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

I have been on vacation for a week in Mexico with my girlfriend Kelly and am posting this using a small internet cafe, and a slow dial-up connection.

Fact is I’m loving the time away from the office, for no other reason then I use my vacations as reading weeks and I’ve been reading two books at day and am full of insights. (And a little color for my Casper-like Canadian winter skin suit I’ve been wearing).

Before I left Montreal, I did an interview with Kristina Tomaz-Young from Smart Initiatives where she wrote the following,

You would think that this would be enough and he would be soaking in the rays in Tahiti with his feet up. But nope, not Austin! Retirement is far away. He’s relentlessly on the go, advising and investing in start-ups and building yet another game-changing company.

The full interview is available here

March and April were really busy but great months for Akoha as we raised some more angel money and rounded out most of our core development team with the hiring of 5 additional people.

During the back to back days of work that is part of the heavy lifting required while creating companies it’s hard often for me to relax. I’m in my groove working longs days and I actually have to force myself to take a break sometimes. Thankfully my partner Kelly knows a lot of the warning signs when I’ve been pushing too much and usually steps in, makes plans for my vacation and tells me when I’m leaving the office and where we are going.

Only once I’ve left the office that I realize how much I needed to take a small break.

So I’ll be back next week, catching up on email and starting on some blogging again (which became sparse when we were trying to hire 5 people due to the incredible amount of time hiring good people takes).

In the meantime, here is a great quote that I started my reading week with from Ester Buchholz.

Life’s creative solutions require alone time. Solitude is required for the unconscious to process and unravel problems.

Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers.

On Fri 27 Apr 2007. [4] Comments

The number one job of any leader is talent development.  Recruiting, retaining, equipping and developing the talent in your team is the not only the most critical part of creating a successful company it is also the hardest.

Raising financing takes time. Dealing with customers, partners and earning revenue takes time. Working on product and getting any of the millions of tasks done that need to be accomplished to be able to afford to employ anyone takes time.  Once an organization has accomplished all these tasks and has enough money, or business to justify hiring it is often hard to switch gears on your plans and go slow enough to allow you the time to do hiring well.

Hiring is the item that most companies don’t plan for or make enough time for.  It takes a lot of time to do well, and there are always areas to make changes or new talent that needs to be developed to fit the businesses changing needs.   Scouting, developing and nurturing top talent is something that is a full time job of the the entire senior management team. 

Just like sports coaches are constantly working on finding the right mix for a winning team, there are constant tweaks and changes that need to occur and a huge payoff for finding the fit that allows a great winning team to begin to form.

Despite the payoff it is surprising that many times hiring gets pushed back as a priority, often being delegated completely to 3rd parties or outsourced entirely by using offshore contractors to build core intellectual property.  

Management personally spending time in recruiting top talent is the best investment any leader can make.  Hiring top players, who have the intelligence, passion and are a cultural team fit in the right positions is the single biggest leverage a management team has in building a successful company.

In addition to taking the time to record a video for one of our job postings (others are coming soon) I’m spending a lot of time personally scouring the worlds campuses, local technology firms and the Internet for top talent.  A huge percentage of Zero-Knowledge’s staff moved to Montreal to work with us because we recruited across Canada, globally from Silicon Valley to Europe and throughout the world.  When looking for talent, I spend a huge amount of time searching for top people regardless of where I have to look to find them.

Top talent loves to work with other top talent.   For Internet web software companies in Montreal there is an incredible number of great people working in the video game & graphics industry, creative agencies, corporate marketing departments and throughout the world on University campuses that are interested in great Montreal opportunities if you reach out to them.

Often time great people are being unrecognized in their current jobs, or have a life long passion for working for a small startup company, or on a product that can make the world a better place.   The only way to find this out is to meet a huge number of people and see if your dreams match with theirs.  Top talent is never looking for jobs.  Jobs need to hunt out top talent.  That takes time, and requires every tool in the shed.

Internet video is a tool that offers great promise to help in recruiting online. It allows for the hiring team, and company to put their message out there and start a conversation with candidates.  It is just another tool though.  The companies top leadership needs to love recruiting the best people and be willing to invest the time to reach out in every way possible to meet potential candidates. 

The company needs to make recruiting top talent a top priority. It takes putting some of your companies best sales people out there spreading the word about why your company is the place for top talent to come work. It takes hiring with your heart on your sleeve with passion.

Here is a little video I shot recently while driving to UC Berkeley on a recruiting trip.   Just some random thoughts on recruiting while I was driving.

If you are a Web Developer/Integrator (Javascript/HTML/XML) , Flash developer, Graphic Artist, Illustrator/Comic book artist, Python Developer or Web Application Architect available for consulting or full time positions then please introduce yourself. 

An interest in or experience with Internet startups, online multi-player games, game development, online web communities, social media or so called ‘Web 2.0′ tools and technologies is a great plus.  Akoha is recruiting for a few positions right now, but we are hiring throughout the summer and into the fall in these areas and are interested in meeting talented people.

On Fri 23 Mar 2007. [2] Comments

Sometimes the light’s all shining on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it’s been.
Truckin, Grateful Dead

I wrote this post in October 2006 but delayed in posting it until I had time to get comfortable with blogging. Although I’ve edited it a bit in the last couple of weeks before posting, most of the content remains the same. I attempted to write a shorter version of it recently, but decided that I would retain the original format of the post I wrote almost six months ago. It is fitting that I’m posting this from the TED conference since it was the TED conference that inspired the idea for my new project, leading me to leave the company I founded with my brother & father.

It was almost a decade ago in the spring of 1997 when Hamnett and Hammie (my brother & father) and I had just sold our Internet provider Total.Net and had begun to work on a new venture. Our new company was based on the idea that we could build a number of services to protect individuals privacy and security online by making military grade encryption and privacy technologies easy for consumers to use.

There was a very large discussion going on about the fears of Internet users regarding privacy and we felt we could make a positive impact on millions of peoples lives with our solution.

While trying to come up with a name for our new venture, I developed a list of all the encryption & privacy related concepts and keywords that I sent to Hamnett & Hammie. It was my father, Hammie who in a meeting at my apartment keyed onto the words Zero Knowledge from a description of Zero Knowledge Proofs that I had sent around. Shortly thereafter Zero-Knowledge Systems was born. At the time, tongue in cheek names were all the rage and everyone was trying to stand out in the crowded early days of what would become the dot.com boom.

We knew going in that we would catch a lot of grief at times with a name like Zero-Knowledge - but we wanted to stand out. We stood for something different, and the name just seemed to fit.

Our Incredible Journey

The name of course, was only the beginnging of what would become an incredible journey that has lasted almost a decade for me personally.

Our staff would go on to plaster downtown Montreal and our office neighborhood with stickers proclaiming “Changing the World with Zero-Knowledge”. I’m still having to turn down requests from people who want to get some of our old T-Shirts or posters. We wanted the world to know what we stood for - power to the people - privacy for all - we were passionate about changing the way the future would look. We were social entrepreneurs believing that we could both make a profitable company and a contribution to the betterment of society at the same time.

I began capturing notes, journal entries, photo’s and video of the companies ascent early on. I had the idea of writing a book about the companies experience one day. This may have been youthful hubris & arrogance but at the time I was confident we would be a billion dollar company eventually and people would want to know how we did it. Given the time this was not a crazy idea, but you could say I was literally Chasing Billions with Zero Knowledge.

Did we ever have stories though, lot’s of good stories.

Over the course of the next nine years I would rub shoulders with incredible industry and world leaders, extremely well armed cypherpunks, brilliant scientists and luminaries of the technology and venture capital industries. (Too many links to post, but Google has a decent memory of my past activities you can peruse if you are curious.)

I began to spend time with incredible people actively involved in changing the world. I gave speeches at the World Economic Forum, traveled the world meeting and working with global leaders on issues ranging from Ethical Technology Design, Privacy, Security, International Cybercrime law, Canada’s technology innovation strategy, net neutrality, technologies role in social responsibility and many meetings on technology & human rights work.

Amidst the world travels we would also become media darlings, appearing on 60 minutes, CNN, WSJ, NY Times and in hundreds of publications as we became one of Canada’s highest profile Internet startups and acted as a regular expert on the issues of Internet privacy and security.

We brought innovative Silicon Valley style recruiting & retention ideas to Montreal as we exploded onto the Canadian technology scene.

We conducted intelligence agency briefings with most of the alphabet soup agencies, battled killer typhoons in asia, and were taxied to silicon valley in private jets as investors wooed us. We set Canadian records for our financing’s and for awhile were members of that generation of dot.com media darlings.

The Tough Times

There were also a lot of very tough stories and painful lessons we had to learn.

Reducing our head count by the hundreds because of undisciplined growth while reacting to the meltdown of the private and public equity markets. Managing teams while teetering on the edge of bankruptcy as we restructured debt, getting out of potentially crippling lease obligations & negotiating a recap with the investors to keep the company going. We faced the challenges of discontinuing the companies flagship product and having to completely reposition the companies products, target market, technology and structure while trying to keep the doors open.

We would experience some of the downsides of being media darlings as the companies shift in direction and layoffs became popular targets for reporters writing about the dot.com bust. Articles with sentences like “Blood runs in the halls at Zero-Knowledge as the firing carnage continues” to report our reductions in staff made each step that much harder as the articles made their way to partners and customers.

In early 2003, as the company started to generate positive cash flow - I started joking with my brother that if we ever told the inside story of our rise, fall and survival through the bubble that we should call it Chasing Billions with Zero Knowledge.

The phrase struck me as a fitting moniker for our own journey as a company, some of the investment trends that contributed to the dot.com bubble, and many of the ideas & entrepreneurs I encountered.

To be clear, I believe that most every company begins with zero knowledge. Assumptions and theories abound but actual knowledge of what the future may hold for the company is a pipe dream. There are so many questions from team, to product, to competitive landscape that the only real bet you can make is that shit will happen and things will need to change. Every enterprise begins with zero knowledge.

The process of building innovative enterprises requires experimentation and failure. How much experimentation is a function of risk appepitite and cost of money. The cost of money was incredible low and the risk appetite for technology stocks were so much in abundances that we were fielding random calls from retail investors looking to buy stock or get on a waiting list for the IPO for almost 2 years before we even had revenue.

I don’t believe even now in hindsight that we were ever chasing billions while clueless. We proved ourselves able to play by the rules of the that time and raised money and built real products & teams in a way that the market was rewarding (Getting big fast, become the market leader by the size of your brain trust and the broad range of your opportunities).

When the rules of the market changed, we changed with them and made sure we could continue to work with customers finding a business model and customer profile that would grow with us. We made a lot of mistakes that in hindsight now seem obvious. But we rushed into our mistakes recognizing them as valuable lessons and we were eager students.

A New Story - Radialpoint Emerges

I often get questions about the fate of Zero-Knowledge Systems. For those interested in our early experiences as a company, I’m posting a case study done by Professor David Phillips that was written over the course of many interviews and on site visits with our staff throughout the early days of the company. David recently sent me this copy to distribute.

Zero-Knowledge Systems - An Early Case Study in Systems of Surveillance. David J. Phillips, Professor University of Toronto

It highlights some of our successes, mistakes, and our early adventures as a company.

It is an account of the early Zero-Knowledge history (it ends about 2001/2 as we made the transition into the Radialpoint business and turned the company around). Like with all accounts, it can never capture even 5% of what was occurring behind the scenes, but it captures much of what was occurring around the company and provides a good account of our early rise and fall from grace.

When we started Zero-Knowledge my internal email signature carried the phrase “Make new mistakes more often”. Our team culture helped us to react and evolve as we saw new opportunities, identified failing products and responded to the dramatic shifts that occurred in the capital markets.

Zero-Knowledge Systems not only survived but changed its name and is now a thriving company called Radialpoint.

The company has emerged as one of Canada’s fastest growing technology companies, Quebec’s 2nd fastest growing technology firm and a market leader in managed consumer Internet services for broadband providers. The company has been profitable for years, is growing quickly and is now providing Internet value-added services for a community of more then 20 million broadband subscribers through its broadband provider customers. This is one of the largest aggregate broadband subscriber bases in the world.

Writing about the last bubble bursting and the dot.com graveyard that ensued was popular sport for many members of the media. Now we have reporters writing about the impeding Web 2.0 bubble and asking when it will burst. I think enterprising reporters could do well to explore companies such as Radialpoint that have survived the dot.com fallout and emerged stronger, smarter and battle hardened. There are great stories out there for those reporters not just looking to write about what Apple announced.

While I know this story well, and I believe in it with all my heart, the Radialpoint story is no longer my story to tell. The story of how Radialpoint emerged from the dot.com bubble and became one of Canada’s largest software-as-a-service companies that quietly cornered the ISP market for desktop delivered services will be told someday.

That story will be told by my brother, father and the team that continues to work with them there. It is their story to tell.

The team working there deserves to take a bow and get full credit for the incredible work they have done. I’m no longer part of the day to day operations at Radialpoint- so I will not be posting about it’s business on this blog.

I left Radialpoint, in June of 2006 to work on my new projects. This was a very difficult thing to do, but I was no longer the right person to help lead that company.

After the sabbatical I took to help my brother fight and ultimately die with dignity from his battle with cancer, things changed for me. It took me awhile after his death to find my footing again, but I needed to do that outside of the company in an area that I felt I could make a difference in the world. My mind and heart had drifted into a new domain and I couldn’t both follow my heart and try to do the work that Radialpoint needed at the same time.

I remain an investor, friend, family member and supporter in every way of Radialpoint and the team there.

In many ways, the team from Radialpoint plays a heavy influence on the work I am doing now since I learned an incredible amount from my brother, father, our managers, our teams and the staff we had. In the school of hard knocks and practical entrepreneurship I was incredibly lucky to have the mentors, partners and teams that I did.

I want to thank all the teams that worked with me throughout the years. I can say without a doubt, I learned more from you then the other way around.

Large amounts of thanks goes to the my brother and father, our management team (especially Marty, Veronique, Carlos that I worked with so closely) and all the direct reports and teams throughout the years. I also need to thank my assistant for almost a decade, Elizabeth. She has had the pleasure of seeing me at my best, and worst - and was always there working hard to make sure that others only saw me at my best, which I’ll be forever grateful for.

I had the incredible opportunity to work with family, an incredible management team and hundreds of bright staff as they navigated the changes required to keep our company thriving. Their support of my eccentric ideas, my crazy personality and most of all their support of me leaving to do a new project was crucial to me having the confidence to tackle what I’m now working on.

Billions with Zero Knowledge - The Blog

Since I won’t be blogging about Radialpoint that much, and my new project will most likely be operating under the radar for awhile this blog is very much a personal sandbox for me to play in. I’m not marketing or selling anything (at this point) - just having fun and looking to be part of the conversation.

I’ll be writing about topics that I feel I can add some unique point of view too. I won’t be covering or reposting other stories, tracking the latest moves of other bloggers or any specific industry.

I’ll be writing about the topics I care most about which are,

• The state of the Canadian startup scene from an entrepreneurs & angel investors perspective
• Promoting Canadian entrepreneurs
• Social Entrepreneurship
• Grass root authentic conversational marketing, Social media and Angel Investing
• Online communities, open innovation and collaborative open source models for community production
• World Hacking (finding easy hacks to make the world a better place), World Changing

One of my major complaints on all the government committees I participated on for innovation was the lack of a strong culture of mentorship in Canada. This combined with a little bit of angel investing from experienced entrepreneurs could help us nurture the next generation of startups and provide a farm system for the venture capital industry. I’ve seen this model work throughout the world in creating a culture of sharing of experiences resulting in the bundling of great advisory experience coming with risk capital.

I have been very fortunate to have had the experiences I’ve had and I hope by sharing my experiences that I can help a new generation of Canadian entrepreneurs begin to shape their own dreams.

My tagline for this blog is “Changing the World with Little Bits of Knowledge”. I believe that there exists within the technology community the power to change the world both for the good and bad, and I hope my projects and this blog help play a small but meanginful role in the postive aspects of this change.

On Thu 8 Mar 2007. [13] Comments

While in Toronto recently I took the opportunity to sit down with my StartupCamp Canada co-organziers and community instigators Rob Hyndman, David Crow and Stuart McDonald.  StartupCamp Canada is now a go.

We are still finalizing the date, but it will be in the last half of June in Toronto.  (The final date will be announced in the coming weeks). It will be a full day packed with some of the top Canadian entrepreneurs from all over the country and the world.  We are going to mix presenting content, doing small team coaching and providing lot’s of chances for interaction with entrepreneurs, VCs and technologists interested in the Canadian Startup scene.

Here is a quick video I shot while we were having breakfast yesterday in Toronto.

I was attenting the Canadian Venture Forum and frankly the entire situation was depressing.  Even some of the VCs on the nominating comittee for the conference were tellling me they couldn’t get companies without business models or revenues to be accepted and were tiring of the entire futile excercise of doing the conference.

Most of the serious venture investors I know didn’t bother to attend and if they did it wasn’t to look at companies to invest in, it was to say to hi to a few friends and they generally popped in for a few minutes and left the conference.

It was more like a meeting of aging Canadian bankers then anything I’ve come to know as a venture conference.  At every venture conference I go to, there is an engergy in the room, excitement everywhere and you can see deals being fought for in the hallways and companies leave the conference with term sheets. 

This conference was very indicative of many problems of our venture industry.   The program had some good speakers (David Lawee & his wife Lorna were great) and the Toronto Venture Group is working hard to promote Canada but I feel most of the good content was wasted on the audience and the quality of the presenting companies and venture investors to listen to them was dismal.

Instead of just complaining, we are hoping to build off the experience of Democamps, Barcamps and StartupCamp in the Valley to put together a conference based on sharing first hand experiences that helps entrepreneurs succeed.  

Some of the topics and sessions we are considering,

• Private elevator pitch coaching with top entrepreneurs who have succeeded in raising large amounts of funds, and building great businesses.
• Lot’s of panels with entrepreneurs sharing practical lessons on how they build their Canadian companies and the problems they faced.
• A BoF session for early stage entrepreneurs discussing the challenges they are currently facing in building their companies.
• What can the Canadian technology commuity, governments and entrepreneurs do to better support an early stage startup community.
• Entrepreneurs guide to understanding early stage financing & company creation (Love money, angel money, IP rights, partnership & shareholder agreements, first VC round, strategic partners).

These will be multiple sessions and we are still working on the agenda, so if you have comments or things you’d like to see included please let us know.

Please head over the to wiki and sign up, and let any of the organizing group know if there are specific things you would like to see on the agenda.

On Wed 7 Mar 2007. [8] Comments

I’m on the program advisory board for the Youth Employment Services Entrepreneur Conference which is occuring tomorrow Saturday March 3rd at the Delta Hotel in Montreal (along with my friend Mitch who recruited me to help, which I was happy to do).

YES the Future is Yours
New TRENDS .  New IDEAS . New CONTACTS

YES Montreal is now accepting registration for the 10th Anniversary YES Entrepreneurship Conference, which will be held on Saturday March 3rd at the Delta Hotel, Centre Ville. Over 350 entrepreneurs and special guests will be in  attendance, including keynote speaker Lino Saputo Jr., President and CEO of Saputo.
For workshop descriptions and registration forms, download the program brochure by clicking here.  Don’t forget to visit our website for updates www.yesmontreal.ca

I’m speaking at 3pm on financing and starting your company.  I’ll be be doing a series of case studies of my various startups throughout my career and how I financed them.  I’ll be reviewing the different approaches to financing and bootstrapping a company.

The program for the conference is here.  Come out if you are an aspiring entrepreneur with questions, or looking to network with other entrepreneurs.

Small correction in the program, I have been mistakenly listed as the head of strategy for Zero-Knowledge Systems :( 

Since the Gazette article where I was mentioned earlier this week, I noticed a lot of search engine traffic in my logs for “austin hill zero knowledge what happened” and similar questions.

For those interested in an update, Zero-Knowledge succesfully survived the technology melt down, flourished and became the world leader in providing managed broadband services for ISPs and changed its name to Radialpoint. 

They are doing phenomonal and are one of Canada’s fastest growing software companies.   (Radialpoint is also hiring and they are growing so quick there are great entrepreneurial opportunities within the company for any really bright and ambitious people.)

I left Radialpoint in June to work on a new venture called Project Ojibwe with my old friend Alex Eberts (also a Zero-Knowledge co-founder).

On Fri 2 Mar 2007. [3] Comments

Google today announced that they have purchased formerly Ottawa-based video game advertising company Adscape Media. (You could call them Video Game Advertising 2.0 if the sidebar picture is Video Game Advertising 1.0)

See today’s coverage on the news,

• Techcrunch - Google to buy Adscape for $23 million.
• PaidContent - Google does by Adscape after all for $23 million.

Mark Evans wrote about the rumored acquisition a couple of weeks ago and explains the companies Canadian roots.

Adscape was named a startup to watch in December 2006 by the Ottawa business journal where they mentioned moving headquarters to San Francisco.

Congratulations to the Adscape team on joining the Google family. According to reports Adscape raised $3.2 million in Venture Capital from H.I.G. Ventures (based in Boston & SF).

What I found interesting was that there were no Canadian VCs involved in this company. I don’t know the players involved, but wonder if they attempted to raise capital with Canadian firms to be rebuffed or if they chose to avoid them altogether.

Unfortunately too often I see both situations where Canadian entrepreneurs avoid Canadian VCs (I’ve spoken to many Canadian CEO’s who can go direct to the US VCs and feel that local VCs don’t add a lot of value. I don’t always agree with this, but it depends on the team & VC) or the Canadian VCs don’t understand or have the risk appetite for some hot Canadian deals that end up going to the states.

Amid a growing video game marketplace and the strong Canadian talent pool of video game developers (Ubisoft in Montreal just announced another 1,100 positions to be hired, Electronic Arts has Vancouver & Montreal presence) you would think there would be more innovative gaming based startups being funded by Canadian VCs.

From yesterday’s Ottawa Citizen in an article entitled Gaming Nation the following stats were included,

As many as one in three North Americans, or 120 million people, play video games for at least one hour every week and recent studies have shown that one quarter of all gamers in Canada are over the age of 50.

Parr said Canadians spent more than $933 million on video gaming last year. Worldwide, the game industry brought in more than $25 billion U.S. in revenues during 2006. That figure is expected to hit $55 billion U.S. by 2009.

During the massive industry explosion, Canada has quietly become a world leader in video game development. The top two game development studios on the planet — EA in Burnaby and Ubisoft in Montreal — call Canada home.

The number of companies developing video games in Canada has tripled in the last three years. According to a study conducted at Queen’s University in 2004, there were only 100 gaming companies in Canada that year.

The ESAC says there are more than 300 video game development companies employing more than 49,700 full- and part-time employees are scattered across the country now.

And these are not low paying call-centre-type jobs. The average starting salary for a video game developer is $60,000 U.S.

I may have missed it, but you would imagine with all the companies working around and supporting the video game industry there would be some activity by Canadian VCs.

While I think it’s great that a Canadian company has succeeded in getting an exit through an acquisition to Google, it is interesting to see that our Canadian VCs are not playing roles in Canadian companies.

Case in point, I had the pleasure to meet two successful Canadian entrepreners Patrick Lor and Ravi Sood on my panel at Garage Canada’s Startup Canada. For those not aware, Getty Images bought Patrick Lor and Bruce Livingstone’s company iStockPhoto for $50 million. Hewlett-Packard bought brothers Ravi & Rahul Sood’s company Voodoo PC for an undisclosed sum and he and his brother Rahul are now in San Fran working with HP.

They are both great examples of Canadian entrepreneurs who built and sold their companies to US firms without traditional VC investment.

In each case they recounted how VCs ignored them until the risk was almost gone and buy out offers started to emerge as viable choices to taking VC money for growth capital. They join other Canadian companies such as Flickr in having chosen to prove the business viability and let a larger company expand the market.

Early stage risk capital means taking risk at the early stage - not waiting until the company has product, traction and sales and then trying to invest to help them grow. As the cost of building, launching and obtaining traction continues to drop (at least for consumer & enterprise software) there becomes less of a role for Canadian VCs who don’t know how to play aggressively at the early stage.

Once a company has proven a product with traction in the marketplace, the US investors care less about location and are happy to invest in a winning concept. So Canadian investors not playing aggressively at the early stages when they can still put risk capital to work will end up always sitting behind the US aquirers and financing options that the best companies will always be able to get.

In today’s marketplace where innovation through acquisition becomes more common place Canadian early stage investors will have to change how and when they invest in made at home opportunities if they wish to play a role in our Canadian success stories.

On Fri 16 Feb 2007. [3] Comments

I am going to be speaking at Startup Canada next week. The conference runs from Thursday to Saturday January 25th - 27th.

This event is being produced by my friends at Garage Canada and the Quebec City Pole Economic Development Agency.

Venture Capitalist, author and evangelism guru Guy Kawasaki is leading a great line up of speakers with an agenda that is based on his great book The Art of the Start. He has done other Art of the Start conferences, but I believe this is the first in Canada.

I recommend entrepreneurs I advise to read a copy of Art of the Start. It is one of the best how-to guides on the basics of starting a company or organization that I’ve found. Simple, clear and jam packed of useful tips on starting something.

If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, or a practicing entrepreneur looking to network this is a great event to attend. I’ll be there with a few entrepreneurs who I’m supporting in a new startup.

My friend Tom Sweeney (Garage Canada) who is also speaking asked me to join Patrick Lor, Isabelle Bettez and Ravi Sood on a panel with Guy Kawasaki discussing the state of the Canadian startup scene.

I hope to see you there.

This shouldn’t be confused with the StartupCamp Canada that I’m helping to organize, which will be later this year.

On Thu 18 Jan 2007. [6] Comments

The team organizing the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference were kind enough to invite me to come speak at their upcoming 2007 Conference which is occurring this week in Montreal.

I’m also going to be at DemoCamp CUSEC that evening. If you are in Montreal and would like to meet others in the Montreal technology community, it’s Thursday evening. Please come by and say hi.

You can see details on my speaker slot on the conference blog here.

On Tue 16 Jan 2007. 1 Comment

I’ve had a few conversations resulting in a few interviews that have appeared in the last couple of weeks. Here is a quick round up of the coverage.

Eric Jackson, who has a great blog on leadership, was one of the first people to ask me to answer some questions when he heard I had left Radialpoint. I recently took the time to answer his questions about working with family, Zero-Knowledge Systems early success with the media and starting companies in Montreal. You can read the interview here. Eric is also one of the bloggers helping us spread the word about Gifter.org and the Million Dollar Blog Post, check out his post about the project here. Thanks Eric.

Mark Evans who wrote about Gifter.org for his Maple Leaf 2.0 blog followed up with a few questions. You can read our follow up conversation where I answer questions about high tech innovation in Canada, Project Ojibwe, and the Gifter series of experiments (along with my typo’s - note to self: proofread) in this follow up post. Thanks Mark.

Cassandra Szklarski from Canadian Press read about David Crow’s sponsorship of the Gifter Project (thanks David) and contacted me to write an article. It appeared in the Globe and Mail on Boxing Day, as well as across Canada in other newspapers. Thanks Cassandra.

I also sat down a couple of weeks ago with Roberto Rocha who writes the Technology column for the Montreal Gazette. We spoke about a number of topics, and he included some of our discussion in this article about the health of Montreal technology community. The article mentions my friend and Barcamp organizer Fred Ngo who is working on a new startup that I’m involved with. (Who also has posted the funniest sponsorship of the Gifter.org wishes project so far - Thanks Fred.)

A couple quick clarfications to the article, where I’m quoted,

“The problem is that in Canada, the government is competing with VCs,” Hill said, citing the Business Development Bank of Canada, the Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec and Investissement Quebec.

This stems from a discussion we had regarding the need for a strong national strategy for early stage technology and venture capital industries. The mention of the BDC comes from our discussion of a great series of posts from Canadian VC Mark Skapinker where he does a great job making the case for a more focused Canadian strategy for supporting venture capital. Mark has done a series of posts on the differences between what he has experienced in Israel and Canada with regards to government support of venture programs. They are worth a read.

The Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec and Investissement Quebec was mistakenly included in this reference. They shouldn’t have been since I believe they are doing a great job supporting early stage venture financing by acting as a fund of funds. The Caisse has invested in a number of the early stage venture capital firms in Canada. This is similar to the role that CALpers plays in Silicon Valley and the team at the Caisse deserves a lot of credit their support of early stage venture capital firms in Canada.

Also the following quote wasn’t clear in it’s meaning,

“This confuses the situation for entrepreneurs. Tech execs don’t go to angels here. Lawyers do.”

The point I was trying to make is that our technology executives aren’t becoming angels often enough. Too often I’ve seen lawyers, accountants and other high net worth individuals playing the role of angels for technology startups in Canada. I don’t see a comparable level of investment activity from technology entrepreneurs that I’ve seen in other areas such as Boston, or the Valley. Entrepreneurs should be able to easily network and reach technology executives who are experienced at early stage angel investing. This is slowly changing, but the early stage angel ecosystem and how it works with VCs and entrepreneurs is still broken in Canada.

My minor clarifications notwithstanding, the article makes a great point about the underlooked potential in the Montreal technology community. Roberto has written about some other Montreal technology community events and I think he’s doing a great thing by showcasing local stories instead of just reprinting what I can read on any newswire or technology industry blog. Thanks Roberto.

Mathew Ingram also posted something about Gifter.org. He mentions another cool project in social giving, which comes the team at Cambrian House, the Robin Hood Fund. I met the team from Cambrian House at Web 2.0 and they are a cool team, and the Robin Hood fund is a great community project.

There are lot’s of other people writing about Gifter, we are tracking some of their posts at the Gifter.org blog.

On Thu 28 Dec 2006. [2] Comments

It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.
Eric Hoffer

Earlier this summer as I was touring Canada looking at the state of early stage technology startups, when David Crow introduced me to the concept of an innovation commons space.

The concept that David and Boris Mann were discussing was an open office space that meshed together the community aspects of Barcamp and Democamp, with the shared office space concept of business centers (such as Business HQ - which I’ve used with my other companies and though they have their place - they don’t fit into a creative center of innovations category).

Last week Mark Dowds and Bobby John, along with some help from the Toronto Mesh crew have launched Indoor Playground.

This is a great project, and I’m going to be meeting with the Toronto team to see how I can help or get involved. I see these innovation centers as being a key part of changing some of the problems I see in the Canadian early stage technology market. The other changes need to occur in the angel and early stage VC communities (more on that later).

I’ve been talking with my friend Patrick Tanguay about putting together the financing support for a similar concept here in Montreal. There are a number of early stage angel investors who’ve expressed interest in helping nurture these type of concepts to help build out deal flow and foster environments of startup innovation in Canada.

Patrick and I are beginning to look for office space around the plateau area in Montreal (hopefully close to Laika which has become the unofficial playground spot in Montreal).

We are going to be contacting the other groups in various cities who have been working on similar concepts to try and help cobble together a shared - open business plan that we can get in front of as many eyes as possible. (I’ve got someone with experience with business plans & projections - who I’m going to fund to write the the Montreal version of a business plan - this might be a good start for an open one that we can share with the community. Contact me if you think you can help or know of similar teams that we might be able to collaborate with.)

My friends and fellow StartupCamp organizers David Crow, Rob Hyndman have some more information on the launch. This was also picked up by my friends & the Mesh conference co-founders Mathew Ingram and Mark Evans. Check out the community page on Ning that the Indoor Playground team have setup.

I’m really excited by a number of things such as this that I’m seeing in the Canadian early stage scene. There are some great quality teams that I’m encountering who are flying under the radar of VCs and reporters, but are delivering real value to customers.

While there are still major problems with the Canadian early stage financing market, if we make it easy for creative talent to launch great projects, money and other networks of talent pools will begin to follow.

On Mon 27 Nov 2006. [8] Comments