Instigator Blog

Our monthly Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast is tomorrow.

I’ll definitely be in attendance. And I’m looking forward to it having missed the last couple of meetups.

The breakfast is held at 9:00am at Bistro, Etc.

Every month we get new people coming out. I look forward to meeting new entrepreneurs, developers, investors, etc. Everyone’s welcome: There’s no cost, sign-up, or anything — just come as you are and meet some great people.

San Francisco is an incredible place for startups. There are so many positive factors to encourage entrepreneurs and help them along the way. It was an eye-opener.

More than anything, everyone’s openness, availability and participation makes the difference.

In order for startups to succeed, you need lots of different people:

• New entrepreneurs
• Veteran entrepreneurs
• Angel investors
• Venture capitalists
• Supporting players (lawyers, accountants, marketing, PR, etc.)

Everyone needs to hop into the sandbox and play. And that’s exactly what you get in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. It’s a giant mashup of non-stop events and networking opportunities. Meeting top people and key players is easy. And generally, people seem willing to help.

The startup ecosystem in San Francisco is designed to help startups succeed. Doesn’t mean everyone succeeds, but having the ecosystem in place certainly helps.

So that begs the question: How can a startup ecosystem be built and promoted elsewhere?

It’s certainly possible. The folks at Outside the Valley recommend building a “nerd-haven” since most high-tech startups are run by nerds, and the people that fund them are also nerds. They offer two initial steps:

1. Create a city with a tech creative-class culture.
2. Create a city with a world-class university.

Montreal has both — although I question how effective our universities are at developing entrepreneurs. Still, there’s a lot going on in Montreal and elsewhere to help build out startup ecosystems. But more is needed.

1. Successful entrepreneurs have to give back. Too many successful entrepreneurs don’t participate in the startup community. This leads to a lack of experienced mentors and advisers able to help and encourage new crops of entrepreneurs. And “giving back” doesn’t have to be solely altruistic; many successful entrepreneurs in San Francisco go on to become angel investors and VCs. It behooves experienced entrepreneurs to keep an ear to the ground - for their own investment opportunities and future projects.
2. Angel investors need to raise their profiles. There are more angel investors out there than people realize, but they’re not very high profile. Angel and early seed financing is critical for most startups; but few of them know where to look. Once again, this comes down to being accessible and willing to participate in the community. In San Francisco, this isn’t a problem at all. Most angels find deals through referrals, and I can understand they don’t want to be pitched non-stop but some of the best opportunities are going to be tucked away in corners that angels and their networks just can’t reach without getting out there.

If more experienced entrepreneurs and angels stepped up and participated in the ecosystem it would also draw others into the mix. Startups need lots of help from lawyers, accountants, etc. But I’ve rarely met any “support people” at Montreal events.

Rob May nailed it when he wrote, It’s The Network, Not The Valley, That Causes Success. The Valley is a giant melting pot of people, not silos of investors, entrepreneurs, mentors, etc. working and meeting separately. Everyone’s mashed up together.

Of course, there’s more to a successful startup ecosystem than veteran entrepreneurs and angels.

1. Governments should get out of the way. Make it as easy and painless to start a company as possible. Play favorites with scrappy startups trying to create jobs and wealth, but otherwise leave ‘em alone.
2. Existing startups have to get involved. You can’t blame everyone else if no one knows you exist. Every week I discover a new startup in Montreal that no one has heard about, and that makes absolutely no sense. You should be blogging, participating at every event, and reaching out.
3. More cheerleading. We need to brag more about the startups that are making a go of it. We need to promote them more. A little “back slapping” never hurt anyone, and a healthy ego is needed. And don’t worry if they fail, all they’ve done is prepared themselves for the next startup, and the one after that, and the one after that…
4. More startups. We get into a bit of “chicken and egg” at this point, but ultimately no startup ecosystem works without more startups. People need to be starting more companies. Just look at what these guys are doing starting one micro-startup per week.

A startup ecosystem works when everyone needed for startups to succeed gets into a room and meets everyone else.

Everyone has to see the value in being open, accessible and participatory. The network breeds success, and this is what works so well in the Valley.

All bloggers are surrounded by their own blog communities. But the number of blogs within any given community is finite. It’s certainly not a walled garden, but growing thenetwork of people you communicate with regularly takes time.

As a result, bloggers often link to the same people over and over. That’s not a bad thing: the links still have value (for SEO, Technorati, and your audience) but there’s so much more to discover.

So the next time you’re writing a blog post, try finding new blogs and linking to them. It’s not always obvious - to go out, find blog posts relevant to your topic, and link to them - but it works well for breaking out of your existing community and reaching others. And it’ll help bring in fresh links back and new readers.

Here’s a simple blog hack to make it happen:

1. Pick the link locations. Preview your blog post and look for key places where links would be valuable.
   • In lists, try and put a link in every second or third point.
   • Links work well at the beginning and end of posts when you’re hammering home key messages.
   • Use links to other sites to back up the point you’re trying to make.
   • Find important keywords throughout your post, and pepper them liberally with links. As David Airey, a graphic designer in Edinburgh points out, you shouldn’t use generic terms like “click here” for links, it completely devalues them.

   With the keywords and phrases picked out for your links, it’s time to find new blogs worth linking to.

2. Discover new blogs. Search for the keywords and phrases using Google Blog Search, which shows more recent content, and Google for a broader archive.
3. Quickly pick promising results. Select a bunch of potentially relevant stories and launch new browser tabs/windows for each.
4. Find relevant content. Scan each new blog for relevant content. Decide if they’re worth linking to for one of the keywords or phrases you’ve selected.
   • Keep your eyes open for great quotes you can pull (instead of just links.)
   • Don’t worry if the entire blog post isn’t relevant, the key is you’re linking to someone you’ve never linked to before.
   • Add the new blog to your RSS Reader or make a note to check it out in more detail later.
5. Change up your keywords. If you don’t find something worth linking to quickly, try changing your keywords and phrases a bit, but don’t overburden yourself. You don’t want to take too much time and there will always be more opportunities to link to others.

Finding and linking to new blogs isn’t something you need to do on every blog post. Pick a blog post each week that you think will be a home run and spend a bit of extra time adding links to it. The extra effort over time, will be well worth it.

Founders at Work is a great book for anyone working on a startup or thinking about doing so.

It’s a collection of interviews done by Jessica Livingston, a partner at Y Combinator. There are many fascinating things about the book, particularly the diversity of entrepreneurs she speaks to, from veterans of the computer world (Steve Wozniak and Mitch Kapor) to more recent startup founders (Ev Williams and Mena Trott.)

I didn’t expect the book to be so technical. Some interviewees go into quite a bit of detail on the technical challenges they faced, programming languages, etc. So for the geek in you, it’s a good read. And for the entrepreneur in you, it’s ideal.

With that in mind, here are 9 things I learned from Founders At Work:

1. People Learned From Their Mistakes. Every single person profiled in the book made mistakes, from small mishaps to outright disasters. Each of them succeeded by learning from those mistakes.
2. The Startup Roller Coaster Is Insane. People often talk about how hard it is to start a company, and that’s a common thread throughout the book. You can expect incredible lows, but also incredible highs.
3. Startups Are All Consuming. Lots of people start businesses on the side, keeping their full or part-time jobs. Several founders profiled in the book followed that exact approach. But their focus was still very much on their startup. Startups are all consuming in terms of the energy, passion and dedication they require. Few people succeed without that singular focus.
4. Working With Venture Capitalists is Challenging. There are a few horror stories in the book about dealing with venture capitalists, but generally the relationships were decent. For most of the entrepreneurs, the problems come because it’s their first time working with venture capitalists; they didn’t know what to expect.
5. Products Sometimes Come From Nowhere. The classic startup story has a couple guys working on something part-time, only to realize at some point that they’re sitting on a winner. Sometimes they don’t even realize it, until they’re pushed by others. These are entrepreneurs that “fall into success.”

   But for all the “holy crap we have a product here!” stories, there are an equal number of stories of founders starting out with a clear idea of what they wanted to do, and taking a much more methodical, focused approach. If anything, this teaches us that it doesn’t matter how you start - what’s important is that you start at all.

6. Things Never End Up Where They Started. That’s a huge understatement. Almost to a tee, each founder started their business in one way, with a few ideas, only to end up in a completely different place at the end. Entire products and business models changed several times over for many of them.
7. Hire Smarter. Some of the most interesting stories in the book are about founders going out and hiring people - how they did it, what they were looking for, etc. Most of them spent a good amount of time hiring (more than most founders do today), and recognized the importance of bringing on top talent.
8. Founders Are Motivated To Do Better Than Others. There are many motivations for starting a company, but one of the most common threads through the book was that founders believed they could do better than the status quo. A good part of that is ego, but a bigger part of that is an honest, analytical look at what’s going on and not being satisfied with it.
9. Take Risks And Be Creative. Many of the startups pulled off funny and risky stunts to get their products launched and generate buzz. Raising awareness is easier today with blogs and social networks, nevertheless the traits of creativity and risk-taking are paramount in a startup’s success. Startups have to make huge decisions quickly. They’re often forced to put all their eggs in one basket. They’ve got to swerve and tumble around obstacles like it’s nobody’s business.

More than anything, Founders at Work reminds us that there’s no formula for success.

Startups come from all over. Founders have a myriad of backgrounds. Ideas are born from a host of sources and experiences. You can get funded, or not. You can start small or go big right away.

There are some common traits and experiences amongst entrepreneurs and startups. And you can learn a lot from the experience of others but there’s definitely no absolute right way of doing things.

The job market is hot. This is especially true in Silicon Valley where every company - big and small - is looking to hire top talent.

How do they do it?

Fred Ngo, co-Founder of Standout Jobs acted as roving reporter at the TechCrunch 9 Party asking people for their best hiring stories and biggest challenges in recruiting top talent.

The results are quite interesting…

My favorite stories come from Emmett Shear at Justin.tv and Dick Hardt, Founder of Sxip.