The Post Money Value

From the Hmmm Department

Up here in Atlantic Canada, Mary rules; the Colonel ain't squat.

It seems the good folks in Mary's marketing department decided to combine a little of the old fashion (Billboards) with this Internet thingy.

So, of course, there is an assumption that you can simply zip over to your computer and pop Mary Browns into Google and get right to those money saving coupons. Not exactly.

You can type wwww.marybrowns.com right in your favorite browser and see the video. You can see the small monthly special logo/link at the bottom of the page which has the word coupon right there. You can click it, see it, download it, and finally print it.

All this to save a few coins on a Big Mary chicken sandwich. My Hmmm, is simply wondering about the number of people who will do all of this vs. other ways to get people into the stores.

I wonder if it wouldn't have made more marketing sense to tell people to SMS chicken some place to get back a free drink code word or something. Yeah, the SMS message would, in theory, cost something but people love to spend good money on free. Or call a free *chicken number to hear the secret code word.. Whatever.

It's observation while I chase down a salad for lunch.

P.S. I could be wrong but Sandwhich is not a correct alternative spelling of Sandwich. Somebody should let Mary's web people know.

A Different Approach to Getting My Attention

You just can't make this stuff up.

Here is an email thread that wandered through my inbox:

From: Mark xxxxxxx Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2008 To: Rick Segal Subject: Time Sensitive - Invest Opp

Rick,

I got your name from [] who indicated you might be a good fit for our company. After reviewing your public profile, blog, general google results, we've concluded that we can allow your firm the opportunity to review our company for investment. I've attached a one page summary of our company. As you will see, we believe that within 9 months, we will obtain $200 million in revenue with only minor losses of $10 million.

We will accept your investment proposal up until midnight, Oklahoma City time, tonight. If you will require an extra hour or two, please notify me within 7 hours of the expiry time so I can convene a management meeting to review this request.

We will consider moving to Canada should we receive a binding notice of tax benefits and inducements from the Canadian Government along with your investment proposal.

Our investor due diligence process will be required prior to finalizing your investment.

Thank you.

I love this gig.. My reply back:

To: Mark xxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2008
From: Rick Segal
Subject: RE: Time Sensitive - Invest Opp

Mark,

Thanks for writing. I've always appreciated it when [] sends me a referral. I've given your proposal careful consideration and, in order to beat both the midnight and 7 hour prior deadlines, I've decided to pass. I believe timeliness is an important quality.

Be careful out there!

best,

>R<

I forwarded this thread to [] with a big smily face and within 2 minutes got back OMG and then within 7 minutes after that, got an Amazon gift certificate with 'sorry sorry sorry' as the card.

As I said, I love this gig!

Congrats to Qik and Flixwagon

As a start-up, nothing is more rewarding, more gratifying, more empowering than being joining the big leagues. To reach the top of your game and be welcomed into the elite group is an honor not lightly bestowed on just any company.

So, it is with great fanfare and enjoyment that I congratulate mobile video companies Qik and Flixwagon for being declared dead right alongside RIM and Microsoft.
First, we have Michael Arrington doing up mushroom clouds when it comes to what he thinks Apple is going to do to RIM and Microsoft. Yeah, iPhone is going to kill RIM and Microsoft's mobile business. Right. Next fantasy?

And the next fantasy comes right on cue. We have Robert Scoble using the "kill" phrase with respect to Qik and Flixwagon. It seems Robert found another company in the same space and because at this very moment, the new flavor of his month has features that the other two don't have at this very moment, the other two must, according to Scoble, surely die.

I could spend an hour ranting about these blog posts, in particular Scoble's who should know that it's only software and the words "next release" usually cover the feature hopping. And let's not even debate the whole notion of different apps for different users, etc, etc.

Let us just do two things.

Item one: A hearty congrats to both Qik and Flixwagon. When you are declared dead these days, you are in good company. Apple, RIM, Microsoft, Amazon, Ebay, etc, have all be declared dead at one time or another. Sometimes they get dead multiple times! So, well done, takes a lot to get into this crowd.

Item two: The lesson for you is simple. Take it all in as feedback, adjust as required, and ignore the rest.

Rent-A-Coder Fun - Follow Along

As I start my trek in Newfoundland chasing Icebergs, I thought I'd get a little coding project started: Cloning Windows Live Writer for the Mac. I've posted a job up on rentacoder.com which outlines a fairly easy requirement. I'm looking to get a native Mac application that is look and feel like Windows Live Writer. It doesn't have to share files or do anything particularly fancy, just the basics.

Assuming I can get it done where it can post stuff to this blog, I will release the source code into the wild and see what grows.

Stay tuned, should be fun.

Kindle Fun for the Whole Borders Family

I really like the Amazon Kindle. I have two, one as a loaner and one for personal use. It's a great way to carry stacks of books in a simple device for reading.  Just recently on a trip to the U.S., I took the device into a Borders bookstore.  There, at the new non-fiction table, I checked out the new books by looking at the covers, thumbing the book, etc, and -assuming I wanted it- ordered it on the spot via the Kindle's wireless connection. Lots of money saved.

After doing this twice, a store person came up, asked me what I was doing and after hearing my answer, got into a serious lather trying to stop me by explaining the store's policy against people grabbing 'pricing research'.  I thought that was a bit of stretch but admired the attempt at some type of response.

I made the suggestion to the manager who happened to come along that maybe having a Kiosk in here allowing me to locally download electronic copies either with my hard copy or as an alternative would allow them to make some money off of me.  Cut a deal with Sony for branded E-book devices they were hawking.  I knew, of course, this person had no control over the chain. 

The reaction was, however, funny and sad at the same time:

[Laughter] Right. I'm working for a technological backwater. If it was up to these people, we'd be using an abacus for checkout.  Use your Kindle all you like, I have one as well. Just buy something, I need this job.

Fun, eh?

More Lessons from Fruit - Habit Changes

I can't tell you the number of business plans that have, as a central  theme, this huge requirement to change somebody's habits.  In the course of discussing this issue with the entrepreneur, it becomes really hard to convince them that changing people's habits - forget perceptions- is a seriously non-trivial task.

A Workflow Example

Consider my previous blog point about Entourage and the back up issues, specifically the lack of what I called proper back up and archive services.  While I think it is a seriously bad problem, the Mac Operating System (Leopard) can somewhat deal with the situation BUT there is a habit change.

In Leopard, time machine is touted as basically system wide snapshots of your machine. If the machine is hooked up or connected over the air to a large hard drive, clones of the machine are made in the background on the external device. If something blows up, no problem, time travel back to the time you want and, presto, life is good.

No habit change for Time Machine, just turn it on. Easy enough.

With Entourage, well, that's another matter. In order to get this to all work correctly, you do have a few habit changes. First you have to use local folders (ie pull the data off the exchange server) and second, if you are a laptop guy (the MacBook Air in my case), you'll need to either remember to plug in that USB drive or buy the external device made by Apple which allows you to come home/office and have Time Machine see the device and start backing up over the air.

You can't just take a full snapshot of your machine in the state she is in with the shared/exchange folders only. If you do and then restore to a different time, the local changes get wiped out when you sync with the server as the exchange server always wins.

The Right Mouse Button (aka Secondary Click)

92% of the personal computing world uses, gets, and understands the right mouse button. Currently around 8% of the world is all about every way possible to avoid it.  Along comes the gestures in the track pad.  A two finger tap = the right mouse click. Brain dead simple, right? I've been showing this to PC folks and virtually all of them think it is an unnatural act. Comments like "that's not it is supposed to work" are repeated to me over and over.

Simple change in the face of big perceptions of what is 'supposed to be the right way.'

The lesson here for you is to watch carefully what habits/perceptions, no matter how small (or in my case how big) have to change when your product or service is used. 

They will impact your take up rate.

Memo to Harvard: Canada is NOT part of the U.S.

I'm standing here in The COOP which is the bookstore (I think) jointly representing Harvard and MIT. I'm in the U.S. Travel section. It has a great selection, in the U.S. Section, of Canadian travel books. In the U.S. Travel section. Harvard.... There is a sliver of hope. As I type this two others just walked up and started to rant at an employee on this very point.

The Great Slog Over to the Mac

Many people have been asking about my use of a Mac these days.  Interestingly enough, this wandering over to Apple land has been really enlightening for me, as a Venture Capitalist.  Here are some of those thoughts. Remember, I'm filtering this as a Venture "is there a buck to be made" Capitalist and not a Mac vs. PC person.

Size matters

Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR)for the Mac has been impressive in North America. On college campuses, etc, lots of people are coming up with the money to buy a variation of the product.  I start to look at this from two perspectives, new purchases and people making the switch from one platform to the other.

Once I break down all this growth, I want to figure out where the opportunities are, if any, for me to turn a buck into ten.

Observation one: The "Nobody uses a Mac" refrain is starting to loose its place on the default answer list. Whereas two or three years ago, that probably worked in most VC pitches, today, you have to be a little more thoughtful about where/when/if the Mac might fit into your product strategy.  It might not, true, but the products have gained enough raw market share and market momentum, you can at least justify the time/expense of taking a look. 

Clearly web based applications/services along with things like Google Gears will make this argument possibly less relevant.  I will only observe that if you said "Mac is back" when it comes to the land of Venture Capital, I might not totally agree with you but I for sure wouldn't laugh you out of the office.

Pain = Opportunity (maybe)

Microsoft Office touts file compatibility across the platforms. For a new person, this is generally true. You can create a Word document and flip it to your PC buddy with (generally) no issues. Same with Excel and Power Point.  Generally.  I say generally because there are a number of 'ouch' points that business users will find. One example. Password protect a Power Point slide deck on the PC and guess who isn't going to read it? Exactly.

Then there are just some bad things. Entourage. For somebody new who buys a copy of Mac Office and loads up Entourage, you won't have many problems or issues.  Mac enthusiasts will tell you to just stay with the mail client that came with the Mac. They will be correct in telling you it is a great out of the box product, very well done. True, but Entourage plays well with Microsoft Office applications and does its thing when it comes to Microsoft Exchange.

All well and good until you talk to change or crossover types like what I am currently simulating.

Then you find that Entourage has such glaring flaws and WTFs in it that if I didn't know (like/respect) the Mac business unit head personally -Craig Eisler- I'd swear the conspiracy theorists were right. They think Microsoft deliberately makes the product bad to dissuade business IT departments from recommending it which in turns dissuades enterprise customers from starting to by Mac units in mass quantities. I don't think so.

The single bad thing? Backing up your mail folders. If you are an Outlook user, you know you can archive stuff based on folders, dates, etc.  In Outlook world, I only keep 30 days worth of sent mail on the server with the rest being archived off into a offline file. Company files that haven't been active for 4 months is another example. I do all of this to keep the active/working email set as small as possible.  Not on Entourage. This critical corporate/enterprise thing called archiving and back up is flawed (aka missing) from the product.  There are other items but this one is the biggest.

I recognize the platforms aren't the same and Outlook certainly is going to be Entourage nor the other way around. Still, basic functionality seems to be lacking in a product that is supposed to be for the enterprise which is just, at the very least, surprising.

And of course, what would life be without the obligatory dialog box showing an application, errrr, in a state of flux. 

From the ENGLISH version of Mac Office:

This could be an opportunity for you. Maybe. Build a better Outlook on the Mac that does a superior job of hooking into Exchange.  And here's the fun part: The Microsoft Exchange folks will help you and  'love you long time'. One of the beautiful things about big multi-product companies is the fierce independence of those units along side a serious desire to protect market share. If you create a product that means Exchange is going to keep seats, sell more seats, displace a Lotus Notes installation, etc, you are a bud.  Exchange is instrumented with API hooks into everything.  I've seen a number of open source mail clients that do an amazingly great job of talking to Exchange. Even Mac mail does a half baked attempt. 

The point here is that it might be an opportunity that years back didn't exist. That CAGR combined with some serious flaws/pain in products & migration, could possibly spell opportunities.

Observation Two:  It seems to me a software package that sits on the PC and analyzes what's gonna need to get done order to move -smoothly- over to a Mac could make some coin. Replicating directory trees (or explaining Mac land to the PC person), figuring out what programs you have on the PC and what you'll need to do those things over on the Mac; these are just some of the things a "welcome" package could do.

As an added bonus, you can do sponsored recommendations and placement ads, etc when the PC person goes hunting.  Again, you'd have to do the homework of CAGR of your target market and then figure out the numbers with respect to where the new users are coming from, how many, etc.

Might not be a VC investment but I'd buy a copy!

Living in somebody else's shoes, walking the walk, etc, is probably the fastest way to feel some pain and think up a solution. If you are right, lots of people will be feeling that pain and looking for your solution.

Windows Live Writer and the Pain Hoop

I'm doing my thing (or trying to) on a MacBook Air. I'm working on a post that talks about this but one thing stood out that I thought was relevant to those company managers/founders out there.

Ask yourself this question: How many hoops would a customer jump through in order to use your product. Put another way, how much pain will somebody endure before dumping your product or service.

Consider Windows Live Writer.  I think the product is off the charts great. I've found nothing - on the Mac- that beats it. I like this product so much that I spent the money for Parallels and have a Windows session running on my MacBook Air which contains exactly one application: Windows Live Writer.  The Parallels session makes this device a bit pokey, I don't care. It's a hassle to boot up and get to Windows Live Writer; I don't care.  I'll take the pain, jump the hoops because the product, along with some great add-ons, simply is the best.

And your product? Your service? What hoops and pain will your 'loyal' users endure in order to use or keep using your stuff.

It does matter when somebody else is only a click away.

Everybody Deserves 100 words

It's around 2a in Toronto, midnight here in Edmonton. 260 summaries, plans, ideas, and virtual napkins are staring at me with an evil grin. Grinning because on the flight over, I plowed through 150.

I could delete em and claim and email bug/screw up.

I could send out a canned, I looked but passed, when I really didn't.

I could do two a day and answer the complaint emails with sorry, busy.

Or:

I could plow through them because everybody deserves a shot.  I got my shot doing a start up (Chapters), got my shot doing this VC stuff, and generally got breaks along the way from people who thought I deserved a shot.

Your 100 words? Make em count. Problem, Solution, and why somebody will care (and pay).

Back in the days of 640 x 480 generally fixed screens, same fonts for everybody, etc, I was trained at the 600 email a day palace called Microsoft. The cardinal rule? Keep it to one screen.  These kids today? Text messaging.  The fixed length limit means to the point.

An exercise for you: Try to put your elevator pitch in a Twitter Tweet.  Then graduate to 100 words.

Back to the grind.

For the Hamilton Linux Crowd

That's Hamilton, Ontario.  Who says Toronto has all the geek fun?

"The Hamilton Linux User Group is having a conference on Saturday June
7th from 9am to 5pm at St. Andrews United Church, 479 Upper Paradise
Road, Hamilton, ON.

Topics will include the OpenOffice office suite, Asterisk phone server,
Zimbra email and collaboration groupware and the Linux operating system.

Registration is required but is free of charge and lunch will be
provided.  http://conference.hlug.ca has all the details and
registration.

Email harwoodr@hlug.ca with any questions you might have."

Where were you when the POS died

Yesterday, I was at the Apple store here in Toronto.  I had gone in to buy a few things (extra power cord, memory upgrade, Apple Air, etc).  I've always been impressed by the efficiency of that store.  Taking orders and payments on the floor, emailing receipts, signing up the Apple Care/Warranty stuff on the spot, etc.  It's a great shopping experience.

Except yesterday.

Yesterday, the point of sale systems went offline with the credit/debit card systems.  This was NOT Apple's fault rather TD Bank or Bell Canada or somebody in between but, for sure, not the Apple Store's fault.

Instantly, the Apple Store became Best Buy.  It was amazing, actually.  Surly staff, pissed off customers, no help, and long lines. Just like normal stores.  The transformation took all of ten minutes.

They could only take this weird stuff called cash or credit cards manually.  Yeah, manually.  Some of you kids may remember those gizmos where you run the credit card with a paper receipt thingy.  Then they had to call in the credit cards to get them authorized. This was for everything, even 15 dollar purchases.

The line for people waiting to checkout became long really fast. The youthful employees basically phreaked out over having to actually write out a form which took care of things like who was buying wait, serial numbers, etc.  The form they were using was the "downtime report" so it wasn't like somebody at HQ hadn't thought this would happen.

The customers. Well, there's a story.  People in line were taking shots at Apple.  Cracks about "bet they are using a damn Mac" were being flung around in anger not jest.  Really. I was expecting a flood of Windows back end shots, but the Apple faithful taking shots at their own kind?  This made the case, loud and clear, that grumpy customers are grumpy customers.  Even though every employee basically said TD bank is offline (which may or may not have been true), nobody cared. It was Apple's fault, Apple sucked, Mac's suck, life sucks, etc.

I hung out watching this for about 20 minutes after I got my stuff.  The nice lady who was processing my order happened to be, as she put it, from my era, so actually knew about those 'old days' when transactions actually involved a little bit a paperwork.  She said, quietly,that this had happened a couple of times before and in each case the employees go nuts before the customers.  She tended to roll her eyes over the whole thing as we both observed this carnival.

I headed home to play with the Air as a young Paris Hilton look alike demanded to know why she couldn't just leave her credit card there and come back tomorrow to pick up the card because she HAD TO HAVE the iPod for tonight, needed to get her nails done and shouldn't have to wait with all these people!!

[Note: POS stands for Point of Sale]

Important Reminder - Your One Liner

I'm digging through the 800+ emails, business plans, etc, as a result of the Blackberry Partners Fund announcement.  Lots of great stuff. To ensure we get fast responses out to folks, we, along with our partners at RBC Ventures have group meetings to zip through our outstanding lists of action items.

I've got a spreadsheet which I've been keeping track of things prior to them entering 'the system' (don't ask).  One of the columns is a one line description of the company to anchor the conversation. 

I get the one line description from your web site.  For each company, I type in the name.com and read the home page for the 'one liner' of what the company does just to remind me.

Make sure your home page can give me, your customers, and anybody else a speedy understanding of what it is you do.

Blackberry Partners Fund: Memo to Windows Mobile Developers

Two words: We Fund em (em isn't a word)

My buddy Mark Relph has a post up about the Blackberry Partners Fund.  I agree, three cheers for Canada and this fund being headquartered here.

He also says:

I had to read Rick’s post twice to notice something -

“we aren't sharing plans or getting sign off from anyone, including RIM, on the investments”

“What Platforms?  All of them. No, really, all of them.  Does that mean if somebody has an application on another mobile device but it isn't running on a RIM device we would fund them? Assuming it was a good investment, yes.  We would expect the RIM devices to be on the roadmap and would certainly fund for that roadmap.”

Correct. Right. Uh Huh. Yep.

And:

"So – if you have a business idea in development on Windows Mobile let us know.  If it’s great, we can go from there…"

I agree. Drop by my office as well, we're in the funding business and great ideas are what we are looking for.

Blackberry Partners Fund: Day Two

• 845 email messages so far. We've been a bit busy.
• 100 speeding dating meetings here at the WES Conference in Orlando with my partners from JLA and RBC. Rumor has it the sun was out.
• 845 emails from around the world and exactly ONE person attached a .VCF. Ben Marcel of Baton Rouge, LA, come on down you've won a free Term Sheet.
• 22 Countries represented in the email flow.
• 8 people wanting tech support for their Blackberry
• 1 person placing an order for the Blackberry Bold WITH a credit card
• 1 person giving me 24 hours to review the company before they were "forced to seek capital elsewhere."
• 12 "sent from my iPhone" emails (tacky people, tacky)
• 82 people wanting to know about funding to port their Palm app to the RIM devices.
• 6 people complaining about Verizon but the IP addresses suggest they are all coming from Mike Arrington's computers.

And my favorite stat of all:

• 24 full business plans WITH NDA's accompanying them.

I LOVE THIS GIG!

How to be authentically fake

A few posts back, I mentioned a company called Projjex.  I poked fun at the team who appeared to be in this photo:

Fast forward to last week when Paul and Leila of Idee Inc, my favorite visual search company.  They were kind enough to let me check out their new product, TinEye. 

It's pretty neat and I wanted to give it a whirl. So, I put in the picture you see above (with my annotations) and (drum roll, can you guess what's coming up?) this picture is a stock photograph which can be purchase here.  Yeah, really.

The caption under this photo reads: "Group portrait of cultural creative business people cheering". 

But wait! There's more.  So now, I'm intrigued even more and decide to dig into the web site a bit more. 

We have this Projjex testimonial from Lawrence:

 

Sweet, eh? Happy customer in Philadelphia.  But, of course, ol Larry here gets around. He has a summer home in British Columbia, Canada.  How do I know? Simple, he is the poster boy for the Success Stories at BC Hydro.  See below:

And in an amazing coincidence, Larry was wearing the same shirt in BC as he was in Philly. Two words, Larry: Bold Detergent.

Lessons for you? Suck up to Leila and Paul. Check out the software they are building and run a check on the stock photography you are using; you never know who else is doing the same voodoo as you.

I'm sure there are a number of people out there with varying opinions on this stuff.  My own is fairly simple.  If I am looking to shoot a 'team shot', I'd use my own people.  And for testimonials? Certainly not Larry! Seems a bit, well, uncool to me.  Your mileage may vary.

You just can't make this stuff up.

Why I am still a proud Microsoft Alumni

Take a kid and head over to this web site.  Amazing.

Mobile Fund: How We Do It In Canada

JLA Ventures and our friends at RBC Venture Partners have teamed up and are co-managing a new $150 million dollar Venture Fund called the Blackberry Partners Fund.  I thought I'd put up a post that will give you the simple facts, process, and opportunities for you.  If you remember nothing else, the simple message is there is a new $150 million dollar fund dedicated to investing in the mobile space and your friendly Canadian venture firms are ready start talking to you. Any mobile platform. Any of them. Come speak to us.

Some background

The prime motivation: To make good investments that have excellent returns for our limited partners.  We collectively believe that with the arrival of super smart/fast/functional devices sitting on top of super fast networks, a radical change in usage was going to happen just as rapidly as the changes which were brought about by the hyper-expansion of the Internet infrastructure.  Before that, by the way, was the telegraph.

[Bonus: If you can find it, get a book called "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage.  This book is a roadmap to all that has been and it coming. Again.]

What We are Doing

This is a standard Private Equity Venture Fund with all the associated characteristics.  The fund is an independent and arms length from any of the Limited Partners.  It means that the investing decisions are made by JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners collaboratively. No other party is involved.  Are we going to get help from Thomson? Absolutely. Are we going to ask RBC Bank for an opinion? Without Question.  But we aren't sharing plans or getting sign off from anyone, including RIM, on the investments. 

What We are Targeting

The Fund has a broad mandate but will be looking for applications and services in the following areas:

• Mobile commerce (payments, advertising, retailing and consumer banking)
• Vertical and horizontal enterprise applications
• Communications
• Social Networking
• Location-base services (navigation and mapping)
• Media and entertainment
• Lifestyle and personal productivity

What Platforms?

All of them. No, really, all of them.  Does that mean if somebody has an application on another mobile device but it isn't running on a RIM device we would fund them? Assuming it was a good investment, yes.  We would expect the RIM devices to be on the roadmap and would certainly fund for that roadmap. 

The word of the day - Partnership

That's the fun/joy out of working in Canada; the partnerships.  I was involved, up close and personal, to witness the CEOs of Canada's biggest and most successful companies argue passionately for partnerships.  That's the real story in my view.  For example, it's too bad everyone couldn't be in the room listening to Jim Balsillie speak passionately about Canada, the great opportunities and how RIM was excited/delighted to be a part of this initiative.  The same can be equally said for chief executives of RBC and Thomson Reuters.  It was great.

Come talk with us as we'd like to fund some great companies. Including, maybe yours.

The Coolest Business Plan Ever

I'm reading a business plan that I received. 10 honking megabytes of brainwaves put to paper. 115 carefully crafted pages which gets me deep, really deep, into the mind of the entrepreneur.  You are thinking to yourself, self, how could a simple business plan allow the VC to learn tons about me and my people.

Simple.

Make tons of changes to your document, pass it to your 'advisors' for advising, get back their edits, make more changes, save and send the document to me without accepting all changes and stripping out all the notes and comments.

Consider these choices tidbits left in the document:

• "Segal used work for Microsoft so skip the name dropping, save it for the afternoon meeting, they are clueless about Redmond."

• "When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them"

• "I'd delete this section since we don't have these features on the roadmap and haven't figured out how to code this unless you believe the investors won't catch this."

• Scratched out "Exchange sucks resources like a vampire in heat", replaced with "Exchange is resource intensive under certain scenarios"

• Scratched out "Competitors are 10 years behind us and will never catch up", replaced with "There is competition out there"

• "VCs are typically stupid when it comes to this section so be prepared for a dumb question blizzard."

• Scratched out "Beta is in 6 months" replaced with "code is out there now"

Sweet, eh?

If you are so inclined, you might want to create what I call the "Yo! Are YOU DAMN SURE" macro for your copy of Word that checks a variety of things before you send it out the door.

I love this gig.

The Power of Restraint

I'm here in Kitchner in a speakers room waiting to do a talk with (among other notables) Chris Anderson of The Long Tail/Wired fame.  In walks a guy from one of the big banks.

Chris, being a polite and friendly guy, says hello and asks a simple question: "So, what are you going to be speaking about."  Friendly banker guy says "I'm the innovation guy and I'm going to talk about how we innovate at the bank."

Chris, in an amazing display of restraint simply says, "Gee, cool. I've got two companies running and I use PayPal to do payroll and basically run the place. Tell me more."  He then proceeds to be great in listening not wanting to pick on a 30 something MBA banker type.

But there is still, shall we say, a bit of adjustment going on at the bank.

When the conference organizers passed out the release forms for being recorded, our banker friend turned a shade of green that wasn't money.  He couldn't sign it without checking back with home office since he hadn't been media trained, etc, etc. Promised to get back the organizers. 

We both agreed, tho, that a bank giving a 30 something some power and influence to change things up, was a great sign. He did a great job at the conference.

Your Strengths

Tawfiq Arafat is probably one of the most important people in my business life. Taf, as we lovingly call em, is a world class monster brain when it comes to facts, figures, and math.  A genius to be sure.  Without him, my mistake count would be off the charts.  Nobody crunches numbers, remembers numbers, and makes magic out of numbers like Dr. Math.

Kevin Patterson is VC Taser when it comes to details. He doesn't miss anything and will stop, shock, -n- stun anything that isn't done correctly. No document, no agreement, no amendment, etc, leaves my hands without Kevin's review and approval.

These guys are the reason I have a prayer at being successful as a VC. And the jury is still out, to be sure.

I bring this up because the topic of teams consistently came up in the VC roundtables. I have one single and simple message that will improve your odds of success.

Surround yourself with people smarter than you, get out of the way, and focus on your strengths

• Jeremy Wright at B5 is building a world class team so he can focus on his strengths, bloggers and blogging.
• Marc Gingras at Tungle is doing the same so he can focus on his strengths, solving people's collaboration and meeting issues.

Both of these CEOs will proudly tell you what they suck at.  Ask them. They case studies in hiring smart people so they can do what they do best.

I can point you to many ex-VCs (speaking from the world I live in today) who were successful at some big software company but ended up flaming out in VC land because they weren't surrounded with smart people and they didn't check the ego at the door before writing checks.

What do you suck at and who's handling it?

VC Left and Right Hand Adventures

True story:

Small start-up has interesting service.  Selling well and doing well.  They decide to raise some expansion capital to open up some additional markets, do some additional development work, and generally speed up the company's progress.

The CEO goes in and pitches big VC firm.  VC firm has tons of cash, people, and offices.  Pitch goes well and the partner says "Let's continue the dialog" while starting to do some work on the file.

The sales guy, who knows NOTHING of this fund raising activity, calls HR department of said big VC firm and proceeds to give the sales pitch.

Two emails come in from said big VC firm.

Email one: "Sorry, we pass"

Email two: "Cool product, here's the signed contract, can't wait to start using it."

I think this is hilarious but I'm generally viewed as twisted so your humor meter may not go off.

A Coder Worth Hiring

A guy over on rentacoder.com has this up as his motto:

"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live" - Martin Golding

Ya gotta love that.

Have a great weekend, folks.

EverNote and Some Lessons for You

There is an interesting product out there called EverNote (thx, Ken).  When you go to the web site, you get nice page and a video which you can view in order to get a view of the product.

This video tour feature is rapidly becoming a must have so people can figure it what you have quickly.  So, some tips are probably in order:

1. Volume.  If you play the video tour for EverNote on a simple laptop with no mondo-speakers or whatever, it is very difficult to hear.  Sounds obvious but it in scanning a bunch of these around the web, this is a more common problem than I would have guessed.

2. Get to the Problem/Solution set quickly.  You can use flash (Tungle did) or a video like EverNote. Either way, doesn't much matter but the messaging remains the same. What's the problem and show me your solution.  The problem is explained in Tungle's demo in the form of meet this person and here is her problem, Tungle to the rescue. EverNote dives immediately into clipping something off a web page and tossing it into big pile of stuff.  In showing this to people, I got "big deal" a bunch of times and had to say, "no, wait, this is cool, check this part out."  The cool part is searching/finding text in pictures. This meant take a bunch of pictures with your camera phone and then you can search this stuff just like it was text.   The ding here was that the "quick" demo took a almost 60 seconds to get to the 'cool' part.  Get to the point, quickly.  60 seconds is a lifetime on the Internet and the 'big deal' factor is an ever present danger.  In this case, the people I showed the video to, assumed it was yet another screen clipping service missing the point of all the other features. 

3. You shouldn't be in show business.  EverNote's voice over is poor. The person speaks too fast, mumbles a bit, and has the volume problem I've already mentioned.  Now, you'll hammer me because this was probably the founder in a garage, no money, 'free' service, etc.  Sorry, that doesn't cut it.  Unless you are a loner living in a cave (with a DSL connection), you have friends, family, etc, that can help/will help for that same 'free' we talk about.  I would argue that there are tons of students out there wanting to be in radio/TV who would gladly help you for a chance to put this on their resume.  In the case of Tungle, she was okay, but used the car phone to record it which somewhat detracts from the message.  My point here is that in both cases, Tungle and EverNote, the demo is an opportunity to get people to go, cool!, and sign up.  Having anything that detracts from that objective is bad.

4. There are no Emmy Awards for this stuff.  As a counter point to item 3, don't get nuts here.  Get to the problem/solution set, do it without distracting the viewer, do it quickly and you will be fine.  This is not, in my opinion, the place which requires millions of dollars to be spent.  The simple thing is to simply put the video/flash demo up and get feedback before it goes live.  I'd argue that both Tungle and EverNote could have (long before the product was available) put their respective demo's up on their blogs for feedback. There is a balance against doing the Vaporware thing and letting your competition know what you are doing/saying, but feedback from the normal person, not the echo chamber and your mom, is important.

EverNote looks cool hope I can try it, Tungle is saving me hours of headaches with scheduling. 

Note: Tungle is a JLA Investment.

More Mail I Love

Embrace failure is a phrase I've been using a lot these days.  When it doesn't work out, dust yourself off, and press on.  These are the kinds of emails I want more of. These are the kinds of folks that are now "seasoned" and now "get it", having their on set of failure points that make them smarter.  Yes, I'm taking the meeting with some enthusiasm.

---------------------------------

From: Scott 
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 9:00 PM
To: Rick Segal
Subject: Re:

Hi Rick,

I hope things are well with you.  It was great to meet you last year to discuss [].  As you may recall, [] was essentially a laboratory project that we worked on internally and rolled with a ton of organic momentum. 

For a number of reasons that I can speculate, it seems that since launching the product, the growth trajectory stalled.  

I guess that's how it rolls sometime.  I've still been working on the service based customer projects that have been paying the bills all along. 

The reason for reaching out is that I'm in the middle of working on a []

I'm wondering if you'd be willing to vet the business concept and provide early critique/input. 

I'm not looking for capital now but am close to getting the product dev/concept far enough along that I'm looking to a few smart people like yourself who can see through the presentation layer and provide real input.

Let me know if you have some time.  I could send you a short introduction first and setup a call or a meeting to discuss.

All the best,

Scott

------------------------------

Scott's first idea didn't make the cut but Scott hung in there and is still at it.  My kinda guy. 

In my humble opinion, every VC out there should block off a couple of hours a week to simply help out the farm team.  If you are jetting off to France, planning that dinner party, picking out the leather for the jet, that's even more of a reason to help out the next generation.  It was people like Scott that got you where you are and put that expensive car in your driveway. 

Give back a little, it won't kill you.