The Post Money Value

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?