By Francis Moran
There is no better time than now to start a technology company in Canada, Montreal-based serial entrepreneur Austin Hill told a sold-out crowd at last night’s inaugural Ottawa Founders and Funders dinner.
Hill told the entrepreneurs and various investors gathered at the Velvet Room how he raised US$25 million on a US$100-million pre-revenue valuation of his company Zero-Knowledge Systems Inc. (now called RadialPoint) just as the whole tech sector was going kaflooie at the beginning of this decade. The tough times that followed taught him very difficult lessons about being an entrepreneur as he was obliged to lay off employees he had personally recruited and induced to move to Montreal.
RadialPoint emerged from the meltdown as a much stronger company, Hill said, because of this focus on creating value. And the same opportunity exists today, he insisted.
“People who understand technology and people who have money and know how to make it work effectively have never existed together in Canada like they do today,” he said, making this “a great time for Canadian startups.”
Hill got chuckles from at least the founders in the room when he asked what you get when “you cross a lemming with a sheep?” The answer, of course, is a venture capitalist, and the current economic meltdown means only the truly committed risk-takers will be left standing. Tough times have a way of “washing out some of the people who weren’t serious about our sector in the first place,” he said.
I managed a brief aside with Hill that I used to ask him about his latest venture, Akoha. I have been curious ever since I signed on to the game whether it was purely a philanthropic undertaking or whether there was a revenue model behind it somewhere. “A very powerful revenue model,” Hill assured me before going into some fascinating details I won’t spill here since I neglected to get his permission to do so. But go take a look at the site for yourself.
Curiously, I was just this morning able to personally experience a sharp contradiction to one of Hill’s contentions, although I suspect he’d be happy to hear about it. Ottawa and other tech-heavy Canadians cities lack the kind of meeting places, like coffee shops, where you can wander in and be sure to run into people you need to meet, he suggested, saying that was his common experience in California. Well, for what it’s worth, I wandered into my friendly neighbourhood Bridgehead this morning only to run into Scott Lake. We spent a good 40 minutes chatting about his newest venture, ThinkSM. While we were doing so, I pointed out the head of one of Ottawa’s largest integrated communications agencies who wandered in while Scott recognised some major investor who was also at Bridgehead having a meeting over coffee. So maybe we do have some of that gravitational pull Hill was pining for.
The dinner itself was a good room and full kudos need to go to Allan Isfan of FaveQuest who pulled it together.
By Francis Moran
“I’ve just come to expect that my (public relations) agency can’t write,” was the astonishing admission I heard a few weeks back from a vice president at one of Ottawa’s larger technology companies who called us to see if we’d be interested in participating in an agency review process.
(I’ve promised not to name him (or her) for reasons that will be obvious as you read the rest of this post.)
I could hardly believe my ears. But yes, he said, it had long been his experience that the PR practitioners he had been dealing with from a range of different agencies and across a number of companies just weren’t very good writers, and so it fell to him to write most of the materials used in his campaigns. One of the key reasons he was approaching inmedia, he told me, was our very strong reputation in the marketplace as superb writers, a reputation he said was confirmed when he read our blog and web site.
I chalked this one up to what I assumed was just an unfortunate experience on the part of one technology marketing executive until I relayed the story to a colleague last week, a CEO at another technology company here in Ottawa and an insightful marketer in his own right. I was again utterly gobsmacked when he said he didn’t view writing as a core requirement in the PR function, that the ability to pitch the story was far more important.
“And what do you do,” I asked him, “When the pitch is initially well received and the next words out of the reporter or editor’s mouth are, ‘Sounds good, send me something about it.’?”
Here’s the thing. To work at inmedia and, I believe, to be an effective media relations practitioner anywhere, you must be able to write at an expert level and you must be able to effectively pitch what you’ve written. There is no hierarchy between these two fundamental skills. Lack one, and you’re out of the game.
And here’s why.
To believe, as these two otherwise successful technology marketers clearly do, that writing is either not terribly important or that your PR function, whether internal or an agency, can be permitted to be lousy writers, is to completely beggar the entire communications process.
In the first instance, despite all the wonderful new communications tools at our disposal, most journalists still want to see something in cold, hard black and white, even if it is delivered electronically. And even if they don’t ask for it, it’s just gotta be in your best interests to give them well-written material so they have the complete story, with all the relevant facts and accurate spellings of company, product and people’s names to which they can refer. This is just so basic I’m staggered it needs stating.
Second, how in the heck does a PR practitioner demonstrate her or his understanding of the story without writing about it? Yes, a properly written document proves the communicator can — gasp! — communicate. That is, the words run together in some sort of comprehensible order, everything is spelled correctly and the commas and periods are in the right places. But it still won’t be any good unless the person writing it actually has a thorough grasp of the subject matter.
Effective writing is not a case of cutting and pasting bits and pieces from other documents to make a different document and it needs to be more than a merely technically accurate use of words, grammar and punctuation. Effective writing is the process of distilling what has been learned — from other documents, certainly, but also, and critically, from interviews with a range of subject-matter experts — into a new piece of work. It not only communicates the story to all who read it, it also demonstrates understanding.
Bottom line: If your agency can’t write about it well, they almost certainly can’t pitch it well. And even worse, they probably don’t even understand it well.
So, did we get the business? Well, that’s another story that I cover here: The Ottawa inferiority complex theorem strikes again.
By Francis Moran
“Life has a way of making the foreseeable that which never happens … and the unforeseeable that which your life becomes.”
I heard that line on Thursday evening last week when I went to see the new movie, Appaloosa, a terrific duster starring Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen as two gunslingers hired to keep the peace in the town that gives the movie its title.
But the words could just as easily have been spoken by Stephen Poloz, senior vice-president of financing at Export Development Canada, who earlier the same day gave the keynote luncheon address at the Ottawa Venture and Technology Summit.
For a banker, Poloz had lots of funny lines as he delivered a logical explanation of how a bit of a live-for-today spending spree by American consumers in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks led inevitably to the near-collapse of the entire capitalist system.
If your world can be randomly eviscerated by unimaginable events well beyond your control, he argued, “what’s the point of having a credit card paid off?” This attitude led Americans to “spend every nickle they earned and every nickle they could borrow.”
The banks played along. “You can’t have a good speculative bubble without a good bank,” Poloz said, adding that the key thing the banks did was redefine what once was known as “uncreditworthy.” “Now we just call them sub-prime, and give them a loan.” Those loans were packaged up and sold off as well-rated and secure investments, adding further leverage to a situation that was already cranked way beyond sustainability.
And when housing prices stopped rising, the blow that American consumers feared would come from terrorists ended up being a self-inflicted wound. This last bit is my take, not Poloz’s.
What Poloz could not do, however, was give any counsel, and this is where he started sounding like novelist Robert B. Parker’s enigmatic retired soldier Everett Hitch. “The most important insight here is, we don’t know” what’s going to happen, Poloz said. “The models don’t explain what happened and they can’t explain what’s going to happen.”
Trouble is, he then started applying those broken models by way of reassuring his audience.
For example, he said the $700-billion package put together by the U.S. government would be enough to counter the $7 trillion he said speculators had blown into the markets because banks can take a dollar of fresh capital and lever $10 in new loans from it. Well, maybe under the old model they could.
Further, he said the meltdown of the U.S. economy would not have the same repercussions as those experienced by Latin American countries or Japan or others in decades past because, unlike then, the economy is not fragile, the regulatory regime is strong and the government has a good balance sheet. I’m not sure which American government he was referring to, but none of those three sound anything like they apply to the government that runs a big country just south of here.
For all of us who have been whipsawed by the markets over the past several weeks, the unforeseeable truly has been made into what our lives have become.
By Francis Moran
Defiantly channeling the “greed is good” credo of character Gordon Gekko from his self-avowed favourite movie “Wall Street,” venture capitalist Paul Dawalibi from St. Lawrence Capital ruffled more than a few feathers at an Ottawa Network event at TheCodeFactory last night.
“Arrogant putz,” one attendee said to me as I headed out the door, while another, accused by Dawalibi of asking a “hostile question,” retorted back, “That was a hostile presentation.” Other opinions were equally scathing. “Why would any self-respecting entrepreneur submit themselves to that,” one audience member asked me rhetorically, while another wondered, “Is this is what it’s come to in Ottawa that we have to put up with the likes of that,” after commenting that Dawalibi’s presentation and approach seemed rather barren of ethics.
Indeed, at one point Dawalibi, whose fund claims an interest in backing green technology, told the 40 or 50 people in the room, “If it (an investment in a company’s technology) earns me a 10x return, I don’t care how badly it pollutes.”
It was a remarkably unrepentent and jarringly discordant approach at a time when greed and unrestrained capitalism have toppled so many of Gekko’s modern-day Wall Street compatriots.
Dawalibi’s “I am not your friend” pitch to entrepreneurs was also in sharp contrast to the other funding source represented at last night’s event, the Ontario government’s Accelerator Investment Fund. Investment manager Shirley Speakman put as much emphasis on the friendly and nurturing support structures the fund offers its portfolio companies as she did on the half-million dollars she could invest.
By Francis Moran
Okay, this has nothing whatsoever to do with technology or marketing but I just had to write about this joyous new oasis in the heart of our city.
All summer long, as I trundled to and from work, I have been monitoring activity at a small city park on Main Street in Ottawa east. The neighbourhood, badly mauled when the Queensway — what our British readers would call a motorway and our American readers a freeway — split it in two more than 20 years ago, is gradually recovering. New residential developments have gone in, a lively farmers market on the grounds of Saint Paul University draws crowds every Saturday and the highly desirable blocks between Main Street and the Rideau River contain, by my reckoning, some of the most attractive housing to be found in Ottawa.
A couple of weekends ago, there were crowds of children and adults working on the park site so I knew some big changes were pending. Just what they were up to was immediately evident when I biked down Main Street on my way to work the following Monday and was greeted with this joyous burst of colour and life. It was such a happy scene I actually burst out laughing as I pedaled past.
One of the mainstays of Main Street, in operation for more than 100 years, has been Lady Evelyn Alternative School, which my two lads attended, first at the excellent Rainbow Kids’ School, a preschool housed in the same building, and then through eight years of kindergarten and elementary school. A few blocks up from the park, Lady Evelyn is an amazing institution in this city, even if its decided lack of emphasis on academic performance has teachers at other schools rolling their eyes. It is, rather, a warm, community-oriented and nurturing place, where a dozen or more languages can be heard spoken at any school gathering and where my boys thrived in their personal development and did well enough academically to qualify for competitive arts and enriched programs when they moved on to junior and senior high school.
The new kids park, formally known as the Old Ottawa East Children’s Garden, is very much a partnership between students at Lady Evelyn and a group called Sustainable Living Ottawa East. According to a story in the Ottawa Citizen, each student at the school painted one of the 300 pickets that border the park while corporations such as Home Depot, Microsoft Canada and UPS kicked in materials and money. Despite a late start, an organic vegetable garden has yielded some produce this year and other plants, many of them donated by neighbours, abound.
It’s a beautiful thing, and I salute everyone involved.
