Entries Tagged 'startup' ↓

My first freelancing gig is with the folks at Unspace. Hampton convinced me to move to Toronto for a couple of weeks to work on CommunityLend. It’s an exciting project, check it out.

Email me if you are in Toronto and would like to meet up.

I’m no longer an employee at Standout Jobs; They will be my first freelance client.

Going freelance will let me work fewer hours, spend most of my time learning about the ‘next big thing’ and contribute to open source in the process. Here are a few things that are on my radar:

• IM as command line: Jabber + twitter
• Semantic web: micro-formats and freebase
• Collaborative filtering
• API design
• Authentication

These are interesting times for net heads, with many simultaneous inflection points, lots of freely usable data and ridiculously cheap on-demand computing.

Rails was that ‘next big thing’ about two years ago. I fell in love. After traveling across Canada and South to California, I spent months learning and prototyping. My parents thought I was crazy, spending months without a job. Maybe they’re right, and going freelance certainly won’t dispel that notion.

I fell in love a few times this past year. I’m willing to bet heavily that one of those muses is going to be the ‘next big thing’. Going freelance will afford me the time to pursue them that I just couldn’t have in a startup. It’s exciting, even if I’ll miss working as closely with the world-class team back at Standout Jobs headquarters.

Wednesday I attended Rick Segal’s VC Roundtable in Montreal. Rick is a partner at JLA Ventures, a venture capital firm specializing in technology and software. Their last fund was one of North America’s top performers (top 5%), and they should shortly open their next fund.

Over the course of 2 hours, he went over venture capital basics and a brief overview of their working process.

JLA’s differentiators:

• Coders. They have techies on staff, and will try your beta software.
• They want to take you out for lunch when you’re still writing a prototype, before you even get angel money.
• Due diligence happens *before* signing a term sheet.
• Deals are made by partners, as long as their other partners don’t have strong objections. This is different from consensus, multi-layered approvals or vote-systems common with some VCs

Because there are a few mistakes companies can make early on that will torpedo their chances of ever making it, I’d recommend talking to them early on. One other point worth mentioning here is that JLA has made a few smaller investments - that is, small by VC standards - in businesses like B5 Media and Tungle. Rick lovingly referred to these as ’science experiments’: smaller bets in an emerging market that are very uncertain but should help them understand that space.

I bet those two experiments will be incredibly successful.

Some of my take-aways probably apply to all VC businesses:

• “Lifestyle businesses” need not apply. While making $5 million in annual revenue might be fantastic for an entrepreneur, they want companies that will sell for 25-100 million. Companies usually sell for 1.5 to 2 times revenues.
• Target investments have to have a ‘liquidity event’ within 5 to 7 years. VC’s have to repay their investors too, so you have to be prepared to see your baby bought, merged or sold on the public market.
• “pre-money valuation” is usually 3-5 million.
• Keep track of who owns the company - including your mom, and that designer or coder in Hungary.
• Ask angels for convertible debt, not equity.
• Don’t call yourself the CEO: those get replaced. A founder gets to stick around on the board.

If memory serves, they met over 850 entrepreneurs last year, and have funded 4. Some of those 850 are still being considered, but most were told ‘no’. Those odds appear quite similar to those of getting funded by most VC’s.

When AngesQuebec announced $750k of funding from the Québec government, I asked what the justification was for giving money to already wealthy investors.

Austin Hill is one of the network’s members, as well as one of Standout Jobs’ 3 founders. I pinged him, teasing him about getting government financing. He argued that while he’s generally opposed to the idea of subsidies, it makes sense in this specific case. In our discussion, a few facts came out that changed my mind about the project:

-$750,000 is over 3 years, after which the network should be self-sustaining
-AngesQuebec aims to have a network of 200 angels
-Over the next 5 years, $50 million should be invested in 120 companies, creating 800 jobs
-Other angel networks have gone bankrupt trying to bootstrap from member fees.

AngesQuebec is a non-profit, trying to build a public infrastructure good - something markets tend to fail dismally on. They are currently all volunteer run, and seeking their first paid staff. Hopefully this hire can improve communications and start the process of recruiting angels in order to grow to a sustainable size.

We lived through crunch mode and the site is live. Since we’re no longer in stealth mode,  I can now tell people what I do. Well, after I kvetch a bit.
We found out the issue we were having had been reported 4 days ago as Bug #10926. We have only managed to replicate it in our production environment, but not in staging. The consequence for us was a 404 (page not found) error when logged in users tried applying for a job. While we did work around it, let’s say that error pretty much sucks for an app that’s supposed to help companies hire people.

It was a horrible type of bug to track down. The only difference we could see? More Mongrel instances, and a 64-bit version of the OS.

• Is it in Rails’ incredibly complex routing code?
• Our own subdomain support?
• Is Capistrano doing a clean restart and getting all the Mongrels running the same version?
• Is caching an issue?

Unable to replicate the bug on staging and given it only appears randomly (1/3 to 1/2 of the refreshes, both hard and soft),  it’s the kind of experience you want to avoid on launch day.Anyhow, the site is live and the inflow of bugs has slowed. We’re still madly fixing any issues as they get reported, and we’ll have refinements over the next few days before we tackle new functionality.

Overall this is a great success. I’m happy to be working with this ‘A team’, and will have more stuff to share as soon as things calm down.

Crunch mode needs to end soon before all the Standout Jobs crew goes nuts.

After initial silly discussions about purchasing a pony after our Series A, or having a guard cat to secure our offices, one of the more psychologically vulnerable members of our team brought in both, for terrible results:

As you may be able to tell from the photo, this is NOT a PONY. It is a unicorn! If your company is considering putting its devs on ‘crunch-mode’, consider some members may lose all semblance of sanity, willy-nilly replacing ponies with unicorns.

It’s official: Standout Jobs is launching at DEMO.

We have a 3 week sprint to finish any promised functionality and deal with bug reports from beta customers. It’s an exciting way to start the year; see you in late January.

The thread on Montreal Tech Watch’s Capazoo Update got increasingly surreal this week, first with their Director of Communications heralding their strategic partnership with the National Lampoon. To contact him, anyone in the press should just do so through the service he is promoting (!).

Capazoo is a multi-level marketing scheme. Like Amway and countless other MLM schemes, it turns people into money-grubbing zombies that erode our social capital.

Today one Jean-Christophe decided to comment as a satisfied customer, pleading for us to see for ourselves how fantastic and lucrative Capazoo can be. Naturally, he finishes by giving us his profile page. If we sign up after visiting it, he earns zoops. So far, he’s earned 806 zoops - or $8.06.

So I looked at the referral scheme:

For every friend you invite who upgrades to Privileged Membership, you’ll earn 100 Zoops!

For every friend you invite who upgrades to VIP Membership, you’ll earn 130 Zoops!

The Capazoo.com Referral Program lets you earn Zoops when your friends refer friends – up to four generations!

Ick. Capazoo will quickly fill up with amateur spammers looking to make a single dollar of each of their social connections. Maybe one day they’ll have Amway-style rallies and conferences. Unlike other MLM organizations that manage to stick around for years however, this socio-economic virus should peter out once they burn through their cash reserves and exhaust their possible partnerships.

I hope Capazoo goes out with a bang rather than a whimper, that it serve as a reminder to other idiots that would try similar ideas.

This morning I attended the December MTEB.

A couple of venture capitalists were in attendance, who graciously answered my questions about what is going on with the VC industry. I basically think the industry is big, slow, and doesn’t understand new technology. They’re closely watching the efforts of Montreal Startup, but weary several incubators, seed funds and other schemes have foundered before.

The real surprise was talking with Darrell and the engineers at Stanox. We come from different technology backgrounds: micro-chips, ERP and web. Yet we all have similar attitudes: KISS. YAGNI. Think. Simplify. We’re all fans of Saint-Exupery’s quote on perfection:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

When I griped about a horrible API I might have to integrate (the variable names are inconsistent and ugly) one VC said “well, it can be ugly, but it’s ok if you make money”. The dividing line was obvious. For the engineers, if it’s ugly and verbose it’s probably buggy. For the investors, it’s bearable if it’s profitable.

The folks at Stanox look like they will be successful, and mentioned they may become angel investors in the future. I’m hoping they succeed; we need more angels like that.

Like most geeks, I love puzzles. I solved Google’s infamous puzzle that started with {first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com. I also solved one of Facebook’s puzzles, just for fun.

Today, Jonathan sent me a link to ITA Software’s hiring puzzles. It’s sexy stuff, and Standout Jobs would have some hiring puzzles too if I could come up with something particularly demented. Jonathan suggested an intriguing roman numeral puzzle. Sadly, we both realize that many people can’t even write a simple Fizzbuzz.

Ah well, back to the ITA Software puzzle. Looking at the average length of a few numbers, I estimate there’s a good chance the 51 billionth letter either doesn’t exist, or is very close to the end. Gauss would be amused.

Even if I’m wrong, brute force is obviously out of the question. It would however be nice to start from the end and have the algo run in a fraction of the time. So here’s how I start.

units = %w{ one two three four five six seven eight nine }
tens = %w{ ten twenty thirty fourty fifty sixty seventy eighty ninety }
teens = %w{ ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen }

def sum_string_sizes(units)
units.inject(0) {|memo, unit| memo + unit.size }
end

sum_string_sizes(units)
=> 36
sum_string_sizes(teens)
=> 70

([''] + units).inject(0) {|memo,i| memo + "twenty#{i}".size }
=> 96
'twenty'.size * 10 + sum_string_sizes(units)
=> 96
# sanity check doesn't bounce, wOOt!

sum_string_sizes(tens[1..-1]) * 10 + 8 * sum_string_sizes(units)
=> 758

So for numbers 1 to 99, I get strings of total length 864. I’m certain of my solution up to 999, but I’m not awake enough to be sure I have the rest really nailed. Either way, if there’s more than 51 billion letters, there’s still a fair chunk of work to do.

Have you solved this? If so, do you want to work for Standout Jobs? If not, how would you go about it?