Within 3 minutes of opening the “store”, a wonderful woman pulled her car over and got out with her son.  She didn’t even know what they were selling (the sign was hard to read from a car window) but just thought it was cool.  She asked her son to pick out his favorite piece of art and bought it for $1.  My children were thrilled with excitement.  I thanked her for helping out and she thought it was amazing what they were doing.  They should be encouraged as much as possible.

When we think about how communities should be supporting startups, Canadians immediately think of government and the role they should play.  Or, they think of the programs to help mentor founders.  Or, the facilities necessary to house all of these upcoming companies.

What we miss all too often is the role the broader community plays in being the first customer for a startup.  It is critical that someone risks trying a new product, spends a little more time giving feedback through the sales process, works through a product that isn’t quite done yet.  That is a role everyone can play in our community and communities around the world – we all need to buy products and services.

On that note, a very big thank you to the wonderful woman who was the first customer for my kids and made their day!

The fact is that when you create the big launch event, you will always see the subsequent big drop-off. Your market is not TechCrunch readers and Mark Zuckerberg does not want to eat vegetable tempura rolls with you. If you plan for massive scale out of the gate, you will face disappointment and a morale drain that can kill your company. And unlike a lot of other problems that you face in the startup world, learning this lesson the hard way can cost you your startup right at the outset.

The key element here is the inevitable connection that founders have between the product and their emotions.  It is inevitable because the founders have created something from nothing and you will always have a strong emotional connection when that happens.  However, it is important for founders to understand when and how their emotions are holding them back.

We all know that this is business and that we should be rationale about the work that we are doing.  The best entrepreneurs are those who leverage passion to incent themselves and their team to create something amazing.  However, it is the same set of emotions that discourages founders from launching their product.  It discourages them from getting the incredibly valuable feedback that comes from putting a product in front of customers.  It discourages them from taking the final step to show the world what they built because in their eyes it isn’t finished yet.  It will never be finished yet.  It will never be good enough.

When the founder gathers the necessary courage to make that leap, they look back questioning what took them so long to launch.  It isn’t as scary as you fear.  My advice is to remove the emotion from it and start small.  Don’t rely on the huge launch event for your product.  Just start rolling it out from alpha to beta to release and gather momentum as you go.  It will be easier on your emotions and increase your chances of success.

Here were my key take aways from the session:

• Credentialing – While many people think of online education primarily from the perspective of the delivery of content, one of the more critical elements provided by education institutions is credentialing. That is, providing a statement that the student who completed the course or program has mastered a certain level of skill in a focused area.  Online learning will need to create a similar model for capturing skill level of students and providing that assessment to stakeholders.  There are several challenges in this area and sadly not enough in the way of solutions.
• Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs as John called them) are creating some unique opportunities to explore how students use online learning tools.  There is gigantic interest in these courses (100K or more students in some courses wasn’t uncommon initially.  Even American Poetry has a 30K classroom).  However, the picture isn’t all positive.  There is an over 90% drop out rate with the biggest issue being the dynamic range of student skills in the class.  The scalable tools available to instructors also make it difficult to determine student skills and find the “sweet spot” for exams by challenging top students but not defeating struggling students.
• Top students are motivated by virtual recognition (e.g. badges) and there are several opportunities that should be explored on how best to create an effective student online learning community.
• Peer assessment can provide an improved perspective in online courses that is much more difficult in traditional classrooms.  Students can seamlessly rate the performance of the peers in their groups along with reviewing/rating submissions for assignments or projects from other teams in the classroom as well.  The ability to learn from the submissions of other teams provides a new perspective on the learning process.

Finally, John mentioned several areas that are ripe for further exploration and investment including adaptive learning, automatic diagnosis, improved large scale assessment tools, increased understanding of the effectiveness of social media/crowd sourcing, and identification of the source of submitted work.

Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier and Geoff Lewis at Grow 2012

Here are my notes from the Grow 2012 Conference in Vancouver last week.  It was one of the best conferences I have attended with top calibre presentations and amazing people at the networking events.

Debbie Landa

Great companies can be found outside the valley. But it is hard. Takes luck and sacrifice.  Debbie loves serendipity even if curated through events.  You need to be proactive and hunt. Never give up. Share your ideas with the world and challenge yourself. Think bigger and change the world!

Catalina Briceno from CMF

Launched a research paper today on crowd funding that sounds worth reading.  Check out their webpage for more information,

Sam Zaid – Getaround

A talk on the future of personal mobility and why we are experiencing a new tectonics shift.  His story starts at singularity university.  Car over population where you buy a car and only use it for less than an hour per day. Get around allows you to rent out your car.

Three things made this company possible. First is the sharing economy. Second is ubiquitous connectivity. Third is urbanization. Connected cars create new opportunities.

Adam Chapnick – indiegogo 

Harnessing the crowd and sharing insights from indiegogo. Largest open crowd funding website from anywhere to anyone. Now one of 540 sites who provide crowd funding. Recently raised 15mm series A.

Learning 1 – Make a big business plan and then throw it away.

Constraints on the campaign page separates good from bad companies. Forces you to clearly show why you should get the funding with the benefits etc.  People will fund someone who can execute.

Learning 2 – There are no elves

Traction comes from action. You need to show people that you can deliver. Execution kills. Proof of concept prototypes work really well. Serial campaigns do surprisingly well which is weird given that they are going to the well multiple times. First campaign completion shows people that they bet on a winner and they want to re-invest.

Learning 3 – People don’t fund projects but rather love to fund people

Video campaigns raised 122% more than non-video campaigns. People are engaging with people so be personal. Detailed personal bios and success anecdotes. A willingness to persist beyond reason and being commited is a real showcase.

Learning 4 – The more you update the more you raise

Social proof gives you more sharing which gives you repeat funding. Updates and sharing with investors or funders is critical to success .  Update with any good news frequently. This focuses all of your daily actions to ensure that you had something to report that moved things in the right direction by the next report. Example is 31 updates or more on indiegogo you make 4x the amount of money. They will likely even give you money again!

Learning 5 – Deadlines give life

Forces you to quickly move and show willingness to fail but not doomed to fail.

Learning 6 – Say what you must say before they click away

Matt Mickiewicz – 99 designs 

Examples of companies who have disrupted industries Square, SecondMarket, airbnb, iStockPhoto, Uber,  plentyoffish, etc. Disruption creates backlash. Uber is a great example with civic backlash. Airbnb is getting challenges about taxes and short term rentals. People who are invested in the status quo they will lash out hoping things will change the same.

99 designs has paid out 39 million to designers. 158,000 design contents run to date.  Dozens of designer meetups.

How do you create disruption?  Answer these questions.

• What services or processes are fundamentally broken?
• What type of assets have no liquidity and need a market place to connect buyers and sellers?
• How can you create an offering that is 10x or 100x better than the alternatives?
• What services could be provided 90% cheaper and provided to a much wider audience?
• What services are expensive today that could be offered for free or with different mechanics for monetization?

The best people to disrupt an industry are outsiders.

Panel – The Role that Venture Capital Plays in Transforming Business

Jeff Clavier, Managing Partner SoftTech VC

Discussion of Dave’s recent article about the changes in VC. VCs can no longer go to LPs with a single strategy and invest cash for 5 yrs because the world is changing too quickly. So raising large funds to avoid being locked into a single strategy or raising smaller funds.

Large numbers of deals won’t insulate you from risk. Anyone can find 200 companies to invest in. You need good processes and deal flow

Segmenting into pre-traction investing and post-traction investing. For post traction investment you need to be really good at picking winners.

Ethan believes it is crazy to overlook international investment right now. Going to see more and more of it. But you need to understand the local signs and signals to stay out of trouble.

Clavier likes international investment but staying inside markets they understand right now. But their portfolio companies invest internationally.

McClure says invest in what you know so if you want to invest international then get to know it well. Focus for them continues to be Brazil, Mexico and India. Silicon Valley investors have an advantage internationally because of their close proximity to top platforms like Google, Facebook etc especially when relative to local investors.  They can leverage their connections to help portfolio companies located outside of the USA.

You have to invest in resources on the ground to understand the culture, language, etc. Clavier mentions to removal of some issues that now makes it easier for them to invest in Canada .

McClure continuing to talk about the value of Angellist.  They have actually built an internal tool that captures data from angellist, LinkedIn etc to help create a full dashboard. More focused on competing with business schools than other VCs. Pointing at business schools as a huge area that hasn’t been disrupted.

Senia Rapisarda – BDC

Retrospective on Canadian VC. Venture capital is complex topic in a complex world. Biggest concern – complete lack of corporate investment in venture capital. This is very severe in Canada and problematic because they can be good customers and good investors.

Over $1B in exits last year with new breed of companies who are changing VC. Claims there are similarities between moneyball and Canadian companies.  Lots of orgs who are doing things differently including Velocity with limited resources.

David Cancel – Hubspot

Providing lessons learned over the past 16 years and various startups. Market timing has been an issue for his companies especially being too early. Started learning that the market demand for the idea was as important as the idea itself.

Key take away – finding fit is really hard. Building is the hardest part because you can waste so much time and money. But you don’t need a product to get product market fit. Hubspot didn’t really have a product for the first several years because they have amazing marketing and sales execution.

Julia Hartz – eventbrite

People make the company great. It is easy to understand and hard to get right but worth the effort. In the middle of a talent war right now. Eventbrite has recruited 100 people in the last year because of their focus on culture. Attrition rate is 5% compared to regional average of 17%.

Needed to triple company size to 100 from 30 based on funding from Sequoia. The culture tenets and brand tenets are uniquely linked. Enable and empower the team to create their own culture to ensure it was sustainable. Everyone should feel ownership for the culture to ensure they will protect it. Favorite element was that anyone in the company could share their skills to teach others through Brightcamps. Allow people to bring their passions from outside the office into the office. Biking, rock climbing, etc. Annual talent show that unites the team.

Big question – have they focused on happiness at the expense of performance?

So they added a new layer to their culture  with a lightweight toolset to manage goals for teams. No one is forced to do something a specific way but rather to execute on common goals. Forcing function to ensure that the company has crystal clear goals. Malcolm Gladwell comment about companies exceeding 150 people causes lost efficiency and intimacy.

Build trust, confidence and ownership in your team.

Brian Wong – kiip and Mikkel Svane – zendesk

Discussion going from outsider to insider in Silicon Valley.

Mikkel moved the company from Copenhagen to improve chances of raising money and the need for a startup culture. Started out pitching VCs in the USA and that ultimately caused them to move over because they were spending so much time. At the early stage the founder dynamics are so critical to ensure you can trust each other for a long period of time.

For immigration you need to find an amazing lawyer since they hold the destiny of you and your company in their hands. Find someone you trust.

Marc Ruxin – Tastemakerx

The web still needs a taste graph. Build a business that you are personally passionate about. Taste matters in an increasingly connected world where everything everywhere looks the same. Make your own taste because it defines who you are. Taste is always evolving and never stops. It also applies to everything. Tons of people care about the same things that you do. Now we have a graph to connect like mindedness but we still need better filters.

Jeremy Toeman – Dijit Media

How mobility is creating opportunity in the TV industry. The world is extremely mobile and 38% of households have a DVR.  The current trend is towards extreme personalization where we are the one outlier.

In TV today you need to not only get on the air but also engage the audience and keep them.

Unbelievable rate of change in tv industry. But people don’t change. TV is not work. TV is about escape and not just about entertainment.  TV is also not dead yet. TV advertising was up last year.

Two things you need to know:

• Old rich white guys are in control. You cannot get around this.
• It is big.  500B per year.  Big!

You need to understand how the money flows. Get a very good understanding of how the money flows because it is the lifeblood of TV. Understand the deals that are being made. What do they mean? What about lock outs?  Critical to understand rights too.

Fail case study – HBO doesn’t go direct. They made 4B last year. No customer support, etc.

You can also fail by paddling upstream. Fail by thinking they are just dinosaurs. Fail by misunderstanding consumers. For example, smart TVs are not an escape! Cord cutting is not an escape.  TVs are not phones.

Important trends include binge viewing, YouTube channels, turf wars (e.g. no AMC on Dish Network), TV Everywhere, the iPad is a TV set, Apple TV is coming, TV is social but how.  Social TV does not equal live tweeting.

You will win by picking the right part of the money flow and disrupt it.

Eric Koger – ModCloth

Online only retailer which is vintage inspired. Second fastest growing company in US.

Customers want to be inspired when they shop. Converging trends: Mobile, social, and gamification.

How do you capture their attention? How do you convert new customers? How do you reduce impact of copycats? The answer is to be community centric.  Community evangelism gets them noticed, creates loyalty, has exclusive merchandise.

Curation is an important element of the value provided (similar comments to Mark earlier about Tastemakers). Remember that everything placed on the website is content including supporting material. Leverage user generated photos too. Community voting, community designers, and community contests. Showcase employees in their creative which resonates really well with the community.

Very cool story about starting the company. Used crowd sourcing on the samples to pick which designs are going to be the hits. Created their own scoring system to take all of the data to determine which products are the best choice. Using data driven decision making combined with crowd sourcing but also needed tools to analyze qualitative feedback that can and should influence decisions too (like comments).

Data will play a bigger role in the fashion industry in the future. Content will play a larger role than labels in the future. We are going to see continued fragmentation of the market because consumer tastes are very fragmented. Online markets can be really meaningful compared to local markets.

West Stringfellow – PayPal

Innovating to get shit done.

PayPal wanted to shift from being the best way to pay online to being the best everywhere. Innovation is a long term investment and hyper growth is an anomaly. Fear kills innovation. Never outsource your innovation.

From search to personalization

Mark Johnson – CEO Zite

Louis Gump – CNN

Mark Silva – Anthem Worldwide

Talking about the Zite acquisition. Approached for acquisition right after launch while trying to raise a series A. Most important thing was passion about the product so wanted the acquisition to ensure the product would excel inside CNN. Need to ask more than just the financial questions as part of the acquisition.

CNN also uniquely structured the acquisition. Listing off the things they cared about the most. Role for the CEO. Set it up as a highly autonomous group with Mark as the remaining CEO. Mark doesn’t even report to Louis. They have a quarterly meeting to report on what they have done and what they will do. Funny note that since the person who leads CNN is the President of the company Mark is the only CEO at CNN. Amazing insight into how CNN was able to avoid its big company issues in trying to change that aspect.

Don’t rely on promises – paper it.

The Future of the Cloud

Dan Levin – COO box.net

How do you understand the stages that businesses go through and kick ass in each of those stages? Going to talk about the “teenage” stage.

How do you separate yourself from the pack in a crowded market?

One theory – if you build an amazing product then users will come. Examples – Google. But it doesn’t happen very often. Building a great product isn’t usually enough.

TiVo vs replaytv is a good example. Need a killer product at least comparable to competitors.

Business model is a critical distinction. Box uses freemium. But the biggest thing was they created the perception they had momentum and were the market leader. They then made that perception a reality.

Press loves a David vs goliath story. So, they said they were like SharePoint indicating they were in the same league even if not true. Made t-shirts that bashed SharePoint. Created Microsoft sharepoo campaign which took off. Continued to pick fights with Microsoft including billboards.

Next they leveraged their strengths. Their unfair weapon is Aaron Levie as a fantastic speaker. They put him everywhere. Built an aura they were ahead of everyone else in their space. They threw their own conference and got enough high quality speakers to convince people it was a happening event. Leveraged business development relationships to get the speakers and to hold the conference at HP.

Then just crushed their enemies. Headlines say the same things now but it is true now. Not just perception.

The secret is that it never ends. You always have to be pushing!

Sheridan Jones – Kinect for Windows

Kinect is the fastest selling consumer device in the world in the first 60 days. What would happen if they released Kinect for windows? Key usage scenarios are therapy, healthcare, retail and training

Mitch Joel

Just finished writing his 2nd book called ctrl alt del coming out next year. Couldn’t figure out in his startup how they could get people to give a shit. Started using blogging as a way to build social proof. Worked but also want to keep the spirit of being a startup. The majority of brands cannot match some of the advantages of startups.

There is a massive world of difference between paid advertising and marketing. You need to embrace marketing and direct relationships. Massive brands do not have a culture of establishing direct relationships. You need to create direct relationships. This is more than just Twitter and Facebook likes.

Think from the perspective of the consumer – what do I need from the relationship? In the race for likes Facebook really owns the direct relationship with the customer. However, the majority of monetization models rely on direct customer relationships.

Most corporates have never heard of Kickstarter.  Yet, Kickstarter for Mitch is the coolest thing he has seen on the web since google. A small company can create hundreds of thousands of dollars of relationships in a couple of days. The chasm between having your idea and bringing to life is massive. The odds are very much against you. Kickstarter fundamentally implodes the chasm.

What can we do we every single day to build direct relationships? Don’t think about what you can do to interrupt users. Start thinking about what utility you can create for your brand and company. There is a new real estate in town.  It is the home screen of your phone. How many of you would say that your product is important enough to be on a users home screen?

Charmin has a sit or squat app that provides clean bathrooms. It works well and provides tremendous utility. Now he has a huge brand affinity with Charmin without them offering coupons etc.

One of the best talks of the event.

Stowe Boyd – What will matter in the future?

Primarily working on social tools. Speculative design not a science or an art. Using design thinking to attack the future differently.

“Don’t think safe. Think dangerous.”

Reject the official future. Whatever the web touches it consumes. But the web will continue to disrupt. Look farther afield than the traditional concepts. New TV as an example.

The world is changing from solid to liquid. From slow to fast.  Political gridlock and chaos in the USA. Can we cut out the middle man in democracy? Pirate party in Europe and their liquid feedback is a great idea and indicator of future change.

“Technology is everything invented after you turn 13.” Jamais Cascio

40% of energy is spent in households cooking food. Is anyone doing anything inventive in cooking food? No.  40% of food consumed in Shanghai each day is grown within the city. We haven’t stopped growing tomatoes in California and shipping to NYC. We will have to stop because of drought.

“The frontiers of the future will be the ruins of the unsustainable” Bruce Sterling

3D printers are a huge opportunity.

“The central economic imperative of the new economy is to amplify relationships” Kevin Kelly

Almost 50 percent of people in advanced economies live alone. But they are more social and more willing to help other people. What about tools to help these people connect?  How about more connected?

You cannot know the future but you can play around with models to think about what he future could be. The future isn’t a map.

Graham Hill – Treehugger.com

Living his life with less. Lifeedited.com

In the 50s the average house size is 1000 sq ft. Now 2500 and with smaller family sizes. We have 3x the space as before.  We have less happiness, more debt and more stuff. If we apply smart design we can make less equal more.  Less stuff and less space is a smaller footprint, more money, and more happiness.

“Editing is the skill of the century.”

Worked with jovoto.com to crowd source the design of a 400 sq ft apartment. Got 300 responses and it looks awesome.

3 principles of life editing

1. Edit ruthlessly
2. Right size your stuff
3. Go multifunctional

Product library is a concept for the future. Stuff you can access but don’t own.

How can you apply this to business?

1. Focus your efforts.
2. Reduce options and product lines to make it easier for customers.
3. Understand your core competencies. Focus on your core and outsource the rest. Enables you to be more lean.

How might we apply this personally?

1. Remove yourself from the state of constant alarm. How quickly do we really need to respond?  Every couple of hours?   Who is the boss?  You or your email?!? Turn off all of your notifications and determine minimal times to check emails. Use Google voice to transcribe your voicemail.
2. Love your family, friends etc. be present especially with your kids. Minimize number of contacts for IM.
3. Make a daily plan and get one thing done every single day no matter what. Put the big rocks in your life in first.
4. News is mostly noise. It tends to be depressing and you don’t need it. Read books and bigger picture items.
5. Value the inbetween time.  Smartphones have ruined the in between time. Argues these are recharge times to get perspective on your life.
6. Own it. Time is precious. So design your own life and set parameters around your life that matter. Focus on having better relationships. Done right less truly can become more.

Michael Baum – Chasing Big Ideas

What is a big idea?

Spent tons of time on research. 3 founders, recorded all conversations they had, 5 prototypes, and a lot of insights. Met with 60 customers.

The simple solution is that people are dealing with a big data problem. Avalanche of machine data was coming and human cost was increasing to deal with all of the details and data. People were trying to solve this problem using old techniques. So placed a search box on top of all of the data. Customers described it as a magical experience.

Build an A team

Don’t use recruiters. Good enough is not good enough. Every person you add to the team needs to be a rock star. And rock stars know other rock stars. The average hiring mistake costs about 500k and 50% of hires are mistakes. Great recruiters make less than 10 percent mistakes.  Make employees your recruiters.  Also great to have people with friends in the company. How does your A team work? Don’t step in to do their job for them.

Thinks that open source as a business model is really tough to make money. Doesn’t like the support and maintenance angle for generating revenue. Created a free download and then ask for money as an upgrade. Sales process becomes less sales and more consultative leading to faster and bigger sales

Don’t charge a ton of money upfront but tie to a metric to generate licensing revenue. Encourage you to really think about your business model. Innovative business models are as important as the product.

Completely ignore competitors. Drove them crazy. Didn’t even mention them.

Blow things up. Move people around in the company a lot. Not just their roles but also their location. Overhearing conversations puts everyone in touch with customers. Don’t let your company fall into a rut.

“Entrepreneurs are never satisfied, because fulfillment comes from participation, rather than reaching a fixed destination.  Entrepreneurship is not a job, nor even a calling but a hunger to change the world.”

Alastair Croll – Solve for Interesting

Your brain is 2.5 percent of your body but it uses 20 percent of body energy. Built to think but writes checks your body cannot cash. We have spent the past 100k years fighting friction with thrust. In thrust bigger is better. But efficiency drives consumption.

Today’s server is yesterday’s data center.  Efficiency drives consumption. Software eats everything. Focus on lube not thrust. Instead reduce the friction in the market. Abundance not scarcity. Scarcity has value but so does abundance. Frictionless supply means there is an endless demand.

Aim, fire and then ready! Bullets are free!

Everything is an experiment.

1. Taxis still using medallions in NYC. The taxi world uses a thrust based model. Über came along and changed the world by reducing friction for customers and drivers.
2. Khan Academy – changed broadcast model to bring the best teacher to the classroom. Do the work at home and bring it to school.
3. Manufacturing – what happens when 3D printers go main stream? What happens when metal lathes show up in every Canadian tire to make replacement parts on the spot?

The digital age allows us to reduce friction, build for the day friction is gone.

Bit.ly/LeanFriction

Lane Becker – make more luck

Really good talk. Worth reading the book.  I didn’t manage to catch all of the notes (mainly because I was too busy listening!)

Cindy Gallop

Your startup has to flow out of your passion. You have to feel emotional because you pitch 15 million times so you better enjoy it. You have to enjoy it every time. You have to be emotional because you have to have passion when everyone thinks you are out of your mind. You need to design emotion into your startup

Brought together corporate good intentions and human good intentions for shared profit and success. Cindy created  ”Ifwerantheworld” which is emotional software to synthesize psychology and technology.

The success of your startup also depends on how it makes them feel about themselves when they use it or do it. Consider a more balanced gender approach to help achieve this fusion. Your business model can be anything you want it to be just like your business can be anything you want. Ask yourself how you want to make money

The future is not advertising units but rather advertising products. Mobile won’t be about delivering ads. It will be about delivering value. For example the Charmin concept that Mitch Joel mentioned earlier. (she gave a different example but his is better).

Hardcore porn has become the sex education for the real world. Created a website to talk about real world and comparing to porn (makelovenotporn.com). She is turning this into its own social platform in a way that no one else has accomplished. She cares about how money works because of the challenges of porn. Check out Gumroad or Stripe (Stripe recently launched in Canada!)

Rethink how you want to make money because money is changing.

Discomfort is an asset. It comes when you work with people who are different from, think differently, etc. Women are the majority on social networks, the majority of shoppers, etc. you need a female perspective if you want to own the future. Making change starts with yourself. It starts with how you feel about yourself.

Amazing talk!

That was the end of Day 2! Overall, a great conference.  I will definitely head back next year!

Chris Shipley 

Now is an awesome time to start a business. It is now cool to be an entrepreneur. Her favorite incubator program is Startup Chile to spread startup fever like a flu. Yet Chris is still worried. We might be doing something that is bad for entrepreneurship. It is hard work to build a business. Long hours, little sleep, etc. Even with all of these resources it is still really hard.

“Building an app is not building a business.”

“Winning a business plan competition is not building a business.”

Entrepreneurs create companies built to last. Building the company itself is the area of value. So do something that matters.  Build a business worthy of your time and the sacrifices you are making. Build something of sustaining value

Dave McClure

Shared a pitch practice game called half baked where you sit around in a circle to practice pitching. One person says a word then another person says a second and the third person pitches the blank blank .com business.

Take risk early with your business. Most people are afraid they will fail but you should be more scared of no one ever noticing you.  500 startups has invested in over 300 companies in the past two years and around 9 companies in Canada.

Dave recommends read Geoffrey Miller – the mating mind and spent.  Spent is about applying basic emotions to marketing. Another recommended book was Influence by Cialdini.

You should have a good time trying to fail so do something you care about.  You also have nothing to lose when you first start so take risk early. Playing it safe equals death as you won’t learn much and you won’t get noticed. Hate is a good signal too. If no one cares then you have nothing to iterate around.  So, “stand for something!” and describe in a single word what you stand for.

Tap into humanity. Fear, sex, power, family and anger.  Be a hero, be a villain.  Less is more.  Use one powerful image, 3 powerful words or a few sentences,  30 second meaningful video.  If/when it works then double down.  Be yourself but be your super self. Passion starts from a place you are familiar with. Be authentic and comfortable. Find an emotion you can sustain to carry you through the tough times.

Isaac Saldana – SendGrid

Evolution or revolution- where is the best place to start?

Ask yourself these questions to uncover the answers.

Why do you want a startup? Who am I? What skills do I have? Would I want to run a company like Apple? Facebook? Walmart?

I wanted to share my rough notes from the conference for those who weren’t able to attend or for those who attended and want a refresher.  There were two tracks at the event – Inspiration and Execution.  I primarily spent my time in the Inspiration track.

Bjorne Herrmann – Startup Genome

The majority of companies are failing because of self destruction.  How can we reduce the failure rate of startups in a scalable way? Extreme uncertainty is the biggest challenge.

The problem – premature scaling where startups efficiently execute the unnecessary. To solve it you need to learn faster and perform proper customer discovery. When teams are more focused on product development than customer development this should be a red flag

Stephan Ouaknine

Going after clean tech!

The problem – resources on the planet are going down and the population is rising quickly. Climate change is also playing a role.  3% of energy comes from renewable sources.

Solution – create a clean tech revolution by raising a billion dollar fund to use tech more effectively to bring down costs and create new opportunities. Also working from a market pull perspective. Energy markets are monopolistic and regional. People should be able to buy energy directly.  The idea being they can provide the sales and customers. So far they have been ridiculed.

What are you doing to get ridiculed tomorrow?

Dan Martell – Motivation Trumps Knowledge

Motivation is everything!  When you become responsible for others you won’t feel like you can screw up. Just do it. Don’t worry about not knowing everything when you get started.

Dan told one of the best stories I have ever heard. Story about his brother Pierre Martell and his home building business.

Jon Gosier – changing government through data

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads” Jeff Hammerbacher

Open data movement is incredibly important. Helps to drive impact and better informed decisions. Another example is crowd sourcing.  Increasingly popular way for governments to work with people. Allow people to vote on items. Citizen reporting is also increasing in popularity.  He cited neighbour land and crime reporting as recent examples.

Predictive technology (for example flow minder) to predict what events might happen in the future. Social media monitoring solutions are being repurposed by large companies like the Red Cross to monitor in a new way of operations center.

Complexity science is a new field being created. Check out the vibrant data project as an example.

Paul Kedrofsky and Howard Lindzon

Howard didn’t make it live (passport expired) so joined by Skype. Do we need more wantrepreneurs?

Howard – We totally need more entrepreneurs. Didn’t want to get off topic defining wantrepreneurs.  Likens entrepreneurs to stock trading in 1999 where everyone wanted to try their hand at it. Not everyone will be good at it. Dig deep – do you really want to do it?

Paul – thinks it is elitist crap and naive of us to think we know who can effectively solve problems. Kauffman data shows that per capita entrepreneur data is decreasing not increasing.  Capitalism operates on waste. Paul wishes more implausible pitches to assure him that too much is a good idea.  Everyone should take a shot at it!

Howard acquiesced at this point based on Paul’s argument.

Paul – If there aren’t too many wantrepreneurs then what are there too many of?  Recommendation is to do away with university based business entrepreneurship programs.   This comment comes from Kauffman research that as entrepreneurship programs are introduced it reduces the number of entrepreneurs. [Further discussion after revealed additional detail from Paul.  Kauffman Foundation research shows that their funding of university business entrepreneurship programs does not produce additional numbers of entrepreneurs.  In fact, funding of technology focused (engineering) programs seems to be where Kauffman is showing the most traction in creating sustainable businesses within university settings.  Paul promised to send a copy of a graph showcasing this effect and I will share it.]

Paul – Andreeson Horowitz has 82 people to create a new model to deal with this mess of only 8 companies per year who matter. Create a studio in house to help them solve these problems. Will it work? Don’t know. But think about the generation of entrepreneurs who are getting the best education in the world. It is more than just getting more people in the funnel but reducing the failure rate for companies when in the funnel

Need to think bigger on how best to build entrepreneurs.  Systems in place to leverage knowledge and expertise. Again comes back to connecting people. Concerns about scalability of the new systems being created like YC and Andreeson.

Way too many accelerators.  Good people gravitate to good people. More competitive people force you to step up your game.

Paul’s suggestion for the biggest policy change to help entrepreneurship is the concept of the Startup visa.  Foreign students who study in the USA would be given a visa to stay in the country for a year or two if they decide to start their own business.  This is also based on Kauffman research.

Randy Smerik – crowd funding

It’s all about the movement of money. Entrepreneurs want to use money but investors want to see it “do something”. What is it they want done with that money?

Making a platform for making it more efficient to obtain money. Based on who you know etc.  Angelist makes it easier to reach these people.  You need to know what people want when they give you money.

Most common reasons are:

1. Be part of something. Fun passion and status.

2. Products and goods (e.g. Kickstarter)

3. Philanthropy – “Give back” (eg. Kiva)

4. Interest (%)

5. Equity

RocketHub and ArtistShare are the oldest forms of crowd sourcing.

For lending sites LendingClub.com and Prosper.com

Two primary camps for equity is either accredited investor or non-accredited investors. Capital marketplaces like Angelist or localstake.

The crowdfunding dream is to provide an equity offering (with real ownership) as a “general solicitation” to make the equity available to a large group of people including non-accredited investors.  This dream has been illegal in the USA since 1933. However, the JOBS act was approved in April but still with the SEC till December. Very revolutionary to relax restrictions in this type of environment.

How?  Beer made this all happen!  What a very cool story. Buyabeercompany.com story.

Two elements of jobs act

IPO on-ramp to make it easier for emerging growth companies (less than 1b  in revenue) you can remove some of the restrictions. Such as a confidential pre-review, relaxing the quiet period, etc. likely to see more public companies now.

Crowd funding

Raise up to 1m in a 12 month period where you use an intermediary platform to help you with the legalities.  If income/net worth less than 100k you can invest 2k or 5%. If over 100k you can invest 10%. If accredited no limits.

The Good News with Equity Crowdfunding

• Entrepreneurs need access to money and here is another way to get up to $1M
• Investors gain visibility to lots of opportunities
• Good for companies not traditionally targeted by VCs
• Good for folks in geographies without willing investors
• Could be better capitalization structure than having lots of “custom” friends and family and angel deals
• Potential “pipeline” for VCs

Potential comes from the fact that the details are not finalized.  However, Randy recommends using Kickstarter for products and goods. Or use capital marketplaces like Angelist to find accredited investors.

Mark Skapinker

Good talk about the beginning of winfax and how they built a strong Canadian tech company.  Some solid lessons learned and his recommendations are consistent with what we are telling teams in our space today.

Craig Walker and Gary Pudles

Spending time talking about selling his companies to Yahoo and Google. Very weird transition when moving from your own company to being part of a larger company. Truly go from turning on a dime to not being able to do that at all.

That is the end of Day 1.  Day 2 notes are available in this post.

 Winner of the elevator pitches

Winner of the teens’ pick

Winner of the grandmothers’ pick

Founder Fuel prize

Winner of the $50,000 Convertible Note

Openera and XYZ Interactive were finalists for the big prize!

I was reading Christine’s blog post about getting plugged into the startup community.  Her article was focused on Silicon Valley but I encourage anyone in the local startup community to read it as many of her points are applicable to any community.  Based on her article, I wanted to add some of my tips for people in Kitchener-Waterloo who are interested in getting plugged into the local startup community.

You need to visit!  Unlike most startup communities, the KW startup community is physically concentrated around the Accelerator-Centre/Research and Technology Park in Waterloo or the Communitech Hub in Kitchener.  Both facilities have great networking areas that you can simply drop into and visit with people.  Don’t be shy!

Attend the networking events! There are literally networking events going on every week that provide a great opportunity for you to meet people in the local startup community.  For example, the KWB2B meetup was held in the VeloCity Garage tonight.  Startup Drinks, moBeers, and networking events hosted by Communitech are great ones to check out.

Ask how you can help! Too many people approach the startup community looking for how it will benefit them.  If you are seriously interested in getting plugged in offer to help.  You never know where the offer will take you but every single entrepreneur can use help and your skills/knowledge/connections could be exactly what makes the big breakout possible for that company.  We are always looking for great people to mentor teams in our VeloCity programs.

Leverage your big company!  Many of the large companies in the region have a physical presence in the Communitech Hub (RIM, OpenText, University of Waterloo, etc).  So, why aren’t you down working at the Communitech Hub for the day?  I know that many on my former Developer Relations team at RIM love coming down to the Hub and meeting developers in the local startup community.  Whether you are in sales, marketing, or R&D there are always great opportunities to spend a day away from your desk at the office.

Use your network! It won’t take very long to find someone in your close network who is either at a startup or works closely with startups.  Reach out and ask to buy them a coffee (or tea or pepsi or whatever) as a great way to learn more about the startup community.

I would love to hear your tips and feedback on how best to get plugged into the KW region startup community.

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

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.