By Leo Valiquette
Last night, I had the honour of attending the Canadian launch of the C100 in downtown Ottawa at Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada.
What is the C100? It’s a group of those ex-pat Canadians who we refer to when we lament the “brain drain.” They have stepped up to put their time, money and Rolodexes into helping our strongest early-stage companies acquire the mentoring, business contacts and exposure to potential investors they need in North America’s hottest technology nexus — Silicon Valley.
Or to say it another way:
C100 is a non-profit, member-driven organization dedicated to supporting Canadian technology entrepreneurship and investment, comprised of a select group of Canadians based primarily in Silicon Valley, including executives of leading technology companies, experienced start-up entrepreneurs and venture capital investors.
There are Canadians that fit that bill all over the Valley said Chris Albinson, one of the founders of the C100 and co-founder and managing director of life sciences and technology investment firm Panorama Capital.
Last fall, overwhelmed by stories from disheartened Canadian entrepreneurs who were struggling to stay afloat as investment dollars dried up due to the economic downturn, as well as the demise of Nortel Networks and the impact this would have on the entire Canadian innovation ecosystem, the founders of C100 decided to do something. They looked to the examples set by other ex-pat communities in the Valley, notably the Israelis, and the networks they had set up to help start-up companies from back home make a name for themselves in the Valley.
At a dinner where 65 guests showed up despite only 50 invitations having been sent out, the audience was challenged to step up and commit to doing something. By the end of the night, 64 guests had endorsed the idea that would become the C100 and each had committed $800 to its creation.
Five months later, the C100 has earned the support and sponsorship of government, economic development agencies and technology incubators across Canada, from EDC and DFAIT, to OCRI, MaRS and Communitech in Ontario. Seventy Canadian companies have been introduced in the Valley and provided with crucial mentoring and exposure from those who have been there and done it first.
After only five months, five of those 70 companies have secured venture capital investment — a total of US$45 million. And this is just the start.
Incidentally, one of the companies that has benefited from C100’s help is cloud data governance specialist PerspecSys of Waterloo, a new inmedia client. Only last week, PerspecSys was one of 20 Canadian companies that were part of 48hrs in the Valley, a C100 initiative carried out in partnership with the Consulate General of Canada. 48hrs is a fun and intense two-day mentoring and business development program designed to help Canadian entrepreneurs connect with the advice, resources and networks they need to grow their businesses.
While on the junket, PerspecSys competed in the elevator pitch sessions before a judging panel of hard-nosed Valley investors and other tech sector players at the Plug and Play Spring EXPO. It beat out about 40 other U.S. and Canadian companies to take top honours due to the strength of its go-to-market strategy and an innovative solution that lies at the confluence of two key growth markets – cloud computing and securing sensitive corporate data to meet compliancy requirements.
So, hat’s off to the C100 — yet another example of how adversity breeds creative leadership and opportunity. It is this kind of grassroots community effort that will drive a bright future for Canadian entrepreneurship and innovation.
By Linda Forrest
Many moons ago, we wrote a post that gave a general overview of how awards fit into an integrated PR program. All of this information still rings true. Awards can be a worthwhile part of your communications program, but make sure that the ROI is worth it if it’s something you have to pay steep fees to enter. The best kind of award is the one where entry isn’t even necessary, where you’re singled out by experts in your field for being the best at what you do. You can’t buy that kind of third-party validation from reputable sources and it may cause prospects and competitors to both sit up and take notice of you.
Since many of our clients have had the good fortune lately of winning some prestigious awards and being singled out as some of the best at what they do, and since I’m working on a report for a new client that maps out appropriate awards opportunities for the year ahead, safe to say that I’ve got awards on the brain.
I’d like to publicly congratulate several of our clients for recent distinctions bestowed upon them:
UNIT4 Business Software, a top-six provider of ERP software worldwide, was named Employer of the Year at last week’s VIATeC Awards, which honour Vancouver Island technology companies. We like working for them; they must also be a pretty good place at which to work.
PerspecSys, whose hybrid cloud platform that mitigates the data privacy, residency and security concerns inherent to using SaaS applications in the public cloud, was both feted as one of Gartner Group’s “Cool Vendor in Cloud Security Services 2010” and named as finalist in the Global Cloud Security Challenge 2010. We’ll be telling the world a lot more about PerspecSys starting tomorrow.
Touch Bionics, the company behind cutting edge bionic technology like the i-LIMB Hand and ProDigits, was recently awarded the Queen’s Award for innovation, the most prestigious award in the UK for business performance. It’s another nice nod for a client that, it is safe to say, is the most decorated of any we’ve ever worked with.
Keep up the great work!
By Leo Valiquette
Last week, a new angel investing network launched in the National Capital Region to support new business initiatives, mentor the next generation of entrepreneurs, and of course, generate great returns for investors.
The Capital Angel Network (CAN) is an informal network sponsored by the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) where angels can view potential investments and discuss them as a group. The goals are to increase the quantity, quality, and success of angel investments in Ottawa, to create a greater pool of capital for innovative start-up companies and to complement existing angel groups.
Laurie Davis, a long time angel investor in the Ottawa area and a member of CAN’s board of directors, took a few moments to share his thoughts.
What was the impetus behind the creation of this new network?
Davis: I meet with entrepreneurs all the time and they tell me they have a great deal of trouble raising money. It’s always been difficult, but much more so in recent times for various reasons. It takes a lot time and effort to find enough angels to give you the amount of money you need. So if you can gather a number of angels together in a group, it saves the entrepreneur a lot of time and effort.
From the angel’s point of view, I enjoy working with others in a group and hearing their perspectives on things before agreeing to commit money.
What are your key objectives and goals?
Davis: Obviously this is only a useful exercise if companies get funded. In the end, the goal is to have people fund companies they find useful and interesting. We are going to track what happens and see if by the end of the year we have four or five companies that have been funded.
How is CAN different from other angel investor organizations that we have seen in Ottawa over the years, such as Purple Angel, Band of Scoundrels and the Ottawa Angel Alliance (OAA)?
Davis: I am a member of Purple Angel, a founder of OAA and friends with members of Band of Scoundrels. What are we doing different? We got some feedback when OAA wound down that there wasn’t much appetite for a formal organization. With OAA, you had to pay membership dues and commit to a certain level of investment. People didn’t like that level of formality. The bottom line is to try something different until you find something that works. The challenge of course, is to make sure you have real investors, as opposed to the room getting filled up with lawyers, accountants and other service providers looking for business. With the informal model that becomes a little harder, but we’ll be watching it.
Where do you think we have the most significant gap in turning great ideas into competitive commercial products that make it to market?
Davis: In general we have people who know how to go about building a product, but that whole go-to-market strategy, to know how to get a product to customers and to identify real customers – that’s the problem we have.
How will CAN help early stage companies overcome this hurdle?
Davis: We are not going to be tackling it directly. The key thing is, if you have a group of smart people in a room, the expectation is that someone will step up and help. The whole idea of angel investing is not to just provide money, it is to get involved and help where you can. We hope to see a lot of that.
What do you think of Terry Matthews’ recent announcement of his new commercialization fund?
Davis: It all helps. None of us are competing. There is a problem out there that needs to be solved and anything that can be done to solve it is a great benefit to the community.
What is the future of the venture capital model?
Davis: I wish I knew. It certainly is not pretty out there right now. If you look at it from an entrepreneur’s perspective, it is painful. And they are trying to address that by creating companies that need less capital. There are some businesses that you can launch with a few hundred thousand dollars, but others you simply can’t without tens of millions of dollars – and those are the companies no one wants to start right now. This is a huge problem and I don’t know how it’s going to be resolved. There is talk that institutional investors will invest directly in companies, as they once did – that would certainly help, but I haven’t seen this happen so far.
By Francis Moran
We’re not big television watchers in our household but like many families in Canada and around the world, we’re putting in a fair bit of time these days with the world’s second-largest (after football’s World Cup) sporting extravaganza, the Olympics. One night last week, it was the women’s halfpipe competition that had my wife and me most excited and the no-holds-barred attitude of these brilliant athletes, plus the controversial “Own the Podium” program that has Canada’s Olympians focused far more on winning than on merely participating and doing well, got me thinking about the pursuit of excellence in other arenas. Like tech marketing.
Let me explain.
The eventual winner of the women’s halfpipe, Australian boarder Torah Bright, fell on the first of her two runs. On the second run, Bright was the very first in the field of competitors to hit the pipe and she nailed an amazing routine and scored a dazzling 45.0 out of a possible 50 points to seize first place. It was then up to the rest of the women, including two highly favoured American competitors, to put in runs that would score better than that.
And here’s where I saw something in many of these athletes that technology companies would do well to emulate. They refused to hold back, to give up in the face of seemingly unbeatable competition, or to tone down their routines so they could finish safely, but in second. The outcome was that nearly all the heavily ranked favourites crashed in the pipe as they did the only thing they could do — pull out all the stops in a high-risk, go-for-broke, all-or-nothing shot at first place.
The same shoot-for-the-stars mentality is behind Canada’s “Own the Podium” program, a well-funded $145-million, pursuit of excellence that set as the target for Canada’s team in these Winter Olympics nothing less than first place in the overall medal standings. It reflected an audaciousness that is terribly uncommon for Canadians in almost all walks of life and it’s been drawing criticism here at home from people who say it’s unsporting of us and even that it puts undue pressure on the athletes. As the prospects of our team achieving that goal became ever slimmer this past week, the chorus of criticism swelled even louder.
I have to say that this sort of winning-is-somehow-un-Canadian attitude infects far more than our sports; it most certainly infects technology entrepreneurs in this country.
Far too many new technology companies play it far too safe. They husband their resources and set far-too-modest objectives for themselves for fear of failure. Here are two critical lessons they could learn from the Olympics.
1. Like the women who followed Torah Bright into the halfpipe, go for broke. Sure, you might well crash and burn, but you’ll do so quickly, the practice will stand you in good stead for your next run for gold and if, like all the women I saw, you come up with a smile on your face and a gleam in your eye that can only come from knowing you gave it your all, everyone who backed you on this crashed run will back you on your next attempt.
2. Set what former Tundra CEO Jim Roche likes to call “big hairy audacious objectives,” just like the Canadian Olympic Committee did with its “Own the podium” program. Was it too audacious an objective now that it has been proven to have been too ambitious? Not in the least. Coming up short doesn’t mean we failed; it most certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have set that objective in the first place. It means that in sports, as in business and most every other aspect of life, the competition can still win no matter how well you play. And who knows how many of the athletes who did win medals and who turned in personal bests did so because they were inspired by this objective?
The bottom line is that if you don’t think you can win, you won’t.
By Francis Moran
At the peak of the dot-com and telecom bubble at the beginning of this decade, my wife, who is also a technology marketing strategist, and I often amused ourselves by imagining the response we might get if we created an entirely fictitious company and put up a website that employed all the utterly meaningless buzz words that were being bandied about at that time. I forget what we going to call the company — the name certainly had the word “solutions” in it — but I remember that we invented an incredibly persuasive mission statement that actually said nothing at all.
We didn’t think we’d get any customers, but we were pretty sure we could get some VC funding.
That little inside joke of ours came to mind this morning as a I watched a lovely little video by Made to Stick co-author Dan Heath on “Writing a mission statement that doesn’t suck.” Using a pizza parlour as example, Heath shows how an initially-quite-effective mission statement is turned into mushy pablum by the use of words that sound aspirational but that really don’t mean anything at all. Actually, it’s not that these words don’t mean anything at all; it’s that they could mean anything to anyone.
I do a lot of work helping technology companies figure out their differentiated positioning in the marketplace. This work is usually done in the same sort of group-think environment that turned “serve the tastiest damn pizza in Wade County” in Heath’s example into the mushy and meaningless “present with integrity the highest quality entertainment solutions to families.” Every time the word “solution” is suggested — and it is suggested almost every time — I implore the workshop participants to imagine the word doesn’t exist. “Now,” I ask them,” What is it that you actually do?” The answers immediately get much sharper and focused and far more meaningful.
The little joke my wife and I still wish we had managed to play on a gullible marketplace was predicated on this tendency to avoid specificity in favour of being all things to all people. In marketing, though, the joke will be on you because in trying to be all things to all people, you will succeed only in being nothing to anyone.
