Entrepreneur week 2009 reflection: talent, money, opportunity
They did it again, Communitech pulled off an amazing week in Waterloo focused on entrepreneurship. With some great speakers (Ali Asaria, Jim Estill, Tim Bray, etc) and a great events (Gala, StartupCampWaterloo, Founders and Funders, etc) the week was a rather intense week of networking, learning, and having fun. I had the opportunity to attend most of it and there were a couple themes coming up in conversations…
Talent, money, opportunity
The number one discussion item is where are the people to lead local startups, develop them or develop for them, and ensure they succeed. The stories range from not being able to pull senior developers from their high paying jobs at RIM to statements like “all Canada’s top talent leaves.” It flows directly into money.
If a startup is trying to bootstrap or has just enough revenue to grow but grow slowly it can’t offer the 100K+ salaries that some local companies offer for the most talented and experienced folks in town or those willing to come to this town. That is probably the big advantage startups in the US have over their Canadian counter-parts in that they are normally better funded earlier on and offer a more interesting life style that makes up for less pay.
However, I don’t believe that. Canada’s top talent is here in Waterloo. They are going to school here and making decisions on their future. The opportunity is here to sign them up to entrepreneurship young and develop that talent locally and I think a big piece of doing that is connecting them to their peers on a different level than simply academic.
The missing component: a belief that you can do it yourself
I have a nearly three year old son, I am his parent and his mentor (along with my wife). How do I guide him? Am I required to? He is fiercely independent and at the moment needs me to stay out of the way and simply (or not so much) keep him from hurting himself too badly. That is an entrepreneur to me. Someone who is constantly pushing the rules, the boundaries, and not taking direction literally. They don’t read instructions, they don’t follow the rules, they see all that stuff as guidelines and principles. Every minute of every day they are learning, adapting, and trying a new way to do something.
That all has to be tempered with the ability to know when to turn off that behavior/instinct and simply play the game to achieve their goal. That goal could be their undergraduate degree or that goal could be to ship a product and start generating revenue even though they themselves might not think it is awesome enough.
Mentors as (and) peers are essential to help entrepreneurs learn to harness their curiosity and drive.
It is about community
You can not underestimate the value of community. I absolutely loved the Founders and Funders event but at the same time it was intense speed dating compared to the open and fun atmosphere at StartupCampWaterloo. I found Founders and Funders a much better event because of the other community events where I have had the opportunity to interact with a lot of the same people in a less formal atmosphere—many I consider my peers or mentors.
Locally we now have community events like: StartupDrinks, DevHouseWaterloo, Web Design Meetup, Social Media Meetup, BarCampWaterloo, StartupCampWaterloo, DemoCampGuelph, MoTH (I think), Ignite, and likely others. These events level the playing field and support the idea that there is not a hierarchy with experts or gurus but a peer driven community.
I will say it a thousand times; money, speeches, and mentors do not create a thriving entrepreneurial community. It can compliment a community or they can hinder community growth or worse perpetuate a class system that might be applied to entrepreneurs (classes defined by age, experience, education, background, etc).
Waterloo is lucky. Communitech, the Accelerator Centre, VeloCity, CBET, TechCapital, and many other organizations are here contributing to the growth of the community at a number of different levels for a number of different big players. Momentum is growing… the best is yet to come.
Finding out what is going on in Waterloo
Over the last couple of months Joseph Fung and I have been working on a little project in a localized community site that assist the local tech community find out what the heck is going on around here and who is doing stuff. In the process we developed a site that could do it for a lot of other communities—we think. At the moment we are calling it Agnostic Platform and you find the Waterloo version at waterloo.techstartup.ca where we have a roughed in application and some warts showing.
The idea is to provide an open place that is semi-moderated by community connectors (a the moment Joseph and I are self-declared connectors) that can maintain the garden of awesome local information. Our experience/assumption is that automated attempts at local news, blogs, twitter, calendar, etc information is prone to both spamming and error. You need people in the community to ensure the quality but you also need to be open about who is included and why.
We hope that a site like this will help people (both new and longer term residents) make better connections with some of the amazing folks locally and find out what is of interest, what is going on, and who to contact. To do that it will need more community connectors involved, people contributing links, feeds, events, blogs, etc. The only rule for content streams is that the content creators are local. They live locally, they contribute locally, and it is even better if they participate locally.
It is a bit of a work in progress so please give us feedback and use the site. I am really excited to what we can do with this.
Being an entrepreneur is like being on a varsity team
In our team meeting on Friday we were throwing around some initial feedback we heard on a number of things and the following analogy was discussed:
Deciding to live in VeloCity is like joining a varsity team. You have to commit to being an entrepreneur; balance the demands of academics with developing your skills and learn to place entrepreneurship on the same level as academics.
This makes a lot of sense to me. If you are on a varsity sports teams there are set practice times, expectations on training, and expectations on how you perform in your academics. Sometimes the team needs will conflict with academic or personal needs but all members of the team figure out a way to balance it all.
As a student and an entrepreneur it doesn’t seem to be a whole lot different from being on a team. If you don’t put in the time in practice and developing your skills you aren’t going to perform. So what would the core skills be? At VeloCity I see the opportunity to work on the following three skills:
- networking and communicating your ideas (and/or pitching)
- taking risks and managing risks
- ability to prioritize tasks and doing what it takes to complete them (Waterloo students are exceptionally good at this, generally speaking)
Working on these skills is not something you can do just when you have time. You must to have the passion and the drive to create opportunities and take advantage of the opportunities that are created at VeloCity for you.
No surprise the analogy came from Sean Van Koughnett (the guy who made VeloCity happen) who spent many years committed to varsity Basketball at Waterloo… and from what I hear he was pretty good 
