NW Startup 2.0 Demo & Mashup Manchester Events

Manoj doesn't look too happy in this picture, and he didn't look too happy tonight after a string of mishaps hit these events tonight. But they weren't significant problems, and the event was a great success. The audience was full of interesting people and the presentations punchy and clear. I'm looking forward to the next one!

NW Startup 2.0 Demo and Manchester Mashup

Manoj has tempted some really interesting speakers up from the South, and put together a line up of interesting start-ups for Thursday night. 

 

Paul Fisher is a really interesting guy; he writes an occasional blog at http://www.thecoffeeshopsofmayfair.com/ about Web2.0 orientated companies and has an interesting perspective having made the leap from corporate finance work to venture capital with Advent.

 

Sam Sethi's also well worth hearing. Sam has started http://blognation.com, for want of a better description a kind of TechCrunch for Europe, but with a rather more European style??

 

Yuuguu will be there, definitely the finest collaboration tool since the chisel and stone tablet (but heck I'm just a little bit biased!), and a whole heap of interesting start-ups.

 

And, clearly best of all Mark Rahn and I will be there representing Enterprise Ventures and RisingStars.

 

I'm looking forward to it!

 

Why entrepreneurs can’t plan and VC’s can’t focus

OK I exaggerate- but let me explain! Over the years I’ve seen a few boardroom conflicts in early stage technology companies, and on reflection I think there’s a pattern to some of these conflicts. They arise when the company is looking to allocate resources and to plan ahead. There’s a very natural contradiction between maintaining focus on the primary business plan, and maintaining momentum towards some alternative/contingent outcome, a “Plan B” if you like. Some characteristics of a good CEO Joining a tiny company, perhaps with no sales, virtually no staff, the vaguest of customer relationships and a VC investor is only attractive if you have something of an optimistic outlook on life! That’s not to say that such people aren’t also very conscious of balancing and mitigating risk, just that you think you can see a route to a good outcome. Also, in my experience, good CEOs tend to be furiously focused individuals. Maybe the CTO can be distracted with wild ideas about the next innovation, but the CEO has to be delivery focused. Characteristics of an experienced VC VC’s need a degree of optimism too, but they have the advantage of a portfolio and expect each individual investment to be as likely to be a failure as a success. Moreover, they have been “backseat driving” to some extent on many, many, more companies that the CEOs have (I’ve been personally involved with around 25). That means that, whilst not at first hand, they’ve seen “the head of terms that didn’t make it through to cash”, the “Series A rounds that ended up as a nasty down-round”, and the “strategic partnerships that never delivered”. What’s more the VC has probably experienced the effect that many if not most of their portfolio will change direction during the early years.Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures puts so well in his recent post: Of the 26 companies that I consider realized or effectively realized in my personal track record, 17 of them made complete transformations or partial transformations of their businesses between the time we invested and the time we sold. It’s therefore hardly surprising that VC’s will have a tendency to constantly want to seek out the alternative route or contingency plan, whilst CEO’s will want to keep the company focused. My only proposal to try and resolve some of this tension is to make sure that contingency planning is something that: • Takes place outside the normal board meetings, where everyone has the space to think a little harder about the what-ifs • That, after considering lots of options you try to focus on as few contingencies as possible: two is good! • One of these contingencies should, as far as possible, only rely on events and progress the company can, as far as possible, control directly So you can see why I believe that sometimes entrepreneurs have deficiencies in planning, and VC’s can suffer from deficiencies of focus!

Connecting Yorkshire

I very much enjoyed spending most of yesterday at the Connect Yorkshire investment forum. Over the years I think I’ve been to nearly all these conferences; they’re a great way of seeing some of the companies that are around, and in bringing the technology community into one place too.

I suspect that Nick Butler and Glen Hopkinson who lead the team at Connect Yorkshire don’t have the easiest of tasks; but they do a great job of making it look easy! They have to screen lots of potential companies to select and coach/cajoale/coax those who present towards the best way of pitching their proposals. Today the companies represented ranged from a device to detect leaks, to a cancer drug targeting technology.

As usual you could rely on the Connect process to have helped the presenters make their proposals clear and reasonably thought out, whatever one thinks of their individual commercial prospects.

I tried to talk to as many of the presenting companies as I could; whether or not I was interested in them as a potential investee. This is really important to me; I find I can learn so much from these people and their intimate knowledge of either technology or market niche, and I think that in return I owe it to them to be as frank as possible about what I think lies ahead for them. As usual, the reaction to the feedback varied from the heatedly defensive, to the open and constructive, which tells you something else about how that team would be post-investment!

The format of all these kinds of events still doesn’t seem quite right to me; somehow the idea that someone stands at the front for half and hour and tells you about their business and its plans is a very one-way process, and there is a tendency for the candidates to want to talk far more about their plans, which after all are pretty fluid, than they do about their product and market opportunity/competition. I’ve suggested to Glen that something like a IRC backchannel might be the way to go, but you might need some house rules about only asking questions. Given the UK hasn’t adopted the laptops-in-sessions culture to the extent that the US has, you might need some kind of SMS based thing…?

P.S. I found this interesting commentary about backchannels on Techcrunch

Nick and Glen were also busy promoting www.mydealmaker.co.uk: their initiative to bring the community together between their events. Those involved in forming, managing and funding technology companies always benefit from becoming more of a community and learning from each other. Bringing people together on the internet has proved to be an amazingly powerful way of breathing life into specialist communities elsewhere and I really hope that Glen’s initiative can do the same for this group.

Over the years I suspect we’ve backed more teams that we first met at Connect than anyone. On this occasion I had the opportunity to meet again a company I was introduced to a little while ago, which I think has some of the characteristics to develop really well. Hopefully I’ll learn over the next few weeks if we can work with the team to develop a really exciting business with them.

Project Sahara

shadow train
Originally uploaded by bendylan

Lee Strafford and friends have established project Sahara and thenetstart with the aim of establishing a community of internet companies across the North of England. It meshes with initiatives such as dotnorth.org which have compatible aims in this area.

What Lee evangelises, and rightly so, is that the most successful internet companies in the UK were those that sprung up in the North of England: he's therefore brought together some of the leading players in those companies to build a repeatable model around this opportunity.

I admire Lee's energy, and am hopeful that his experience and track record will help bring the various parties together to create a set of really exciting new enterprises; this may be challenging but it's surely a challenge worth serious pursuit.

In our own small way I think we could claim to have been the most active investor in this sector across the North in recent years, and we're looking to do more in future. I think we'd suggest that the problems Lee is addressing are important and prevalent. Most start-ups in this sector do have the feeling of being "on their own", and they'd benefit greatly from being part of a community in many different ways. The powerpoint embedded below gives more detail on the problems the project is addressing and what is being built.

I'm keen to see the project grow and succeed. There seems to be a growing momentum behind the initiative and I'll be keen to contribute where I can. In recent months Mashup, GeekUp, Opencoffee and now Project Sahara and DotNorth have exposed the size of the pool of both entrepreneurs and technical experts interested in this area of activity, and I'm looking forward to seeing us play our role as an active early-stage investor to help nurture the companies that will surely emerge.

Enterprise 2.0 - some great posts on the beauty of edge-in adoption

Nic Brisbourne at Esprit has put together a really concise post about the market entry strategy of Enterprise 2.0 companies. I totally agree with his premise and have thought it's one of the most exciting opportunities in the current arena. Maybe I've just missed it, but I'd really like to see a great example of this having worked. Please point me to any great examples, excepting perhaps Salesforce.com, which seems to be used as an exemplar for every enterprise software strategy in the last five years!

Littlewoods Subsidiary adopts Blue Prism Technology

Everyday Financial Solutions, a subsidiary of Littlewoods Shop Direct Group is to deliver business efficiency improvements with Blue Prism Automate.

It's great to see another endorsement for Blue Prism's technology- well done Alastair, David and the team!