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

It’s been overdue, but since I’m going to be using this blog more frequently with Akoha’s impending launch I wanted to update a number of disclosures about my affiliations, relationships and investments.

I’ve posted a new About Me page that now lists some of the angel investments I’ve made, some of the other business relationships I have in the technology industry and some updated info on my personal & business life.

Some of these details were previously mentioned throughout some posts that I made in the last year, but I had never updated on my bio.

There is some new information about companies I’ve invested in (Standout Jobs, Bumptop, BrainparK) and partnerships I have with some VCs hat I will announce properly in the coming weeks, but I’ve updated the About Me pending proper posts that will be coming soon.

On Tue 9 Sep 2008. [2] Comments

My brother Hamnett and I were on the cover of Report on Business Small Business Magazine last week.  The article does interviews with a number of Canadian serial entrepreneurs.

It was fun to do the photo shoot, which involved my brother and I jumping on a trampoline on the roof of the Radialpoint building overlooking Montreal.   It was a first for me, posing for the photographer & trying not to fly off the trampoline or the building

I’ve embedded a scan of the article below.

On Sat 6 Sep 2008. [5] Comments

I’ve been away from blogging for a couple of months lately working on my dream, Akoha.

Despite that I had to post this video in honor of Dr. Randy Pausch who died today after a battle with pancreatic cancer.   Having lost a family member to a similar type of cancer I felt a personal connection with Randy’s battle since I heard his speech last September.

Randy in the final year of his life became world famous through YouTube broadcast of his lecture, an ABC News special that Diane Sawyer did on his story and published a book about his Last Lecture In the end more then three million people have watched his lecture in the last year and he has influenced so many people in sharing the story of his life.

An incredible story from an inspirational man.  He will be missed.

On Fri 25 Jul 2008. No Comments

Being part of a startup includes a mandatory ride on an emotional rollercoaster that will  find ways to break your nerves and patience, straining every relationship you have at various times throughout the ride. 

Startups are powered with emotional rocket fuel, but never seem to lift off in a vertical fashion.  Your emotional rocket fuel is actually powering a crazy up and down rollercoaster ride that can make lesser people pass out.

Recently I’ve been caught underwater with three large transactions occurring at the same time, two of which were unplanned resulting from some events outside of my control but need to be tended too regardless of what I had on my schedule.

Each are complicated and carrying lots of small moving parts, differing personalities, large expectations, opportunities for profit & loss with the corresponding communication problems that tend to arise and need to be worked out.

In each case my relationships with my partners, and the outside parties we are doing business with have been tested in positive (in the case of my partners) and some negative ways.

I like what Marc Andreessen recently wrote in his post on Why Not To Do Startups

First, and most importantly, realize that a startup puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced.

You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again.

Over and over and over.

And I’m talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs.

There is so much uncertainty and so much risk around practically everything you are doing. Will the product ship on time? Will it be fast enough? Will it have too many bugs? Will it be easy to use? Will anyone use it? Will your competitor beat you to market? Will you get any press coverage? Will anyone invest in the company? Will that key new engineer join? Will your key user interface designer quit and go to Google? And on and on and on…

Some days things will go really well and some things will go really poorly. And the level of stress that you’re under generally will magnify those transient data points into incredible highs and unbelievable lows at whiplash speed and huge magnitude.

Sound like fun?

Marc’s a smart guy who gave me some great advice the couple times I met with him when I was building Zero-Knowledge Systems.  He’s been doing some great blogging sharing his considerable experience on startup life which is worth checking out.

The fuel that drives startups and any growing company is passion and intensity.  The day to day decisions may affect the navigation, but you need this startup fuel to create the momentum to face the daily challenges of startups and to achieve escape velocity.  

This startup fuel (Mix equal parts passion, intensity, and relentless need for getting things done) is volatile and needs to be mixed and handled with extreme care. In my experience it takes at least 2 co-founding partners to both create and safely handle this startup fuel.

I advise lone entrepreneurs I work with to get some sort of co-founding partner before they go any further for two simple reasons.

#1 Reason you need co-founder

• If you can’t convince someone else to jump into the startup void and join you on your adventure then odds are you aren’t a good enough personal sales person to do what it will take to build a company without a co-founder creating a no-win situation.   Creating companies takes team building and millions of moments of convincing (sales, financing, hiring) and if you can’t find a co-founder who is better than you at something and convince them to join you in your adventures then it doesn’t bode well for your abilities to build a company. 

In the Valley it’s easy to find a co-founder and the environment is incredibly supportive in teaching smart people how to operate startups and navigate the industry.

Finding startup minded people in Canada is more challenging, since we don’t teach or promote risk taking and entrepreneurship as a career option. Culturally we have many smart and successful people, but we don’t have an abundance of risk orientated startup minded people compared to other countries. 

It can be done if you work at it.  My partner, Fred Ngo started to organize Barcamp in Montreal specifically to help meet other people interested in startups.  That’s where we met alongside with Ben and started the discussion that led to the creation of Standout Jobs.

My buddy Marc Chriqui at ILovetoPlay also just announced a co-founding partner, Sandy. - Congrats to Marc since this is a big step in building a company. 

#2 Reason you need co-founders

• More importantly, startups are emotional rollercoasters and they are only fun when you have trusted co-founders and partners to ride the ups and downs with you.  Your partners and co-founders talk you down when you are angry, and up when you are down.   Then you swap sides as you take the lead in talking them up when they are down and you are riding high.   Many times you are both looking at a shitty situation, sigh together, suck it up and know that you both will fix whatever problem has occurred. This becomes easier because you know you’ll be in it together.  Would you try to lift an 800lb. weight without a spotter? 

The ability to bounce ideas off each other and act as emotional cushions while riding the startup rollercoaster is essential to the success of the company.   Teams that bleed together, succeed together.   Because at the end of the of day, it’s the tough times when peoples real characters are tested. You will always be learning about the characters of your partners at the same time you are judging the characters of all the people you will be dealing with in your daily startup adventures (financing, sales, hiring).   Many of the characters you will meet aren’t worth your time and will suck the energy out of you and you need your partners to help you ride that out and help you both learn from the experiences. 

The most important thing your partners help you realize together is at the end of the day it is just a ride.   Although it may not feel like it, the situations are never as bad as they seem and the intense twists and turns are just normal by-products that come from mixing any intense activity with a highly volatile amount of passion, piss, and guts poured on for fuel.

I am very lucky to have some great partnerships with my various co-founders that have all come in handy this last couple of weeks. 

Despite weeks like I just had, I love what I do including all the ups and downs - and that is only because of the partners I have.

Startups are adventures made fun and enjoyable because you share the experience with people you enjoy riding rollercoasters with.  Not because you have any real control of which twists and turns you will be riding on any given day.

Thanks to my co-founders who help me keep my perspective and my activities intense, rewarding and always full of adventure.  

• Alex and my team at Akoha have been pulling together some great stuff for an upcoming team offsite.  Alex works with me on all aspects of my business affairs and he and I talk throughout the day about all our decisions to help each other balance our ideas and activities.  We have been friends for more then a decade and can talk each other up and down any situation.  We keep each other in check.  (I’m looking forward to introducing the whole Akoha team once we come out from behind our curtain for our premiere.  They are all co-founders in our project.).

• Ben and Fred my partners at Standout Jobs are incredible in their level headed and practical way of tackling day to day startup adventures.  We each have had the fun and nerve racking moments tackling some curveballs in the last month. As these curveballs come faster and more erratic Ben and Fred have been incredible to work with.  We discuss how we tackle the issues of the day and move on to the next thing.

• My father and brother, who I have been working on some exciting Radialpoint business with. This required us to work through some complicated financial and business decisions. Working with family comes with a unique set of advantages and challenges.  One of the benefits is that you can pretty much always trust that family will figure out ways to make things work, which is what took a lot of time to work out this week but we sorted it out in time for some tough deadlines since the transaction needed to close quickly.

• Todd (our financial Analyst & Spreadsheet jockey), Katherine (my executive assistant) and Rosalie (our bookkeeper & admin assistant) at Brudder Ventures who have been helping me deal with juggling all the various meetings and financial aspects related to each of these transactions. Knowing that I have a strong financial and administrative teams to compliment my skills on creating companies is a great piece of mind.

• My greatest co-founder in my projects is my partner at home, Kelly.  She has been incredibly supportive by taking care of so many life details allowing me to focus my time effectively on the projects on my plate.  Many of my early startups were done without a relationship in my life.  I would always date after the startups were in revenue generating mode because I couldn’t handle the distraction from work.   At this point in my life, I appreciate having a loving partner at home who reminds me to take breaks and is the ultimate anchor of what is important.   Thanks babe for all your help & support.

If you have the right friends along for the ride, I still can’t recommend a more satisfying experience then working for a startup. Whether you are part of the founding team or an early employee there is an incredible amount of pride that comes from contributing to the fuel that creates something new and of value.

On Sat 30 Jun 2007. [9] Comments

Mine kind of felt like this,

but I’m getting off the plane and the end is in sight…….

On Fri 29 Jun 2007. [4] Comments

I want to congratulate my brother Hamnett, father Hammie and the entire team at Radialpoint who were just honored by Profit Magazine as the fastest growing company in Quebec (measured in 5 year revenue growth) and the 32 fastest in Canada. 

This is a great acknowledgement of a lot of hard work done by the entire team over there.  Radialpoints evolution from its beginings to its position today and the current success as one of Canada’s fastest growing technology firms is one a great Canadian success story.  Not many ventured backed companies succesfully navigated the late 90’s and early 2000’s and large provider of managed services to ISPs during the meltdown that network providers and the industry at large were in the midst of.

Early this week I was at a conference where Profit magazine columnist Rick Spence was doing a case study on what Quebec’s fastest growing companies do well.  He highlighted how Radialpoint has focused on it’s partners business success and has become a critical partner for its customers in helping them earn additional revenue and reduce customer churn.

I picked up a copy of the Profit Magazine that goes on stands next week from Rick and my brother Hamnett is interviewed in an article on serial entrepreneurs;

Most repeat CEOs are creatures of habit, getting into businesses in industries they know and understand. Take Hamnett Hill, co-founder and CEO of Montreal-based Radialpoint Inc. (No. 32). At 35, Hill has owned five businesses, all of them in the technology sector. To help pay the bills while at university in the early 1990s, Hill started a multimedia consulting firm that designed PowerPoint presentations for executives and corporate-training programs. At 21, he and his brother Austin launched an Internet provider in the early dot-com days of 1994, which grew to be the third-largest in Canada. When Hill realized how hard it would be to turn a profit — especially as big telcos entered the business — he sold the company to a firm that eventually became BCE Emergis. Hill then set his sights on the Next Big Thing on the Web: privacy. He and Austin started Zero-Knowledge Systems, an encryption company. When the tech bubble burst in 2001, Hill put the brakes on the privacy service, restructured the company and created Radialpoint, which provides managed Internet services for the world’s largest broadband ISPs.

Radialpoint is continuing a long time tradition of taking the entire company and friends of the company out to see a movie (Ocean’s 13) tomorrow, and they have invited our team at Akoha and Standout Jobs to join them.  

Thanks to everyone at Radialpoint for the invite - we are looking forward to it, and congratulations on another great year.

Radialpoint has a number of positions open and has a standout culture of it’s own.  If you are looking for a great company to join, check out the open positions they currently are hiring for.

On Fri 8 Jun 2007. [3] Comments

I’m in Toronto all week and will be speaking at the following events.

JCI Toronto Entrepreneurship talk: Tomorrow night be speaking about entrepreneurship and my experience starting companies at the Junior Chamber International’s Young Entrepreneurs association Toronto chapter. Tuesday May 29th, 6:30pm - JCI Toronto - Delta Chelsea Hotel. There is a $55 registration fee for this event. You can register here.

Mesh Conference: I’m really excited about the Mesh Conference this week. Many old friends from across Canada, and some friends from the valley are attending. The Mesh organizers have done an incredible job with the agenda and line up and I’m proud to be included among an amazing line up of speakers. Mesh is already sold out.

On Mon 28 May 2007. No Comments

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

I got to check out the new Tesla Motors vehicle which they had on display at the TED conference.  Electric candy that makes you go hmmmm. I recently got rid of a toy, but this certainly got me thinking. Potholes in Montreal and a lot of investing in my current startups puts this toy on the wishlist for now, but wouldn’t it be nice

Well just realized I wrote hybrid, but the Tesla is an electric car. My bad.

On Tue 13 Mar 2007. [4] Comments

I’ve heard the process of naming a company is often compared to naming a child.

I don’t have any children yet, but I’ve been through the naming process with more then ten companies (including spin offs, rebranding, as an investor, founder or advisor) and in the last six months have been involved in the naming of 4 more.  I hope when I do have kids, that I don’t use the same method as corporate branding and wind up calling them Zero Knowledge

Sometimes names are easy (Total.Net), but recently it has become harder to find proper names that have available domains, search engine uniqueness and provide meaning or a story that people can identify with.

I am not a fan of names that don’t embody some story of the mission of the company. Made up names that combine vowels and consonants to create a five letter words that don’t mean anything except that they are unique and the domain name is available is not my style.

It took some time for us to develop our story and find a proper name for what has until now been called Project Ojibwe.

On behalf of my partner Alex and our incredible team, it is my pleasure to announce that our new project which will launch this summer is going to be called Akoha.

There is a story and meaning behind this name, but you’ll have to wait a little while longer to hear it.

Project Ojibwe is dead. Long live Akoha.

Ultimately names are important. They embody the passion and effort of the product creators and provide a container for our team to pour our creative energies into. It is our hope that when we share our community project with our members they will see our passion and start to share some of our love for what we are working on.

We look forward to sharing more of our story with you in the coming months.

For now, if you’d like sign up on our mailing list and we’ll let you know when the Akoha blog and community preview trailers are ready for launch.

On Fri 9 Mar 2007. [5] Comments