Demo Day
Image by miketippett via Flickr
Today is GrowLab‘s first demo day with the 5 companies from the first cohort showing to over 50 investors what they have worked on since mid August. I am incredibly proud of all of the teams – they worked very, very hard for this moment and I have no doubt that all of them will nail their pitches today.
Reflecting on the past few months with the GrowLab companies, I am reminded of a few things:
- Never ever underestimate the power of a strong and engaged network of mentors – especially as first-time entrepreneurs you can avoid an incredible amount of pitfalls if you get the right advice as the right time.
- Never ever underestimate the power of a great pitch – most entrepreneurs don’t spend enough time creating (and telling) the story of why their start-up is worthwhile investing into. A great pitch doesn’t get created over night but is the result of many, many refinements, trial pitches and feed-back loops. Don’t treat it as a side project, it is one of the most important things a CEO should focus on.
- And last but not least, never ever underestimate the power of a platform that elevates you above the noise of the ever increasing start-up activity – we have seen an explosion of the numbers of start-ups in the past couple of years and it is becoming more and more important to find ways to break through the noise and leave a mark. Accelerators with a good reputation are probably the best platform to do so these days.
Related articles
- Finding Signal In The Noise Of Demo Days (avc.com)
- What the BC technology industry really needs (wmediaventures.com)
- GrowLab announces startups of its ‘accelerator program’ (canada.com)
M-commerce opportunities
It has taken some time but mobile commerce finally feels ripe to take off and I personally think that there are tremendous opportunities for start-ups in this space. Over the past couple of months, I spent some time with my portfolio company KimaLabs on product opportunities in the m-commerce space and was really excited to see their new product TapBuy launch earlier this week. TapBuy is a mobile app and platform with a focus on creating a super-smooth mobile shopping experience as you have to enter your credit card / shipping information only once and can then use it across different stores (comparable to Amazon’s 1-click shopping experience).
But the TapBuy product really speaks to 2 larger opportunities for start-up entrepreneurs in the m-commerce space.
The first one is in building m-commerce infrastructure: in the same way that companies have figured out in the past year that the digital advertising infrastructure (ad serving, targeting / re-targeting) needs to be rebuilt for mobile as the existing web products are far from optimal for the mobile platform, m-commerce presents the same opportunity for the commerce vertical. The mobile check-out experience (that TapBuy focused on) is certainly one of the most broken pieces but there is clearly more new infrastructure to be built.
The second opportunity is around discovery: in the same way that news are now mostly consumed on mobile phones, commerce can also shift to mobile but requires a very different kind of shopping experience that is much more focused on discovery / serendipity than in a web environment (which is still largely driven by clear purchase intent / search). Tapdeals is a first attempt of KimaLabs for this problem in the deal space but again, this is still a mostly unserved area.
Looking forward to seeing more innovation in m-commerce in the upcoming years – it feels like very early days.
Related articles
- EBay to drive mobile commerce innovation with open system (textually.org)
New investment: SilkStart, SaaS for membership organizations
All membership organizations I am involved in face the same challenges: how to deliver value to and engage their members, how increase revenues to invest back into their organization and how to do all this on a shoestring budget. Technology can help solve these problems for the millions of associations out there and I am happy to announce an investment in one of the leaders in this space. SilkStart provides membership organizations with a simple SaaS solution that provides a one-stop shop for everything from membership management to event ticketing to social networking features. The product is already used by some leading membership organizations, including the Vancouver Board of Trade, US Asian American Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC, VANTEC and DigiBC, and has received extremely good feed-back in the marketplace.
Daniel Chu and his team are some of the hungriest entrepreneurs I have seen in a long time and I am sure that they will run with this company long and far – excited to be part of it going forward!
Inspiring a new generation of entrepreneurs – RIP Steve Jobs
Image via CrunchBase
We have not truly celebrated entrepreneurs since the generation of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison – entrepreneurs got respect, awards, sometimes biographies but never the attention of top athletes or celebrities. Steve Jobs has changed this – he became a mass media phenomenon with a deep impact beyond the technology circles. I hope that many thousands of kids and teenagers from around the world now have a new role model and got inspired to become entrepreneurs trying to change the world.
This might be Steve Jobs’ greatest legacy. RIP.
Relaunch
The products of start-ups sometimes evolve so quickly that the communication of those changes falls behind – websites suddenly appear outdated and stale compared to the real story. This is how I felt when I looked at the w media ventures site a few weeks ago and decided that it was about time for a relaunch. w media had changed in quite a few ways over the past couple of years and the website was still telling a different story:
- While I was exclusively focused on consumer internet companies when I started in 2007, this focus has expanded to SaaS (GoInstant) and mobile (Flurry, Kima Labs, Rewardloop) start-ups since.
- A similar expansion happend in the geographical focus. While I originally only invested in the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada, 5 of my last 6 investments were either based in Eastern Canada, New York or the Silicon Valley.
- What has stayed the same is the focus on investing in passionate entrepreneurs with deep domain knowledge, great product and design instincts and a desire to change the world.
