Author: David Quail

US Immigration is completely broken for startups

A lot of talk has been made recently about the shortcomings of US immigration policy and how it’s hurting the US’s competitive edge in the global economy.  A good friend of mine who is a Canadian, and acting president of an LA based company valued at > $100M just had his visa revoked and isn’t allowed entry to the US.  That was enough to get me to write this post informing people of my personal experience with starting and working for companies in the US as a foreigner which I believe demonstrates some of the problems.  For more of a history on the shortcomings read about it the Startup Visa act here.

3 Canadians get funded

In 2007 after myself and 2 Canadian friends spent about 6 months bootstrapping Attassa from Edmonton Canada, we raised almost $1M from Silicon Valley based Tandem Entrepreneurs – who at the time had a slightly different investment model than they do now.  We were building software to solve a lot of the pain in document and email collaboration and were tightly integrated with the Microsoft technology stack – Windows, Outlook, and Office applications.  Once we closed funding we decided it was best for the company to nestle up closely to Microsoft in Seattle.  Seattle obviously has a deep talent pool of Windows engineers, and we viewed Microsoft as a potential partner or acquirer.

2 Canadians get TN Visas

Myself and Rod both arrived in Seattle with our investment money, and our freshly printed TN visas and set up shop next to Dwayne.  We spent about a year working on product.  We hired a full time engineer, and paid for several part time consultants, and a book keeper.

2 Canadians get TN Visas revoked

During our time in Seattle, I traveled back to Edmonton about once a month to visit family.  I did this for about a year without issue.  That all changed one day in October.  Rod had been travelling back to Canada earlier that month and was denied entry on his trip back to the US.  His Visa was revoked.  I was actually in Canada when his visa was revoked, and naturally, this flagged our company, and when I returned to Edmonton International to fly to Seattle a few days later, my visa was also revoked.  I was given 2 days to get in and out of Seattle to deal with my apartment and belongings.  If I wasn’t back in Canada after 2 days, I’m not sure I’d ever be allowed back.  Ultimately, they believed that the job I was performing went above and beyond what was allowed for my visa type.  I won’t go into too many details about what went down at the airport but at the risk of sounding overly dramatic, I will say that those 3 hours of interrogations were quite possibly the most brutal 3 hours I’ve ever experienced in my life.  If you’re interested, read Zack Homoth’s story.  He was a Y-combinator kid that got rejected at the border.  It pretty much describes the nightmare I experienced.  At this point though, it was as if USCIS told us they didn’t want us or our ~1M investment.

One Canadian gets an H1B, the other … no dice

We put our hellish experience at the border aside and both applied for H1B’s.  We still wanted to do business in the US.  Our applications were pretty near identical, at least the company portion of the application.  Rods was approved, mine was not, for reasons I still don’t quite understand.  They claimed we were missing evidence (tax info, payroll info) that we clearly had sent them.  The cost to re-apply was too high so I ended up staying in Canada and working remote.

During this time period I travelled to the US to play Ultimate frisbee (of all things), and to visit friends on weekends.  Each time crossing the border, I typically spend 45 minutes in secondary screening answering questions about the intentions of my trip.  Believe it or not, I once was turned away at the border when trying to drive down to Seattle from Vancouver.  The reason?  I was carrying too much laundry in my Rav4.  Yup … I’d forgotten to drop my dirty laundry off at home before heading down to Seattle, and they thought it was a red flag that I was entering for the weekend, but had 2 weeks worth of cloths.  Fair enough I guess …

We get acquired by a US company

In December of 2010, Attassa was acquired by Yousendit, a successful exit for us and our investors.  By this point though, Rod and I are both back in Canada, largely due to the immigration nightmares that we’ve faced.  A bunch of cash that could have stayed in the US basically left the country that day.

But … I decided to move to the bay area after the acquisition, while Rod stayed in Canada

I decided to move down to the US after the acquisition.  I worked at Yousendit for a year and as of last week gave notice that I’m leaving in April.  I’m starting another venture but ….

I’ve got to do it from Canada

Despite preferring to start from the Bay Area, and having the financial means to bootstrap for some time, Immigration policy doesn’t allow for that.  All options require significant investment, either from yourself or institutional investors.  While those may be viable options, I can’t help but believe that raising money to facilitate immigration is a ridiculous idea.  Instead I’ll raise money if and when it facilitates the acceleration of an idea with traction.  At this point I simply don’t want to experiment and learn on someone else’s dime.  So instead, I’m going to return to Canada to start the next company.  I love the Bay Area, I have a truly amazing support network there, so I will be back, but it’s going to require time, investment, and a stupid amount of paperwork.

Concluding

Over the last 3 years, the US has made it damn hard for me to spend 1) investment $ 2) acquisition earnings and 3) seed money in starting.  Most other people probably wouldn’t have gone through what I have and moved down there post acquisition, and most probably wouldn’t think about starting something down there again.

I think a lot of people read about the startup visa and have a theoretical sense that it sounds worthwhile, but they don’t see first hand what effect it’s having.  I’m sure most of you have never heard of Attassa but we’re just one of many lesser known foreign companies that tried desperately to get Uncle Sam to allow us to spend our capital in the US.  It really shouldn’t be that hard …

Moving on from Yousendit

It was just over a year ago that Rod, Dwayne and I joined Yousendit after they acquired our startup Attassa.  After much thought, I’ve decided it’s time to move on.  There’s a lot of amazing people at Yousendit who’ve made me feel completely at home.  For that, I leave with nothing but respect and thanks to the people I’ve worked with.  In addition to leaving some truly great people, the hardest part is leaving a green card process.  The thought of trading permanent residency for the world of H1B’s, B1’s, E-2’s and ultimately the whims of USCIS is a little sad.  The US needs to take a serious look at immigration policy.  I dream that in 10 years, people look back at this time and view it as archaic and asinine.

Paul Graham would say that true “hacking” is not science, it’s not math, but rather, it’s art.  It’s creating things.  A hackers tools are a compiler and an IDE rather than a canvas and a paint brush.  Call it what you will (I like the artist analogy since it makes me look way cooler, hipper, and trendier than I really am), but whatever it is, I love it. I also believe that if you define hacking as “seeing a vision and implementing it”, it becomes something very hard to experience outside of starting up.

In larger organizations, it’s necessary to avoid disaster.  Only a very small number of programmers can actually envision and then design software;  and it’s super hard to find these people.  So … organizations gravitate towards designing by group thought, mostly lead by PM.  In this world, developers implement the design and vision.  And this works since for larger organizations to win, they just need to suck less than other big companies.  You could argue that strategically this is the way it should be.  You’d be foolish to pin the corporate strategy on the design and vision of a few hackers.  But for startups, the corporate strategy IS the design of a few hackers.  That’s your only choice.  Companies like Google used to get away with a hybrid by encouraging hack days, 20% time, and innovating from within.  Their revenue / employee afforded the luxury to innovate from within while still producing the bottom line.  That’s rare.

Most hackers can’t “hack” for a living; much like musicians can’t play music for a living; they mostly hold down day jobs at bigCo to afford their true passion to build what they want on evenings and weekends.  But I’m in the fortunate position to step back and hack full time again.  For all I know, I may be implementing someones vision in 4 months, and I’d be ok with that.  It annoys me to no end hearing engineers complain about working for bigCo and their lack of ability to engage their creative minds.  What a first world problem.  But for the time being I can’t wait to get started …

Tandem entrepreneurs

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.

For mobile, it’s all native – appcelerator vs phonegap vs native

I finally took enough time to form a stronger opinion in the html5 vs. native, vs Appcelerator, vs phone gap debate and for me, I’m all in on native.  Here’s a bit of a breakdown on the different choices.

Appcelerator

  • Pros: It’s main selling point is that it allows web developers to quickly create cross platform apps using html, javascript and css.  Appcelerator will actually compile down to native code which in theory runs as fast as native code written in objective C
  • Cons: Compiling to multiple platforms is a bit of a double edged sword.  It feels like they’re constantly having to make design decisions that support the lowest common denominator between the multitude of mobile platforms.  Furthermore, inherent in this model is a bit of follow mentality.  Any time a mobile platform introduces changes, they have to catch up to provide support.  I’ve heard anecdotes about developers experiencing performance hits when using appcelerator … but I actually think I’d call BS on that.  It’s fast.

Phone Gap

  • Pros: Phone gap allows web developers to write html, css, and javascript that runs within a mobile app.  So your web devs can write code quickly across multiple platforms.
  • Cons: IMO this is a cheap solution.  Unlike appcelerator, the javascript isn’t compiled into native code.  It’s simply embedded into a UIWebView (or other webkit control for other platforms).  This has important implications that you have to understand:
  1. UIWebView is a pig and has major performance issues.  Your app is NEVER gonna be as performant as a native app.
  2. You don’t have direct access to native controls like a UINavigationController or UIPopoverController, and native resources like the photo assets on the phone.  Instead, they’ve created some admittingly pretty awesome hooks which bridge the “gap” between native controls and javascript.  But these are a bit clunky from my experience.  It’s difficult to persist application state between these controls.  They’re also playing the same game as appcelerator is here – trying to support several cross platform controls.  They’re always playing catch up, and making lowest common denominator compromises.
HTML5
I’ve heard people argue for an HTML5 version of an app instead of native, but truthfully, I’m not sure these people really know what they’re talking about.  I guess they’re suggesting an html5 website that users browse to in their phones web browser.  But that’s got incredibly obvious shortcomings – Among others, no access to native controls or assets (obviously); no ability to receive push notifications; a very different look and feel; and having zero presence that persists on the users device.
Developing native applications across platforms is more expensive, no doubt.  But without native, far too many UI and UX compromises are made in a market that’s so dominated by solutions that really nail UI and UX.

 

 

Series A crunch – Who’s losing?

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

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

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

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.

Why an app for the 2012 World Hockey Championships?

I think there’s a number of opportunities that exist in the digital sports entertainment market; all of which I’m excited to experiment with.  More about some of those ideas here.  It wasn’t too long into thinking about these opportunities that it occurred to us that the 2012 World Junior Hockey Championships would be a fantastic event to learn as much as possible about these ideas.  Here’s a few of the reasons.

  • Just enough customer acquisition – The event was held in Edmonton so we could leverage a lot of unfair advantages in getting just enough press to help acquire initial users – Good friends within local media (Edmonton Journal, Oilersnation), the Edmonton Oilers team, management, and radio personalities.  I was very confident in this customer acquisition hypothesis.
  • Customer engagement – The event is held during the holidays, where people have nothing better to do than eat, relax, watch hockey, and consume content on their new iPads.
  • Canada’s a bit off the grid – Ideas are a dime a dozen, true.  But the goal for this experiment is NOT to see if we can take over the world.  We want just enough sport fan users to learn what really drives them.  What they care about.  What engages them.  How and when do they interact with a tablet device?  Being in Canada allows us to be loud in Canada, but not make too much noise elsewhere..
  • The emotion we’re trying to capture –This tournament engages an emotion unmatched by many other sporting events.  It’s hard to describe unless you’ve followed this tournament from Canada, but the tournament brings out an emotion in fans we’re looking to capture and learn as much about.  You just don’t see that emotion in regular season NHL, MLB, or NFL games.

A couple days into the tournament, we’re at about 1000 sports fans using a highly instrumented app.  A good start to getting some really solid data to help enable us make decisions moving forward.

Lean interview about Row0 iPad app

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 ….