Who You Calling a Jesse?

The road trip: San Francisco and Austin (sxswi) notes

For a week in March I did my first big road trip in many years and headed to San Francisco on my way to Austin for SXSWi. With only 3 days in SF and 4 days in Austin I was expecting a pretty intense trip, I wasn’t let down. The goal? In SF it was to meet up with VeloCity alumni (there are around 14 of them I know of there) and find out if there is more VeloCity can do for our students. In Austin it was to purely network and take in all that SXSWi circus has to offer. Every type of marketing strategy is being executed at once by hundreds of different companies; from traditional brands trying new things to crazy useless apps trying to get my attention using the more traditional (but not so classy) booth babe strategy.

San Francisco and the valley

Oh my. I forget how sexy the city of San Francisco is for the entrepreneurial minded. Sure people fall out of love once they get to know it (or think they know it) but if you are wanting to bounce ideas around that is the place. You can meet dozens of different people in a day that will give you dozens of new ways to think about a problem. The weather there is like May in Waterloo without the crazy chance of snow storm so you can walk around comfortably dressed and spend a lot of time outside.

I met up with 10 VeloCity alumni (they have lived in VeloCity before) working for different startups or doing their own thing. Some are very well connected already as they are highly skilled and know their worth. Others are taking notes and plotting their own move. It was great to see them and it was even better to hear their perspectives in the context of the environment we were in.

Austin and SXSWi

What a circus. I booked in late January and the best hotel I could get was the Hampton out at the airport. Thankfully a friend offered up a room downtown which made my experience that much better. Getting around is a nightmare if you aren’t located downtown and you will be tempted to bring your laptop around with you. There is no point in doing that, the internet doesn’t work during the day — far too many people.

What you have in Austin is a great event for networking but don’t go for the talks unless you are there for a few specific ones and you can actually find them on time. I am entirely not sure if the marketing works for all the apps pushing hyper-local services but it is hugely entertaining for those of us there to observe and see all the different things that people try to gain attention. The conversations with people are priceless as well, the event attracts so many leading edge folks. If you are a new startup looking for some validation on what you are building that is the place to be. For more established brands or products like GM, they put on a great show. They even let me drive a Corvette.

It was very cool seeing Kik there as well — they have the most useful chat app but the network suck-age hurt them. I was a bit disappointed because there were a ton more people I wanted to meet and chat with but the best ‘twitter friend I had yet to meet in real life’ moment was bumping into Jonathan Snook in the elevator at the Hampton. How unlikely is that?

A short list of knowledge

The key bits of wisdom sticking in my head:

• The Canadian Angel scene is totally messed up (not news to many) — there are some good angel investors but not nearly enough are spending the time to build relationships with entrepreneurs in Canada or willing to take risks. This is really clear to me now.
• Better connections are needed in the valley for students — not to drive them down there, more to demystify the place and provide them with some solid connections. This could be accomplished through their peers or a group like the C100.
• You never have to eat alone in San Francisco.
• Austin is an awesome city that is totally overwhelmed by SXSW and you will love it.
• If you have any dream to be a community manager or be in marketing you have to participate in the madness at least once but do not plan anything there unless you have been there already.
• Waterloo students are everywhere. Randomly ran into Holden of CS Club fame playing foursquare at the foursquare location, talked with a returning VeloCity resident who is currently working for Foursquare as well.
• VeloCity/Waterloo needs to do more relatively simple things to help our students — even use SXSW as a way to find new and exciting employers for our students on co-op. We can’t stay in Waterloo waiting for people to come to us.

As I plan to sit down over the next few months and pull together a grand strategy for the next little while at VeloCity I am full of crazy ideas. This is good!

Startup thinking featuring the 7cubedproject

Tomorrow is the University of Waterloo IT conference, WatItis. I had planned on doing a talk on Startup thinking and how it relates to higher education using examples out of VeloCity but I had a conflict so decided to feature the best example of that thinking in the residence currently, the 7cubedproject. Why them? I think they are a perfect example of what I was going to talk about — build stuff quickly, get people to use it, move on to something else, be sure to be as open as you can with the process from end to end. That way people know what you are working on and why but also both yourself and those paying attention will learn from your experience.

How that could work in an institutional setting? That depends but to know you can build something and get it out their in a day should certainly work to change the current thinking/process that leaves things to committees that can take years to get something out the door.

On the final day of the 7cubedproject they found themselves on the front page of the local newspaper as well as giving a demo of their stuff to the Provincial Minister of Research and Innovation, Glen Murray. If you are curious as to why he thought he should sneak away from his announcement function at the Tannery in the Desire2Learn space to come talk to a bunch of University of Waterloo students come to the presentation tomorrow.

It will be in RCH 309 at 2:30pm, December 7.

The 7cubed project at the Hub

During this week in November a team of seven University of Waterloo students (six live in VeloCity) are hacking away at building seven applications in seven days. They call themselves the 7cubedproject. To me, this is the most exciting thing to happen at the University of Waterloo since VeloCity was announced… why? Because seven students got together and planned out everything themselves. No company approached them, no one set their agenda, this is just pure passion for building stuff and on top of that they are even skipping classes for a week.

It isn’t that U of Waterloo students have done awesome things on the side that make this special in my mind, it is that they have built a bit of a public relations machine around their coding and thought to do that. They have reached out to companies like Facebook and Google for support, built a blog, video blog, live stream, IRC channel, tweeting, etc. They are conscious of the fact that people might find what they are doing to be interesting enough to watch with their market being schools in the US where they have connections (friends).

Is it a marvel to say uni students know how to use social media? Nope. Countless *experts* have raved about that for 10 years or more. What is remarkable is how well these folks work together and special to see Waterloo students broadcast this off campus experience to the world while beaming a little University of Waterloo pride in the process. For a school in Canada and particularly a school like Waterloo this is special as it isn’t students rallying against a logo or something else, its students building stuff and having fun that is pulling connections together.

It certainly inspires me to work away at more things and keep pushing VeloCity to do even more to build community.

The “Dormcubator” and the entrepreneur by-products of higher education

Having had a great opportunity over the last year and a half to work at VeloCity I am convinced that the “Dormcubator” (The Globe and Mail made it up, not me, but have you Google’d it?) model in higher education is a hugely important effort as part of an overall student success strategy in higher education. This, in my opinion, is because it leverages a by-product of higher education and therefore is actually easy (with regards to the relative cost of new investment) to make relatively successful but it also essential to consciously enhance the experience for those students that enter University for other reasons than academic development.

The business take of by-products is pretty well explained in this Think Vitamin article, here is my take in the context of what I am doing at VeloCity in Higher Education.

Why are entrepreneurs a ‘by-product’ of Higher Education?

Higher Education is tooled to create more academics, not employees (and yes, the government talks about direct influence on job growth and training but the economic impact of higher education is itself arguably by-product). The process of undergraduate to graduate student to post-doc to finally a prof (with a few steps in-between) is a long held process to find the best of the best academics. It attracts the some of the smartest people in society to push themselves and give it a try. Pretty close to all of those that try don’t go all they way to a PhD but that doesn’t mean they aren’t hugely intelligent and capable people, they just aren’t academics.

This talent that ‘falls off’ after their undergraduate or even graduate experience is what fuels the job market with highly skilled and knowledgeable work force. Those that go on to do research fuel development of new technologies, develop greater understanding of how technology or others influence us and our world, and educate the next generation of talent. Those that don’t go on to become academics and do research and/or teach are a by-product because the primary product that higher education focuses on is the academic or researcher.

At the University of Waterloo it is a bit different. The University recognized early on that Engineers aren’t going into Engineering to be PhD’s — they go to be Engineers. Consciously or not, the University was focused on creating professionals as well as academics and researchers which crosses all Faculties. Developing the worlds largest co-operative education program made perfect sense. The University’s second core product was born, a highly skilled and educated professional worker. The University of Waterloo produces amazing Engineers, Actuaries, Optometrists, Accountants, Pharmacists, etc. All roles that could get PhD’s but it isn’t the primary focus of the program.

Enter the Entrepreneur as a professional product of higher ed

The Entrepreneur is a different professional and much harder one for a University to create a program for. An Entrepreneur tends to not fit in any one program, likely aren’t attracted to or perform well in the lecture style environment, and they come from just about anywhere without a set academic career goal. They likely go to University because it is an interesting and a challenge, not because they want to conform to a system. Waterloo has the coders that are entrepreneurial but we also have the business or medical or physics or math or recreation and leisure entrepreneurs. Even the Co-op program isn’t ideal as it is focused on getting  the student a job and a great experience as an employee. However, my theory is that the Co-op program along with new leading edge academic programs attract some of the most talented and entrepreneurial students in Canada.

Campus culture in Canada and Waterloo is weak

Where the University of Waterloo has fallen short overall is on building a campus culture and experience. The challenge of the co-op grind every 4-8 months (month 1 is apply to jobs, month 2 is interviews and midterms, month 3 is midterms, assignments, and maybe interviews, month 4 is exams, repeat), the constant moving, the lack of real community connection and culture in the City of Waterloo, along with a bunch of other things means the positive experience and culture is difficult to create. A lot is changing though.

Enter the frat house for entrepreneurs that make stuff

Certainly by no means an Animal House, VeloCity is a fraternity of entrepreneurs that share a common goal in life but come from all sorts of different programs and/or streams on campus. The living environment allows Waterloo students to establish solid friendships with future co-founders, expand their network, and find some of the best co-op jobs at startups that are out there. This has been called a “dormcubator” as it mixes a dormitory setting with an incubator like program.

The advantages to students are numerous but I think there are a few core things:

• Broader base to build relationships with fellow students: connections across educational streams means students meet people they likely would have never met, Computer Science and Software Engineering students rarely go to class together and then we through a Business student in there.
• A common experience: the experience in the environment gives those that live there a common but exclusive connection even if they weren’t living there at the same time. These connections are stronger than simply the ‘you went to Waterloo?’ connections — which are also fairly strong given the grind all of Waterloo Alumni have experienced.
• Leveraging connections the University has already: Startups based in Silicon Valley, Montreal, Toronto, Boston, etc have a self selecting group of entrepreneurs to aim for at the start of every term they are looking to hire. This gives the students easier access to learn from other startups and still keep their debt loads down.

The residence, in my mind, is one part of an important shift to improve the student experience outside of the academic streams recognizing that students go to university not only for the lectures and assignments. This is something that is easier for Waterloo to do given the Co-op program is something it is already deeply committed to and it certainly is not an academic process. I would challenge other schools to look at similar ideas.

The Ryerson DMZ is another take on this model in Canada that is really exciting, lets see some more.

There is a likely a PhD in waiting on this topic so yes I oversimplified this but it is a blog post after all

The VeloCity workspace

Yesterday on the VeloCity blog I announced the VeloCity workspace at the Communitech Hub. It is, to me, a piece that has missing at VeloCity as we have tried to do an awful lot in what is a residential building but what you can’t do is work as part of the startup community locally. The University of Waterloo campus is just too isolated with the way parking is and its size to try and have a space that is open to the community for various events and collaboration. When you add the cost of living in residence and housing rules that require you to be a current full time student (all understandable and reasonable) there was a clear need to have a ‘next step’ space for students that have other living arrangements and recent grads of the University.

Currently there is no better place to be than in the new Communitech Hub in Kitchener. With bigger companies like Desire2Learn (founded by a uwaterloo grad) and Google as well as smaller companies like DossierView in Tannery space along with the partner organizations within the Hub itself, it is a good opportunity to be in the middle of the best that the Waterloo Region has to offer. Plus I get to work with the Accelerator Centre and Communitech, something I love doing as they are both organizations that have climbed a big learning curve and are now really influencing the services offered to companies across Canada.

This is a fluid experiment and I am assuming certain details of how we run the space will change but it is really exciting to try. What I do know is that a similar space at Ryerson (the Digital Media Zone) is a success with a load of startups working away in a gorgeous space in downtown Toronto. VeloCity and the DMZ are working closely together to develop this new model for an incubator type service inside higher education which is also something I am excited about. My hope is that we can get more Universities and Colleges working with us but time will tell.

What I see as our big challenges going into this are:

• Cost of the space and covering the costs of the services — current guestimates place this kind of service for very early stage startups at around $1000 a month per startup. Our costs aren’t that but I will need to keep an eye on it. Certainly we do not have anywhere close to the same staffing level as Ryerson and I am not sure we need to but we do need more help to keep things moving. That will increase our cost.
• What does success look like? With the residence I am still not sure what success is. I know it isn’t having a startup launch out of the residence into the real world and it is more important to build a strong bond between future co-founders but I will need to work on that. With the workspace it could very well be measured by the number of startups that find some revenue.
• What are we missing? I try not to let this drive me nuts but I am constantly trying to find the gaps in what we are doing and ensure we stay focused on what are core mission is. That means saying no sometimes but a lot of the time the ‘no’ is because we just don’t have the staff to work with certain groups. Need to tackle point one above.

In a few months I will find new challenges and see if what I think are important problems really are. This is pretty exciting! Any questions, just ask. I aim to be as open as I possibly can about this whole thing