My Own Pirate Radio

Over on the Brightspark blog Mark Skapinker wrote something that really struck a chord with me:

“More “Bill Gateses”, not more graduates”
The press in Canada has been full of articles about how Bill Gates thinks that if Canada and the US want to stay ahead, they should “focus on improving the quality of education and expanding the number of young people who study math and science in school”. He wants us to create new computer scientists, engineers and researchers. Academics like Roger Martin answered him in the Globe and Mail by saying that North America has its lead because of our great MBA schools (like The Rotman School of Business where he is Dean) and management studies and the creation of more managers.”

Mark argues instead that what we really need is “more Bill Gateses. We need entrepreneurs who are willing to “go for it”, start new companies and create startups like Microsoft was not so long ago.”

Woot! This one speaks to me. Lessee, I studied Math and Computer Science at Waterloo, worked at Microsoft, and married a Queens University engineer who recently completed an MBA at Rotman. And now we’re both neck-deep in trying to get a startup off the ground. Must… voice… opinion.

I would love to see more entrepreneurs in Canada, especially in technology. Canada has a huge per-capita gap relative to the US on this. But what’s the cure? Check out some of the comments Mark’s post received:

• “Entrepreneurs are born, not made.”
• “[Bill Gates] was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, and ruthless enough to profit from it.”
• “[one of] our biggest barriers to entrepreneurship is the negativity surrounding failure”
• “few of our graduating students have entrepreneurship as their goal beyond education”

My take:

On nature versus nurture: It’s both.

Take Gates for example: Sorry naysayers, luck and drive were necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions for his achievements. I used to think wishfully that I could have done the same thing if I was just lucky enough. You know, show up at just the right time to become the driving force behind Windows and Office, grow a company from 2 to 60,000 employees, that sort of thing. But then I met Bill, and reluctantly swallowed my delusions of genius and grandeur.

While at MS I gained a good deal of respect for him. Don’t get me wrong; I’m no toady. He has his flaws, as do we all. But I assure you he is also an extremely talented technical problem-solver and business strategist, and — this is important — a big, big risk-taker. He was very, very good at being chief technology freak in a company chock-full of technology freaks. He will most likely be very, very good at running the Gates Foundation. Some of this capability derives from his nature — raw smarts, passion, drive, and guts — and some of it from nurture: family wealth and encouragement, access to great schooling, brilliant friends and colleagues, among other things. It takes both.

On schooling. Education is a huge enabler. It creates opportunities. In particular, for tech jobs, great problem-solving ability is essential. In large part, this can be taught.

Some might argue that problem-solving skill should emerge from a technical degree, or an MBA, or great community college programs, or from inspirational highschool teachers. I think debating this is a waste of time. We need ALL of these… and we should let the market decide how much of each. Entrepreneurs will emerge from all of these halls, and from the school of hard knocks too.

On funding. Entrepreneurs need financing. As Mark argues in earlier posts, we need a more concerted effort to make funding available for startups through a broad variety of non-governmental orgs.

The government tries, but can’t get it right. Case in point: $40M of government funding pumped into MARS Discovery District. It’s big. It’s beautiful. It makes for great PR. But that same money could have launched a thousand small startups instead.

The funding also has to be made available to companies from early stage up, not just startups that are mature enough for VCs to consider. And it needs to be available from a wider variety of funders, enough so that there is real competition amongst them to find and nurture the next great entrepreneur.

On risk. Innovation is fueled by risk. This single factor underlies everything else, in my opinion… the educational choices we make, the jobs we take, the inventions we create. The Canadian culture and economy needs to get much more comfortable with taking and supporting risks. And as things stand, Canada’s traditional risk-aversion is a real barrier to entrepreneurship. It makes it harder to get funding, it makes it less socially acceptable to fail, and it heaps too much emphasis on doing only “safe” things in school and in the real world thereafter.

That’s my recipe. I’d love to hear yours.

Back in April of this year a friend who works at Toronto’s MaRS tech incubator kindly gave me a tour of the facility. I walked away feeling a little conflicted; I wrote: “…Mars is an incredibly well-funded tech incubator, but it isn’t yet offering much in the way of educating the broader community of people outside the four walls of the building…”. And I sent my tour buddy a way-too-long mail with some ideas for improvement.

I had all but forgotten about the visit, since I haven’t been tracking MaRS since then. But Veronika, who coordinates the MaRS venture services programs, just posted a response to my April comment: “It is frustrating to see such remarks because we’ve been getting amazing feedback from participants in MaRS programs and clients of the MaRS Venture Group. … So, what more should we be doing to reach this “broader community ?”

Well, I don’t know how useful my April thoughts are any more (or ever were!) but I did manage to find the email I sent after that first visit. Below is the “Ideas / suggestions for improvement” portion of that mail, with the outreach-related stuff bolded. Beyond what I wrote then, I would also push to get all the information resources online, for free, and I would broaden the focus beyond bio-tech. Veronika, I hope some of this is helpful.

We talked about the desire to get companies collaborating. I suspect MaRS may struggle with this because the tenants may well be competitors, and many of them will anyway be very secretive about certain areas of intellectual property. To get past this you might consider asking them to share with you what help they need and would like to receive, both from you and from other tenants. Then it will be obvious where the safe ground is for group collaboration.

Workshops: you said you’re already doing some of this… public speaking, how to pitch to VCs, etc. More is good. Entrepeneurs need that help and people are often embarassed to ask. This is definitely an area where all the tenants’ interests will be aligned and they should be able to collaborate.

Mixers: …

• Regular weekly “unwinder” events with beer and cheap eats
• Weekly “brown bag” speaker series: invited speakers, talking to tenants, 45 mins + 15 min q&a, bring your own lunch (hence “brown bag”)
• Host more events that invite the external community in. maybe see what ROM does in this regard?

Techfest / Science Fair
Read about it here and here. This concept may not work because of the IP disclosure issue, but perhaps you can approximate it in some other way. Basic idea is to get everyone to understand what everyone else is doing, and thereby foster connections and collaborations. It was an incredible success at Microsoft in that regard. It was also a lot of fun… a great big nerdfest social event. :-) (And I can say that because I was one of the nerds loving every second of it.)

Cafeteria: really high quality food, and an upscale ambience. It’s amazing how much of a difference this makes.

Business Resource Center
Need a physical space – already in the works I’m sure, but this is a high priority. If someone has to make an appointment with a BRC staff member and then travel three floors to meet them, the interaction is less likely to happen. I’m sure I just don’t fully understand what’s available today and how it works.

Improving the space

• Something to fill up the atrium and make it feel warm and welcoming. Chairs, lounge area? Like a hotel lobby.
• Other common areas in/near incubator: lounges, places sit down to chat, have coffee, etc. whiteboards, pens. Lego blocks. Toys.
• Art
• Add carpets in the incubator (linoleum right now, I think? Dismaying contrast with the granite and marble everywhere else.)
• From the atrium you can see right into everyone’s offices. Consider curtains or blinds for privacy.
• Mix and match incubator offices w/ other spaces in the building. Current setup is super corporate, most powerful people in outside and corner offices. And I understand why this is the case, I just think you have an opportunity to do something more egalitarian.

To sum up here, with the financial resources available to MaRS, a much bigger share should go into making the current incubator space great. Do this before further buildout. Otherwise you are sending a message to tenants that they don’t matter as much as everyone else… which is exactly the opposite of the goal, right?

Improving the Web site

• The site marsdd.com is quite hard to find on all of the major search engines. You need to know the exact title to find it.
• The title of the marsdd.com homepage should state what Mars is, e.g. “MaRS – [descriptive tagline here]”. Right now it says “Marsdd.com”. This will help site visitors know they’re at the right place. It will also help search engines make the site discoverable.
• The site content might be better organized around target audience segments. That would make it easier to understand and navigate. Maybe think about “Entrepeneurs”, “Investors”, etc. as more logical top-level tabs.
• The site content needs to be written more in plain English. Example (not to pick on anything in particular): “The MaRS Business Resource Centre (BRC) is your entryway to the core of MaRS: the convergence of resources, people and ideas to spur innovative collaboration. MaRS BRC is comprised of a set of physical and virtual resources designed to make the commercialization ecosystem more robust. The BRC is the strategic hub for the development and coordination of all MaRS commercialization programs.”

My 2 cents.

Thanks for the opportunity to see MaRS.

I’m interested in how people discover things: web pages, music, places to eat, other people to hang out with, so on and so forth. Here are two items in that vein that I recently stumbled upon:

1. Discovering music: I signed up a while back with Last.fm, and played around with it for a bit. It’s interesting, but somehow left me a little flat. Last.fm uses collaborative filtering to recommend music that people with similar tastes enjoy. It’s a Black Box approach: assume you will never satisfactorily model the human brain and instead, just map human behavior and draw inferences from that. Where it fails for me is that there isn’t enough randomness; song sequences are too similar. Subsequently I’ve heard a lot about Pandora, which takes a totally different approach and tries to model the “genetics” of music. So… the new thing is a mashup of the two services. I just signed up.

2. Discovering people: If you are considering or have tried online dating, take a look at TeamDating. They enable group dates. Seems smart to me… there’s safety, fun, and serendipty in numbers.

3. Meta: I found out about the Pandora/Last.fm mashup from TechCrunch, and TeamDating via Springwise. If you are into business innovation and haven’t seen Springwise, check it out. They seek out and write about innovative new businesses almost every day.

The Globe and Mail published a short piece on Tuesday about lessons learned in bootstrapping Waterloo’s successful entrepreneurial community.

…Mr. Siim surrounded himself with … Tech brains from the computer-mad University of Waterloo and business smarts from Wilfrid Laurier University … Unlike many Waterloo startups, Sandvine’s network intelligence products are not the direct result of research undertaken at the University of Waterloo. But Mr. Siim is convinced that the university, along with WLU and Conestoga College, lie at the heart of why people build companies here. He is a serial entrepreneur who has been in on the start of three companies, and will be involved in more. The educational institutions are like anchor tenants in a shopping mall of creativity, he says — they are magnets for new ideas and new ventures.

Read the article here.

DemoCamp 5 is on tomorrow. If you are into technology innovation, live nearby, and have a pulse, you should come.

DemoCamp 4 ignited a fair bit of buzz about how to grow the tech community in the Toronto area. David Crow chronicled some of that and issued a call for comment here. Many other people replied back to my DemoCamp 4 trip report. And other folks like Mark Kuznicki, Thomas Purves and Rob Hyndman have been adding their thoughts to the mix too. Good stuff.

Come out tomorrow night and join the discussion.

I sat in on a Toronto Venture Group breakfast meeting yesterday morning. Quite an interesting event. The attendees are a mix of VCs, angel investors, entrepreneurs looking for funding, and professionals offering related services like consulting.

I shared a table with John Philip Green of Savvica, whom I seem to keep bumping into all over the place. He nicely summarizes the main presentation by Charles Chi of Greylock Capital here.

One interesting organizational tidbit: after a buffet-style breakfast, the event kicks into higher gear with a networking round. Anyone who wants to can stand up for 60 seconds, deliver a short elevator pitch on their company, and state what sort of help or connections they are seeking. It was basically the monologue equivalent of speed-dating. (Or, as Charles Chi lightly quipped, akin to the introductory segment of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.) It worked well; very lightweight and informative. Worth keeping in mind for future mixers.

Or, “Gladwell, Godin, Quantum Physics, and Entrepreneurship”.

I love it when seemingly unrelated things coincide in serendipitous ways. Four events over the last two weeks have collided in a particularly delightful fashion.

Thing 1: Malcolm Gladwell (of “Tipping Point” fame) spoke at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management today to a full house of MBA students, alumni, faculty, and some free-riding tailgaters like me. Gladwell is a U of T grad and a friend of Rotman’s dean, so he was on home ground. (By the way, he blogs occasionally; see here.)

Gladwell delivered a thought-provoking piece on creativity, dwelling in particular on the dichotomy between early-bloomer creatives like Picasso who peak near the beginning of their careers with a big bang followed by a years-long trail of quiet thunder, and late-bloomer creatives like Cezanne who continually refine a single theme, working up gradually over decades to finally reach a point of mass critical acclaim. Gladwell postulates that the western business world is increasingly focused on funding only those who show visible potential to be early bloomers, to the detriment and marginalization of late-blooming creative efforts.

He cited HBO’s Six Feet Under as an example of a show that took some years to catch on, and would never have been funded on mainstream TV, but is now extremely popular and profitable with a set of diehard fans. In contrast, mainstream media effectively forces artists down the early bloomer path, typically by funding them to do warmed-up rehashes of recipes that are known to work. Why? The risks of investing this way are visibly lower: the design methods are more formulaic and easier to explain, the market reactions are easier to predict, and the profits arrive (or fail to arrive) much faster. The downside is that we the customers get fed a stream of pablum.

Thing 2: Quantum Physics. Last week I got to spend time with Michele Mosca, an old Waterloo classmate who is now Deputy Director at the Institute for Quantum Computing and a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Mike graciously made time to tour me around Perimeter and talk about their ambitious plan to build a world-caliber organization for pushing forward the bounds of physics. Both Perimeter and ICQ invest in the kind of research that, in many cases, may take 15 years or more before it manifests itself in applications. Perimeter’s initial funding came largely from the personal donations of Mike Lazaridis and fellow RIM executives Doug Fregin and Jim Balsillie ($100M, $10M and $10M, respectively). Talk about investing and innovating for the long term. It was an incredibly impressive experience.

Thing 3: Seth Godin. I finally got around to watching Seth Godin’s recent presentation to Google. In it he talks about moving from “interruption marketing” (ads pushed at users regardless of their contextual wants and needs) to “permission-driven” marketing. He advocates the latter approach, in which customers actually want to hear marketing messages, provided they are personal, contextually relevant, and offered in response to an invitation. It’s a great talk, and if you care at all about how to market a concept, you should watch it.

Godin commended Google for growing their usage organically, by first building a service that was remarkably different and then encouraging word-of-mouth recommendations, rather than by plastering ads everywhere. It’s an approach that takes patience. When it works, it ultimately yields many customers who are insanely loyal evangelists for your product. He also warned Google that they need to move to the next step, and start asking customers for their permission to follow through with personalized, relevant marketing messages about their new offerings.

Thing 4: Entrepreneurship. The March ‘06 Toronto DemoCamp event stimulated some interesting conversation about innovation and entrepreneurship in this region. One of the topics is whether it’s worth spending time reviewing demo ideas that come without business plans attached. I argue it is worthwhile: the demoers may eventually want help turning their ideas into businesses, and everyone else in the room is meanwhile benefiting by listening, learning, and building synergy between the demos and ideas of their own. It’s OK if the payoff isn’t immediate.

Conclusions: In a way, a tech community investing time and energy in nurturing its aspiring entrepreneurs is much the same as a formal organization investing time and money in nurturing and marketing long-term creative work. Both entities have important choices to make about how much attention to invest (attention ~= time ~= money), how risky to be with their investments, and how long to wait for commercial success. Striking the right balance is crucial. And good things - some of which may take a long, long time to develop - are worth waiting for.