My feeling is that VC’s tend to wait for the deal of the century in order to throw in as much money as possible in order to get a large part of the pie. While this might work for some industries (Pharmaceutics for example), it no longer works with the Internet industry. A few months ago, the BlitzWeekend project proved that a great concept/prototype could be designed and created in less than 48h. Many people were skeptic but in the end, very interesting prototypes were indeed demoed to the attendees and a judge team.

The facts are plain simple:

• We don’t need expensive Sun servers
• We don’t need expensive bandwidth
• We don’t need expensive Oracle databases
• We don’t need expensive phone systems (PBX)
• We don’t need expensive Aeron chairs either

• We only need money to pay salaries.

Of course, that’s exaggerating of course but that’s how cheap it is to start a business nowadays.

Guy Kawasaki spent 20k on Truemors (one of his startup) and I think he paid too much for it. A big chuck of it was on legal fees actually. Being a VC himself, we can’t blame him for not covering that area. He’s probably used to deal with lawyers.

Everything is in the cloud these days. You can host your web servers and your database online. You don’t even need a physical office anymore. Everything is becoming virtual, even assistants! My prediction is that there will soon be toolkits (like Yahoo Pipes but more advanced) to develop your own online business for a low monthly fee. Everything from code to design to marketing will come out of the box. The worse thing? I’m pretty sure someone is working on this as we speak..!

It’s becoming that easy!

Will we see a change in the way VC’s work with Internet companies? Will we see them leave the Internet industry to focus on other larger industries? It remains to be seen but I believe they must adapt or die.

The way I see it, VC’s must become startup centers where you bring your ideas. If you are accepted, then they will match you with other people so you can use their skills (to fulfill your lacks). You will be able to use their network and office space (if needed) for a few months until your product is ready. A super incubator in some way. That would be nice and we would see way more great companies. Maybe not all rock stars like Google, but a lot of damn good companies for sure. If I were a VC, I’d be working on this right now.

Trois-Rivières est stragégiquement placée entre Québec, Montréal et Drummondville ce qui en fait un  endroit stratégique pour une petite entreprise désirant rejoindre un grand marché local.

Trois-Rivières héberge également TimmyOnTime, qui présentera leur produit au prochain DemoCamp à Montéral.

Good luck guys and keep up the good work!

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.

It’s great to hear about this type of news. This makes me wonder why Montreal is such a great place? Not to sound pessimist but I would think that Vancouver or Toronto are better positioned. Is it the hybrid (French-English) culture? Maybe. The cultural diversity? Vancouver and Toronto are probably more “diversified”…

The article also mentions about BarCamps so I’ll take the opportunity to mention about 2 upcoming activities:

BarCampCanada1 is coming up. Please take a look at the official site. Fine folks already registered and I think this will be huge. I hope it won’t be limited to 5 participants and I REALLY hope it will be over a weekend or at least a Saturday.

DemoCampMontreal5 is already packed and will take place on Wednesday, 24 October 2007. 18:30 to 20:30. I guess I missed my chance to demo my current project. Oh well, “you snooze, you lose”.

Étant moi même un “entrepreneur en herbes”, je suis vraiment déçu par cette situation et il serait dommage que plusieurs compagnies Québécoises aient à déménager au sud de la frontière simplement pour se faire remarquer. Dans le monde Internet, l’adresse du siège social importe peu. Je urge donc tout les gens impliqués dans une startup de contacter la FTQ afin de leur faire part de votre mécontentement mais également de votre recherche de fonds, s’il y a lieu. S’ils ne sont pas au courant de ce qui se passe au Québec alors c’est à nous de faire leur travail…