By Leo Valiquette
Despite common misperception, Ottawa is home to entrepreneurs seasoned in the school of hard knocks who understand that the road to success is more often paved with customer interaction than it is by venture capital dollars or a preoccupation with product development behind closed doors.
Jay Litkey is one such entrepreneur. He took centre stage last week (or at least, the centre of the boardroom floor) at the last Startup Drop-in of the season at the offices of Labarge Weinstein.
Jay is co-founder and CEO of Embotics, a company he and the management team built from the ashes of Symbium, which met its end after a venture capital deal went sour a few minutes past the 11th hour.
Embotics has a relatively simple value proposition. As virtualization becomes more and more popular in the server farms of large organizations, it can be a challenge to efficiently manage it. Embotics’ V-Commander product helps organizations manage and monitor their virtual machines (VMs).
As Jay summed it up in an interview with the OBJ last fall:
“With the products of companies like Microsoft and VMWare, all you have to do is click a button and create a new server, and that leads to what is called ‘virtual machine sprawl,'” he said. “There’s exponential growth in the number of servers since you no longer have to buy a physical computer (to deploy a new server), and that’s a bad thing for enterprises when they can’t know who did what and what’s happening.”
Clear market, clear value proposition. The trick for Embotics has been keeping its cards close to its chest while the market matured enough for there to be substantial demand for its product. Before v1.0 of V-Commander became commercially available last fall, it was in beta with large enterprises in key verticals such as pharmaceutical, telecommunications, internet hosting, financial services and manufacturing sectors. With v2.0, the company is again taking that beta approach.
And as Jay emphasized this week, that kind of customer engagement throughout the product-development cycle is key. There is no other way to get the pulse of your market and understand whether or not your product addresses the right pain points and offers the features most valued by potential customers.
From the perspective of what we do here at inmedia, at some point that would likely involve a calculated public relations campaign targeted at those key trade media that reach these potential customers. And nothing gives the story more punch than testimonials from existing customers, but I digress.
Coming back to what Jay had to say, to drive a product through from idea to market adoption, he offered the following points:
1. Your first great idea is always full of holes. The sooner you can accept that and the more willing you are to seek out and absorb candid feedback and criticism, the quicker you’ll move ahead. So be humble.
2. Customer feedback is the only sure way to find out where you’re wrong, which means that …
3. Your focus out of the gate should be on customer interaction, rather than chasing VC dollars. Nothing gets the attention of investors faster than early traction with potential customers. (Embotics, by the way, has no VC investment.)
4. Adopt a philosophy that’s been evangelized by the titans in the Valley—fast failure. Failure is the path to wisdom and insight. Countless corporate icons have an impressive list of failures to their credit.
Perhaps you agree with Jay, perhaps you don’t. Feel free to comment one way or the other. What’s important is that there is dialogue in the local community on how to grow successful companies in Ottawa. What works, what doesn’t and what can we try next.
But I wholeheartedly agree with Jay — the primary focus out of the gate must always be on the end user, the customer. Product development for its own sake has no place in private enterprise. Engineers in the Valley get that and appreciate the value of early customer engagement. It’s the difference between being product or service focused, between saying “I have a product you should buy,” or “I have this solution to your problem. “ As long as we remain product-focused, the outlook for this region’s tech economy will be uncertain at best.
By Leo Valiquette
Anyone savvy with the local tech scene and the areas of focus by yours truly during my time at the OBJ will know all about that made-in-Ottawa problem with developing a sales culture among our companies. Well, somebody’s finally doing something about it.
Eliot Burdett and the team at Peak Sales Recruiting have teamed up with a number of other like-minded individuals to create a not-for-profit organization called the Sales Leadership Initiative (SLI).
SLI’s mission is simple: ferret out from among the estimated 6,000 sales people who live and work in Ottawa the shining stars, the high achievers, the trailblazers who continually set and raise the bar. But this isn’t about showering praise and recognition, it’s about picking the brains of these people for the wise insights that can help others up their own game.
“We are interested in learning from the best practices in technology sales, whether close to home or further afield,” is SLI’s official line. “Our goals are (1) to increase and develop the pool of sales talent, and (2) raise the profile of Ottawa as a center of sale excellence.”
SLI is kicking things off with a launch event on June 13 featuring best-selling author and award-winning motivational speaker Jeffrey Gitomer (pictured) to help sales professionals “turbo charge their sales engines.” It’s a morning event at Ben Franklin Place. Click here to learn more.
In a town dominated by a bureaucractic mindset and a horde of engineers turned C-level executives, we definitely need an initiative like this to push the sales side of a business. Now let’s just hope those most in need can acknowledge their shortcomings and take advantage of what SLI has to offer.
By Francis Moran
Last week was quite an extraordinary one for Ottawa’s start-up community.
Wow. When was the last time over the past six or eight or 10 years that I could make a bold statement like that and not have the guys in the white coats start measuring me for a jacket that buckles in the back?
And no, I’m not referring to a spate of product launches or company foundings or even venture capital funding announcements that would have been the basis of such enthusiasm in the past when Ottawa’s technology sector was dominated by capital-intensive efforts to invent a better telecom system or new semiconductor.
Instead, my enthusiasm today comes from a series of events we attended last week, all of which we blogged about and all of which contributed to a subtle but undeniable sense that something very exciting is afoot.
On Monday, I joined a warm and standing-room-only crowd at DemoCampOttawa9, where developers from six companies demonstrated their applications and received scads of intelligent, creative and constructively critical feedback from their peers.
Tuesday night, several generations of Ottawa technology entrepreneurs helped Ian Graham celebrate the official opening of his novel and creative co-working and collaboration space, TheCodeFactory. A series of short speeches was book-ended by veteran Denzil Doyle and emerging company founder Scott Lake. We here at inmediaare such big fans of what Ian is doing that we’ve signed on as founding partners of TheCodeFactory and we’ll be watching with more than passing interest as he builds a facility that is much needed in this town.
Wednesday night was The Ottawa Network‘s regular monthly Start-up Drop-in at LaBarge Weinstein and this was when the penny really dropped for me. As I wrote here Friday, every speaker was, among other things, sounding the consistent notes that Ottawa’s start-up community is focused on exciting new opportunities in the online world, is actively supporting its individual members and is building a broadly collaborative and globally minded ecosystem that may just yet spit out the next Facebook.
Thursday night I took a pass. But my colleague Leo Valiquette attended an event that in many ways emphasised one of the key realities of this exciting new world. In a session titled, “Buddy, keep your million, but buy my product,” The Ottawa Network in collaboration with the city’s various technology clusters came to the inevitable next stage of its now three-year-old series on how to tap into venture capital.
The first year, the title was, “Buddy, can you spare a million,” emphasizing the traditional route to building a company — beg for whatever venture capital you can lay your hands on.
The second year’s title, “Buddy why should I give you a million,” betrayed the fact that most of the begging was going wholly unanswered as VCs shut their wallets and became unyieldingly skeptical about the business plans they were seeing.
Last week’s title brought the whole thing full circle. If you can’t beg funding from VCs who either don’t have it or won’t invest it, then you have to build a company the old-fashioned way — develop a product and find someone who wants to pay you money to buy.
What a concept.
Fortunately, this reality now aligns with what Ottawa’s startups are doing anyway. Exciting and promising new ventures really can be launched on a shoestring. When a budding entrepreneur needs help, there is a wealth of events to attend, or many willing peers in the community who will contribute counsel or even hands-on support. When the venture grows a bit larger, places like TheCodeFactory will give it an affordable home. And by the time the VCs come calling, they really won’t be needed very much.
Hold the buckled jacket. It really is an exciting new day here in Ottawa.
By Francis Moran
The official theme was “Ottawa’s digital media industry,” and the gamers, social networkers and content developers were there in spades. But what I heard at Wednesday night’s regular Start-up Drop-in put on by The Ottawa Network at LaBarge Weinstein had as much or more to do with propagating and supporting the entire start-up — indeed, the entire technology — community in Ottawa than it did with digital media per se.
In keeping with the format now well established by LWLaw partner and event host James Smith, we heard briefly from several different actors before the headline act shared what is billed as “words of wisdom.”
First out of the gate was a quartet of self-described “next generation” entrepreneurs who see themselves as having a serious role to play in cultivating and supporting their fellow tech entrepreneurs. Putting their blogging skills where their mouths are, they run StartupOttawa.com, an active blog by and about the start-up community. Mercury Grove‘s Scott Annan, Shopify‘s Scott Lake, TravelPod‘s Luc Levesque and Jean-Sylvain Sormony of Fuel all talked about the importance of cultivating “our generation of entrepreneurs,” as Lake put it.
Two start-ups whose very business model is all about propagation went next.
David Thompson described his company, Noleo, and its platform that hosts social networking applications, allowing them to simply and simultaneously run on a number of social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Alan Isfan’s FaveQuest is also all about propagating content across social networking sites, in this case taking broadcast television material and packaging it for redistribution to the social networking ecosystem.
Ben Houston, a fascinating young developer whose computational magic has been seen in several Hollywood movies, was an example of the propagational potential of the Start-up Drop-in itself since that’s where, a few months ago, he first met Keith Taylor, the business executive he has now recruited as president of his company, Exocortex Technologies.
I was momentarily stuck when Distil Interactive CEO Robert Thompson began to share his words of wisdom since it was not immediately clear to me how his comparison of Ottawa to other tech-savvy centres in which he worked would fit into my propagation theme. But his talk was really about challenging the 50 or so company leaders and managers in the room to propagate their obvious enthusiasm, commitment and empowerment throughout the rest of their company employees and, indeed, throughout the rest of the community.
It was a high energy evening, as have been the last several of these drop-ins.
