Many of you know this already, but I got the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go to the USA – Canada Gold Medal Hockey Game at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics.

Words really can’t describe it. I wish I had taken more photos and videos, but it’s hard to do that and really soak it all in. Plus, the battery on my iPhone was dying. But I saw some incredible things. One of the funniest was outside Canada Hockey Place where cops (with guns) were playing street hockey with fans. Presumably they were doing their security duty, but it looked hilarious — and really spoke to the community spirit in Vancouver.

So, I did manage to snap a few photos and a couple of videos. The videos are all essentially the same – scattered, bumpy and loud. Yes, you’ll hear me screaming like a lunatic (and singing Oh Canada horribly out of tune). But you’ll get a glimpse at what it was like on the inside…

Here’s a picture of me, my mother-in-law (who got us the tickets!) and my friend (who is an American fan):

And here are the videos (unfortunately I think the last two are super-huge files and seem to be very slow to display):

There’s been no shortage of debate and discussion about how to replicate the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem (or whether it’s even possible, worthwhile or applicable to other places). I wrote about it way back when in 2007 and certainly a lot has changed and improved in a few years. But when you read a book such as Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle you realize just how far so many places have to go.

Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle is a book about Israel’s brief, violent and incredible history. It goes through a number of interesting and amazing stories of Israeli entrepreneurs, who essentially built a country surrounded by enemies. It’s a fun, interesting read, but not really about specific lessons that you can learn and apply immediately to your own startup endeavors. It does make you go “Hmmm…”

Since reading the book I’ve been thinking about it a lot and how the Israeli startup experience can be applied to other places, including my hometown, Montreal, Quebec. Truthfully, I don’t think you can apply all the lessons and experiences from Israel, simply because what they experienced is so different from other places. Canada, as an example, was not born out of war. We’re not in a constant state of threat, and therefore can afford to be lazy, slower moving and not as intense (although I don’t think we can afford those things, but we do.)

Still, there are some interesting ideas in the book that I do think can apply and should be talked about a lot more for Montreal and many other small but growing startup ecosystems.

1. You need chutzpah. If you don’t know what “chutzpah” is, look it up. Suffice it to say, as I was reading the book I kept thinking, “Where is Canada’s chutzpah?” Turns out we might have just captured some of that after winning a Gold medal against the US in Olympic hockey. Startups need chutzpah, lots and lots of it.
2. Failure is inevitable. A lot of people talk about failure in startups, but it turns out that a lot of that is nothing but talk. In many places, Canada included, failure is still failure. A black mark. In Israel they genuinely tackle failure differently.
3. Tout the exits. The entrepreneurs that exit in Israel are considered national heroes, the stories become legendary. Canada needs more exits, and it needs to tout those that its had. Those referenced in the book are huge, but I still think Canada could do a lot to promote even the smaller exits we’ve seen.
4. Keep the entrepreneurs. Israel does a good job of keeping people, although they do struggle with brain drain. Canada doesn’t do as good a job of keeping its successful entrepreneurs. Some of them come back, but not many.
5. Mature students are more successful. One of the biggest differences in Israel is the fact that nearly everyone spends at least 2 years in the army. While in the army they learn a ton of critical skills. Most importantly, they’re maturing – fast. By the time a 22-year old leaves the army, he or she has experienced something that no Canadian will even come close to understanding. Somehow Canada needs to find ways of providing students with more opportunities – and crappy internships at large companies doesn’t count. Students need to be thrown into incredibly intense and meaningful internships and roles. They need real responsibility with real consequences.
6. Focus beyond your borders. Because Israel is so tiny and surrounded by enemies, it’s forced to look far beyond its borders for success. That means exporting a lot. It also means having a unique worldview. Too few Canadians look beyond their borders to seek out opportunity, learn what’s going on, etc. Reading a couple blogs like TechCrunch and Mashable doesn’t count (although it doesn’t hurt either!) More entrepreneurs need to be networking past their city limits, and need to recognize how much competition is out there. Smaller startup ecosystems have to work extra hard to be on top of everything that’s going on, and need to get their fingers into every pie.

   I’d like to see more valuable partnerships with US and Israeli-based entrepreneurs and investors. There should be Silicon Valley and Israeli bootcamps and/or exchange programs. I haven’t thought through all the mechanics, but we need to be out there. We need to go out, learn, steal, connect … and then come back to our home base.

I would encourage you to read Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle – there’s a very good chance you’ll find some lessons, examples and ideas in there that will help you and your startup … regardless of where you’re located.

Every so often I read a blog post and say, “I wish I had written that!” That was absolutely the case with Mark Suster’s post, The Fallacy of Channels: Startups Beware. Mark hits the nail right on the head with respect to the risk (and usually the abject failure) for startups using a channel partner strategy.

Most people would expect a channel partner strategy to be fairly simple: You find partners who then go out and sell your stuff. In principal it sounds great for startups because most startups don’t have a real sales force. Channel partners are a sales force in a box! Ready to go, experienced and hungry to sell. Right? Right? Well…

To expand on Mark’s points regarding the risks of a channel partner strategy, here are two major issues I’ve experienced:

1. Lack of control. At the end of the day you’re handing responsibility over to someone else to sell your product. And as much as you can get reporting on sales activity, prospect pipelines, momentum, etc. you’re probably not in there closing the actual deals. Mark makes the critical point that in fact you should be doing the sales, but even still, you are giving up significant control of your sales efforts, learning and pipeline through channel partners. You should be very concerned about this. Your investors will likely be concerned as well. If they come to you and ask for a sales forecast but you can’t really give them one because it’s buried in your channel partners bureaucracy, you’re fucked. The lack of learning is a huge risk: If you don’t really know what’s going on inside the channels, you can’t really improve your own direct sales strategy or make significant changes within the channels.
2. The investment is very high. You can’t expect any channel to take your stuff and just sell it. Nothing is that easy. They’ll need training, sales materials, motivation and a lot more. Mark makes a very good point regarding the motivation of channel salespeople – frankly, it probably won’t exist at all. They just won’t want to sell your stuff. They make less on it, they don’t know it as well and it’s just one more thing they have to deal with. In my experience, setting up channel partners took 2-5x as long as expected, and even still there was considerable ramp-up and ongoing maintenance. So the dollar and time investment are huge. And for most startups that can bury you if you don’t have a long enough runway and enough traction on your own.

Four recommendations I’d make:

1. Don’t go to the channels until you know what you’re doing. Channels are really not the right place for validating your business. And they’re not the right place to validate a sales strategy either. You should have a fairly well-oiled machine in terms of sales and marketing before you build out a channel strategy. That way you can provide a lot more cohesive and precise knowledge to the channel. You’ve been selling your product, it’s working and you know what to expect. Now you can use channels to blow that out to a greater capacity.
2. Look for other adoption / sales models. Before going to channels as a sales strategy, look at other evolving enterprise sales and adoption models for your product. This should be done very early on in the customer development and validation process. For example, can you get users and sales from the bottom-up in an enterprise versus going top-down?
3. Assess past channel success. When looking at potential channel partners, make sure you do your own due diligence. Find out if they’ve successfully sold partner products in the past. Find out how they’ve done it. Talk to those other partners and find out how well the channels operated, how long things took, what costs were involved, etc. Remember: It’s your ass on the line if the channel fails, the channel partner is probably much bigger, selling tons of other stuff and can drop you in a blink of an eye. Your time, investment, effort and strategy will just go down the drain. So do your homework.
4. Get widespread acceptance within the channel. I’ve had experience in the past where management was excited to partner, but as it went down to others within the organization, we ran into roadblocks. And management didn’t have the fortitude (and/or interest) to really institute change. So you might negotiate a sweetheart deal with management only to find out that the people who will be selling your product, or implementing it with customers are less interested. You need to get widespread and detailed acceptance from all levels of an organization before you jump into a channel partner relationship.

Channels carry huge potential. And Mark is right – very often a channel partner is an inevitable acquirer. You want to get into bed with these guys. And the potential looks so great. But I’d say there are more “gotchas!” in the channel partner experience than “hoorays!” and there’s huge risk for startups that focus on channel partnerships too early in the game.

One of the big roadblocks that first-time entrepreneurs face is the issue of raising capital. There are no easy answers. But one thing is certain, the only person that can raise financing for your startup is you.

There are enough high quality resources out there on raising venture capital and angel investment. And there are some fairly well-accepted best practices on how to raise capital as well. You’ll have to do your research.

There are plenty of fairly easy ways to get connected to venture and angel investors too. That means more research and legwork.

There are probably people in your network that have done it before and can provide advice. If you need help, you have to ask for it.

If you’re waiting for an existing investor or partner of some kind to do the work for you, you’ll be waiting a long time. It’s most likely not going to happen. And unless you’re prepared and reasonably well-organized, your friends, colleagues, existing investors, partners, etc. will be hesitant to open up their rolodexes for you, because they’re putting their reputations on the line.

Note: Please be wary of consultants that are going to help you raise money for a fee (upfront or for success). This is a scary, seedy, dangerous arena. You can learn more at Jason Calacanis’ Open Angel Forum.

Raising venture capital is not something that most of us have experience in when we first become entrepreneurs. And when you first start a company the only way to get experience is do your research, learn as much as you can, prepare the documentation & pitch, and get to it. There’s no excuse for not jumping in and figuring it out.

People assume that startups have a certain type of culture. It’s fast-paced. Lots of caffeine is involved. Personal hygiene is optional. And the culture is automatically ingrained from day one. But none of those things are (necessarily) true.

Too many startups – and specifically startup founders – ignore their internal culture or don’t maintain a consistent one. They don’t create a strong set of consistent values. It’s not easy; after all founders are insanely busy and their company’s culture probably doesn’t rank overly high on the priority list (next to releasing products, raising financing, closing deals, etc.)

But it doesn’t take much for founders to adversely affect their team without even realizing it.

It might be a bad word or two about a frustrating prospect or customer. Or (dare I say it!) harsh words about your investors. Badmouthing customers is particularly troublesome, because that will very quickly give employees the perception that they can treat troublesome customers (and eventually all customers) in a negative way.

Founders have to consistently set the tone for their startups and be cognizant of how they’re doing it. If you want to go negative, so be it. If you want to be ultra-aggressive, OK. If you want to be more passive, that’s your call. But however you’re going to act and respond to things, you want to make sure that your team understands the motivation and intent. Otherwise they’ll pick up cues (even subtle ones) and run with them, probably without you realizing what’s going on. And all of a sudden what seemed like a strong, cohesive, motivated team is falling apart at the seams.

Founders: Think long and hard about the type of company you want to build. Imagine the company with 100+ employees, where the first few employees are now running significant areas within the company. What values, goals, personality and culture will they be driving through the people they work with and manage?

On February 18th, 2010 I’ll be speaking at Internet Marketing Conference in Montreal.

My talk is at the end of the day. I’ll be expanding on my previous presentation on social media and inbound recruiting. Actually, since I know that the speakers before me will spend a good chunk of their time focused on social media marketing to drive sales, brand awareness and customer service, I can probably get on stage and say, “Do what they said, but for recruiting people. Thank you.” Maybe I’ll toss in a few examples too.

The Internet Marketing Conference (IMC) is a 2-day event. On February 17th they do a full day of training. The conference day with speakers is on the 18th. Please note: IMC does cost money ($395 for the conference, $295 for the training, with a discount if you pay for both days.)

I’m looking forward to presenting and expanding on my ideas around social recruiting.

As well, I have 1 free ticket (for the conference day) to give away. I have a super-secret code that I can give you to register with, and they’ll comp your conference day ticket. Without making things overly complex, I’d like to run a simple contest.

1. Please comment on this blog or tweet out a message with this hashtag (#benimc) to enter the contest.
2. Ideally it would be great if you shared with me (and others) why you’d like to attend.
3. Let’s stick with 1 comment and 1 tweet per person (so you can leave a comment and tweet if you’d like).
4. On Friday, September 12th, I’ll randomly select a winner.

See you there!

How often have you seen startups go down the following road?

1. A couple people come up with an idea. They’re excited. Really, really excited.
2. They get nervous about competition or people stealing their plans. So they get very hush hush.
3. They start building something. This usually involves locking themselves in a small, dark room with lots of caffeine.
4. They raise money quickly. It’s quite often a seed round to get them through to launch.
5. Lots of code is being written. Lots of ideas are on a whiteboard. People are pumped. And there’s money in the bank.
6. Development is taking longer than expected. Scope creep is insidiously sneaking its way in. Estimates are out of whack. But there’s no turning back.
7. They hire an extra person or two to try and accelerate things.
8. Money is running out, but motivation is still fairly high.
9. They launch! Time to party and await huge success.
10. No one cares.

Now at this point, or possibly around step 8 or so, some amount of panic has set in. It depends a lot on how much blind faith the founders are running on and/or how successful they are at convincing themselves everything is going to work out.

One of the huge problems is that the number of points of failure actually increase as you move through these steps. You’re not eliminating points of failure or risk, you’re adding to them.

This path towards launching a startup is what I would call: Startup D.O.A — Startup Dead on Arrival. It sucks big time. It’s painful to watch. It’s depressing and frustrating. And it’s extremely common.

Here are three major problems that too many startups end up facing:

1. Not enough systematic validation early on.

Validating a startup idea is a very big challenge in and of itself. But without some amount of systematic validation you’re flying completely blind. Some ideas are harder to systematically validate than others. Business-to-consumer web apps, for example, can be hard to validate. How would you validate a Twitter before it existed? But even in that case if you’re going exclusively on a hope and a prayer there’s a very good chance you’re D.O.A. We hear plenty about the success stories; a lot less about all the failures.

Please, please, please, please find a way to validate. Sit down with your co-founders and talk this out. Think about how you could validate. Think about who you should speak to. Don’t be shy. Get past the fear of rejection as quickly as you can. Please.

Please, please, please, please be rigorous about it and have the gumption to say, “We went through a systematic validation process and this isn’t flying. Let’s kill it now before we’re Startup D.O.A.”

2. Not enough money.

If you raise money for a 6-month runway you have to start raising a follow up round the next day. That’s because it takes ~6 months to raise financing. If you don’t give yourself enough time to launch and iterate thereafter to build up traction and measurable milestones, you’ll have a freaking hard time raising more money. This isn’t necessarily an argument to raise tons of money out of the gate, but it is an argument for understanding how to spend the money properly, launching more quickly (so you have time to reach better, measurable milestones), and not getting bogged down in trying to build massive systems that will be overwhelmed by scope creep. Solve small problems well. Start small, stay focused and have a clear value proposition. Make a frequent use product. Please.

3. Not knowing how to run a business.

First-time entrepreneurs generally don’t know how to run companies. That’s because they never have. It’s just the reality of the circumstance they find themselves in. Even people who have kicked the startup can a few times still have issues in this regard. It’s hard. Get help. As much of it as you can. Get good help. Recognize that you don’t know what you’re doing and find out who is willing to help. Please.

Being Startup D.O.A sucks.

You pour your heart and soul into it (and a lot of blood, sweat and tears … and money!) only to launch, fall down and not have the resources, wherewithal or strength to keep going. But there are ways you can change this. And now is exactly the time that you need to, even if that means massive shifts in your strategy, your team, your roadmap, etc. Change everything and anything that needs changing. Don’t wait and hope it gets better. Don’t wait and expect millions of people to visit your site and pay you. The sooner you make the change you need to make, the better your chances.

Video is a powerful storytelling medium. Just ask Thomas Clifford, who has been using video for many years to tell some great stories. Many of them might have seemed dull or unclear at the outset, but video and smart storytelling can work real magic.

We’re seeing quite a few startups use video prominently on their website as a quick and very helpful way to show off their products. This makes a lot of sense; not because what they’ve built is necessarily complicated or difficult to understand, but because visuals are almost always more compelling and interesting than text. I can read five bullet points that speak to your value proposition, or you can just show me.

Short videos also force you to think creatively and distill your value proposition down to its very essence. You don’t want to ramble in a video; it looks a lot worse than rambling in text. So you have to put considerable effort and thought into what story you want to tell and how. And why you’re telling it.

Video = good. There, simple.

Now for a more personal connection to the power of video and storytelling. Stresslimitdesign was engaged by Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to produce a short video about greening corporate fleets. Pardon? Greening corporate what exactly? You want to paint my feet green? Not feet – fleet. Cars. Lots and lots and lots of cards. Corporate fleets are big in the US. There are millions of corporate fleet cars. And they create a lot of pollution. EDF wanted to promote the importance of making corporate fleets a bit more environmentally friendly. This isn’t about a couple kids with Methos and bottle of soda. This isn’t some chubby Star Wars fanatic swinging around a light saber. It’s a serious topic, difficult to promote and get people excited about.

Stresslimitdesign took on the challenge and put an immense amount of work into creating the video you see embedded below. Soon we’ll be releasing a “How To” micro-site that walks through how the video was created. But what makes this video particularly cool (at least for me) is that I did the voice over! That’s right … click the play button on the video and you’ll get a chance to hear yours truly. I used the best “announcer voice” I could muster. It took about 2 hours to get right. I hope you enjoy it!

Please do me a huge favor and help spread this video around. It’s important to get the message out there, and everyone deserves to hear me, right? *smile*

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about “mega trends” and how to use them when pitching your startup. Investors like mega trends. After all, they’re big. And most of us are aware of them and have been affected by them (or expect to be in the future). Tens of millions of baby boomers getting set to retire, for example, is a mega trend. Everyone using an iPad is another mega trend (OK, I had to slip in an iPad reference somewhere!)

Mega trends are good for storytelling, and a big part of doing a great startup pitch is exactly that … telling a story.

Startups should leverage mega trends and weave them into their pitches. Startups should also think about how they can piggyback on other companies that have huge traction. An obvious example is Twitter. Lots of companies are piggybacking on Twitter. But very few of them do it well. At some point in a startup’s life it has to jump off the mega beast’s back and be able to survive and scale much more on its own. StockTwits is a great example of that. It started by aggregating tweets with a $ symbol and capturing the conversation on Twitter about stocks and stock trading (which was largely already happening). Stocktwits found itself at the intersection (or piggybacking) on a couple mega trends – Twitter and people’s appetite for communicating on stocks (in a more public way). But ever since it launched, Stocktwits has actively pulled itself away from Twitter, reducing its reliance on it.

Mega trends.

Which ones will your startup ride and leverage? Which mega trends and mega companies can you piggyback on, use to tell a great story, and then move to the front of, in order to become a leader (instead of a follower)?

Every blogger suffers writer’s block at some point. It’s inevitable. And extremely frustrating. For some it means months without creating any new content, while others can recover much more quickly.

Skribit (the project of Paul Stamatiou and others) is a service that’s designed to help you defeat writer’s block. It also has the potential of increasing user engagement with your blog or web site. It’s a simple application that lets you take writing / topic / blog post suggestions through a small sidebar widget. You can see it installed on the right of my blog. People leave suggestions, and there’s a simple web interface for managing those. Other people can also vote on suggestions that are made.

I like the idea behind Skribit – that’s why I’ve installed the widget on my blog – and I’m curious to see what kind of response it gets. I do think it has the potential of being more interesting as a user engagement tool, because people will want to see their suggestions come to fruition, they’ll appreciate that and probably invest more time in promoting that content as well.

So, what should I write about?