@TheMIN.ca – 2018 April

We’ve moved away from the Listserver we had running on a private machine in the basement of SFU in BC.  This will be the first issue run with 24-bit-colour graphics and web-links that actually work using the MailChimp platform.  I’m sure we’re all excited that this guy who was once on the cutting edge of tech, a 14-year-old turning Steve Wozniak’s boards into software on the Atari platform, finally got around to joining the 21st century!  Past issues ‘may’ become available on TheMin.ca if wonder-boy can format them again! Plus, we will be more compliant with anti-spam legislation. No more “unsubscribe/subscribe” emails being sent repetitively by new members to all members.

Our team at TheMIN.ca watches HBO’s Silicon Valley on Sundays and then we come back with nods of “how true, how true”.  One thing I have noticed is how rough (sexist, racist, derogatory) some of the dialogue is and have trouble remembering if that’s how it was when we did it.  But then a few stories come to mind. We had a great algorithm writer from Korea in one of the companies I worked at in San Mateo, who wrote most and optimized all of our assembly code.  The engineering team lead nicknamed him “Fuji”! Not only was it racist it wasn’t even close to being culturally correct. Working for that bully wasn’t super fun for me either. He disappeared from the map and I never met him again. I did, however, meet up with Hyon at another company and he was a different man – talkative and friendly.  We spoke only once about our former boss and he told me what I used to be called, and though I felt kind of bad, I was relieved I could look Hyon in the eyes as an equal. “So what,” you say. Well, in the next few months we’re going to build a scorecard for something I call ‘destructive bullying’. It’s a way that founders and start-up staff can quiz themselves and see if there is a destructive element in the company, with some ideas on remedies.  If you’ve seen this type of behavior in your workplace, or you’ve seen it and solved it, please drop me a few sentences on what and how to aao@themin.ca.  I’ll explain the qualifier once we build the questionnaire!

Going back to the First Round 2015 post about the top 10 findings of successful startups, the number 7 reason for success in a startup is that a technical co-founder is essential in enterprise companies, but a hindrance in consumer-facing companies.  That seems counterintuitive, because:

  • Sergey Brin and Larry Page were tech guys who founded Google (0/1).
  • Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay had a computer science degree (0/2).
  • Michael Dell was a biology major drop out from University of Texas (1/3).
  • Jeff Bezos graduated from Princeton with a degree in Electrical Engineering (1/4).
  • Branson is a high-school dropout (2/5).
  • Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard although he was one of the programmers (2/6).
  • Steve Jobs attended an acid cloud at Reed College but no one would consider him the technical one (3/7).
  • Robert L. Johnson had a degree in social studies and another in public affairs before starting Black Entertainment Television (4/8).
  • George Lucas graduated in film production from USC (5/9).
  • Muhammad Yunus had a BA in Economics (6/10).

So this doesn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule as 4 of the top 10 founders I have listed here were actually very technical founders.  Next month we’ll look at number 6. Some successful investments could reflect the importance of some hidden variable. Venture capital is largely an exercise in intuition and pattern matching. This sort of data doesn’t substitute for judgment, but to the extent that it can help investors identify things that track with success, data can inform those judgments.

Email last week from a subscriber: “Why don’t you cover more non-mainstream start-ups.  Mississauga has a lot of other communities.” When we find them we’ll put them in or let us know where to search.

The newsletter is looking for someone or a group of people to interview Angels who can relate their first investment and what they learned.  We’d like it to be a regularly occurring part of the newsletter.

Please send us your ideas for a Pitch-Day in the late Summer or early Fall.  The earlier vision of using the foyer of the Living Arts Centre for the day means we need to schedule ahead, so odds are good we will use the City Facilities at the Hershey Centre, The City Hall Rooftop or the Small Arms Building.

More ideas for discussion: a couple of founding members want this Newsletter to turn into a full-fledged magazine, and having it move to MailChimp with graphics is the first step in that.  The newsletter membership needs to grow for us to attract some advertising revenue or we need to charge a membership fee for the information gathered to get some more staff. Let’s remember that we’re all volunteers here and we’ve been at it for 14 issues!

And for the last time Sal, we are not going to have a Buy-Sell-Swap section for office equipment … or missed connections!

Finally, we usually don’t do much in terms of meetings from May to August, but James has asked that we have an organizational meeting in the Summer to plan out our Trade Show attendance for next year.  Andrew will send out a doodle at the end of the month.