Instigator Blog

Very, very carefully.

Hiring people is the biggest, most challenging decision a business owner has to make. This is even more true for entrepreneurs starting new companies.

When hiring people, there are two ways to do it:

1. Build a core, passionate team.
2. Or don’t.

Very few people would admit to choosing #2 as an approach, but lots of companies do exactly that — they hire for reasons other than passion and fit. How many companies start with salary as the key decision point for hiring someone?

Companies don’t put enough stock in the importance of building a real team; they focus on getting people on board with the right qualifications at the right price and that’s it. It’s an easy trap to fall into because it’s an easier way to hire. And when your company is growing fast and doing well, and you’ve got more work than you know what to do with, to heck with building a core team…you need warm bodies at desks!

The end result of building a team without really thinking about the team is usually not a good one. Higher turnover. Dissatisfaction at work. Lower productivity.

A core team of passionate, true believers will always go the extra mile for each other and by extension the company they work for. People will stay at jobs they dislike if they love the team.

The problem with hiring the right people is that it takes a lot longer. You have to be prepared to invest a good chunk of time in the process — finding candidates, interviewing them, testing them, trying them out — it’s more akin to dating than anything else; there’s a dating dance or ritual that has to take place.

But the payoff is enormous. This is especially true for startups - those first few hires are going to be key ones. Those people are practically partners. You need them to stick it out through thick and thin, and be as devoted as possible. You need them to create the culture and spirit for future hires. You need them evangelizing the business. You need them taking ownership. You need them to be the driving force of success.

It’s a tall order, which is why you need to invest the time, thought and energy into hiring people properly. And you always need to focus on building a great team, not a bunch of people connected together by the fact that they work in the same office.

It’s short notice, but we secured a location for the next Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast.

Bistro, Etc. has agreed to open for us on Tuesday, April 10th at 9am.

Please note the time change - it’s 9am *NOT* 8am. In the future we’ll probably swing it back to 8am, but we’ll test this new place and time and see how it goes.

Location:

Bistro Etc.
1291 Avenue Mont-Royal Est
Montreal, QC H2J 1Y4
(514) 525-1895
Map

All technology entrepreneurs are welcome! Hope to see you there Tuesday.

A BIG THANK YOU to Sylvain Carle for finding a new location…

The Power Within is a day long event with a variety of different speakers aimed to inspire, motivate and teach. In Montreal, I attended the conference on April 3rd, 2007. It was well worth the price of admission (app. $220).

There were 7 speakers in total, each one accomplished, successful and worth seeing. Some brought total, unadulterated motivation, others brought a quieter, more pensive approach. They were all excellent speakers in their own way - standing in front of 5,000 people is no easy feat - although for many of these people it’s par for the course on a regular basis.

Mike Lipkin

Mike Lipkin started the day off with an ear-blasting, hair-raising presentation on motivation and persuasion. It was a great way to start the day, and if you were looking for a little pick me up, Mike was the guy for you. I took the most notes from Mike (maybe cause it was at the beginning) and he may have inspired the most future blog posts as well.

Two points of Mike’s presentation really stuck with me:

• Back yourself completely; and,
• Invite your fear in.

I’m a strong believer in both, and do fairly well with them most of the time, so I spent a good chunk of time nodding in agreement as Mike spoke.

Mike also said, “Everyone is fascinating,” which struck me as interesting from the perspective of a blogger. It’s quite the blanket statement, but it resonates strongly when you’re putting yourself out there as a blogger, writing and publishing your thoughts and connecting online with as many people as possible.

Terry Savage

Terry Savage is an expert on making money. And that’s a great thing to be an expert at! Terry’s got a very calm, matter-of-fact approach, and although much of her information was fairly basic, it was still a good reminder. Invest your money. Invest early. Invest diligently. Keep investing. You’ll be rich when you retire.

Terry’s job isn’t to make you cheer and sing, it’s to remind you how important it is to manage your own finances. I contacted my financial adviser the very next day to get a move on some things.

Irshad Manji

Irshad Manji is author of the best selling The Trouble with Islam Today. Aside from the fact that the lights went out during her presentation, it was great. She’s as courageous as they come, and a wonderful public speaker. Animated, excited and dedicated to her mission in life. Irshad’s focus is on religion and culture, but there were many lessons to take away as an entrepreneur as well…stuff I hope to write about in the near future.

One of her best points, “Courage isn’t the absence of fear.”

Mitch Joel

I was looking forward to seeing Mitch speak since he’s a personal friend of mine. He did not disappoint. Mitch focuses on personal branding. It’s something I haven’t dedicated enough time to talking about on this blog, but it’s something I’ve focused on for myself a great deal in the last year. Personal branding is strategic and requires effort. It’s about shaping each and every communication and interaction you have with others in a positive way for yourself. It’s about cultivating a good image and backing it up.

Sadly, I don’t think everyone “gets it” when it comes to personal branding. Although Mitch provides concrete steps people can take, I got the impression that people weren’t totally clear on the concept. Mitch also delves into connecting online, which drew a few blank faces around me.

He ended his presentation with a video about the “Free Hugs” guy, Juan Mann. I hadn’t seen it before, but it was great.

Jerry Greenfield

Who doesn’t like ice cream, right? Jerry Greenfield is half of the dynamic duo of Ben & Jerry’s. Extremely relaxed and casual on stage. Jerry’s not going to pump you up with ra ra speeches; he just tells his story which is incredibly interesting.

I didn’t take any notes while Jerry spoke - it wasn’t so much about learning lessons as it was about enjoying a great success story from a guy that comes off as genuine and incredibly friendly. I’d love to meet Jerry Greenfield in person.

The Ben & Jerry’s story is quite something; a true, entrepreneurial success story with all the elements of craziness, luck, innovation and hard work. The key to their success was definitely innovation. Jerry might think it was luck, but listening to what Jerry and Ben did - how they tackled competitors, marketed, bootstrapped…it was all about innovation.

Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins is insane. I don’t think there’s any other way of explaining him.

His presentation is wild. You spend most of the time standing, and a good portion of the time cheering and interacting with others around you. For some, they might find it overwhelming. I wasn’t feeling well, so the jumping made me woozy.

Tony focused almost exclusively on emotions as the ultimate driver and resource of everything we do in life.

WHY?

Keep asking that question and you always get down to an individual’s emotions.

Intertwined with his message of “emotions rule all” was a recognition of how our nervous systems and bodies regulate and manage so much for us. The state we’re in - physically - affects us emotionally and drives us positively or negatively. It’s not about whether you’re healthy or not (although that’s definitely important), it’s more about your physiological state at any given moment in time.

In the end, Tony Robbins gave me a lot to think about, although I did find the cheering a bit much. Call me a cynic…(I’m not though, honest!)

Bill Clinton

President Clinton didn’t speak long enough, which is a shame. He’s a master at it. He has a completely different style than Tony Robbins (no surprise there!) but he’s got a commanding presence.

Clinton’s focus was on everyone’s ability to do more to help others. He talked about the state of the world, the environment, politics, economics…

You didn’t have to take notes, you just listened. Clinton was absolutely correct in his assessment of how effective the Internet has been at mobilizing more and more people (including people of lesser means) to give more money to worthy causes. I still remain a skeptic of so many charities - how much of my money really goes to help people? And I also question how effective the money is at really helping? Clinton touched on both points very briefly. He said that they know how to spend the money and how to do so properly. I want to believe him, but I’ll admit that it’s tough.

I do donate money to those charities that are important to me, and I particularly like concepts such as Kiva.org where you give out microloans instead of handouts.

Conclusion

The Power Within was a great experience. The mix of speakers provided a lot of variety in styles, topics and approaches. I enjoyed each one, although my money is still on Mike Lipkin for the best speech of the day. It might be that what I needed that day is exactly what Mike was serving…but when you combined his wild South African accent, dynamic demeanor and inspirational content, it just worked.

5min.com is a new video site geared towards answering questions. You’ve got 5 minutes to teach people something of interest and answer their questions.

“How to make a Surfer on Acid cocktail?”
“How to make the Jackson Cube?”
“How to make your own home video projector?

These are all burning questions. And now we’ve got answers…

5min.com bills itself as a Life Videopedia where you can get the answers to your questions - in 5 minutes or less - via video. Anyone can participate by uploading videos and there’s already quite a few excellent ones in there (although the site’s only been live for a handful of days.)

5min.com is based in Israel. I got the opportunity to interview one of 5min.com’s founders, Ran Harnevo, and that interview is provided below. I find the site fascinating and I think it’ll be a success. YouTube is a mess, and it’s harder and harder to find stuff on there unless it gets very popular or you’re tracking specific people in your community. 5min.com is a niche site, targeted at helping people with interesting content, and gives people a chance to get their name out there in their own specialties.

1. Briefly, explain 5min and the term “Life Videopedia.” Why did you decide to develop this project? And when did you launch?

5min is a place for video solutions, a place for knowledge exchanging. We believe that everyone of us is an expert in at least one aspect of our life. Everyone of us can share this aspect and learn from others. This is why we chose the term “Life Videopedia” – we want to create a video library of our common knowledge, a library that will serve anyone and shall inspire every user to add his/her own knowledge.

2. Can you give us some of your own personal background? How did you come to build 5min? And how many people are on the team?

I’m Ran Harnevo, a former IDF fighter pilot and a former journalist. I’m only one of 3 entrepreneurs – Tal Simantov (a strategic planner in the Advertising business) and Hanan Lashover (a very experienced software engineer that worked and developed some of the main features in 888.com).

All of us are great Internet fans and good friends. We came up with 5min after seeing too many YouTubes on the Net, all of them are ME2 sites. We realized that video online today focuses only on entertainment, with no added value to the videos. We didn’t like that. We believe that the video era can do more than that, and not only help them when they are bored. We raised some small money and started working. The company today has 7 employees, including the 3 of us.

3. Why limit to 5 minutes? Is that a hard constraint?

Yes, that’s a hard constraint. Why? Because we believe that today people are looking for fast and efficient solutions, especially on the Net. We live in a very hectic world, and we would like to supply quick solutions. For very deep solutions, I believe in buying books. But the Internet is a great tool for solving problems, especially in video. 5min aims to give them fast answers. We want our creators to be able to contact the users and maybe deepen the solution on a more personal channel.

4. Do you have human editors who verify and validate the content as appropriate / worthwhile?

We do. But we don’t filter by quality. Who are we to determine if something is “good” or “bad”. We only filter videos by two criteria: (1) the video is 5 minutes or less; and, (2) your video gives a solution. If you’re there, you’re in. If you want to sing in the toilet while your webcam is on, you have plenty of sites that will allow that…

5. The video player - Smart Player - was built by you and the team, correct? It has some very interesting features. Give us some background on it, why you decided to build your own player, and what that experience was like.

Yes, we designed and built the Smart Player. We think that the players today are trying to give the users the same experience they get on TV. But what if I came to learn something? Isn’t the Internet a great tool for that? We invested a lot of time in trying to think how people can really learn with online video. The Smart Player gives you great features for that – you can zoom in and out, see instructions in slow motion or in frame by frame; the creators can enhance the learning experience by adding their own Storyboard – explaining more things and sometimes even giving more Internet links, when needed.

If you want to see Ali G, the Smart Player is just a burden, but if you want know how to make sushi, we want to give you a better service than the others.

6. Do you have a business model in place that you hope to roll out eventually? Premium services? Licensing your technology? Advertising?

Our business model is varied and I wouldn’t like to fully expose it. All I can say at the moment is that we can monetize traffic well. We address people by real interest. That is why we have different logos for each category. 5min is a place for people with passion. If your passion is Extreme sports, you can skip the homepage and bookmark the Extreme page. We believe in vertical traffic, and think it can help us build profits as well…

7. What are your licensing terms for people uploading content?

The creator owns the rights for his/her film, not us. This is, in our opinion, a solid ground for talents to grow. We have the right to use the content while it is on the site (in terms of embedded player, advertisements, etc…) But if the creator chooses to remove his content, he will be able to do so (we don’t have the feature yet, but it is coming soon. Anyhow, an email to us will solve the problem as well).

8. Can you give us a sneak peak on some features you’re working on? Tell us what you have planned?

We want to customize our player, adjust it for specific categories. We are also developing more “knowledge tools” that will give us the right advantages.

We’re also adding an embed feature so people can take the videos and embed them elsewhere. This is coming in a matter of days.

I can’t say more than that at the moment. Register to the website and you’ll be fully updated.

9. How are you planning to market & promote 5min?

That’s the main challenge.

We want to do it from the bottom – through bloggers, through viral marketing. We are only in the beginning of a long trip. So far, we are surprised by the traffic we have.

In addition, we call everyone who has a small DIY site to upload his videos to 5min and embed our player (with the smart player abilities). We will help all small sites to promote their site. We want to see ourselves as the gate to their own sites…

10. Do you see a lot of niche video sites like 5min coming out and taking audience away from YouTube?

I think niche is the only way now! We are flooded with information, any kind of information. I find it hard to get good results in YouTube (though I really like it). I think that people will find out that there is no difference between the textual and video era. Text also started with a few key players and has grown incredibly since then. I think that online video will take the same path. I just hope and believe that 5min will lead the knowledge path, with the help of everyone our ‘Life Videopedia is achievable…

Brief Summary

A big thank you to Ran Harnevo for doing this interview about 5min.com.

I encourage you to check out the site at http://www.5min.com. Now is your chance to be the guru in something, whatever it is you can share with the world. And, you’ll get a chance to learn how to use a speed bag, play guitar and bass, do your makeup and much more.

A day late, but worth the wait.

Blogtipping is the invention of Easton Ellsworth. Smart guy that Easton. A community builder, blog evangelist and generally nice person…Easton created blogtipping to give people a chance to do 2 things:

• Promote cool blogs by picking 3 blogs you like and listing 3 great things about each; and,
• Help bloggers out by giving each of the 3 blogs you’ve highlighted 1 tip.

Simple enough really. And quite a bit of fun. Oh, and you blogtip on the 1st day of every month. I haven’t been keeping up 100% but I did do some blogtipping in February, November 2006 and October 2006.

With the recent success of DemoCamp Montreal, I’ve decided to do some local, Montreal blogtipping…

Blog #1: web1979 by Mat Balez (RSS feed)

1. Mat is wonderfully opinionated. He’s not coddling up to anyone, which is quite refreshing. Note a couple of recent posts - The A-List Blogger Phenomenon: Antithesis of the Web and RIP Twitter (2007-2007). Whether you agree or not, at least he’s honest.
2. He’s tackling meaty issues. Mat’s not one for short, quirky posts. He’s going for the jugular with a lot of his content - going deep instead of wide. Although for those of us with bad cases of A.D.D. (i.e. ALL bloggers) this might be challenging, sometimes you need to just sink your teeth into it.
3. The design is as simple as they come. Granted, he’s using the Wordpress.com service so he doesn’t have a lot of opportunity to change the design, but he’s picked a super simple design; the content is the focus here.

The Tip: Write more. It might be tough when each post is meant to be a dissertation of serious consideration, but writing more will help draw people back and develop a community around the blog.

Blog #2: Montreal Tech Watch by Heri Rakotomalala (RSS Feed)

1. Quick, interesting news. Heri’s covering the Montreal technology scene, and he does it quickly and efficiently. I find myself checking it regularly for interesting tidbits.
2. It’s not just the news. The blog could be quite bland if Heri just fed us the news, but he’s injecting his own opinions and ideas into the mix as well, giving us a 1-2 punch of news stories and insight.
3. He’s serving the community. Heri is making a difference in Montreal by contributing. And that’s great to see. While some complain that Montreal tech entrepreneurs don’t do enough, Heri steps up on a daily basis.

The Tip: Setup WordPress and get a slick, custom theme. It’ll do a lot to enhance the overall style of the blog but also draw more attention to the content. It’s worth investing to take the blog to the next level.

Blog #3: Montreal Startup by John Stokes (RSS Feed)

1. A great combination of local content and expert advice. John’s expertise and interest lies in VC and angel investing, with a local/Montreal focus, which means an interesting combination of information on investing and entrepreneurship along with a good amount of attention on what’s going on in Montreal.
2. John has a frank, open style. There’s a certain openness to John’s writing that makes you feel welcome, engaged and curious about what he’s up to.
3. John is tapping into the Montreal tech scene very quickly. He hasn’t been here too long, but John’s making an effort through his blog (and showing up to events / participating) to get involved and show his interest in Montreal and the tech entrepreneurs working here.

The Tip: Not to be redundant, but…write more. I know it’s a challenge, but I would guess that there are others out there like me interested in hearing a bit more about what you’re doing, planning and thinking.