decided that moving to IMAP would solve the problem and was much cheaper (an additional $0.50 per month).  

The only major downside is that email synchronization still appears to only work one way with emails marked read in in Outlook are still not marked read on my device.

2. PIM Synchronization – I had a similar experience trying to sync my contacts and calendar.  In this case, the only solution is to use Desktop Manager.  I find myself routinely connecting my device to my computer to synchronize between the two before I head out for meetings or before I go to bed at night.  I asked friends and family how they manage this problem and the response was consistent: they don’t use the calender in Outlook at all; they simply store everything on their BlackBerry.  This is a big loss of functionality and convenience for me and I would gladly pay RIM for a solution that would solve this problem.

3. Address Book Lookup – Over a period of 10 years at RIM I came in contact with thousands of people many of whom were never stored in my address book (including hundreds of key contacts at RIM).  I find it incredibly frustrating that I no longer have access to the RIM Global Address List.  This forced me to properly create an address book, but it also created an opportunity for solutions like Xobni and others to fill that gap.

I had a unique opportunity to spend the two weeks after my resignation at RIM helping with the transition of my role to minimize the impact to both the developer community and my team.  As part of that process, I had some lessons which I thought were worth sharing.

1. It is awkward.  Inevitably, sticking around for two weeks after announcing your departure is an awkward process as people try to determine the right social practice for engaging with you.  So, be prepared to deal with some awkwardness and my recommendation is to engage others proactively rather than reactively dealing with it.
2. People will need your support.  Even though you are going to making a big transition yourself (leaving the company) most people will view it from their perspective and the impact these changes will have on their specific situation.  Expect to spend quite a bit of time supporting others through the change.  I encouraged people to not make any emotional decisions and to spend time thinking through their own path rather than relying on others to define it.
3. You will get cut out of the loop.  Understandably people will recognize that you are no longer the right person to engage for specific questions or problems.  Your inbox will start to dry up and your calendar will show a lot more free time.  It will be challenging some days to “keep busy” as you work through the transition.  In terms of lessons I learned, here is how I would fill your time:
1. Build a Transition Plan Early – as the end of your two week period approaches you will get more and more people stopping in to “chat” or looking for support.  It is critical that you spend the time writing out a transition plan (with your leader) to ensure an effective amount of time to close out any remaining activities.
2. Proactively Transition Work Now – For many it will be easy for them to avoid your transition by assuming that you are going to continue doing the work for the next two weeks.  As part of the transition plan in (A) you need to proactively start handing off the work so that any questions or concerns can be raised at the start of your two weeks rather than at the end.
3. Build in Time for Yourself – This is a big period of change and you will want to give yourself time to think about next steps and new opportunities.  Proactively block off time in your calendar to plan for the future.
4. Don’t forget the administrative tasks – Depending on how much time you have spent in the company there can be quite a bit of “baggage” you need to work through before leaving on the administrative side.  For example, old expenses that need to be submitted or approved, distribution lists or network drives that need to be assigned new owners, cost centers that need to be shifted to new people, etc.  Putting in some time now to clean up these elements will save your successor(s) a lot of extra time and effort.
4. Plan for your exit interviews - Most companies will have automatic programs in place to capture your feedback on exiting the company from simple electronic surveys to in-person interviews.  You do NOT need to perform an exit interview but there will be pressure for you share the reasons why you are leaving the organization.  In planning for your exit interview determine what you want topics you want to discuss and how you want to phrase them.  Your exit interview may be used in the future to drive change (with your name attached to it) so be sure to consider that in your responses.
5. Stay Positive – Leaving a company is a difficult decision and many people will view you as a person to discuss many of the negative experiences they have at the company.  Engaging in those conversations (other than to support them) doesn’t provide anyone much value especially if they just degenerate into venting sessions.  Stay positive throughout the transition and show that leadership from within.