David Crow

Connector of dots. Maker of lines. Rider of slopes.

Entrepreneurship

Do Great Work, Repeat

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The title is from Greg Story‘s article The Future of the Digital Design Agency in the United States.

I have been thinking about design firms.We can call them agencies, studios, evolutionary consultancies, or whatever. They are the firms that have unique skills, competencies and perspectives that it is difficult to capture or justify inside a company. Sometimes the value or impact is so important that it is better to have the resources in house. We are seeing this tension between agencies and in-house design being played out. Capital One acquired Adaptive Path. TeehanLax shutting down and the principals joined Facebook. SmartDesign shutting down. The misconceptions of working in-house.  This is compared to a bright future for design firms to compete on mindset. To build a new operating model to evolve at least as fast as the world around them.

The design firm is not going anywhere. The design firm, like a startup, has speed as their advantage. Being able to evolve the practice, the processes, the mindset, the tools, the outputs faster than the market while still doing great work is what defines the firms and people.

But there is something in the back of my mind that makes me think the business model is broken. This is most likely just a hangover from my >15 years of thinking about startups, venture capital and growth as the narrative of impact and success. The conversation to me is reminiscent of conversations I have with product companies and founders. It is probably just co-incidence.

https://twitter.com/mustefaJ/status/558374585117466624

https://twitter.com/mustefaJ/status/558382377375129600

Six months to two years of cash on hand is when the “studio is the VC for the org”. This is eerily reminiscent of funding for emerging companies. And it triggers a lot of questions for me:

How should design firms invest their profits? Should they invest in growth? Culture? New companies? Should the new companies come from inside the design firm, i.e., growth by attrition? Is the role for the design firm on that is like a General Partner (GP) at a venture fund? Is it one that is closer to a  Limited Partner (LP) that invests in funds managed by others? Are the skills and people that are capable of growing a design firm that is capable of having both growth and 2 years of operations in profits the same people to build emerging companies? Do skunk works and labs projects generate new businesses or new insights that can be incorporated into client work? Are their alternative monetization strategies and business models for design firms?

For design firms it is clear. Do great work, repeat.

UW VeloCity Evolving

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December 31, 2011 marked the end of my reign as the Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EiR) at UW VeloCity. The VeloCity residence announced a new leadership team before Christmas Holiday. I’m still affiliated, I’m still an alumni and I’m still an avid supporter.

I was lucky enough to spend 6 months with the students and their companies in Waterloo. I made the trek down the 401 to Waterloo almost every Tuesday night for dinner. The dinners were modelled after the YCombinator dinners. We brought in our friends and acquaintances from the world of high tech entrepreneurship to talk to the students. To share their experiences starting companies, raising funding, working with cofounders, etc. The goal was to provide a social, educational experience for the students and hopefully teach them something about the industry and software culture.

I was an undergraduate back in the early 90s. I wrote Objective-C on NeXTSTEP boxes. But no one at Waterloo really promoted starting a software company as a career path, maybe I’m just an idiot, but I never thought that I could start a company and sell the software I was writing. There were a few startups (MKS, RIM, Maplesoft) but this wasn’t a career path that was promoted. You could argue may this was because I was in the Kinesiology department. But spent a significant portion of my time in CS and SYSDE (SYSDE142, 342, 542 and others). The closest was a class about database management in the department of Management Sciences but it definitely wasn’t about entrepreneurship (how much do I still hate Access).

It wasn’t that hadn’t been exposed to entrepreneurship. I grew up in an entrepreneurial household, my Dad had left Clarkson Gordon to start his own small business accounting and consulting firm in the early 1980s. And my first real job was with a small usability consulitng firm, but I thought that I would get a job at CIBC or IBM or maybe Delrina. I was never provided the skills, the experience or even the awareness that entrepreneurship (software entrepreneurship) was a career path. I went to CMU for graduate work, and I was exposed to founders from MIT, CMU, Stanford and other places. My first job after grad school, I did research at UIUC and was exposed to things like early Netscape. But it wasn’t until I started working at Trilogy Software with a bunch of Stanford graduates did it become clear that I could start a software company. I always wished that someone had shown me entrepreneurship (beyond consulting) as a career path.

My view about VeloCity comes back to my own experiences at UWaterloo. And the role that VeloCity needs to play in exposing and educating UW students about high-tech entrepreneurship. It will be great to see the evolution with Mike Kirkup (LinkedIn, @mikekirkup) and Brett Shellhammer (LinkedIn, @bashome). VeloCity represents something that wasn’t available to me when I was a UW student. For me, VeloCity represents the next stage of evolution for the University of Waterloo cooperative education program:

” the solution was not just classroom instruction but “the co-operative program,” which offered students alternating terms of paid work in industry to get practical experience.”

Velocity feels like a starting ground for the next set of education at Waterloo. With the launch of MITx in addition to Open Courseware, MIT is attempting to change the face of higher education. There is inspiration and direction from TED, TEDx, and SingularityU. There is also the rise of self-learning platforms like Codeacademy, Khan Academy and others. It is time that UWaterloo explored evolving the cooperative education program beyond the constraints of the existing program. For me VeloCity represents the start of a new academic experience.

I can’t wait to be a part of what is next.

 

Apps for Heatlh

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Apps for Health 2011I am not a huge fan of design contests as a motivator or educational tool. However they seem to work, there are business plan competitions like Moot Corp, SIFE Student Entrepreneur Competition, MIT $100K, among others. They do define external criteria, timelines and rewards help structure the process. That aside there is a new competition happening at Mohawk College in Hamilton focused on building “technological solutions to real-world challenges sponsored by health care organizations”.

Ever since I had a heart attack at DemoCampToronto6 I have had a renewed interest in personal health technologies. This shouldn’t be a surprise given that my undergraduate degree in Kinesiology in the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences (ask me about how a 17 year old makes decisions about educational programs, and I did seriously want to be an orthopedic surgeon until I realized I’d have to work with sick people). I’ve been interested in reimagining personal health technology:

I have friends at BodyMedia, Massive Health and other organizations that are doing some amazing things. I am fascinated with the change in delivery and practice engagement that Canadian companies like HelloHealth and Myca. So I am impressed to see  Apps for Health that presents a series of challenges:

Teams are then required to do the necessary research, design and iteration to build a presentation. You can think about this as the initial pitch session whether for funding, recruiting, customer development, etc. Teams create a 10 minute presentation that “demos” the solution.  The goal is to concisely present your idea and demonstrate:

  • Must demonstrate a thorough understanding of the health care problem
  • Must be clinically useful in the health care environment
  • Must be created by team for purpose of the competition
  • Must be technologically feasible
  • Degree of completion
  • Cohesive presentation

What’s the best way to present this? Technical details? Screen shots? Demos? Simulators? etc. Up to each team. You need to demonstrate impact and win hearts and minds. I think I’ll look at forking out the $50 to attend including the drive to Hamilton.

 

Goodbye Microsoft, so long and thanks for all the bits

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Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/2049233526/
Photo by Stuck in Customs

Can you believe that it has been 1230 days since I announced I was joining Microsoft? I’m guessing a lot of people lost out on that one in the over/under pool. Well, it has been a fantastic 3 years, 4 months and 7 days so far, unfortunately there are only 4 days left until it’s over for me. Effective Friday, September 24, 2010 I will be leaving Microsoft Canada.

I’m heading back into the fray. Or as John so eloquently puts it, I will be starting on a new path, with some old friends and the plan is actually quite simple:
Have fun and try to take over the world responsibly. I’ve spent the past 3+ years talking to entrepreneurs about programs like BizSpark and trying to help them build on the emerging Microsoft technologies and platform. I’m looking forward to getting back in the trenches and using customer development to build and ship products.

I’m not alone. There are a few of the folks that I’ve worked with or been lucky enough to call a friend that have also left Microsoft in the past year including: Don Dodge, Adam Kinney, Scott Barnes and others. This didn’t impact my decision to leave, it’s more just a curious observation.

As a sidenote, I’m pretty sure that John will be looking for a ISV DE (in non-Microsoft acronym speak: a developer evangelist focused on independent software vendors). What does an ISV DE do? Here’s the ISV DE job description from Belgium.

The ISV Developer Evangelist mission is to drive platform adoption and revenue growth with depth and breadth ISVs. The ISV Developer Evangelist is focused on winning ISV adoption of Microsoft platform technologies by working with ISV senior technology decision makers within these organizations. This is accomplished by collaborating with the ISV PAM (Partner Account Manager) to build a well-managed, mutually beneficial alliance that drives revenue growth and expands the reach of strategic Microsoft products within the partner’s solution portfolio.

It was a great time to be a part of the Developer & Platform Evangelism team at Microsoft Canada. And if I’d consider working with John Oxley (@joxley), Mark Relph (@mrelph) and the team again in the future. If you’re looking for a fun gig working with ISVs including startups and emerging companies, make sure you follow up with John.

Twitter as a protocol

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Friend Wheel

Mathew Ingram asks “Does the World Need More Than One Twitter?“. Can you imagine if e-mail was only run by one company? How weird would it have been if we’d all been stuck with a CompuServe email address? It’s interesting to see companies like Status.Net build an open source microblogging platform that can serve as the basis for an alternate real-time micromessaging communication protocol.

Mathew also mentions one of my other favourite companies, StockTwits, founded by StartupEmpire speaker Howard Lindzon. Howard is well versed in the Twitter ecosystem having invested in StockTwits, Disqus and other Twitter based apps. Howard has a great post about what would happen to StockTwits minus Twitter. StockTwits is something like Bloomberg built on top of a micromessaging platform that can publish and subscribe to Twitter. Twitter is a great public micromessaging platform, but it is a platform that is continuing to evolve. We’re starting to see the emergence of different protocols including XMPP, PubSubHubBub and other protocols. There is a great opportunity to think about the opportunities beyond Twitter. And make sure you check out both Status.Net and StockTwits, they’re awesome.

What’s missing?

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It’s been more than 4 years since I first blogged about hosting BarCamp in Toronto. And it’s been a crazy 4 years.

And the thing that I’m most proud of are the dozens of derivative events (like ChangeCamp, CaseCamp, StartupDrinks, eCommerceCamp, and the entire *Camp scene). And the ever increasing number of new people and the connections between individuals. There are fantastic social events like Ignite Toronto and PowerPoint Karaoke. There are mobile events like MEIC, Mobile Innovation Week, MEF, MoMoTO. There are events focused on Generation Y – #genYTO (make us GenXers even more bitter). There are opportunities to connect with others in Toronto. There are parties and fundraisers (#hohoTO, #twestivalTO).

There’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear

Guess what? There’s a scene! There are events. There are investors. There are startups. There are parties. There are fund raisers.

Why does this matter? It makes it easier to find others that share your interests and may have shared values. It is easier to find the nodes in the network and then exchange value.  It makes it easier to find potential employees. It makes it easy to identify the funders, the mentors, the serial entrepreneurs. The goal was to build a hub, to enable people to come together, to share and connect. It’s up to every participant to identify who might be interesting to them, to build a trust network and to determine how to participate. Hopefully everyone figures out a way to add more value to the network than they extract.

What’s missing?

Well funding. It’s not that there is a lack of funding, there is funding. Venture capital in Canada is an industry that is changing. But the shortage over the past 10 years has created a unique environment. It has pillaged the talent pool. It has left a talent gap. Hear me out. Companies like Microsoft started hiring away  the  best in the early to mid 90s, “228 grads in 1993, 219 in 1994, 283 in 1995, 233 in 1996” . Sure there were others, but Microsoft, Trilogy, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and others are fantastic training grounds for young entrepreneurs. The secondary effect of hiring out of university is that your young talent is free to move about the country. They are unencumbered by mortgages and small children. They tend to work hard, develop mad skills, grow the company, and then settle in and raise a family. Then they stay.

They don’t come back. Why because the companies have grown, they have vested options, nice pay cheques and the prospects in Toronto are weak at best. There are not enough well funded and executing startups to move back and take a senior level role that pays near market rate. Why take a paying gig? Well you’ve got kids. You need to move back. You haven’t spent 10 years in Toronto building a personal/professional network. You know that in Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle you can garner a base of $150,000 at a funded startup.  You compare that to startups that think that stock options are incentive compensation (seriously, there’s a vesting schedule you give execs a big grant to incent them to work, if things don’t work out you terminate before the vesting date, sign).

Jumping the Gap

What’s missing? It’s the 25-35 year old up and coming development executive/entrepreneur. It’s the individual that goes from employee to early employee to founder. That experiences the successes and failures of building, launching, selling products in a compressed incubator. We individuals that could be in these roles, but they often get frustrated and leave many of the larger organizations to start agencies and consultancies. They learn the skills of being a time-and-materials junkie (which as previously discussed is not a bad skill set), it’s just different from building a massively adopted product. The lack of funding has meant many of the startups that could hire these individuals can’t because they can’t compete against the base salaries and lifestyles that have been adopted. It doesn’t mean that you VP of Sales should drive an Aston Martin (if that’s part of your compensation package, call me, I’m available for all Aston Martin driving gigs), but it does mean that you need to attract and retain the best available talent locally and around the globe that will enable your company. The chronic underfunding of Canadian companies has hamstrung startups to relying on whoever is willing or able to work for cut rate salaries or those that have the deep passion for the startup culture.

We need to: