Billions With Zero Knowledge - Austin Hill, Entrepreneur & Angel Investor

I loved this. It comes at a great time and certainly mirrors my world view & perspective on entrepreneurship.

(found via the great folks at BootupLabs)

On Wed 20 May 2009. [6] Comments

I often get asked by students about how to be an entrepreneur or what courses to take to get into startup life.   I won’t dip my toe into the murky pool that is our education system and its shortcomings in educating of the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Students today are graduating into an environment where jobs are scarce. This advice delivered yesterday by President Obama in his commencement speech at Arizona State University was worthwhile advice for any student of life.

I particularly enjoyed his focus on service to society and the role of entrepreneurs to improve the lives of those around them through innovation.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The full text of his speech can be found here.

On Thu 14 May 2009. [2] Comments

Last month while in the Valley for the Game Developers Conference I dropped in to attend Dave McClure’s Startup2Startup dinner.   It’s a great gathering of entrepreneurs and investors.  Dave brings in a speaker each month to help share expertise among the attending startups.

The most recent Startup2Startup held last evening featured Steve Blank & Eric Reis.

Steve is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of dot.com success story E.piphany.  His book, 4 Steps to Epiphany - Successfull Strategies for Products that Win on Customer Development & Product Strategies is a great resource for anyone thinking about building successful products.

Eric Reis is also a serial entrepreneur and the advocate of the lean startup model.  Eric’s blog Startup Lessons Learned should be required reading for any entrepreneur (and frankly at all Engineering & computer science Universities who in Canada do a piss poor job of teaching our graduates anything about building successful products).

Here is the talk from last evening.

Dave continues to be a mitzva machine (Mr. Karma generator) by sharing all the Startup2Startup videos online & broadcasting the event publicly.  (Not the first from Dave, which also includes Startonomics, Pirate Metrics for Startups).

I’ve learned a lot from watching Dave.  In speaking with him recently, I’m going to be copying some of his examples for events & initiatives we do to support the Canadian entrepreneurial technology scene.

One of the reasons I am a firm believer that it is one of the best times to be an entrepreneur is the incredible amount of freely accessible learning tools at our disposal.  When I started my career as an entrepeneur (very early in life) I had to go to the public library to find articles in Byte Magazine that gave me any insight into the early stories of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mitch Kapor and how they started their companies.

There was no attention by the regular business press, no Internet to search, no podcasts, online video or Slideshare to get good information.

It wasn’t until after my first few failures and one success in 1996 that I began to see books written about the experiences of technology entrepreneurs with stories about raising venture capital and the way different companies organized things like product marketing, product management.   (Jerry Kaplan’s Startup a Silicon Valley Story was one of the first books of this type).

Any aspiring entrepreneur now has the world of rescources, learning, advisors, blogs and rich information on every aspect of building a company waiting on the other side of the browser.  If you have a computer, broadband and an iPod you can literally earn an MBA in startup history, theory & take advantage of more then a billion dollars of mistakes & lessons paid for by other entrepreneurs who are now willing to share what they learned.   There is no replacement for hands on experience but most of the entrepreneurs I coach run into the same problems and the answers to how to avoid them are often already out there.

For those interested, Eric Reis is doing an O’Reilly Webcast on How to Build a Lean Startup - A Step by Step Guide Philosophy at 1pm EST today (May 1, 2009). It’s a free webcast, but requires pre-registration.

On Fri 1 May 2009. [2] Comments

Congratulations to my brother Hamnett, father Hammie & the entire team at Radialpoint. Yesterday they publicly announced that they completed the acquisition of Toronto based Casero.

Here are some interesting facts from the press release,

• With the acquisition of Casero Radialpoint’s customer base includes 20 leading ISPs worldwide with direct access to more than 50 million subscribers. Radialpoint’s addressable subscriber base now includes one in every three broadband connected homes in North America and Western Europe.
• Radialpoint has grown rapidly over the past five years, from 75 to 250 employees, while experiencing an average annual revenue growth rate of 40 percent.
• This year the company is estimating 50 percent annual revenue growth over the previous fiscal year and expects to exceed the $100 million mark in annual revenue within the next two years.
• Radialpoint has been profitable and cash flow positive since 2004, and projects an estimated EBITDA growth rate of 40 percent this year.

It’s been awhile since I wrote about the incredible continued growth at Radialpoint, but if you haven’t been tracking the company here are some other recent events that have occurred,

• In September 2008 (actually a week or so before the economic crash) the company raised $98 million from the private equity firm TA Associates (our friend & Akoha investor John Meeks joined the Radialpoint board)
• In January 2009 Radialpoint acquired Boston based HiWired an award winning PC Support solution.

This is the latest in a series of transactions that Radialpoint has completed becoming one of the fastest growing & largest software companies in Canada.

This latest transaction is also interesting for the following reasons,

• Casero was founded, financed & run by Canadian serial entrepreneurs Kevin Kimsa & Paul Atkinson.  This is a great deal for them (congratulations to the entire Casero team).  I’m pleased to see Paul joining the board of Radialpoint and the company staying in the hands of a Canadian technology company instead of being sold to a foreign company.
• Kevin & Paul have had a number of startups in Canada and have also been angel investors & coaches for entrepreneurs at Universities such as Waterloo.
• Casero was funded in part by Canadian VCs including ArgoGlobal Capital a fund that Canadian serial entrepreneur, angel investor & venture fund operator Charles Sirois helped establish.

This is one of the best examples of our serial entrepreneurs (from multiple generations of tech & Internet successess in Canada), VCs and fast growing Canadian companies working together to create large Canadian based market leaders.

There have been a lot of discussions on the Canadian startup blogs recently about promoting Canadian success stories & the role of our serial entrepreneurs, angel invesetors and VCs working together to create an ecosystem of success.   (See Rick Segals recent run of great Canadian tech posts (1, 2, 3, 4); Chris Arsenault’s CVCA post on our industry being alive & kicking, Startup North’s great coverage of Incubators & Ignition and the debates about the problems with our VC industry and MontrealTechWatch’s recent coverage of the increases in Quebec provincial support of the VC industry and local startup incubators)

I continue to see incredible signs of success at every level of Canada’s technology ecosystem.  There are many problems with the global economy, the Canadian innovation sector - but as Radialpoint continues to show, there is a lot of exciting success stories occuring in our own backyard as well.

Radialpoint is just one example - but it happens to be one I’m very familiar with and couldn’t be prouder to be associated with.

On Wed 22 Apr 2009. [7] Comments

I love Twitter and am fascinated by the ecosystem that Evan, Biz and the team at Twitter have created around the popular microblogging service.  While many people on the sidelines are obsessed with when Twitter will make money, I see nothing but great opportunities ahead for the Twitter team.  (Disclosure: I’m an investor in Identi.ca - an open source microblogging service.)

Twitter is also undeniably the hottest startup out there today. It’s got plenty of money, and more mainstream press than any startup has received in a very, very long time. The times I’ve met Evan I’ve been impressed with his ability to stay out of the echo chamber that surrounds the popular service (As an entrepreneur Evan’s got class).

My affection for Twitter is also the source of my concerns for the Twitter team as I saw the signs of fail whales to come on their recruiting page.

Let me explain.  During the last Internet boom & crash I was the CEO of Zero-Knowledge Systems, a company that was also a media darling with tons of money and attention to go with it.   Like Twitter we defied the trends in the industry when we raised $22 million at record valuations nine months after the dot com crash had begun to sweep through the tech industry.   (This was after having just raised $25 million the year before. Unlike Twitter we did not have a successful product and it took us a number of years to turn the company into the success it is today.)

Throughout 1998-2002 we had employees from around the world desperately trying to join the company to be part of our dot.com dream.  One of the many mistakes we made was hiring too quickly as our staff rolls grew to over 200 people.

The Problems with Twitter’s Recruiting Drive

Twitter no doubt needs to hire.  Here’s Twitter’s career site: http://twitter.com/jobs

Twitter has almost 15 open positions listed which according to reported numbers would be a 35% increase in their current headcount.

Despite their ability to recruit people like high profile people from the Google campus Twitter falls far behind its Mountain View rival for talent in a critical aspect of HR: employment branding.

Google has a long history of strong employment branding. They’ve won awards for being a top employer, and received plenty of press – not just for the lavish perks, but also for the way they recruit.  Google may have many problems inside the Googleplex (crazy cash flow hides many problems), but their attention to advertising what it takes to be hired by them has served them well as they grew.

Google’s attention to its employer brand started very early on, and has been pervasive throughout its growth. Even as the most popular darling of the Internet world, it remained focused on its brand – a rigorous recruiting process, lots of perks, unique value proposition and only hiring the absolute best.

So what about Twitter?

As one of the hottest startups in the Valley hiring while unemployment rates continue to rise Twitter needs to be vigilant about guarding their culture.  To do this they need a concerted effort to ensure only the best candidates enter their hiring funnel.

Despite this attention in the middle of an economic downturn Twitter appears to have a lack of any focus on employment branding.

Some might argue that given Twitter’s popularity they don’t need to focus on their employment brand; they don’t need to promote their internal culture more effectively and focus on publicly attracting the best. I’m sure Twitter wants to hire the best (and has the dollars and buzz to help them do so), but it takes a more concerted, ongoing effort. Just look at Google…

Much of a company’s public-facing employer brand starts with its career site. (Disclaimer: I’m an investor and co-Founder of Standout Jobs - http://standoutjobs.com - which helps companies with their career sites and recruitment. But this post isn’t about vendor selection or products as much as it’s about the importance of strong employer branding and developing a rigorous culture of recruiting.)

Although Twitter’s made some effort to include cultural content on the site, it’s lacking. As much as I think I know what it’s like to work at Twitter, or I can imagine it, I don’t really get the picture I want from their site. They don’t even provide a roll up of recent tweets from their employees like Zappos & employee culture genius Tony Hsieh does.

Worst still, are the job descriptions they use. They’re about as generic as job descriptions come looking like they were haphazardly copied from some other boring job advertisement on some average job board.

If you look at the job posting for Product Manager or Software Engineer (arguably two of the most important roles in a software company) there is nothing there that discourages anyone with the minimum requirements from throwing their hat in the ring.   The amount of investment that goes into a unique & specific job description tells candidates how important you take finding the best fit.   When you copy a weak job description you send the signal that you are too busy to take hiring seriously.

As important as the cultural information and the job descriptions is the need for more information on the recruitment process and what Twitter wants to see from applicants. One of the goals with this kind of information is to help job seekers self-select. I’m sure Twitter doesn’t have a problem getting a large volume of applications, but quality is another story. Allowing applicants to self-select by making sure they understand more about the recruitment process and expectations can help weed people out before they even apply.

Compare the Twitter job descriptions with the job descriptions I recently posted for a UX Designer for my company Akoha.   Another great exampleis the job description that my friend Alistair Croll listed for a Program Manager.  In both cases candidates have a clear picture of what will be expected of them, hopefully a sense of the companies mission and most importantly a number of explicit requirements that allow candidates to self-select whether they believe they are qualified for the role.

Twitter has changed the way many of us communicate on a daily basis. You can pack so much into 140 characters. And yet, the Twitter application process is multiple steps and driven almost exclusively by a person’s resume. Boring. Twitter can’t be hiring based off resumes, I’m sure they’re looking for so much more, and yet that’s not reflected in the application process. There’s so much opportunity for creativity when it comes to recruiting, but too few companies – Twitter included – take advantage. And it’s not enough to rely on their own popularity to attract the best, they need to publicly cultivate and promote a strong employer brand that’s pervasive through everything they do.

Hiring your next fail whale.

I’m sure that Twitter can’t keep up with the volume of applicants attempting to get in on the ground floor of the company.   With the only requirement to apply being a resume and basic qualifications there may be a few incredible candidates in their funnel, but I’m sure for the hiring team it is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Having set the bar so low publicly puts all the burden on Twitter to screen and find the best candidates.   Many candidates will probably never get a call back or hear from the company (In my test attempt to apply I didn’t even get an automated thank you email, one of the most frustrating experiences for candidates applying into a black hole)

This overflow of candidates means that Twitter will,

• Spend too much time reviewing mountains of candidate applications using resumes as the way to screen candidates.
• Miss potentially great candidates who get lost in the noise and are not elevated to the top of the hiring pool by the hiring process.
• Invest too much of their teams time on 2nd tier candidates who can write fancy resumes and may have been in the vicinity of success instead of the creators of it.
• Stretch out hiring time frames which makes topgrading a difficult exercise since candidates cannot be ranked during a constrained timeframe allowing you to pick the best.
• Reduce the amount of time you can spend assessing cultural fit in your interview process.
• Start to make compromises on hiring candidates as the time to fill critical positions continues to increase.
• Increase the chance that a few bad apples will enter the company at a critical time.

While the momentum of Twitter may seem unstoppable, I know first hand how quick a few bad hires can contribute to a company losing its way. Many of the worst mistakes I’ve made in my career can be traced to making compromises in my hiring practices.

At a time when Twitter needs to be accelerating to fulfill their potential their public hiring practices seem to be indications of future fail whales to come.

A great example of hiring practices is how my friend Andy Nulman screens candidates read this interview or this great story of his hiring practices.

On Fri 10 Apr 2009. [12] Comments

With conference season upon us the Montreal technology community is preparing to descend on a number of very large industry events.

Our community has a number of speakers, attendees & company presentations occurring at:

• SXSW Interactive in Austin (March 13-17)
• Game Developers Conference in San Francisco (March 23-27)
• Web 2.0 Expo (March 31-April 3)

Conferences give us a great chance to network with many of our industry counterparts from around the world. They also provide us a chance to meet members of our local community that we may not have connected with while in Montreal. Meeting your local counterparts at these events allow us to help support each other in many ways while we are stateside. Whether you are looking for a job, trying to recruit for a position, inviting people to listen to your session talk or need help trying to meet that critical investor/partner/speaker or guru your local community might be able to help you get more out of your conference experience.

If you are planning on attending any of these conferences this year please send a tweet using the conference hash tag & #MTL to introduce yourselves including who you are, which company you are with (if any) and any information about meetups, promotions, presentations or help you need to get the most out of your trips.

• #SXSW #MTL Example: @georgefavvas CEO of @smarthippo is at #SXSW #MTL this week where SmartHippo is going to be doing a fun promotion.
• #GDC #MTL Example: @austinhill from @akoha #MTL is doing a keynote at #GDC Serious Game Summit
• #Web2Expo #MTL Example: @acroll @seanpower Authors of new O’Reilly book on Watching Websites are speaking at #Web2Expo #mtl

This will allow other Canadian & Montreal tech community members to reach out, introduce themselves and hopefully lend a helping hand to each other for any specific things you are trying to get done. It also allows those of us not attending events to keep an eye on your tweets from Montreal.

If this picks with with other cities such as #Tdot (Toronto), #Van (Vancouver), #Cal (Calgary), #Ott (Ottawa) or #CAN (Canada) you can use these links to track the Canadian tech community at these conferences. Expat Canadians are also welcome to grab the #CAN tag to join in on the fun.

Update: As Boris Mann suggests in the comment below, there are more often used Twitter hash tags for other cities.  The tags he suggests are YVR (Vancouver), YYZ (Toronto).  The round up links haven’t been updated for this, but if you are using Tweetdeck you should find it easy to create a search that includes a number of the variants on city hash tags.

• #SXSW - Full Canadian City round up
• #GDC - Full Canadian City round up
• #Web2Expo - Full Canadian City round up

At the very least we can co-ordinate meeting up for drinks to showcase our drinking prowess to our industry counterparts around the world

On Thu 12 Mar 2009. [4] Comments

In this video Ed Ulbrich from Digital Domain talks about the technology they developed to show Brad Pitt growing younger in the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The team won the Oscar for best special effects.

A great example of how technology is allowing our storytellers the ability to create our own view of reality.

On Thu 5 Mar 2009. 1 Comment

I just setup my public Google Profile - (Look here if you are interested in setting up your own Google Profile)

Suggestions for Google,

• I’m sure this is being considered, but vanity URLs optimized for SEO would be great. Instead of http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/100761717775559459217 I’d like to see the profile url be customized like LinkedIn allows (e.g. http://www.linkedin.com/in/austinhill)
• Consider auto-suggesting discoverable links to other profiles. I’ve already linked my FriendFeed account, blog & twitter to various other parts of my online public profiles. If Google wants to be the ‘One profile to rule them all’ it should consider using it’s indexing power to take some of the custom links I’ve added and detect links to my other profiles and suggest them to me as profiles to link to this one. (For instance, I still haven’t added my Friendfeed, Flickr or Last.Fm accounts. There are many others….)

Update: I added my Friendfeed account and discovered that Google does detect & suggest other links to add to my profile. Since Google has a much larger audience then Friendfeed, they might consider extending this functionality for users without Friendfeed.

• Provide the user with a clearer explanation of the benefits of setting up a Google Profile. I know that Google likes to sneak features & products into their mix of offerings early, but there isn’t a clear user value proposition associated with Google Profile. I happened upon it while doing something else in my Google account and because I’m promiscuous with use of online profiles I decided to give it a try. Users should understand what they gain, exchange & how the profiles might be used in conjunction with other Google products.
• Allow me to enter Tags associated with my profile. This could be a powerful way of creating, discovering other Google Profile.

On Wed 4 Mar 2009. No Comments

Last year at TED I posted a small list of TEDsters who were Twittering the conference.

I hadn’t planned on posting an updated guide of TEDsters & Twitter this year since I assumed that most people would be using http://search.twitter.com to track #TED, TED or TED2009 keywords to track the conversation.

After seeing the recent spike in search traffic to last years Twitter TED guide, I’ve decided to update the list of people I know are Twittering the TED conference this year. Some of these people are posting more often then others and many are not including the #TED hashtag.

I hope this will also allow TEDsters to connect with each other, since many of us may not have had the chance to exchange Twitter names. It might help us know who are the Tweeters in our neighborhood.

If you’ve been left of the list and are Twittering at the TED conference, leave a comment with your Twitter username or just @austinhill me on Twitter.

TED Twitter Accounts & TED Staff

• Official TED 2009 Converage

• Chris Anderson, TED Curator

• TED Palm Springs

• Tom Rielly, TED Comedian, TED Fellows Organizer

• TED Talks Updates

• June Cohen TED Conference

Great live TED Twitter Coverage

• Loic LeMeur (Seesmic, LeWeb)

• Maria Popova (Digital Anthropologist)

• Tara Hunt (Author, Community & Whuffie junkie, Akoha power player

• Helen Walters (Editor Innovation & Design, NewBusinessweek)

• Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media founder, blogger, Web rationalist & futurists)

• Leigh Ferreira (Change maker)

• Sören Stamer (CEO CoreMedia)

• Laurel Touby (MediaBistro Founder/Entrepreneur)

• Jennifer 8. Lee (Author, Blogger)

• Roseann Higgins (Founder Entrepreneurs Forum, Writer)

• Remo Giuffre (Merchant/Thinker, Founder Remo Store)

• Rod Beckstrom (Author, CEO, Starfish & Spider, Director of Homeland Security National Cyber Security Center)

• Evan Williams (Mr. Twitter)

• Garr Reynolds (Author, PresentationZen guru)

• Erik Hersman (Dir. of Ops Ushahidi, TED U speaker)

• Juliana Rotich (Kenyan blogger, Renewable Energy)

• Mark Gibson (Optimist Gibson Consulting)

• Hamid Shojaee (CEO Axosoft)

• Eric Grant (blogger, futurist)

• Jason Sack (User Experience Designer)

• Ben Thoma (Art Director)

• Michael Silverton (TED associate, watching remote but great tweet coverage)

• Patrick Kearney (VP Tech & Ops at Participant Media)

• George Brett (Techno Artiste)

• Nilofer Merchant (CEO Rubicon)

• Amy Leaman(Designer; The Movement; Toronto)

• Ash Donaldson (Humane Experience Designer)

• Sandro Farina (Tech Director Tunde SRL)

TED attendees twittering about the conference
In no particular order

• Alex Eberts (Akoha co-founder, my Partner)

• Harlene Weijs (Akoha Taskrobat, Artist)

• Anand Agarawala (Former TED speaker, Founder of Bumptop)

• Maria Giudice (Founder HotStudio Design Humanist)

• Pierre Omidyar (Ebay & Omidyar Foundation)

• Tony, CEO Zappos

• Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC, Angel Investor)

• Paul Kedrosky (Investor, Finance & Charts guru)

• David Hornik (VC,Lobby Organizer)

• Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital)

• Rob Hayes (First Round Capital)

• Robert Goldberg (Investor/VC)

• Michael Parekh (Tech Investor, Blogger)

• Steven Levy (Author, Reporter, Person who found Einstein’s brain)

• Lars Hinrichs (Entrepreneur, Founder XING)

• Sarah Jones (TED 2009 Speaker, Tony winning performer)

• Steve Rosenbaum (Magnify CEO)

• Christopher Herot (Entrepreneur)

• Bill Holsinger-Robinson (COO Spout)

• Tara (OnePinkTee)

• Josh Spear (Digital Marketing, Blogger, New Media)

• Jim Stolze (Happiness guru)

• John Hodgman (Mr. PC guy in Apple ads)

• Susan Bratton (Podcast Published - Personal Life Media)

• PeterMe

• Sean Gourley (TEDfellow, Analysis of the Mathematics of Wars)

• KoKoe2 Great coverage of TED

• Patricia Amaya (Director, Writer, Producer)

• Daniel Kraft (Inventor, Doctor, Scientist, TED2009 speaker)

• Danny Sullivan (Search guru, Blogger)

• Padmasree

• Mark Yturralde (ComicCon Board member, Amazing Race contestant)

• MadLOLScientist MadLOL informed me he isn’t here, just retweeting

• Kluster (Crowdsourcing team, TED contributors)

• Tony Robbins (Inspiration Guru, Past TED Speaker)

• Jimmy Guterman (MIT Sloan Author, Writer) - Lots of TED2009 Blog Coverage

• Cameron Sinclair (Founder Architecture for Humanity, TED Prize Winner)

• Hugo Schotman (User Experience Architect)

• David Hoffman (Storyteller, Videographer, Communicator)

• David Geller (Founder EyeJot)

• Kyra Guant (Speaker, Songwriter, Merriam Prize Winner)

• Yuri van Geest (Blogging, Media, Mobile)

• Kevin Rose (Digg Founder)

• Al Gore (Former VP, Current.TV, former TED Speaker, Nobel Prize Winner)

• Chris Sacca (Angel Investor, Startup Coach, ex.Google)

• DK Matai (Entrepreneur, Philanthropist, Engineer)

• Wil Shipley (Delicious Library CEO/Programmer)

• Zem Joaquin (Eco Fabulous Writer)

• Minky Worden (Human Rights Watch)

New Additions Feb 6th 1:52pm PST

• Amir Bahadori (Microsoft)

• Peter Diamandis (X-Prize founder, ZeroGravity Flights, Singularity University, former TED speaker)

TED PalmSpings Attendees & Coverage

• Andre Lee (Corporate Coach, Blogger)

• Stephen Collins (Blogger, also seeding Akoha in Australia for us)

• Aaron Tang (Designer)

• Diego Leal (Blogger, Geek, World Changing)

• Mattias Ask (Open Causes)

• Steve Hanson (Hanson Backstage Digital Agency)

• Traci Fenton (CEO WorldBlu)

• Jane Samson (Sewing & So)

• Robert Agouri

• Dominique Jaurola

Great Blog Coverage

• EthanZ on Twitter - Ethan Zuckerman Global Voices, more blogging then twitter. Great constant blog coverage.

On Fri 6 Feb 2009. [5] Comments

While checking out the very cool new electric motorcycle developed by the team at Mission Motors today at the TED conference, the TED balloon that was anchored over the conference area decided to take a trip.

This is some video that my friend Loic LeMeur and I happened to grab from two different perspectives.

This is the video that Loic was filming at the time. It includes an interview with the team from Mission Motors. Very cool motorcyle I want one.

On Fri 6 Feb 2009. No Comments