• Board materials: send out the board materials including the agenda well in advance, preferably 48 hours before the board meeting. Board members might be traveling or could be tied up in meetings and you want to give them enough time to review the materials before the meeting.
• Spend less time talking about the past, more time talking about the future: I have seen board meetings where the CEO spent almost all of the meeting reviewing the past quarter with no time left for strategic discussions about the future direction of the company. Keep the MD&A (management discussion and analysis) part short and reserve most of the time for discussion about the future of the company.
• Stay focused on the high-level, don’t get lost in the details: Board meetings should be the time to discuss high-level questions like the company’s marketing or product strategy, the fundraising strategy or the team’s performance (and what kind of talent needs to be added) but can get lost in details when board members start providing feedback on specific product features or elements of the marketing plan. While this feed-back can be very valuable, it should be dealt with in 1:1′s after the board meeting and not take away from discussion of the key questions during the meeting.
• Avoid surprises in the board meeting: Board meetings are not the place to surprise your investors or independent board members so if you have bad news to share, do this immediately via email / calls and do not wait until the next board meeting. Delivering surprises in the board meeting would immediately create some unease in the meeting and take away focus from the discussion that you intended to have.
• No email, no calls, no walking out: board meeting time should be solely focused on the meeting and not dealing with day-to-day-stuff. You might reserve some time for breaks so that everybody can quickly check their email and place a few calls but it should be a hard rule that nobody does that during the meeting (full disclosure: I have been guilty of that in the past).
• Leave enough time for board items: in every meeting, there are a few formalities that need to be dealt with (like stock option approvals, board resolutions, etc.) and it is important to leave enough time for them at the end of the meeting.
• Follow-up with email outlining the key take-away’s: it is always very valuable when the CEO follows up with an email to all board members outlining the key take-away’s from the meeting and then shows these key take-away’s (and the progress the company has made since the last meeting) as the first slide in the next board meeting. This really aligns the whole board around the key priorities of the company and the execution against them. (thanks, Chris!)

Would love to heard about more best practices in the comments and will update the post accordingly.

Techvibes TV: Boris Wertz, W Media Ventures from Techvibes.com on Vimeo.

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People are increasingly getting their news from the social networks they’re part of (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), but this is rapidly getting overwhelming. If you’re connected with a few hundred people and companies, it’s hard to stay on top of the news they share. There’s currently no way to get the important stuff without going through all your news.

Summify gives you a river of news in a way that you can consume it in minutes, rather than hours. The important stuff bubbles up at the top so, however much time you have at your disposal, you always know you’re reading the important stuff first.

It’s a HTML5 web app (only modern browsers supported, sorry!). It aggregates all your incoming news from your Twitter and Google Reader account (Facebook and Google Buzz support on the way!). It then curates your news feed by using the social reactions gathered from your networks. The important news makes it to the Top News section. There’s also a Recent News section that allows you to see everything in chronological order.

Summify is the first Bootup Labs company I have invested in.  I got to know the team after spending more time over at BootUp and was immediately impressed by their technical strength – Mircea and Cristian are probably the best “strong engineers & early-stage entrepreneurs combo” I have ever come across in Vancouver so I am extremely excited to working with them to build a great company!

The product is still in private beta but you can get an invite code by sending me an email (bwertz [at]wmediaventures [dot] com – looking forward to getting your feed-back!

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• Early-stage consumer internet / SaaS companies located in the Pacific Northwest / Western Canada. Geography is a must for leading a deal but I do co-investments outside of that area.
• Large addressable and capital efficient market: company addresses a large market (hundreds of $ millions +) and does not require more than $1-$3 million in funding to become a $25-$50 million (exit value) company
• Strong founder team with a visionary and passionate (yet coachable) CEO at the helm. Team must include at least one technical person who can actually build stuff.
• Differentiated product: no “me too’s” and strong technical focus
• Easy-to-understand business model that does not depend on scale and can generate revenues within 9-12 months from launch
• Initial traction with – at the minimum – an existing prototype/alpha version that is currently being challenged by users

In reality, no investor will ever only make deals that fit 100% with their investment thesis but it is important to have a consistent set of criteria against which investment opportunities can be benchmarked against. So here is mine, looking forward to feed-back!

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We are extremely excited to have over 20 investors from more than 15 funds attending the event:

• Shawn Abbott, iNovia
• Chris Albinson, Panaroma Capital
• Chris Arsenault, iNovia
• Jonas Brandon, Rogers Ventures
• Roger Chabra, Rho Canada
• Rob Chaplinsky, Bridgescale
• Jeff Clavier, Softtech
• JS Cournoyer, Founders Fuel
• Rob Hayes, First Round Capital
• Scott Jacobson, Madrona Venture Group
• Paul Kedrosky
• Anthony Lee, Altos Ventures
• Mike Lee, Rogers Ventures
• Jevon MacDonald, Innovacorp
• Dave McClure, 500Startups
• Maria Pacella, Growthworks
• Tim Porter, Madrona Venture Group
• Kalle Radage, BDC
• Mike Satterfield, Yaletown Ventures
• Aydin Senkut, Felicis
• Jason Stoffer, Maveron
• John Stokes, Montreal Startup / Founders Fuel

Thanks to all of you for coming – I sure hope that you will recognize that Vancouver and Western Canada are home to many exciting start-ups.

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After the investment in Empire Avenue last week I am very excited to announce another investment today: Barcode Hero‘s mission is to help shoppers in physical stores, through breakthrough mobile technology. Simply put, it is like a “Foursquare for shopping”: Barcode Hero users scan products at home or in a store, build their collection, and share recommendations with friends. Users can follow others to get their recommendations and compete for fun titles based on the products they interact with.

I met the two founders of the company, Blake Scholl and Jason Crawford, back in March in Seattle and decided after one meeting and a few emails exchanges that I wanted to invest. I usually take a bit longer for taking an investment decision but this one just felt right. First of all, there is tons of opportunity at the cross-roads of mobile, social and commerce to come up with the right product to help shoppers in an offline context. Secondly, Blake and Jason had convinced a few A-list angels like Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant and Owen van Natta to participate in the seed round. But most importantly, this just felt like a rock star team of founders with the right vision, background (Amazon, Whrrl) and ambition.

So really excited to be part of the Barcode Hero story forward – you can get the iPhone app here and try the product out yourself (currently only working in the US app store though).

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For the next 3 days the Valley descends on Vancouver for the GROW conference and you can feel a real excitement in the local tech community about hosting entrepreneurs like Tony Hsieh (Zappos) or Andrew Mason (Groupon) as well as investors like Rob Hayes (First Round Capital), Dave McClure (500 Startups), Jeff Clavier (Softtech) or Chris Albinson (Panorama Capital) here in town. Building a company outside of the hot spots of the Valley or NYC is sometimes a tough undertaking despite many success stories – entrepreneurs don’t have the same easy access to experienced talent, mentors or investors and have fewer opportunities to learn from peers. So having close to a hundred top notch tech entrepreneurs and investors coming into town gives the Vancouver tech community a real boost and will provide some fantastic learning and networking opportunities for entrepreneurs from here and the rest of Canada.

Big thanks to Debbie Landa from Dealmaker Media for organizing the event, really hope this will turn into an annual conference!

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With the explosion of social media in the past few years, we now have millions of people broadcasting and curating  information on a daily basis, making personal recommendations and endorsements to their friends and followers and creating personal brands on the Internet. But with that explosion of small “media outlets” it is getting harder and harder to identify what the really important people are that one should listen to. At the same time, those influential people want to know what their personal brand is worth.

In comes Empire Avenue, the first world’s first influence stock market. Empire Avenue is partly a stock market, partly a game. It is fun, addictive and has attracted over 15,000 members during their closed beta.  Over 750,000 virtual share trades have occurred on the site in the past three months with a total value of over a 500 million Eaves, Empire Avenue’s virtual currency. As the site scales up, stock prices will provide valuable signals to information seekers (who are the influential people in my community that I should follow?), advertisers (who can credibly endorse my brand?) and the influencers themselves (what is my personal brand worth?).

The company not only has some early traction but they also have a superb team that knows how to build great products with minimal resources. So I am very happy to announce today that W Media Ventures just lead a seed round for the company that will provide the necessary means to accelerate the growth of the site.

And by the way, I think you should now go the Empire Avenue site and buy my stock – at 14.88 eaves it still looks like a steal to me…

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With Demand Media filing for their long-expected IPO last week, the discussion around scalable content generation platforms (or “content farms” as critics of those models prefer to call them) is back in full swing. As an investor in Suite101 (the third-largest platform behind Demand Media and Yahoo‘s Associated Content), I have been watching the space evolve over time and getting to understand and appreciate the business model behind these platforms. Since the Wired article on Demand Media last year a lot of the discussion in blogs has however solely focused on the algorithms versus humans topic with some people even calling for the “death of hand-crafted content“.  What was discussed much less is the fact that these new content generation models provide crucial solutions for media companies in an Internet age characterized by fragmentation of audiences, high demand for long-tail content and increased performance-based monetization.  There are 5 key differences that make platforms like Demand Media, Associated Content or Suite101 superior to traditional media platforms for generating high-quality content in a scalable way:

• Distributed model: having access to thousands of contributors around the world (instead of dozens or hundreds in a traditional media model) increases the chances of having a true (and often very passionate) expert writing about the topic of choice
• Aligned incentives between platform and content creators: most content creators are being paid on a revenue-share basis (Demand Media also pays a fixed amount per piece but increasingly moves to revenue-share arrangements like Suite101 and Associated Content) which perfectly aligns incentives across all participants – you only get paid if the content you create generates revenues
• Demand-driven content creation: all platforms use content guidance systems that help contributors understand what readers actually want and take the guessing game out of deciding what content to publish
• Scalable editorial models: editorial oversight is being implemented based on scalable models that try to maximize efficiencies while guaranteeing the highest level of quality possible
• Performance-based monetization: a large percentage of the content is being monetized through performance advertising like Google AdSense

Content generation platforms are often seen as pure search engine plays. And while it is certainly true that they all get a significant share of their traffic from Google and Co., I would argue that the long-term vision of all those platforms is a much broader one: to build up the largest talent pool of passionate contributors that can create highly targeted, high quality media experiences in the most efficient and scalable way, delivering value for readers, advertisers and contributors alike.

I personally think that this is how media will be created in the Internet age.

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I finally got around reading Dave McClure’s investment thesis and agree with almost all he says. There is one especially interesting paragraph when Dave talks about the “market stage” which caught my attention as it has been the topic of discussion with a few of my portfolio companies as of late:

“Next, you’d like to be able to improve the user experience and engagement / retention, get them to increase their love for the product.  If you can do this well enough, your customers will become your marketing… at very low cost.  Even if you can’t get to strong word-of-mouth or viral marketing, you can still hopefully reduce customer acquisition cost by getting incremental social amplification.  Regardless, your job is to discover SOME kind of scalable distribution channel that seems like it COULD be optimized to a point where it’s cash-flow positive at some point in the future.  Hopefully this doesn’t take more than $1-2M and 6-12 months to figure out.  But most of this spend should be on MARKETING channels & testing, NOT on adding more features… you can pivot to discover new customer use cases, but DO NOT keep adding features.  in fact, you might want to remove them (see KILL A FEATURE). If it looks like you’ve got scalable distribution, even if not quite break-even, then double-down”

Product-driven teams often forget about the market stage and continue to add features and develop the product. But as Dave points out this is not where you create value at this stage in the life of your company (you should be even thinking about killing features instead). The “market stage” is really about scaling the existing business and more specifically about 4 areas:

• Customer acquisition: how efficiently can you acquire customers at scale?
• Customer activation: how do you move people from signing up to your service to actually using it on a regular basis?
• Customer retention: how do you maximize the length of time that people use your service?
• Viral loop: how do you get them to spread the word about your service / product to their friends?

Optimizing all 4 areas will literally require hundreds (if not thousands) of a/b tests for ad campaigns, landing pages, process flow, email copy, etc. and will take some significant attention to detail and metrics. But this is the only way how to scale an online business and entrepreneurs that don’t take this seriously will not succeed.

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