What are they talking about?

Everyone has their own opinion and here is where you can read what they are. These are blog posts, not necessarily endorsed by anyone – except the team member who wrote them!

The world is NOT broken!

Filed under Uncategorized

11 04.09

I’ve seen so many pitches that start with "The (insert a given industry) is broken". I hate pitches that start like that – industries don’t break, they evolve. And the venture capital industry is no different!

One of the reasons that experienced entrepreneurs often make decent VC’s is that they understand the need to evolve their venture capital business in the same way that they evolved their previous businesses.

Mark Skapinker and the Brightspark team have recognised this and decided to evolve into an ideas lab. Selfishly, I think this great because it means we have less competition, but i’m sure that soon enough some other "entrepreneur turned investor" will spot the opportunity that their departure creates – there’s nothing like competition to keep you on your toes.(Hey Mark – if i’m ever given the opportunity to invest in one of your ideas please make sure the pitch deck doesn’t start of "the (industry) is broken" ;-) )

Rick Segal and the JLA/Blackberry Fund team have also evolved with the introduction of their Jump Start program. As the industry evolves opportunities also open up for new models such as those of the Y-Combi"Nations". The Boot Up Labs guys in Vancouver and Extreme Ventures in Toronto have been able to position themselves favourably in this evolving world – and to some extent so have we at MSU. But even in the past year we have felt the need to evolve our strategies twice and there is yet another twist in the works as we speak.

Any under-grad marketing student knows that a problem in a market is actually called an opportunity, but it’s a smart entrepreneur that can work out how to make money out of that opportunity.

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More investment news for Montreal

Filed under Beyond The Rack, Investments, Marketing Dept, Oneeko, Press, Whatsnexx

09 03.09

Continuing with the shout-outs to the entrepreneurs in whom we’ve invested recently ……

Marc Lefrancois and Marek Krepec at Oneeko have recently (beta) launched the upgraded version of their software solution that enables "click-to-collaborate" screen sharing with the utmost simplicity.

We also have two previously unannounced investments.

Whatsnexx (no website yet) is building it’s business from some technology and talent that has been spun out of TSX listed Komunik. The software is still in development and more info will follow as the company comes out of development.

Yona Shtern and Robert Gold are the Founders of Beyond the Rack, Canada’s answer to Gilt or Vente Privée. The company offers its online members luxury brand clothing and accessories, via limited time "flash sale" events. This business model has proven to be extremly successful in Europe – to the point that we were able to attract european co-investors to invest "across the ditch".

With all this activity we had better spend some time putting our own pitch together so that we have some more money to invest in these "opportunity" filled times !

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Web Startups in Montreal

Filed under Akoha, Alex Eberts, Austin Hill, Book Oven, Investments, Keenong, Press, Standout Jobs

06 03.09

We’ve been pretty quiet on the blogging front recently. Whilst I can assure you that doesn’t mean we haven’t been doing anything – perception is reality !

The truth is that we’ve already made two more investments this year – giving us a total of 10 companies in our portfolio – and if we keep this rate up we will have invested our first fund in about six more months !

Most of our companies are still in development or beta so we aren’t trying to raise their profile yet but but over the next few days I’m going to give a quick shout-out to the companies we have backed so far.

To get the ball rolling i’ll start with the companies that we have announced:

Standout Jobs has developed a Saas platform that powers and centralizes companies’ online recruiting efforts. The company is being driven by Montreal tech community activists (Instigators) Ben Yoskovitz and Fred Ngo.

Akoha is a developer of online and real-world social games designed to make the world a better place. Alex Eberts and Austin Hill (the quiet guy in the background ;-) ) are Akoha’s Founders.

We quietly announced our investment in Evan Prodromou’s latest startup Identi.ca. Having started both Wikitravel and Vinisimo, Evan has proven his abilities to build communities and execute open source/collaborative projects.

And here are a couple more of our yet to launch investments:

Keenkong is currently in private beta so why don’t you sign up to keep posted of developments. The company’s CEO, Olivier Berger, is bringing his six sigma training to the startup world – watch this space.

The Book Oven is also in private beta but it wouldn’t take a genius to work out that Stephanie Troeth and Hugh McGuire’s latest startup has something to do with books – it looks like they are working on something very appetizing!

Whilst doom and gloom may be all around us, we continue to be excited by the entrepreneurs we meet and by the strength of their ideas – and we are happy to keep funding the best of them ! 

There will be more shout-outs next week.

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2008

Filed under Uncategorized

16 01.09

MSU closed its first seed stage fund a little over a year ago so I thought I’d do a quick wrap up of how our first year went. 

  1. The initial fund was $3M and we said we wanted between $5-$10M. As we raised another $2M this fall, I’m calling this one despite being on the low end of our target.
  2. We said we were going to co-invest alongside Angels. We’ve got Angels involved in about half our deals, so I’m calling this one as well even though we need to improve upon it.
  3. We were aiming to do at least eight deals in 2008. Well, we did eight and another two are due to close shortly, so we’re good here as well. By the way, not all the investments have been announced yet, but some of you may have heard about the latest one.

So we’re three for three in 2008! Of course, investing the money is the easy part, now we need to help those companies grow and raise their next round of funding. While we still have money to invest, the bulk of our time in the next six months will be spent on our existing portfolio companies rather than looking for new investments. 2009 is shaping up to be a lot of fun!

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Solidarity Fund QFL invest $2Million in Montreal Start Up

Filed under FTQ, Finance Dept, Investments, Press

29 11.08

It has been a busy few months behind the scenes at MSU and we’re really pleased that we are able to make the following announcement:

Montreal Start Up, a venture investor dedicated to supporting Montreal based entrepreneurs in their quest to create and build successful companies, today announced the closing of a $2 million investment in its venture capital fund by the Solidarity Fund QFL, bringing to $5M the amount of assets under management.

This extra $2,000,000 GUARANTEES that more Montreal entrepreneurs are going to get funded ! We would really like to thank Janie Béïque, Luc Couture at the Solidarity Fund QFL, as well as Jacques Bernier, for their support in making this happen.

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Le FTQ investit 2 millions $ dans Démarrage Montréal

Filed under FTQ, Finance Dept, Investments, Press

29 11.08

Nous avons été très occupés ces derniers mois et en voici une des raisons:

Démarrage Montréal, un spécialiste du capital d’amorçage, dont la mission est d’appuyer les entrepreneurs montréalais qui bâtissent les succès de demain, a aujourd’hui annoncé avoir reçu du Fonds de solidarité FTQ un investissement de 2 millions $ dans son fonds de capital de risque, ce qui porte à 5 millions $ les actifs gérés par l’entreprise.

Ces 2,000,000$ de plus, garantissent que plus d’entrepreneurs montréalais vont recevoir des fonds! Nous aimerions remercier Janie Béïque et Luc Couture du Fonds de solidarité FTQ, ainsi que Jacques Bernier, pour leur aide à réaliser cet investissement.

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Collaboration

Filed under startup

25 11.08

Last week at Startup Empire in Toronto a couple of people told me they felt that the Montreal startup community was much more collaborative than the Torontonian one. While I can’t comment on things in la ville reine, I definitely agree that people here go out of their way to help one another. Last week for instance, I asked Sylvain Carle if he’d be willing to answer a few questions from the CTOs of two of our portfolio companies. They were preparing to deploy their services on Amazon’s cloud but, as newcomers to AWS, they had some concerns. Sylvain went one better and organized a round table discussion for CTOs, developers and sysadmins. In two hours, the newcomers to the cloud were up to speed and even those who had been using EC2 since its inception learned a thing or three. Shout-out to the Praized and Karabunga crews for generously sharing their time and knowledge. 

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Akoha (raises) opens the bar

Filed under Akoha, Alex Eberts, Austin Hill, Ideas Dept, Investments, startup

29 08.08

Last night, Akoha gave a sneak preview of their product offering to a number of their friends, family and investors in Montreal (disclosure -  MSU is an investor).

The founders, Austin Hill & Alex Eberts (along with PR guru Dov) are no strangers to creating buzz and excitement about their projects and once again they made a splash – albeit the type of precision splash that you would see from a Chinese Olympic diver and not that of Shamu the whale !

A reasonable amount of money would have been spent on the event and as an investor in the company I can’t but help consider wether this was actually a good use of money. My conclusion is that it was; and that it achieved a few  things that any start-up entrepreneurs could consider as they launch their businesses.

1) When you’re sprinting the marathon – don’t forget the feeding stations.

When your legs, lungs and brain are fatigued but you realise you’ve only just started the marathon it’s great to see the 10km feeding station. A feeding station is designed to give you renewed energy, but it also marks another milestone on the race. The lungs, legs and brains of any start-up are of course its founders and employees and its essential to provide feeding stations along the way to motivate and re-invigorate the team.

The sneak peak event created an opportunity for the founders to put the whole team in the spotlight. Akoha hasn’t even launched yet but their sneak peak event felt like a celebration of success; as an investor I don’t see Akoha as a success (yet), but I can fully appreciate that as a team, coming together to deliver a product, they have successfully reached a major milestone.

I don’t think that Akoha is actually creating any real marathon runners, but last night a few probably felt like junior (tech) rock-stars.

2) Practice your pitch

I assume (obviously) Akoha intends on taking its pitch to the "world" at some point. That would probably involve presenting the company at a much larger event than the one last night. So their sneak peak event gave them a chance to practice their pitch in a realistic environment -  in-front of an audience with all the adrenaline flowing and nerves jangling (or in Alex’s case "Jango"ing).

Anyone at the event (including myself) would say that the presentation went really well, but the guys at Akoha know that to be the best you can’t be satisfied with "really well". You need to be outstanding – and as practice makes perfect, I think that a real-life test run is a valid investment of time and money. Its all about raising the bar.

3) You get out what you put in

By inviting the community to become "insiders" the sneak peak event has placed Akoha as one of the companies that everyone in Montreal will want to help. This help is invaluable to any start-up and I would encourage ALL start-up’s, early stage and venture backed companies to open up more to the Montreal community. It’s through the community that you will probably find your next employees, your next investors and perhaps even some of your most innovative ideas.

So to the Akoha team – thanks for a great night and good luck with the next 10km !

 

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Montreal’s startups versus Y-Combinator’s startups … part 2

Filed under Y Combinator

24 08.08

Here are some more of Y-Combinator’s Summer 2008 intake and where appropriate a mention of Montreal companies I am aware of that are competitive or complimentary.

Youlicit

Youlicit automatically generate simple, link only web sites that are supposed to be at least as relevant as those generated by human editors – time will tell if the automation as good as a real person produces but it should generate them plenty of free organic traffic that is very monetizable. Do people want this ? I’m not sure but it may well be one of the more commercially viable companies presenting.

Job Alchemist

As the name would suggest, these guys are in the online recruitment space. They have two offerings that are somewhat related . The first is a series of niche job boards and some white label software to roll out more job boards. The second is a syndicated distribution network for jobs that will try and place job adverts on blogs, forums, networks etc. They say they "want to fix on-line recruitment " – but, whilst I admit they have have done some great work in a short time, I don’t think they are going to fix anything – they are just adding to the current melting pot of offerings. (We are investors in Standout Jobs .)

Slinkset

Slinkset is another company that is providing software to enable not programmers to launch a white label version of a well know offering – in this case you can create your own version of  Reddit /Digg (social news site) and brand it as you like – with no coding necessary. I guess that they must have been caught out by Reddit going open-source.

Frogmetrics

Frogmetrics have developed software solution for doing mobile survey response that tracks responses in real time. I don’t see anything new in this business but they have taken the Apple approach of delivering a smooth, polished, end to end solution that includes both hardware and software – in this case they were demo’ing on Nokia hardware. I really see this as a systems integration play.

Anyvite

Competition for E-vite. Nothing new per se, but well done and less of a hassle to use than E-vite. Not sure how they plan to gain main stream awareness – always the problem with a ME2 product, but if it is that much better .. who knows.

Ididwork

Ididwork enbales you to share your work log with co-workers and managers. Nice implementation but I think they could look to incorporate some of the thinking from the team at Timmy on time - developed by a couple of young guys from Trois Rivieres (almost Montreal!).

Popcuts

Think pyramid marketing scheme meets indie music. The earlier you buy a song the more "revenue share" you will get when (if) the song takes off. I don’t think this is going to fly using financial incentives but it could evolve into something interesting. 

BackType

BackType was the only Canadian team presenting ( a second team are still in "stealth mode") and one of the reasons we wanted to go to Demo Day. They refer to themselves as the Google of comments. Simple idea; they provide a search service that allows you to search the Web for comments by a particular author or on a given topic. Let’s see if they end up in Montreal or the Valley ;-) .

That’s it for the reviews – the next post will draw some conclusions about my trip to Demo Day.

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Cool Start-Up Seeks PHP Developers

Filed under Jobs, startup

19 08.08

We often get inquiries from start-ups looking to hire top talent.  Usually, we just tap our network of contacts to produce a list of potential candidates. This time, I thought it would be interesting to cast the net a little wider and so I’m blogging about it.

Recently I’ve been asked by two start-ups if I could recommend anyone for a developer position. Both are cool, expanding companies run by great people and looking to make a big splash. One is looking for a web developer that also knows a little about SMS and MMS. A lot of the work involves APIs and widgets and most of the code base is in PHP and JavaScript, so knowledge of both languages is essential. They are looking to bridge the Web and Mobile worlds. The other company is looking for a developer with 1-3 years of PHP experience and the right attitude. As a bonus, all of this company’s code is released under an open source license; therefore not only can you earn a living, you can also accumulate some good karma along the way!

So if you’re looking to escape from the drudgery of the corporate cube farm, have always wanted an employee number in the low single digits and are willing to sign on to the crazy roller-coaster ride that is an expanding start-up, please get in touch with me (daniel AT this domain). I’ll tell you a little bit more about the companies and, if there is a fit, I’ll arrange the introductions.

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