Nous préconisons une approche nouvelle avec le fonds d’amorçage; une approche qui aura, nous croyons, un impact significatif sur l’entrepreneuriat et l’innovation technologique en TIC au Québec. Merci à tout ceux et celles qui nous appuient depuis le début et qui contribuent au dynamisme du secteur.

The government could get involved, but for most people, I would assume (could be wrong assumption) that most of the personal information in Facebook is already available to the public somewhere else on the web, weakening any case the government would have against Facebook. Besides, who doesn’t have pictures of themselves or videos somewhere on the web that are a lot more damaging to their image or privacy than the information in Facebook. With everybody walking around with a GPS device and a camera connected to the Internet, this situation will only get worse.

I do not trust Facebook with my personal information, nor do I trust any other site or online service with my personal information. Call me paranoid. Besides, nothing’s free. The advertising business model implies that the user data will be used for “targeted ads”. I think it’s wishful thinking to believe that the personal information we put in the cloud is private.

That being said, what Facebook is doing is wrong. Using an industry standard and the assumed trust that users have in the TOS process to make sweeping changes to a user’s rights is both unethical and abusive behavior, not unlike how monopolies treat their users/customers. Facebook is behaving like a company that firmly believes it has a strong enough position with its users to shove just about anything down their throat without much consequence. Does Facebook believe it has a monopoly position in the social web?

There’s a silver lining here for those of us concerned about the dangerous amount of power that Facebook wields on the social web. By opening up its data to the world, Facebook is at the same time making it a lot easier for competitors to access its users and migrate them to competing services. The value of Facebook is in its data, the fact that it is extremely difficult for users to port their personal information to a competing service, the amount of time spent and regularity of the visits of its members. By opening up the data to search engines and the web, other social networks will now be able to more easily move users to their services along with their data. I believe it is in Facebook’s best interest to remain as closed as possible and keep control of what comes into its kingdom. They already have over 350M+ active users and are still growing double digit year-to-year. Everybody is on Facebook or will be at some point. By opening up to the Internet, it is at risk of morphing into it. Facebook should follow Apple’s model, not Twitter’s. Facebook is an Internet within the Internet that third parties want access to and it should control who/what gets in and when as much as possible, just like Apple does with the iPhone. Facebook’s semi-openness is its biggest asset. Opening up will cause its demise.

JS Cournoyer is a Principal with Blunt, a Partner with Montreal Startup and an entrepreneur.

js@montrealstartup.com

http://twitter.com/jscournoyer

http://www.socialbuckets.com/jscournoyer/JS_Cournoyer

MENTIONS LEGALES: Veuillez notez que nous ne sollicitons pas d’investissements de la part de qui que ça soit!

Plutôt, nous allons soumettre une proposition à Investissement Quebec pour gérer un des fonds d’amorçage de $42M annoncé lors du dernier budget provincial.

Nous avons des idées intéressantes sur comment ces fonds pourraient être utilisés pour accélérer de façon radicale la croissance de la communauté Web québécoise (et canadienne). Par respect pour le processus de sélection, nous ne donnerons pas de détails ici, par contre si vous voulez nous faire part de vos idées, de ce que vous les entrepreneurs attendez de la part d’un fonds de capital de risque, c’est le moment ou jamais!

Nous aimerions aussi savoir ce que vous pensez de notre rythme d’investissement, de la façon dont nous traitons les entrepreneurs et de notre implication dans la communauté.  Vous sentez-vous à l’aise de nous présenter vos projets? Croyez-vous qu’on saisi bien les enjeux et le fonctionnement de l’écosystème des start-up Web? Qu’est-ce qu’on pourrait faire à l’avenir pour améliorer notre performance?

SVP laissez vos commentaires ci-dessous, en français ou en anglais, et merci d’avance pour vos suggestions et votre appui jusqu’à présent.

We have often had the debate about how much time is needed to raise your first follow-on round. The average time quoted is between 3 and 4 months – we have seen a range of 30 days to 7 months.

30 days was based pretty much on doing an internal round and letting regular co-investors into the deal – this is the only way it’s going to be that quick.

Those raises that have taken 5 months or longer are probably because of one of two reasons:

A) The business had not achieved it’s significant milestones (showed uptake / traction) in the time frame it expected.

B) The market was moving very quickly and the business hadn’t absorbed and reacted to the changes quickly enough.

So how do you pull yourself out of the hole in these situations ?

In the case of A) failing to hit milestones you have two options:

One option requires you to explain the reasoning behind the failure to hit anticipated milestones, explain how you have adjusted things to achieve the milestones and raise a small bridge round to give you the time to hit the (revised) milestone.

The second option requires you to redefine your milestone retrospectively – showing that you had achieved a milestone (but not the original one) with the money you were given and that you are now raising a round to enable you to prove uptake / traction.

My recommendation is to choose the option that is closest to the truth. Sometimes (option 1) your lack of experience / good advice means that you just don’t execute well enough – in this case you need to show investors the extent of learning your experience has provided and hope that they still have faith in you. Sometimes (option 2) the milestone you originally set becomes irrelevant and hitting another milestone is genuinely more important.

In the case of B) not evolving your business quickly enough – this nearly always comes down to either a failure to execute (see above) or more often an unwillingness to listen to the advice of others.

One of the hardest things to do as an entrepreneur is to be able to have your head down focused on execution but at the same time be aware of everything that is happening around you. Really listening to external voices (advisors, mentors, investors) is probably the best way to keep a balanced view of where your offering sits in the overall eco-system. If everyone is telling you that the market is changing, then you need to considering changing too.

In some cases this just means acknowledging the shift in the market as part of your pitch and highlighting how these shifts might affect your business. In other cases it may mean that the product (or product development roadmap) may need to be changed to take account of the market shifts.

In either case you need to show new investors that you have the ability to evolve your business quickly in the future and show to current investors that you are now more open and willing to take input and advice – and hope that they still have faith in you.

Work hard to maintain the faith of your existing investors – because without that, it’s going to be much hard to raise follow-on financing if (when) something (inevitably) doesn’t go to plan.

Hope to see you there!

• Two teams, one composed of investors, the other is composed of tech start-up founders and employees.
• Each team must maintain a minimum of one representative of each sex on the field at all times.
• Absolutely no skill required! It is all about having fun with old friends and making new ones. Anyone taking themselves too seriously will be subjected to disapproving frowns and made the butt of many jokes.

Sign-up here to let us know which times are most convenient for you and we’ll let you know the Where and When of this awesome event!

There were 20 companies and about 80 mentors !

Mentors were split into groups of eight and each group spent about 30 mins each with 8 of the 20 companies. The feedback on the event from the mentors and the entrepreneurs was really positive and I personally can’t wait to do it again.

Seedcamp runs a number of mini-Seedcamps in 6 European cities and then hosts "the full monty" once a year (to date this has been held in London).This is structually different to the other "feed capital" programs and may work well in Canada.

Interestingly the type of mentors invited were very broad. Of course there were investors and experienced entrepreneurs, but there were also a number of people from industry and some recent grads from the Seedcamp program. I think that this only adds support to the feedback that comes from all the feed capital programs, showing that knowledge transfer between smart founders plays as much a role as knowledge gained from mentors / advisors.

I’ve now been to a Seedcamp event, a Y-Combinator event and Alan MacIntosh (one of MSU’s other Partners) has also been involved in Launch Box Digital. I can honestly say that the raw quality of entrepreneurs and ideas that we see in Montreal (and this also applies to the limited number of entrepreneurs I’ve met in other parts of Canada) are as good as anywhere else; but our entrepreneurs must continually compete and co-operate in order to push themselves harder (ie smarter).

Whenever possible MSU tries to get the Founders of its portfolio companies to get together and engage in some co-opetition. We will continue to do more of this and we are now also looking to find ways in which we can get other funded and "to-be-funded" entrepreneurs in Canada involved in these sessions.

Look out for some upcoming MSU out-reach events!

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.

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 !