Archive for category Uncategorized
Tandem entrepreneurs
Posted by dquail in Uncategorized on February 7, 2012
I was a cofounder of Attassa – a software startup started in 2007 which was acquired in 2010 by Yousendit. Along the way, we worked with Tandem entrepreneurs - our original venture partners. I recently spoke about our experience with Tandem – a summary of my discussion, as well as other entrepreneurs working with Tandem can be seen below.
I’d be happy to share my experience with any prospective Tandem company. Drop me a line at @dquail. In short though, working with Tandem was extremely advantageous for our company. They provided tremendous sweat equity, gave a very high level of commitment and dedication, and ultimately introduced us to our eventual acquirer. Their model has changed slightly since 2007 – but their basic model of common stock for sweat equity was still the same.
Series A crunch – Who’s losing?
Posted by dquail in Uncategorized on January 22, 2012
If you’ve been following the Series A crunch chatter, you probably saw the McClure interview today on Techcrunch. My thoughts tend to line up pretty close to Dave on this one. At a high level I really don’t understand who loses with the given financing environment?
Traditional VC’s?
Their deal flow is more vetted now than ever. There’s a plethora of early stage startups that have gone through accelerators already. They’ve got serious data because of it to enable VC’s to make smarter decisions. I can’t see how any of this is a bad thing for VC’s.
Entrepreneurs?
More entrepreneurs are being funded now than ever. Sure … some hit a wall in a year or 2 … after gaining incredibly valuable experience starting their own thing. They’ll be worth more on the market when they started up because of it … and last I looked, the tech scene was still paying ridiculous amounts of money for this type of talent. There’s also plenty of other startups which would make easy landing spots for people who’ve startups have failed. Sure, more entrepreneurs hearts are gonna be broken, but come on … at least now they’ve had a shot.
which brings me to …
Other startups
I think if anyone’s losing out it might be other startups. Simply because the talents being spread out a little bit more thin. But talents out there. You might have to get scrappy and look beyond the valley. But it’s out there.
I’d love to here a great argument of who’s losing out. Seems like a win win win to me ….
Simplified NSUserDefaults
Posted by dquail in objective c, programming, Uncategorized on January 15, 2012
I use NSUserDefaults all the time for storing simple users settings and application state. But there’s a whole lotta string literals and a bunch of repeating yourself that takes place. That sucks ….
So I like to create a category on NSUserDefaults so I can treat it like a concrete class, whose API is enforced by the compiler and autocompleted by Xcode. Here’s an example of how I use it to track a users email address within my app. Note the rcast_ prefix. Always a good idea to prefix your categories to prevent future name collisions.
//NSUserDefaults_RCastr.h
@interface NSUserDefaults (RCastr)
@property (assign, getter=rcast_userEmail,
setter=rcast_setUserEmail:) NSString *rcast_userEmail;
//NSUserDefaults_RCastr.m
#import "NSUserDefaults+RCastr.h"
NSString *const rcastDefaultsKeyUserEmail = @"rcast_userEmail";
@implementation NSUserDefaults (RCastr)
#pragma mark -
#pragma mark Username
- (NSString *)rcast_userEmail {
return [self stringForKey:rcastDefaultsKeyUserEmail];
}
- (void)rcast_setUserEmail:(NSString *)userEmail {
[self setObject:userEmail forKey:rcastDefaultsKeyUserEmail];
[self synchronize];
}
@end
That allows me to use user defaults like the following:
//Set the email address
NSUserDefaults *defaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];
defaults.rcast_userEmail = @"user@domain.com";
//Get the email address
NSUserDefaults *defaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];
if (defaults.rcast_userEmail){
[FlurryAnalytics setUserID:defaults.rcast_userEmail];
}
Dead easy change, but much cleaner and far less error prone.
Out of the bubble
Posted by dquail in Uncategorized on January 12, 2012
It seems that recently my social interactions (digitally and in the flesh and blood) are mostly with tech / startup type folk. In this circle people like Eric Ries are treated iconically, and IMO, for good reason. His work with the Leanstartup is amazing.
You sometimes forget how small this little “startup” culture bubble is though. I was reminded about this recently when perusing twitter:
Eric Ries, with all his accomplishments, and energy he invests in his online presence, has 4/5th the followers as Jordan Eberle and his 48 tweets. This reminds me both that our little startup clique is actually pretty small … and also that people are pretty nutty about sports and getting into the lives of their favorite players. Imagine how many people would “follow” Jordan Eberle if he invested 1/10th the energy into his online brand as Eric Reis does.
Hey mom! I’m on CTV National News with Row0
Posted by dquail in Uncategorized on January 2, 2012
Given they were just as excited about a national news story broadcast from their basement as I was, I owe it to my mom and dad to post the CTV interview … and to clarify that indeed the interview took place from their basement in Gull Lake Saskatchewan. Very Waynes World – esque … And yup, the Oilers logo is original. We painted that up some 20 years ago 
My interview with CTV Re: Row0 iPad app for World Junior Hockey Championships.
Lean interview about Row0 iPad app
Posted by dquail in Uncategorized on December 31, 2011
After a crazy week with Row0 where I was interviewed and featured in the Edmonton Journal and CTV National News and Sean was featured on Global TV, I took a moment to document some of the interview questions that weren’t shown in any of our coverage about the app.
What’s Row0?
Row0 is an iPad and iPhone app built for the World Junior Hockey Championships. It allowed hard core sports fans an opportunity to consume as much information about the event as humanly possible. It also allowed them to interact with other fans who care about the event as much as they do. It was available in the app store for 4 days before we removed it after getting some heat about content rights of articles and photos we were embedding.
What’s the first thing people ask you about Row0?
So many of the people I’ve chatted with, especially since the press releases about the app, ask me “Where did you come up with the idea?” I’ll often spew off some canned answer talking about my love for sports merging with my fascination with computers, but the truth of the matter is … not only do I not really remember how “the idea” actually came together, but the app which we released is just a minimum product that tests a few hypothesis about a greater vision. Answering “where did you come up with this idea” seems to imply that this is a good idea … when I really don’t believe this version of the app is good enough to be a bug business.
Well, what do you wish people would ask you about Row0?
The real question I wish I could answer is “Why did you decide to release *this* app first?”
Okay, you said that you don’t think that Row0 today is a big business, what IS the big opportunity that you’re going after here that Row0 sheds a bit of light onto?
I don’t know … but that’s the fun in all of this. Experimenting and collecting data as fast as possible to iterate towards the big idea instead of spending a tonne of capital with a “build it and they will come” attitude.
There are a few opportunities that I think could be pretty huge in this space. Without going into too much detail (I could probably write several pages on each opportunity), here’s a list of some of these really high level opportunities that Row0 helps us learn more about.
1. Elite athlete identity – How can we go way above and beyond what twitter and Facebook are doing to allow an athlete to create a brand for themselves, and to interact with their fans. A portal for blogs, tweets, photos, and interactivity with fans.
2. Digital program guide for sports teams enabling fans to interact with their favorite teams before, during and after a game or season.
3. Second screen service allowing fans to interact with other fans and content before, during and after an event.
OK, all those sound great even though they’re incredibly vague, but why build Row0? It doesn’t seem to be any of those?
You’re right, I believe that all 3 of these opportunities could be real businesses, but like any new software venture, each is riddled with leaps of faith and untested assumptions. With Row0, we took a page out of the lean startup handbook and put metrics in place to learn the following:
- How often will people return to read about a recurring sporting event they care about?
- What do they care about reading? Blogs? Player tweets? Fan tweets? Looking at event photos?
- While consuming sports content, how often would people interact with a game about the event?
- How often will people interact with each other during a sporting event?
- When will they consume content? Before, during or after an event?
- How do you best reach these fans? Social media, newspaper, news, feet on the ground marketing? Radio ads?
- Who owns the content? do bloggers care? Do photographers care?
Leveraging a number of unfair advantages (relationships with local journalists, sports bloggers, Radio personalities, the Edmonton Oilers), we felt very strongly that we could attract a good user base for our app. With that user base we could answer a lot of the above questions and then iterate closer towards a bigger vision.
Ah, very wise young lean startup grasshopper. Can you tell us more about the results of these tests?
We gathered a tonne of data. In 4 days we had over 1000 active users and every interaction within the app was instrumented. But lets save the details for a follow up interview / blog post ….
Tweetgab startup weekend project
Posted by dquail in software startup, startup weekend, startups, Uncategorized on August 15, 2011
Twitter is an unbelievable tool for getting the sense of what’s going and what’s being said at any given moment. It truly is a tool for measuring “the pulse” of any event.” One of the greatest things about twitter is that it’s completely free form. There’s really no rules – as long as the content crams into 140 characters, it can be said. As a result, the data within twitter has become very chronological. A stream of unrelated tweets, with no real surrounding context.
No where is this felt more than at Conferences where organizers are beginning to use twitter to broadcast on projectors what the audience is saying. This is great in theory, but there’s still no real structure of the data. It’s just a stream of tweets, bound by a hashtag with no real context.
I attended a Startup Weekend in Palo Alto last week and formed a team which tried to solve this problem. Here’s the presentation … Pardon the number of “Um”‘s … I really need to learn to speak better publicly.
Starting up during this bubble
Posted by dquail in Uncategorized on March 27, 2011
Over the past few months I’ve often been heard saying what a wonderful time we’re in to start a company. The convergence of mobile, cloud services and social media has created a boom of opportunities ripe for the picking.
But after being here in the Bay area for just over a month, I’m starting to think this is actually a pretty terrible time to start a company. Mostly cause I’m convinced we’re in a bubble …
1. Tech talent is incredibly hard to find right now.
It’s well documented how hard it is to find technologists right now. Google, Facebook, Apple, Zynga, and others are resorting to pretty extreme measures recruiting talent. It’s hard to compete with those guys when you’re a startup. New York times had a good article about the competition for talent. I’ve gone to about a dozen networking events, and talked to enough startups to see this first hand. EVERYONE is pulling out all the stops to try to find technical help. EVERYONE!
2. Tech talent is incredibly expensive right now
I’ve spoken to several developers and recruiters over the last month. iPhone developer contractors are making $200 / hour, sometimes $250. That’s ridiculous. Permanent full time developers are making upwards of $180/year. That’s insane. As a startup, you’ve gotta promise a lot of upside to overcome those numbers. Chatting with Otavio Good last weekend at Super Happy dev house about recruitment challenges really highlighted this for me. His company Wordlense is a super hot startup right now, and IMO, the sky’s the limit with their potential. Yet recruitment is posing it’s own challenges for them now (albeit they are looking for elite A++ level talent).
3. Now’s a perfect time to SAVE!
You really can make a killing right now in the market. Why not save up some cash, wait for the market to hit the tank (and developer salaries to plummet) … and THEN use your savings to fund your startup. Use this time to hone your skills and build your network.
4. It’s hard to be heard through the noise
Simply put, competition is steep right now. It’s more difficult to be heard by your market.
The biggest challenge with starting up during a bubble like this is finding technical talent that isn’t going to break the bank. The biggest challenge during a downtime is finding funding. I’ll take my chances on the latter thanks ….
An inspiration for 4 days in the valley
Posted by dquail in Uncategorized on March 26, 2011
Earlier this month I launched 4 days in the valley. I’m stoked to be working on this program to help foster entrepreneurship at the University level in Canada. I blogged about one of the inspirations on the 4daysinthevalley blog but I thought I’d share the inspiration here on my blog as well …
About 1 month after graduation from the University of Regina with a Computer Science degree, I attended my first interview. 2 kids about 22 years old wearing Bermuda shorts, flip flops, and ragged looking t-shirts welcomed me at the door (I was wearing dress pants, a shirt and tie). They led me into their board room, where on the middle of the floor sat an old picnic table. We chatted about the job, about how they still didn’t know exactly what product they were building, but that it was going after a general pain. They were using php, but thinking about changing to Java.
I still remember thinking to myself “what am I doing talking with these bozos?” I left the interview thinking about how I couldn’t wait to go talk to Sasktel, or SGI … companies that clearly had their sh#$t together unlike these dudes in their $10 tee shirts. In hindsight, I really wish I’d had someone tell me that taking that job would have been the best career decision I could have ever made.
Things worked out well for me. I took a job at a company called Saflink in Edmonton, ended up by some strange twist of events starting a Attassa with 2 awesome friends, was able to get that company acquired, and had the time of my life doing it and can’t wait to do it again. But it was mostly luck that I was exposed to the startup world. That experience really inspired me to make more students in Canada aware of the possibility of starting a technology company. The valley is a fantastic place … but there’s nothing in the water here that makes people smarter. There’s no reason you can’t make something big in Edmonton, Regina, Toronto, or Gull Lake Saskatchewan! 72 valley hours is a great way to start spreading that message.
Startup weekend – startup lessons learned presentation
Posted by dquail in advice, software start up, startup, startup weekend, Uncategorized on February 19, 2011
During the demo’s at a recent startup weekend event in Edmonton I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to share the experience of starting a technology company and eventually selling it. I also highlighted some lessons learned, things we did right, and things we failed at.
I plan on writing posts that dive a little deeper into the presentation, but for now, here’s the slide deck from the presentation.
