Fred - Venturing Again

I was fortunate enough to be invited to the first STIRR event in Canada a few weeks back. The fact that is based out of Calgary makes it particularly fortunate, and follows my theme that Calgary’s tech entrepreneur community is becoming one of the best in North America, which besides attracting entrepreneurs, and capital, has gotten the Alberta government’s attention - no small achievement in the land of fossil fuels.

Much of the credit for this happening lately is due to Patrick Lor, who lives in Calgary. Patrick was part of the founding team for iStockphoto, who has spent his ‘retirement’ building Barcamp Calgary and Democamp Calgary, which as STIRR is, modeled after similar organizations in Silicon Valley.

STIRR which has no definition that I can find, other than ‘Where High-Tech Entrepreneurs Mix’, is a networking community for high-tech startup founders, former founders, angel and VC funders and technology journalists.

With Claudia Moore’s help, Patrick brought Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon fame BACK to Calgary, to speak. Many people don’t know that StumbleUpon (like iStockphoto, Voodoo Computer, Harmony remote, M-Tech, SecurityFocus etc) are Calgary companies, that do so well that many people think they are or were California based.

Part of STIRR’s objective is to make this more well known, so that tech entrepreneurs and funders know that there are huge tech success stories right here in Calgary. Based on the buzz lately, you’d think Calgary was Boston or Silicon Valley.

The event itself was great. You can find better descriptions of what went on at the STIRR website. I will say that it brought out some of the best and brightest minds in Alberta (might have had to do with the invite list). This was a small group - the complete list in Alberta would have filled a ballroom at the Fairmont. There are a lot more accomplished tech entrepreneurs that didn’t make it, that would impress even the most skeptical investor/government official/journalist.

Way to go Pat and Claudia!

It’s a great time to be a tech entrepreneur in Alberta. Besides the entrepreneurial spirit that already exists here, the buckets of money, and the positive business environment that is willing to buy early adopter products - we now have a provincial government that is willing to step up with providing a much better investment climate. Or at least one that is as good as the other provinces.

With the flurry of government funding announcements, tax credit changes, and private equity going on, you’d think that we just caught up in 3 months, what should have happened 10 years ago.

I guess good things just take l o n g e r to cook, and we have a provincial government that has the money and the political capital to really diversify the economy. This is great, because along with the entrepreneurial capital, energy and spirit here, it will make for a great combination and I think you’re going to see some great tech companies come from it. For people who live here, and see companies like RIM, ATI Graphics, Nortel, Cognos, and other tech companies become great companies out east, it’s a signal for them to build the next SMART Technologies (who helped bring these changes about) in Alberta.

I believe this to be true, because of the smart and determined people here. Many have succeeded in spite of the previous lack of capital and infrastructure, so imagine what it will be like now.

All that was missing was an initiative like this to tell everyone that Calgary and Edmonton is where you want to go to make it BIG in technology.

I’d like to believe that all the folks that I’ve been previously giving credit to in previous posts, raised the profile enough to get this done. A special thanks to David Martin, Chairman of SMART who has an ‘elder’ statesman (sorry Dave) of the tech community led the charge, and has the experience that the politicos were willing to listen to, and act on.

Now if we can just roll back living expenses 4 years, and this would be a really incredible place to start a tech company….

Thanks Eddie - my new best friend.

Thanks to Stephen King, a TechVibes blogger, many of us have discovered the TechVibes Startup Index, an informal index to tech startups across Canada (and also Portland, WA for some reason). Using a mixture of Alexa and Compete rankings, along with criteria to make sure the company is a startup, this index lists a number of well known companies, along with some not so well known.

Taking a look at the Alberta Index, One thing they all have in common are uncommon names. Shoptoit, Loa PowerTools, Evoco, Tynt, SideFinder, Cambrian House are some startups I know, and as you can see have some interesting names. It’s definitely worth a look, so you can check out the tech startup action in Calgary and Edmonton. Click on the names to get to the various websites to see whats up.

Our company (listed in the top ten for Alberta!), ActiveConversion is proudly on this index now to wave the flag. If you have a startup, make sure you get yourself listed!

And now that TechVibes Calgary has a dedicated blogger in Stephen King, providing the local tech startup news almost every day to you. His blog today is outstanding, as he lets us in on the latest from the Alberta government as to their plans to help encourage technology investment in Alberta to help diversify the province’s economy. The premier, Ed Stelmach looks like he is going to act on task force recommendations led by David Martin of SMART Technologies. This looks like exciting news so click here to read more about it and other tech startup news on Stephen’s blog.

Well, the event came and went, and as usual it went off without a hitch with the Claudia Moore and her team from Material Insight making sure everything went off as planned by Ivan Sierralta and TechRev. It was a long night that went very fast from 5 to almost 9pm for me, because of the ongoing networking before and after the event. I had to decline hanging out with Jessica and the TechRev organizers after such a long day.

Jessica Livingston proved to be as charming and well-spoken as she is thoughtful in her book, Founders@Work. Far from just regurgitating the contents of her book, she added some startup examples not covered in her book. She also added some Calgary-centric points to her talk, by imploring Calgary investors to ‘make bets’ with smart, tech startups, even if they didn’t fully understand the technology. She brought up example startups like Calgary’s StumbleUpon that were under the radar for 3.5 years before being discovered by A-list angel investors in Silicon Valley and subsequently sold to eBay for $75 million. Imagine being a seed investor in that, and staying in until that acquisition!

Jessica then proceeded to do a Founders@Work interview with local serial entrepreneurs, Geoff Lyons from CoolIT and Michael Sikorsky of Cambrian House. Using the same questions she would pose in her interviews with the technology rockstars in her book, we were educated (and entertained) by their responses to what to do and maybe not do in a startup situation.

I think I’m able to summarize Jessica’s findings with two points. Be persistent and build something that customers really, really want. Nothing new but in a startup, where everyday is a challenge, those two points are much easier said than done.

Kudos to Claudia, Pat Lor, Ivan, Darren Massey, Derek Ball, and the other TechRev instigators for bringing this and the Guy Kawasaki event to town. With these events and DemoCamp/BarCamp, I’ve never seen Calgary’s Tech community in better shape and with this kind of promotion and exciting profile.

Finally finished Founders@Work by Jessica Livingston. I’m sure to have a better idea of what she will be speaking about after 500 pages. The book was easy to read (for a techie anyway) and very insightful, but I was slowed by the sheer amount and depth of the interviews.

Like I mentioned in the previous post, some of the best parts are the ‘tell all’ parts, where the founders reveal their greatest fears, and the difficulties they had with VCs, competitors, and with ex-employees, who were in some cases friends (but not somuch now..). I thought there would be more on ex-partners, but surprisingly this didn’t jump out so maybe most partnerships in successful ventures work out.

Although I highly recommend this book, I would suggest an adjunct is to read Paul Graham’s essays online. Paul is Jessica’s partner at Y Combinator, and likely one of the reasons why this book got written. Paul’s writing reflects more of an analysis of founders as well as startup success/failure.

I lost some sleep reading this, because of the amount of reading but it was well worth it. At the very end, on the last page, the secret is revealed in one word, as to what the common denominator is to startup success. Experienced entrepreneurs will know it right away I think. The rest should read it!

Our friends at Material Insight (as part of TechRev) are bringing Jessica Livingston to Calgary on April 7th. Her story is that she interviewed 30 famous tech founders to get the inside scoop on how startups differ from ‘real’ companies. The interviews range from the founder of Adobe to the first employee at Yahoo! (here is the whole list). It includes techie Joel Spolsky’s privately funded companies like Fog Creek Software, to household names like Steve Wozniak’s (the other Steve) Apple Computer.

Even though I’m invited to go, and apparently going to get a free copy of the book there, I couldn’t wait and bought one, knowing that I’ll pass it on to some worthy entrepreneur. The book itself is in interview format, and fairly easy reading. The stories are funnier than h*ll, yet enlightening as to how similar and different startup companies are. Be prepared to cover some technical parts, as many are the technical founders, and cover the detail of how they solved particular technical problems. It’s also somewhat of a ‘Tell all’, as it reveals some of the nastier, behind the scenes issues (like bad VCs), as well as the ‘unsung heroes’ of each venture.

I particularly like how Jessica has used a wide range of companies. East coast to west coast, and from early 80’s VisiCalc to today’s Del.icio.us. It includes Canada’s largest tech company, Research in Motion (better known as the makers of Blackberry), so we get a great Canadian perspective.

Jessica herself is a founding partner at Y Combinator, which is a well known seed-level ‘venture firm’, which makes her an authority on startups in her own right. She was previously VP of marketing at investment bank Adams Harkness and she organizes something called Startup School. She has a BA in English from Bucknell, which makes her standout in a world of propeller heads. My thinking is Claudia Moore at Material Insight, and her should have a lot in common.

Another nice touch to the event, is having some local founders speak. Geoff Lyon at CoolIT and Michael Sikorsky at Cambrian House. Both have already been successful, with their current gigs being their second or third startups. It will be great to hear their Calgary perspective, and to see how the follow-on ones are different (or similar).

This is where you go to signup. See you there!

The big R word is making its rounds in the U.S. And while it’s no joke that some people are losing their jobs and maybe their homes, there has been a noticeable decline in marketing budgets. Soft spend type marketing is already down, as reported in a recent survey conducted by CMO Council, which was sponsored by Deloitte Consulting. Recessions sharpen a company’s focus on marketing, as it tends to be one of the first things cut in a slow down.

“Those companies that can’t measure marketing will likely cut budgets just as they did in 2001, and ultimately will pay the price for it in lost revenue.” “Those organizations that measure the value of their marketing will be the winners now because they can justify the expenditures,” says Rich Eldh, VP and Co-Founder of SiriusDecisions, a leading research consultancy specializing in sales and marketing alignment.

The fear is that a downturn could slow the sales cycle for companies, especially those with higher price tags. As analysts like Sirius keep an eye on how the economy impacts marketing budgets, they also point out that a downturn in the economy would likely result in a bigger advantage for the early adopters of sales and
marketing automation. There is more on this at DemandGenReport.com.

In fact, there appears to be acceleration on marketing spending for dashboards, and other ROI measurement tools to improve accountability and efficiency. Fat gets trimmed, and tools like ActiveConversion can tell marketers what works and what doesn’t.

Recessions upset the status quo, which is good for vendors that have early stage technology that make processes more efficient. It helps manufacturers, and it helps technology companies. Look for these investments to increase, especially if the price is right. There is no recession for products and services that make companies more efficient, and help them weather recessions.

And in case you were wondering what CMO Council said about where they were going invest in 2008? The top six areas of system and solution investment for respondents to the CMO Council study were:
• Email Campaign Management
• CRM
• Marketing Performance Measurement Dashboards
• Customer Intelligence
• Search Engine Marketing
• Sales and Marketing Integration Tools.

As you can probably see, after the holidays, I’ve been extremely busy. Our business has taken off on the online marketing (now renamed demand generation) services side, and we have been also re-tooling the user interface for ActiveConversion. You should see a much more intuitive interface in about a week. In less than a month you will see some changes that will rock, and change people’s perception of what it can really do.

We are also adding people and processes to make all this work. Customer service is going to be beefed up and you’ll start to see much more customer involvement in development and support.

Besides all the internal things going on, we’ve been excited by the market that has started to develop. Potential partners, suppliers and customers have unanimously indicated that ActiveConversion is the start of a new wave of B2B marketing and sales tools that will change how demand generation will be created, measured and acted upon in the future.

According to a 2007 Sales Lead Management Survey, 83% of companies fail to measure ROI on their demand generation efforts because it is too difficult or too time consuming. We aim to change that so that you will be able to instantly to not only measure marketing ROI, but deliver an ongoing stream of qualified leads to a sales team. Closed loop marketing like this is the future, along with the marketing automation that goes along with it.

No wonder that the market for this is growing rapidly. B2B marketing tools like this will automatically connect sales to leads created and nurtured by marketing. This promises to change the existing flawed system that has been in place for decades, whereby marketing creates ‘leads’ only to have sales reject them because they are not qualified or ready.

We’re excited to help change this inefficient and flawed model with ActiveConverion, which we’re sure will be adopted by thousands of companies in the future. We can’t wait!

Guy Kawasaki must be a skier. Because not long after leaving Las Vegas (from Pubcon) in December, he will be coming to Calgary to open the first every Bar Camp Calgary on December 15. Nobody comes from L.V. or Silicon Valley to Calgary in mid December unless they are crazy, in an Amazing Race episode or a skier.

Thanks to the efforts of Patrick Lor, Kempton Lam, Sarah Blue, David Gluzman and John Bristowe, the marketing and startup legend is coming to Calgary to give his ‘no-bozo’ advice and experience to the many tech entrepreneurs in the Silicon Rockies.

This is going to be a great event. Besides hearing from the foremost expert on tech startups from his Art of the Start, and the Managing Director of Garage.com, the purpose of BarCamps is to have open and high participation among its attendees. What This means is participants will be able to tap the brightest minds in Calgary on all the various facets of web technology and marketing and cooperate in real time to help each other.

I’ve seen Guy present a few times, going back 8 years. He’s often asked to keynote events so he’s in circulation at many web and software conferences and so I’ve had the opportunity to see him speak. And of course, he’s written some great books, besides Art of the Start, such as ‘Rules for Revolutionaries’. As far as I know though, he’s never spoken publicly in Calgary so this is a real treat. This will be in front of a much smaller crowd, so he will be interesting to see him in this type of venue. He puts on a great talk every time, so I’m looking forward to it in addition to the Camping afterwards.

Bar Camps are user generated conferences, and as such, are not announced really. You will not have seen advertising on it, and attendees find out about it via blogging, RSS feeds, Facebook and from attendance at Demo Camps. These happen all over the world, wherever there is a large enough mass of techs and entrepreneurs to make it happen. To have one the first one in Calgary, and with Guy Kawasaki opening is a historic moment for the Calgary tech community and puts us in a different category. Thanks again to Patrick and the gang for this.

As of this writing, it is full, with a waiting list but there should be video and a wiki afterwards with the proceedings. Check Kempton’s blog for the latest on that later.

I got a copy of a 30 page report from IBM Global Business Services yesterday that predicts that there will more changes in the advertising industry in the next 5 years, than there has been in the last 50 years.

That’s a pretty bold statement from IBM’s professional services unit (which as far as I know, don’t have significant stake in online ads or even online marketing services). It goes on to state that there is a massive move to online advertising and warns ad agencies and media publishers that they’d better plan for new capabilities before advertising as we know it disappears.

The summary also states, ‘“There is no question that the future of advertising will look radically different from the past. The push for control of attention, creativity, measurements and inventory will reshape the advertising value chain and shift the balance of power.”

As I’ve referenced in my online marketing blog, companies like Microsoft (which does have a big stake) see a sea-change to online and digital advertising, led by Google of course, but now permeating everywhere and producing billions in valuation for Facebook, Myspace and other online destinations. And there’s the promise of personalized, online ads in mobile that still has to be realized. This is just a start of the cycle that fulfills IBM’s prediction.

Although there are no shortage of technology startups in providing the tools to hasten this change, you can bet there will even more, as advertising and marketing is uprooted and replaced with technology-driven versions that will give companies control over attention, creativity, measurements and inventory (think Google). There will be an insatiable demand for this, because it works way better than ’spray and pray’ marketing.

Marketing and advertising agencies beware. You’ve been forewarned…