Archive for the ‘business’ Category
Looking for start-up founders / Recherche des entrepreneurs
September 19th, 2007
Je suis en train d’écrire un article sur les startups au Québec et je recherche des fondateurs désirant être interviewé. C’est une excellente chance pour vous de faire la promotion de votre compagnie, peu importe le statut de celle-ci (ex. : more « stealth » ou en roulement). Si tout va comme prévu, l’article sera mis sur un site ayant beaucoup de visibilité.
Si vous êtes intéressé, contactez-moi (denis@quebecvalley.com) et je vous enverrais un questionnaire à remplir. Veuillez noter que les réponses devront être en français.
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I am writing an article about startups in Quebec and I’m looking for founders willing to be interviewed. This will be a great chance for you to promote your company regardless of its current stage (i.e. stealth or running). If everything goes as planned, the article will be posted on a site having a lot of visibility.
If you are interested, please email me (denis@quebecvalley.com) and I will send you a small questionnaire. Please note that the answers must be in French.
Posted in Quebec, Startups, business | Comments (3)
The story of Plenty Of Fish
September 13th, 2007
I already mentioned about the founder of Plenty Of Fish and I wanted to point the readers to a very interesting story.
Markus Frind is basically a one man company and earns from 5M$ to 10M$ per year running his web site. Very inspirational and motivating story.
Posted in Startups, business, ideas, internet | Comments (0)
Praized raised some
September 12th, 2007
Praized.com, started by Sébastien Provencher, Sylvain Carle et Harry Wakefield received 1M$ funding from Garage today.
Good luck guys and keep up the good work!
Posted in Montreal, Startups, Venture capital, business, internet, investissement | Comments (0)
Ready for a GeekShop?
September 12th, 2007
There were a few posts recently regarding incubators. This made me think a little but and I think there is a market for a “shared start-up business center”. If you read Guy Kawasaki’s blog recently then you probably know about TechShop, a place where people can subscribe (pretty much like a gym) and use heavy machinery and tools.
Traditional business centers already exist, but they are mostly equipped with basic amenities such as conference rooms, copiers, faxes and so on. Basic stuff and nothing very impressive. A geek-ish business center could have much more such as a shared small scale data center where you could “borrow” space on an existing server until your project is ready for prime time. Having a limited number of businesses could result in decent performances compared to an overcrowded shared hosting provider.
Having multiple of those geek-ish business centers would also allow redundancy and geographical load balance thus allowing users to benefit from a heavy duty data center at a very low cost. Try getting this from your current hosting company…
On the HR side, there could be many beneficial services such as accountants, lawyers, marketing gurus, programmers, designers and other freelance people. These resources could be available on a contract basis or be included as part of the regular package. Of course, VC folks would be very interested in following those new start-ups and I believe that high quality start-ups would come out of this machine.
Basically incubator meets business centers. This could allow people with ideas to come in, “add some water” and voila!
There are some incubators and similar services around here but none of them offer the equivalent of what TechShop offers.
Posted in Incubator, Montreal, Startups, Venture capital, business | Comments (0)
Internet for Small businesses
September 12th, 2007
The Videotron debate made me think about what I should do with my current provider and I thought it would be interesting to switch to a business account and host my projects at home. After all, even larger sites like plentyoffish.com used to do so (BTW, very interesting story here). While I don’t have a data center in my garage, I could surely put some servers there and it would be a nice way to kick starts my project (for a relatively low cost). I have plenty of computer parts to make something decent. This fits perfectly with my 1000$ start-up goal.
However, after talking with Videotron, it appears that even business accounts are very limited. Yes you can host pretty much any type of server you want, but bandwidth stays the same. This means you run all those services on the 800-900kbps stream. Wow, no way I told myself. I’m not Google but I know I need a bit more than that. The sales guy was quick enough to offer me a T1 but I kindly refused his overpriced under performing offering. BTW, anyone still using T1’s ??
So I went to Bell, even though some people have had bad experiences (oh, really?). There, after waiting for a few minutes and getting the wrong department for a few times (how hard is it for “Emily – the automated assistant” to understand “business internet connection” anyways?) I was told that there was no coverage since I was in a rural area and dial-up was my only choice. “Rural??” I told him. I’m a few minutes from downtown Montreal and I can see the phone junction box if I look outside so I should be able to get wire speed on your DSL. I even got the Bell Optimax flyer in my mailbox a few months ago when they installed fiber optic all over my street. That’s when I found out that he probably didn’t know that the 514 area code was Montreal and that he couldn’t care less about me. He was anxious to get the next call as some fish wanted to join the beaver team. *Sigh* Poor Sympatico users… I now feel your pain…!
Next I found Openface. They offer shdsl (up to 9MBps up AND downstream). While very interesting, it is limited to downtown so once again, I was out of luck.
SO… here goes my question to you all and I hope someone somewhere has an answer for me. What are the options for small business on the Montreal Island? Not everyone is hosting/co-locating in a data center! Are there any SDSL providers out there?
PS: If you’re an ISP, please contact me. I have money to give you! I want to be a customer! But I need a decent upload speed.
Posted in Bell, Startups, Videotron, business, internet | Comments (2)
Micro financing in Montreal..?
September 10th, 2007
MontrealTechWatch has a great post regarding Angel financing in Montreal. I spoke to a VC analyst some time ago and it’s true that VC’s want to invest as much money as possible in as little projects as possible. It only makes sense to them. If you have $100M then you’d want to minimize the workload by investing 1M$ in 100 projects. It’s sad to say but you don’t want to invest $100K in 1000 projects. That wouldn’t be efficient at all and I must confess that I agree with them on that point. Investing in too many projects require more resources to monitor those projects and it lowers any potential gains they can make over time.
I guess this is something WE do all the time in a way. In order words, why bother putting a little bit of money in many bank accounts when we can put all our money in a few accounts that have different risk levels as long as our overall risk level is acceptable..? I don’t think anyone would feel very excited about having to deal with a dozen of so bank accounts. That would be way too much work. In that way, same goes with VC’s.
With that in mind, I also agree with Heri on the fact that some people don’t need a lot of money. I, for instance, am working on a project where I don’t need a full scale datacenter to support my project. Of course, if you give me $2M then I might re-think my wish-list but I don’t need that much money, at least not for the first year or so. But on the other side, I could use a few $10K’s to pay for a full time programmer, an artist, etc.
So what to do? Garage’s idea about a seed fund is nice. Put some money in a high risk, high reward fund. Let a college graduate (tech-savvy and low paid) manage it. A one or two million dollar fund could go quite far especially if there is a $100K investment limit. I don’t know about you but I could do a LOT of things with that much money and I’m not talking about buying Aeron chairs.
Other than “micro-financing”, I believe that an incubator would be welcomed as long as they don’t get too much participation in return of a small investment. Y Combinator, for example, received bad critics for getting a too big participation while bringing-in little value. While I don’t want to bring the eternal issue of participation and % of shares, it’s often better to have a little piece of something big than a big piece of nothing. Small companies often have the same needs as larger ones do. No one is an Internet marketing, accounting, HR guru and getting some help/coaching through an incubator is a nice thing.
Posted in Incubator, Startups, Venture capital, business, investissement | Comments (1)
