Thanks to Michael Fergusson and the team at Rude Boy Games for hosting last nights meetup with the team from Wavefront. Wavefront is a non-profit “accelerated commercialization centre” for BC, focusing on wireless and mobile applications and devices.

They came to Gastown to find out more from developers and companies working in mobile here in Vancouver, to tell us more about themselves and the services they offer, and to feed us free beer and pizza.

Michael ran the evening admirably. He had everyone sit in a circle, introduce themselves, their company, their projects, and talk about challenges they were facing around mobile here in BC. We didn’t get very far before some person’s commentary on anything from embracing the web as THE path for mobile development or a discussion on funding realities right now evolved into a discussion by everyone in the room.

I talked a bit about Bootup Labs, a bit about the VCC program (info on BC’s Venture Capital Programs here) that we’re applying for, and a plea for less duplication and more working together on common issues. Things like “HR bootcamp” or a seminar on getting investor ready is not at all specific to mobile startups, and I’d hope that local industry groups work together on co-sponsoring or organizing such events.

Lastly on the funding side of things, I mentioned the JumpStart program from the BlackBerry Partners Fund — this is something to keep an eye on to get started with really early stage. For those that are currently iPhone crazy, getting some investment dollars to focus on BlackBerry might be what it takes for people to look at the platform more closely. I definitely think there are interesting demographics around it, and of course folks are much more guaranteed to have things like data plans.

Back to the discussion, the huge theme was seeing the web as the primary platform for delivery, and anything like device specific applications being a step backwards. There were a handful of Nitobi developers there that in particular esposed this point of view, hence their involvement in the open source Phone Gap project, to make native iPhone apps (and soon, Android) using just web technologies. Parveen Kaler from Smartful Studios – who comes from a game developer / console background where he has dealt with lots of “gatekeeper” companies with much stricter rules and is now building iPhone apps – was the main contrarian: he’s loving Objective C and developing natively for the platform, and his business model fits with the rules in place.

It was great to find out more about Wavefront and the programs they’re currently offering. The item of biggest interest, judging by the crowd, is probably the handset library they are going to build up. They have a couple of G1 Android phones today, and one of them already got lent to the guys from Handi Mobility. I still see a little bit of overlap with, for example, WINBC, but it would be great if Wavefront focused on the developer / technology / direct carrier interactions. I think leading these type of developer-centric gathering events would be a great direction for Wavefront, and hope to see more of them as they get ramped up.

Roger Ehrenberg just wrote a post entitled: “The Pyramid Principle: Venture Investment in a Capital-Efficient World”  I think it’s very much worth reading if you’re as passionate about making Vancouver a world class tech center as we are.

It will require a culture that pushes rapid assessment and admission of mistakes, rewards innovation and compensates heavily for successes that can be broadly applied. Most large venture firms find this activity too time-consuming and capital inefficient to warrant much attention. In the future I believe that getting the base right will be the key to success in the large-scale venture field.

Bootup Labs is the base of the Pyramid.  We live to serve the rest of the Venture Capitalists who don’t feel like changing their model or letting go of their management fees.  Help us, help you.

The PACT event that we attended just had a release from the Trade Commissioners out of the San Francisco office. It looks like some of our feedback — specifically, moving the “Boot Camp” programs of prepping companies for investment and pitches to regional locations in Canada — are going to go ahead. We’ll keep everyone up to date on how this program evolves, it looks like there are definite plans for a similar event April / May 2009.

Thanks Guillaume, Thierry, and the rest of the San Francisco and Palo Alto office teams for putting this event on. We’re looking forward to be involved in the regional Boot Camps as well. Full post of the results / press release after the jump.

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We were all crossing our fingers and holding our breath, hoping that Yaletown would close their new fund in these tough market conditions.  That’s why I was so happy to learn that we can finally exhale!  Yaletown did a first close with $65M and plan to do a second closing to top the fund out at $100M.

Congrats to Steve, Mike, Kirk, and Hans.  But more importantly, I think this is a big win for the Vancouver tech scene in general.  Many funds around town have put themselves in maintenance mode, and angels are in a wait and see pattern, which has all but halted any new innovation in BC.  I’m hoping that Yaletown folks will be acting like kids in a candy store.

My favorite warren buffet quote: “Be fearful when people are greedy, and be greedy when people are fearful.”

Sean from QCDocs is king of the “top 10 lists” on the QCDocs blog. He just posted a wrap up of lessons learned from our PACT conference attendance last week. I still need to do a longer wrap up plus cut and paste the content from my Cover It Live live blogging session from last week, but I’ll add a few comments on Sean’s post here.

As Sean says, Chris Gill from Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs (SVASE) did a great job of running the presentation Bootcamp organized by the Federal government trade commissioners. I think there was consensus that running such a Bootcamp on a regional / provincial level would be ideal: get everyone trained in their home locations, and then do an investment roadshow to Silicon Valley similar to how TechStars, Y-Combinator, and Seed Camp do.

There were lots of connections to be made with Canadian companies from across the country, and we’re still navigating our way through introductions at both the Federal and provincial level. There definitely are resources to lean on, it’s a matter of finding the right ones. To continue those connections, please join the PACT Canada 2008 LinkedIn group so we can stay in touch.

Image by bmann via Flickr

And yes, the Mai Tais were delicious, and *I* think they helped loosen us up for presenting the next day.

To get an investor to agree to that first round of financing, usually all you need is three documents:

1. Slide Deck
2. Executive Summary
3. Financial Projections

Danny and I are still down in San Francisco at the Plug and Play Tech Center, just wrapping things up before we head up to our Canadians in the Valley beer up in the city.

I’m taking a few minutes to catch up on my reading when I came across May Chu’s post on the Clarity Accounting blog - Don’t be afraid to be small. It’s an absolutely great write up of their approach to their business.

Less than 12 hours ago, I received an email sent through our contact form from a potential client who wanted to know more about our company. He wanted to know how long we have been in business and how big our firm is. He noted that our mailing address looked like a small business running out of some one’s apartment. He wanted to know if the business he is dealing with is a big, fail-proof company.

At first I was worried about how best to respond to this inquiry. After all, we are a small company that is run virtually. Everyone who has ever worked on this project has been contracted virtually. In the spirit of being an online accounting software, we conduct our business using as many “online tools” as possible.

Go read the whole post, and also check out the two Seth Godin posts that May references — Small is the new big, from 2005, and his recent post Too small to fail.

May and Dobes are doing a great job with Clarity Accounting, building their business one piece at a time, and I can’t help but think that they will be highly successful. I’ll leave you with another piece of information that I think highlights this:

Recently I found out that a company providing similar services as us burns 6 million dollars a year. I thought to myself, “wow, give me 6 million dollars and I would only spend a fraction of that amount”. In fact, within 1 month of our full launch, the business is already paying its own bills.

Image by akakumo via Flickr

Yeah, that title has probably been overused a lot lately. We have a joke here in the office that pretty much anyone that has a website can now say that they do “cloud computing“. But we *have* been doing a lot of thinking about how hosting and Internet infrastructure will be changing. From the beginning of thinking about Bootup Labs, we also thought that we could support the companies we were working with by helping point them at best practices around scalable web services: from hosted tools to hosting providers.

LayerBoom is Trevor’s baby: it’s tackling problems around next-gen hosting and virtualization that would be THE area that I would have been diving into if Bootup weren’t around. Now I get to have my cake and eat it too, as I peer over Trevor’s shoulder in investigating where all this stuff is going.

To that end, I completely agree with his most recent post on the future of the hosting industry: Hosting Apocalypse. Yep, that does deserve a drumroll and an explosion. I could go into all sorts of Gutenberg printing press analogies etc., but the fact of the matter is that we don’t really know what orders of magnitude changes affect: some businesses are destroyed, but like fireweed after a fire, new opportunities are created. Hmm, kind of sounds like the current economic situation, too.

Other folks covering related ideas include Mark Mayo, who writes about the changing role / skillset of sysadmins. Tim Bray’s Tough Times series covers infrastructure in part. Zero Cloud Lockin is having a good discussion on what does or does not constitute lock in with platforms.

Lastly, the ask. LayerBoom is running a survey asking what people would want from tools to run their own cloud. Trevor will be sharing the results on the blog, trying to get some data to see if the hosting apocalypse concept is real, and how far away it is.

I’ve been watching and reading CNBC, Bloomberg, New York Times, Paul Kedrosky and everything else I can get my eyes on.  And I think I’ve figured it out!!  NOBODY knows what’s going to happen with the economy.  It’s a very unsettling time.  I actually feel like I’m staying up to date with developments of the bailout, the elections and the extreme depth of the problems the world faces as a result, but they’re not providing me with any conclusions.

I do, however, have two fundamental beliefs:

1. The economy will recover at some point (1-5 years)
2. Investors make the most money when they buy low and sell high.

So am I making is this just too simple?  Is the “Buy low and sell high” doctrine just too obvious to really work?  With the dow closing at 9447 today, I think we can all agree, that we’re in a buyers market.  Take Warren Buffet and JP Morgan for example.  A New York Times article, Like J.P. Morgan, Warren E. Buffett Braves a Crisis, calls Warren a “Profitable Patriot”.  The biggest fortunes in the world’s history have been made in times like these. But investors are also human, and fear does often override this basic common sense logic.  The smartest investors are the ones who can put their fears aside, and invest long in companies now, when valuations are low.  By the time these companies are ready for a liquidation event, the markets will have returned.  I still find it very puzzling how some long term investors (like Angels and VCs investing in private startups) make investment decisions based on short term indicators.  Ron Conway is one of the more respected Angel investors, and I take the message that he’s sending out to entrepreneurs as a pragmatic warning of my very point.

“I would tell (entrepreneurs) to keep their day job until they got one year of funding, and if they couldn’t get that, then they’re not meant to start that company right now…. My advice to (start ups that don’t have a year’s worth of money in the bank) would be to raise money by reducing your own spending. If you can’t raise more money, you have to cut costs. And that’s what I’m harping on to my companies.”

Vancouver’s own Lyal Avery had some pretty insightful words to say in the comments:

“With all respect to Mr. Conway, I think it’s dangerous advice to tell people behind startups to “not quit their day job.” In my opinion, economic downturns are the perfect time to get started - the conditions are better than during a boom. Labour is cheap, distractions are minimized, and a lack of over-abundant investment means the business models produced can weather future storms. “