Will Lam.net

Hey! Thanks for the follow :)

Thu, 10 May 2012 13:00:25 -0400

Nooo problemo :)

Hi Will, I would love to understand the VC scene in Toronto for early stage startups? Thanks! Dave

Thu, 10 May 2012 13:00:17 -0400

Hi Dave,

What about it specifically? Take a look at these answers I wrote on Quora before we get more specific.

http://www.quora.com/Who-are-the-most-important-respected-players-in-the-Toronto-tech-startup-scene

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-find-angel-investors-in-Toronto

- Will

Blake Masters: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 4 Notes Essay

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 22:45:52 -0400

Blake Masters: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 4 Notes Essay:

blakemasters:

Here are my class notes, typed in essay form, from Class 4 of CS183: Startup. Errors, omissions, and/or poor phrasing are my own. Credit for good substance and wording is Peter’s entirely.

CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—April 11—The Last Mover Advantage

I. Escaping Competition

The…

Create Content: The Psychology of Tackling Hard Problems

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:41:24 -0400

Create Content: The Psychology of Tackling Hard Problems:

dmvaldman:

The thing about hard problems is that there are many difficulties and few solutions. Sounds obvious, but what’s often overlooked is the psychological component to this asymmetry. There’s a simple reason why tackling a hard problem can lead to depressive symptoms: you’re necessarily wrong 99% of…

yongfook: Design is Horseshit!

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:03:56 -0500

yongfook: Design is Horseshit!:

yongfook:

In direct response to: http://designerfund.com/infographic

I’ve created products / services in the past that have garnered praise for their design. I love good design and I am good at design. But I’ve never called myself a designer.

Here’s my pitch. This talk of designers as the new…

The consequences of being a Non-Technical Co-Founder (or how I failed so hard on my first startup)

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 16:57:00 -0400

Recently, I’ve seen a deluge of posts on HackerNews that detailed candid accounts entrepreneurial pursuits that didn’t end the way they originally intended. I’ve read posts that detail it takes several at-bats before you connect or 3 years to get traction. I only lasted a little over a year. Well, it’s my turn to add to that list.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably thinking of starting a new company or had your “entrepreneur cherry popped” and in the thick of running your startup - which are both awesome exciting positions to be in.

The point of this post is not to deter you from attempting to build an awesome company, change the world or making oodles of money from the process, rather it’s to inform of the consequences I’ve realized only after the fact I had to throw in the towel for my startup Date Ideas.

While running Date Ideas I learned the hard way that your greatest enemies are delusion, ego, your relationships and your runway as well as having a rock solid team.

Delusion

For a while, I was delusional. I mean, a small amount of delusion is okay. As an entrepreneur, you’re going knowing the odds are already stacked against you. Despite that, you’re creating something out of nothing, turning vision into reality and seeing an opportunity and capitalizing on it.

The problems begin when you don’t hit milestones. When things start to slide and excuses stop popping up over and over again. The feeling of dread and embarrassment overtakes you when someone asks you “when are you going to launch?” and you’re left sidestepping and making up some lame excuse to cover up you weren’t able to ship.

Have a high standard for yourself and your team because time is already against you as you burn through your capital or savings. In a startup, there are no excuses. Just fucking do it or don’t. Sometimes high hopes, encouragement from your friends/family and positive visualization ain’t gonna cut it.

Calculating your runway

Cash is the lifeblood of your company. Once you run out, your startup is dead and you’re in a pretty sticky situation. Ideally, you should have enough runway for yourself to live off of for 1.5 to 2 years. I only had about 9 months in me. Despite the markets being flush with seed money, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be given a lifeline. It takes traction, some proof that you have a repeatable business model and obviously a working product released into the wild.

Your focus is to make money in a repeatable and scalable fashion, and not trying to raise money. It’s a huge distraction and will throw off your roadmap.

Ego

This is related to delusion. It comes down to not being honest with yourself and your team. Sometimes living in your own world where nobody really grills or questions you repeatedly makes things easier to cope with. I remember angrily arguing with loved ones that I *would* make it happen no matter what. Having too much pride (ego) and being delusional is a deadly mix. Make sure to have a solid network of friends and mentors who will not pull any punches to get you grounded in reality so you’re not bullshitting yourself or those around you. In the end, all you have is your reputation so be sure to preserve it by not turning into a complete dick without even knowing it.

Your relationships

Your relationships with loved ones and mentors are some of the few things that can keep you going, sane and collected when shit hits the fan. Thank you for believing in me and supporting me despite our many heated arguments, Irene.

Conversely, they can be some of your greatest obstacles as their lining of questioning or constructive criticism may instill doubt, fear and belief in your own abilities. I don’t know the best way of handling this it varies from person to person, but I know this - treat those around you with respect, patience and empathy to understand they mean well. It’s up to you to discern whether their concerns of your entrepreneurial efforts are genuine or destructive.

Having an awesome (full time) team

Because I wasn’t technical and couldn’t build, after having to let go of my co-founder after my experience at Extreme University, I found myself having to hustle to assemble a new team. It raised a lot of eyebrows and definitely was not the best way of stepping with the right foot forward on your first startup, but I digress… Luckily I had a mentor who poured a lot of time, effort and belief into me to make me understand my primary role as a product manager. He was instrumental in pulling some strings for assembling my team.

The new team (Alvin, Andy, Grace!) I eventually brought on are fantastic people, but they weren’t all in and didn’t have much skin in the game, meaning that Date Ideas wasn’t their full-time gig. I was the only full-time team member.

In any startup, you need to putting in stupid amounts of hours on a weekly basis. At best, I got half of that from part time (but awesome) rails developers. I learned the hard way that you simply cannot succeed with a part-time team. Needless to say, looking back it was a very frustrating experience, even though it was no fault of theirs. We tried our best with what limited resources and travelled to Montreal to start having conversations when things were starting to look promising while we had hardly any money.

In retrospect…

It was a pretty shitty feeling (downright depressing, actually) when you know the writing is on the wall and you have to break it to your team, family and investors that you can’t continue anymore.

I could go on and on writing about this seemingly catastrophic personal and professional failure. I risked almost everything to make something happen. From the beginning I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. Today, a bit of that fog is clearing, and I’ll share with you what I’ve been working on in future blog posts.

Sure I’ve suffered a few scrapes and bruises, and incredibly humbled in how hard it is to make it as an entrepreneur. Learning from many friends, colleagues and mentors (Matt O’Leary, Sarah Prevette, James Woods, Amar Varma, Mark Organ) I realize it truly was a great learning experience and I’m definitely stronger after picking myself back up. Thank you to Dwayne Forde at Xtreme Labs for being so helpful to Grace and all those I asked for help and advice along the way. I appreciate the chance and opportunity Extreme Venture Partners bestowed on me for my first entrepreneurial step up to the plate. I don’t regret having gone this route and I’m forever grateful to my family, friends and mentors. It’s time for me to start taking care of myself after putting everyone else before me until I’m ready for my next at bat.

If anyone is hiring a person in product management or business analysis/biz dev in the areas of online dating, mobile apps or social media marketing, I’d love to connect with you :)

One of my favourite scenes in Naruto Shippuuden.

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:03:10 -0400

One of my favourite scenes in Naruto Shippuuden.

The Murky Waters of Sales

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:15:43 -0400

Just the other day, I watched an episode of This Week in Venture Capital with Mark Suster.

At one point in the show, he had mentioned that at some point, a “young person” or aspiring entrepreneur should take up a role in sales as it’s a lifelong skill that will pay off in spades down the road in one form or another.

While I was on the fence and had iffy feelings about Sales as a profession and sales people in general, I’m leaning towards Mark’s sentiment towards Sales.

If I were to really pinpoint my “beef” with sales is that it’s highly uncomfortable. Just thinking about it gets me a bit flustered. Maybe it’s the high rate of rejection. (Who likes being rejected?) or my aversion to failure - whether it’s cold calling, prospecting, lead generation and the like, it’s all so foreign to me. You need balls of steel, persistence, and hungry to make money and deliver value. Strangely enough, despite the uncomfortable sentiment towards Sales, that’s what also has me so intrigued and excited to learn about the sales process in general.

An element of being a kickass salesperson is being “fearless” and having a rock solid confidence and belief in oneself that you will prevail overall. I think that’s just a condition of the people you surround yourself with as well as the material you absorb. Not to toot my own horn, but I think I’m a pretty good connector and “relationship guy” and have a strong network of mentors. But that doesn’t quite cut it.

I need to dive into Sales and work in it to learn more about the all the nuances of Sales - as an artform, as respectable profession and as a science.

Outside of doing “biz dev” while I was doing Transforming for SickKids and a bit of freelance for TeamBuy in terms of “real world” experience, I’m slowly going through Neil Rackham’s “Spin Selling” as well as a the Sandler Sales Institute audio course.

Let’s see how this goes.

Cultivating Habits

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:38:00 -0400

In a previous post of mine, I wrote about Consistency and Rituals. Today, I’m going to write about my process that leads up to building consistency and rituals - cultivating habits - desired ones at that.

For those who know me, it’s been a bit of a hobby of mine to soak up anything personal development or productivity related. From blogs like Leo Babauta’s “Zen Habits” to personal development systems from Tony Robbins.

Over the last little while, I’ve put a lot of effort into building a “fitness habit”. Just recently, I finished a Crossfit Bootcamp over at Crossfit Toronto. A fantastic program, which is constantly varied, forces you to wake up at an ungodly hour (they only had a 6am and a 7am class.. I opted for the later :), that WILL. KICK. YOUR. ASS. The result is that I feel stronger and more energetic by getting up first thing in the morning and getting a killer workout out of way to set the tone for the rest of my day.

Anyway, a few of the challenges for me before in instilling this habit was accountability and just being plain bored from working out alone. Over the last 3 years, I had started and fizzled out on programs like P90X and Insanity. The thing I sorely missed was that I didn’t have others I was in constant contact with or guidance in order to perform certain movements or exercises properly. I was a loose cannon. I had a lot of freedom to work out whenever I wanted but it turned out I made too many excuses by not putting in effort to block out time at a certain part of my day that was “sacred” to my fitness.

In retrospect, through the bootcamp, I had a few things going for me in building up the habit. For one, I paid $250 for the bootcamp - not a paltry sum so I didn’t want to waste my money, which definitely helped with me following through. The workouts were set for us and our instructor Ryan really pushed us and was ever so helpful in correcting our form - so I didn’t have to put conscious effort in wondering if I was doing things properly - I got almost instantaneous feedback. Also, I didn’t have much choice in what time I was to attend their bootcamp. 6am or 7 am. That was it. Although it was tough the first two days, I quickly fell in line with my other classmates and just showed up consistently. A little over a month later, it feels really weird to not head to the gym for that short hour to start my day or just simply blow off some steam.

A simple concept that Leo (of Zen Habits) wrote about in many of his materials are 30 day challenges. His logic was that anyone can complete a 30 day challenge right? Whether for self-experimentation or simply to pour in conscious and deliberate effort into building a habit and blogging about it for accountability purposes in order to “program” some positive change for the long term.

I think it’s kind of bullshit having to self-experiment in complete isolation with no real-time feedback in understanding a new endeavour properly. I didn’t blog, I just used Facebook’s check-in service to detail my effort to my friends. Those that cared gave me all the “virtual” feedback and encouragement I needed to continue.

Looking back, maybe I was a slow learner, but it simply didn’t work for myself doing 30 day challenges without some community I could lean on whenever I had some difficulties. I’ve a slew of journals that detailed my experiences, but they just trailed off. As with anything in life, simply being *physically surrounded* by people of similar mindset and striving towards a common goal is probably the single most crucial aspect of reaching goal or cultivating lifelong habits.

Come to think of it, this resonates in all things I’ve done where I’ve experienced any modicum of lasting success. Having some sort of in person community (not just virtual) that will push, encourage, keep you accountable and kick your ass (in a good way) to prevent you from failing or faltering.

Forcing outcomes

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 15:42:18 -0400

Sometimes things can’t happen no matter how badly you want it to make it happen — at least not in the timeframe you originally wanted.

I realize that with Date Ideas first iteration in Rails 3 proper (finally!!) behind me with its imminent launch, despite several setbacks and months of delays, that I accept it for what it is - something that can grow organically and where me and my team can learn from as our first stab in the consumer web startup space.

It takes a very special set of circumstances for a team to come together. The right timing, stage in life, mindset, passion, money in the bank for decent runway, having a full moon and the perfect windspeed, whatever it is to be aligned perfectly in unison to start and build something great.

Despite your being “relentlessly resourceful” and no matter how hard you try with boundless passion/enthusiasm, sometimes things that can’t happen now doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t happen later.

On consistency and rituals

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:02:00 -0400

Recently, I’ve been experiencing a stellar run this week where everything just seemingly “clicked” and I’m on a roll in terms of productivity, my workouts, and nutrition. This was a direct result from reflecting on Jason Goldberg’s (of Fab.com) fantastic blog post, “13 Things You Must Do Every Week as a Startup CEO”

Breaking this down further, I realized that there were certain things I did on a regular basis that put me “in state” and helped me build momentum and start the day off with the right foot forward.

Affirmations – the moment I rise and right before I go to bed. Every day, without fail.
Working out – I do this as often as possible (pretty much every other day) with a mix of P90X, P90X+ and Insanity thrown into the mix to keep things somewhat different. Oh, and cold showers :) (I’d love to pay for CrossFit, but it’s too rich for my blood right now lol)
Nutrition – the 4-Hour Body style slow carb diet
Obsessively thinking about product and driving home the vision for Date Ideas I have in mind, for the short and long term, and communicating that with my team.
Measurement – having a GTD system (I use Wunderlist) and tracking literally everything I deem “important” via Daytum.com and iDoneThis.com. I do weekly reviews in my journal, writing about the important areas of my life that I try to keep track of and reflect on.

It made me think about how World class champions get to the top of their game, how top sellers gross the most out of everyone else, why people who excel at what they do.

There’s never a magic bullet or overnight success to be had overnight. It’s a very slow (sometimes painful), conscious and deliberate process of doing the same things over and over that matter the most in order to arrive to an outcome that you can very clearly define and visualize.

Here’s a video I watch from time to time that I think encapsulates what I mean.

Daytum.. how I love thee..

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 12:23:40 -0400

Brought to you by Nicholas Felton, famous for his “Feltron Annual Reports”, Daytum.com is one of those unique tools that you never knew you really wanted or needed until you actually start using the product. Their tagline is “Daytum helps you collect, categories and communicate your everyday data”. Through my experiences, it allows me to visualize all of the boring data I collect but still deem important in pretty graphs that really bring life to it.

I liken Daytum’s product to the case of Twitter or Dropbox where you don’t quite understand how powerful the product is until you actually dig deeper beneath the surface. You discover it’s many uses beyond just being a stream of thoughts and links (Twitter) or just a “magic” folder that syncs to the cloud across all your platform (Dropbox). The sheer amount of possibilities and applications is astounding and gratifying, once you start collecting data.

Since Daytum’s core use is to “collect, categorize and communicate”, I’ll be focusing on the core strengths and some oversights of the product in terms of how they collect data.

Collecting data

Daytum makes it widely known that the key action that users should make is to actually start entering data. From number of coffees had to even the number of times you’ve went to the washroom, the possibilities are all up to your imagination of what data you want to collect, measure and communicate.

While it’s been well thought out in terms of the UI/UX, I believe they can further simplify to lower the friction of first time users to churn and never come back. Simple things like having highlighted instructions for first time users, or even a minute video to teach the users how to use it can play an important role in adoption and continual use in the long run, and incite the user to start the action of entering data to collect.

Making it even simpler and faster

What’s great is that their laser focus on manually collecting and entering your data. However, their implementation can be improved. Following the 80/20 Rule, 80% of your results (in this case data) comes from 20% of the entries/categories that make. So to that end, being able to list the top 20% of entries makes sense in allowing the user to enter their data even more quickly with less clicks, to improve the user experience. When you enter data, you’re prompted to enter the date, but you’re required to manually type it out.

One thing they hit the nail on the head on is their use of autosuggest. While displaying your most used items (your top 20% most used), this definitely works for the remainder of the 80% of the long tail items you want to track.

It’s about time…

Perhaps this was through the process of building lean really fast, but forcing the user to manually type out the date is a bit cumbersome experience, especially when you’re trying to do so on their iPhone app or mobile optimized version of Daytum. A simple solution to get around this would be to add something natural like a jQuery popup calendar to choose the date, with the default date being “now”.

Some other decisions they’ve made is leaving in the time of when you entered that data. Perhaps that’s a bit overkill, in terms of measuring all your data at the exact moment of when an event or thing occured, which through my own heavy use has never been the case at all.

Categorization

The way they allow categorizing (which is essentially tagging) can be critiqued the same way as well: show the most used categories to enable fast tagging to collect and categorize data in the most useful way. What they did get right, is their use of autosuggest for the more obscure categories and entries. It allows you to sift through the number of entries to properly assign the right name and categories so there aren’t duplicates and minimize error in that regard.

The future of Daytum

It doesn’t look like the founders of Daytum will be working on the product on a full time basis after they were “acq-hired” by Facebook.

While the focus of the product is collecting data actively and manually typing it in, I’m sure they’ve thought of hooking into other social API’s to collect data in a passive manner, where each check-in to a coffee shop instance, can count as “having coffee” and typing in “Americano” into your checking with the data being fed into Daytum and automatically categorizing and tagging your check-in like how Mint.com does with your transactions. What about other important data like your health or finances? DailyBurn and RunKeeper have “health related” API’s. If you’re into lifehacking, measuring and optimizing all areas of your life, how cool would it be to visualize all your personal data to draw upon insights in graphs and the like?

It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, that with such a great product, they were only half way there in terms of really making it fun and being ultimately a “life dashboard”. Be it a solitary experience that it provides or gamifying the product and inciting competition or reaching goals even, there’s so much potential, but at the end of the day, I’ll still be using Daytum to visualize my personal data.

Startup Festival Recap and Lessons Learned

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 16:09:00 -0400

Startup Festival Recap and the Lessons I Learned First off, props to Phil Telio, Alistair Croll, Rebecca Croll, Guy Vezina, all the volunteers (too many to name) and anyone else who helped promote and pimp the shit out of Startup Festival.

It was a fantastically fun and action packed event drawing some of the biggest names in the startup world. I learned so much, especially at the off festival, Lean Analytics event at RPM/Year One Labs. Props to Alistair and Sean Power organizing it!

Anyways, I’ll just list off the things that I learned to make the most of my experience and improve upon the next time I ever decide to a go to a conference of this magnitude and scale.

To those who are reading to the end, would love to read your thoughts and give me some feedback.

What’s your plan?

Before I even went to the festival, I had a very clear goal in mind while I was prepping for our (false start) launch. If you’re spending upwards to $1000 (in my case anyway) you better have damn good reasons why you’re spending good time and money away from building your product.

I had a very clear intention of who I wanted to meet, what outcomes I wanted to achieve and the very steps I needed to take in order to achieve those outcomes, which all required a lot of planning, hustle and serendipity. In terms of planning, I made a list of all the names of people I wanted to meet being, Sean Ellis, Hiten Shah, Dan Martell, Jason Bailey, Charlie O’Donnell, Jeff Clavier, Dave McClure, and James Levine.

Of those 10 people I had on my list, I thoroughly researched each and every one of them, reading their blogs, engaging them on Twitter, email and watched their Mixergy interviews if they had one. In Sarah Prevette’s talk, she mentioned that if you’re looking to get help, have a very clear ask, so the entrepreneur, (potential) investor or advisor can actually help you. Is it an introduction? Specific advice about their domain expertise? Don’t waste your time or the time of the person you’re asking advice from.

My goal was to get a few minutes of their time to ask for advice and start the conversation and continually follow up with each and everyone of them to show them my team’s progress in the coming months.

Don’t be a douche bag When attending an event like this, I knew I could be drowned out by the horde of startups that attended this event. I wanted to stand out from the crowd and not come off as a douche bag by straight up pitching.

I asked, learned and applied advice distilled from Sarah Prevette (Sprouter), Dan Martell (FlowTown) and Chris McCann (Startup Digest). The general consensus was to get advice by asking well thought out questions and maybe the conversation (no guarantee) would revert back to you where a small window opens where you can tell them about your startup/story. Only at that point you can follow up with email and continue the conversation afterwards. It’s a subtle change in your approach, but the outcome can be entirely different had you gone in and spitfiring everyone with your pitch.

Ya ain’t gonna get funded, fool!

Chances are, going to a festival like this when you’re not showing any traction or being “teh hotness” of the Festival like the LocalMind team getting funded a few days before the Festival.

You’re there to start the conversation and *maybe* something will happen afterwards. You just have to hustle and keep iterating on your product and keep those relationships that you’ve built warm by showing your progress and asking advice wherever you think you they could help best.

As Jeff Clavier had mentioned in one of his blog posts regarding how many people he’s funded after being pitched at a conference:

Out of the thousands of people who have pitched us at conferences after a talk, how many have we invested in. You might have guessed the answer: zero.

Like Charlie O’Donnell mentioned in his talk, you must value your time and the relationships you build. Don’t burn your chances of potentially working together or helping one another in the future by being “that douche bag” that pitched, hounded and annoyed the fuck out of the speakers at the conference. Focus on the long term and invest the time to build real relationships.

Show genuine interest and offer some value (at least try to)

What are you interested in besides getting funded? There’s a reason why McClure is famous for his saying, “Don’t pitch me bro”. Him, angels, and VCs get pitched all the bloody time.

They’re like that hot chick in the club. They’re highly sought after, but probably way out of your league. What makes you think you’re going to be any different from the army of startups that have attended the conference as well?

As much as you’re interested in getting funded to follow your dream, you have to know the person you’re interested in on some level. For Dave, one of his passions is his Geeks on a Plane endeavor, so if you could help him out in some way (I don’t know how), he’d remember you. But even then, that’s not even enough.

The value you truly offer should come from your startup should have some amount of varying success to even register a blip on his radar or any other angel or VC’s radar.

Leverage your community

In retrospect, I didn’t do a good job on this one at all and dropped the ball. I should have made more of an effort of reaching out to other Toronto area entrepreneurs to have a more organized approach in hanging out.

While they may be not on the same team as you, they’re still your brothers (and sisters) in arms in spirit.

It can especially tough when everyone is going about going after the next sought after event or after party.

Shit ain’t going down at the conference

Real talks and more intimate and off the record conversations happen at the off festival events, be it after parties or presentations. If you’ve been around the startup scene for a while and start building relationships with other entrepreneurs who’ve had some varying degree of success.

There is no real magic trick to this, if you show some promise and don’t be a douche bag and assuming you’re “cool” and “savvy” enough, you might be invited – no promises though.

Assuming you’ve made some sort of warm connection, just keep on following up and keep those would be mentors and connections warm.

The follow up

Be sure to connect with your contacts and ping them once every so often, be it on Twitter, LinkedIn and email. A good way of engaging is through their blog posts as well, which shows that you’re reading their content and putting thought into whatever their post is about, and hell, even learning from them.

Sooo, this was a mind dump on my part, as I wanted to put out what I observed and what I’d learned throughout the festival. Any tips?

betashop: The CEO of a startup must be the primary product manager

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 22:49:28 -0400

betashop: The CEO of a startup must be the primary product manager:

betashop:

One of my more controversial viewpoints is that the CEO of a startup must be the primary product manager.

My extreme position on this is that I am personally responsible for every last pixel that makes it onto the screen. There is no better use of my time than to ensure the user experience maps…

Advantages of being Asian and running a startup

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 12:21:00 -0400

I love being Asian. I mean, you get all these perks just because of your heritage! Some other things that are automatically assumed when you’re Asian are:

That I’m smart (not really) because I’m Asian and wear glasses
That I’m to be underestimated (which I totally love)
Your parents unconditionally love you ~~and it’s cool if you’re nearing 30 and living in the basement~~. It’s expected you live at home until you get married

I’ve been able to keep my startup alive by keeping our burn rate really low. What is it when I mention “burn rate” anyway? Being able to pay for basic living expenses like rent, food, energy and um.. internet. This is in addition to having an awesomely dedicated team and advisor all in part through moving back home to my parents and avoiding soul crushing debt.

Sure, it sucks at first moving back home, cramping your style, but in hindsight that advantage that you get sure outstrips having to fold your company, put it on hold or go back to working for “the man”.

What is it when I mention “burn rate” anyway? Being able to pay for basic living expenses like rent, food, energy and um.. internet.

So what about other “meta-issues” like “saving face”?

The guise of doing something that garners respect really does matter to parents. Do something that brings in the money. I try to keep it vague as possible because communicating in Chinglish about virality, k-factor and other metrics is pretty ~~damn tough~~ impossible.

I just show them any progress we have from time to time. Other than that, my parents can say “Yes, our son is running his own company”.

Other than I have to do some freelancing on the side to keep the cash flow coming in, so that I don’t have to mooch off my parents entirely.

Food delicious food

Besides not having to pay for rent, you get your meals are cooked for you. If it isn’t hot meals, at least you get a fridge full of yummie leftovers that you can quickly heat up.

Laundry done

Now if you’re really a mamma’s boy, you’ll get the advantage of having your mom do your laundry.

What does this all equate to, less time being spent on stuff that can be major stressors in your life and distracting your from making shit happen. Win!

Closing thoughts

All joking aside (and swallowing some pride) at the end of the day, when all is said and done, blood is thicker than water - don’t forget to appreciate your family and do them proud by hustling for all your worth and turn your vision into reality.

The point is to not be a burden on your parents, keep your impact as low as possible. I’m not talking about taking money from them when they offer. You should be at the very least be able to create some sort of residual cash flow to pay for basic expenses (mostly food).

GetDateIdeas.com is launching in Startup Festival in Montreal on July 13, 2011! Sign up to get early access!

betashop: 13 Things You Must Do Every Week As A Startup CEO

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 14:31:09 -0400

betashop: 13 Things You Must Do Every Week As A Startup CEO:

betashop:

Being the CEO of a startup is a hard and complex job. Here’s my quick list of the 13 things every startup CEO should make sure to do each week:

Remember your One Thing. Your startup can only do one thing well at a time. Know Your One Thing. Write it on the wall. Repeat it every day. Put it…

Head to the Valley, son.

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 23:54:00 -0500

I’ve heard time and time again from friends, mentors and acquaintances that heading to the Valley is the best idea for your startup. I hear that the culture of the Valley/Bay area is a LOT more different that in Toronto. Everywhere you turn in terms of coffee shops or restaurants, someone is either doing their own startup or an investor. And deals are always being done - even as favours to friends.

One friend who works at ExperienceProject.com remarked on the Toronto tech scene and referred to us being barely “zygotes”, not even fully developed babies compared to Silicon Valley. But I digress.

Talking to acquaintances, mentors, who are seasoned entrepreneurs to Y-Combinator alums, all of them have constantly remarked that heading to the Valley is something that you *need* to do. Not only to see whether or not you can drum up interest (investment), but it’s almost a “rites of passage” so to speak.

I read somewhere in a post on HackerNews in that being in the Valley is having “instant startup mix” (I think it referred to Facebook moving there or something like that).

A few years ago, Albert Lai apparently got into spat with VC-turned-entrepreneur, Rick Segal over the viability of starting a startup in Toronto. The argument was over the lack of support from the venture capital community in Canada and their “conservative approach”. (It was a different time back then, but still not much has changed despite this impending “bubble” of 2011).

Even a mentor of mine remarked to a VC who I gave a tour of Extreme Venture Partners’ offices to (and I’m paraphrasing this), “the valuations you can get here in Toronto are much better than what you can get in the Valley or Boston”. Obviously, not in the favour of the Toronto based entrepreneur.

That’s not to say that you can’t take advantage of having offices in Toronto (or Canada for that matter) AND in the Valley/Bay Area.

There’s too much action going on there and the speed is ferociously fast. Obviously I’m still “a zygote” when it comes to all of this, but I am noticing a pattern. I’m starting to sway over to Albert’s argument that being in the Valley is a lot more advantageous for your startup than sticking around solely in Canada.

*Disclosure, this is not to say that I’m ungrateful to my initial seed investors EVP as they have afforded opportunities that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to achieve at a hyper-accelerated pace. They connected me with so many of my mentors and taught me pretty much everything I know up to this point.

Core Peer Groups: How I Found a Co-Founder, Built a Prototype, and Raised $5M in Less Than 4 Weeks

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:22:46 -0500

Core Peer Groups: How I Found a Co-Founder, Built a Prototype, and Raised $5M in Less Than 4 Weeks:

brianbalfour:

The $5M Keg

In 2007 I was 23 years old, working full time as a product manager at ZoomInfo while moonlighting on a number of entrepreneurial side projects. I had previously started a few companies with angel funding and a couple small exits, but certainly nothing of scale. In a whirlwind of a…

A quick glimpse of 2010

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 10:03:00 -0500

In previous years, I used to write massive posts on my successes and failures for the year. This time around after checking out my friend Malcolm’s post on his Recap of 2010, I was inspired by the simplicity of the post. His year was in bullet points, detailing the major events and progress that happened in 2010.

I’ll do the same.

Entered into a fantastic relationship with Irene
Made over $1,000 in ~~beer money~~ AdSense revenue purely from SEO
Pushed CheapDateIdeas.ca as far as I could with Irene
Quit BMO after being inspired by this video and meeting him at his “Crush It!” book launch talk at UofT
Started freelance work and took more control of my time to work on the stuff I care about.
Lived (and still am) living a very lean lifestyle.
Became Curator for the Toronto Startup Digest (Sign up! It’s free :)
Found a co-curator (or more like he found me) - Josh Sookman
Got accepted into Extreme University and seed funded by Extreme Venture Partners
Incorporated Date Ideas
Completely redesigned and rebranded CheapDateIdeas to simply “Date Ideas” with the help of the guys at You Say Yeah!
Went to the Startup Digest/Startup Weekend Worldwide Curator Meetup in Kansas City, MO. Outcome - made connections in Silicon Valley and around the world.
Parted ways with one of my Co-Founders (one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do)
Met and learned from some of the top entrepreneurial minds in Canada on a week to week basis for 4 months straight.
Learned about Customer Development, Lean Startup and applying it.
Gained two advisors who took me under their wing.
Gained two new team members and building “Beta 2” proper of Date Ideas in Rails
Received a crash course in Product Management and learning UX/UI design.
So proud of my friends, Malcolm, Josh, Dave, Jaime and Rob and what they’ve been doing this past year.
Learned more about myself and what I’m capable of compared to any other year.

It’s been a wild ride. Here’s to 2011!

If you want something done..

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:21:00 -0500

… you should learn it yourself.

I’ve taken my advisor’s advice and started to take up Ruby.. but for fun so I understand what’s going in when it comes to web development.

I’m starting with The Pragmatic Programmers Learn to Program: Using Ruby by Chris Pine and HTML, XHTML & CSS For Dummies. Yep. The basics is “teh hawtness”!

Thanks to Zach Aysan as well for the encouragement and hooking me up with some cool resources :)

I love challenges. I don’t imagine this will be an easy process or something that will come overnight. Rather, I know it will all come together over time and only after learning the fundamentals and having a solid foundation before I can try out any fancy shit. It feels exactly like when I first picked up my copy of The Game by Neil Strauss…. I won’t elaborate on how that turned out.. but boy this is gonna be FUN :)