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. “

Well, James and I head back to Vancouver tomorrow, after 2 days in Banff, and one day in Calgary.

The Banff Venture Forum was definitely a worthwhile event. I got to connect with many different people, from entrepreneurs to VCs to government representatives. I also got to review a ton of different investment pitches, taking notes for working on our own pitches.

I worked with James at AdHack to tune the presentation: we ripped it apart and put it back to together last week, with an excellent graphical upgrade from AdHack Community Manager, Corey Rollins (check out the WTF is AdHack video for another Corey production). But, at the end of the day, James went off by himself, prepped, and then stood up on stage and spent 12 minutes telling the story of AdHack, and (in my opinion) — knocked it out of the park. Congrats, James!

(Sandra captured most of the pitch on video, so I hope that we can link to a copy soon.)

After a great closing keynote by Terry Matthews, Calgary Technologies Inc put on an entrepreneur “unwind”. I invited Terry to join us, but he was a bit busy — he did have great things to say about Todd Tessier, Director of the Investment Capital Branch and BC Renaissance Capital Fund. At the unwind, I spent quite a bit of time finding out more about the non-profit CTI program and people, and how they support startups of all kinds in Calgary. I’m looking forward to connecting the west by working more with them.

Kudos to Nicola Burdeniuk, Associate Executive Director, and the entire rest of the Banff Venture Forum team. You put on a great event and I look forward to attending next year, hopefully with a larger contingent of delegates of all kinds from BC.

Strutta launched the first real customer on it’s new platform yesterday.  I’m saying “real” because we did run the Launch Party contest on it last week, but it was sort of an inside job since we also organize Launch Party.

Check it out, enter to win Free Pizza for a year, and let us know what you think.  Oh, and especially let Maura know if you want us to make something like this for you.

Win Free Pizza for a Year!

I’m here in Banff, at the Banff Venture Forum 2008. I’m here with James from AdHack, who is presenting at 2:45pm on Thursday. We’ve got the AdHack booth set up at #14, and already had a great discussion with Kevin Dahl from Calgary Technologies, Inc.- a non profit that helps grow the Calgary technology ecosystem. Sounds like a great partner for Bootup (and I’m going to hit the Vancouver municipality over the head with your example) - we’ll be trying to make some cross pollination happen.

Update: a few one liners around some of the companies and presentations I saw during the forum. Look at Rob’s great coverage on Techvibes for a more in depth write up of each company.

In any case, for the next 2 days, we’ll be hearing 12 minute pitches from the following companies in the IT Stream:

• StandOut Jobs
  - social media upgrade your careers page. I’m going to talk to Ben to see if we can maybe use Standout Jobs to connect around startup jobs and co-founder searches somewhere on Bootup. Regardless, a good solution that’s getting even more interesting
• Shopster.com
  - good solution for super charging
• Myotis Wireless (placeholder page, no website yet?) - funny comment was “we have no one under 40″; has real tech around very low power radios, and cuts through interference
• Semanti Corp. - toolbar powered semantic search upgrade on top of Google results
• Business Infusions Inc.
  - practice management software for veterinarians
• Reflex Photonics Inc.
• VoIPshield Systems Inc. - security solutions around VoIP systems
• WideSail Technologies Inc. - sells digital chip designs that increase range and/or throughput using new error correction techniques - excellent quote is “when I make a sale, I send an email”
• Flixel Technologies Inc.
• Psyko Audio Labs Inc. - positional audio, initially for gamers
• Mingleverse Laboratories Inc. - stealth! out of Vancouver, interesting plan with audio, also related to positioning. More general usage with web-delivered audio conferencing and virtual rooms. Pretty much have to demo for it to make sense until they come out of stealth
• Akoha - Austin Hill’s new startup, labeled as “casual gaming”, but has lots of real world interaction through physical cards and missions. I went for dinner with Austin and have a bunch of Akoha mission decks that I’ll schedule a meetup around.
• MoboVivo Inc.
• Tribal Nova - kids gaming, lots of licensed content like Curious George, etc.
• Ph03nix New Media Inc. - casual gaming, deal with Big Fish Games, and new virtual world concept with education plus gaming on a hip hop theme.

I’ll be coming back to this post to flesh out some one-liners about what each company does, and link to any longer posts or comments from my myself and others.

Well, James and I arrived in Banff. We left early this morning from Vancouver and drove out. It was a long day, but was actually a great opportunity to talk strategy and different ideas around AdHack without interruptions.

We checked into our hotel, and then managed to connect with Sandra MacDonald for dinner at the Rose & Crown. Sandra and Mic are working with the Sun Startup Essentials Canada program and are talking to startups across the country. They’ve got a temporary blog up, I’m hoping to see it integrated directly into the SSE Canada landing page  — where’s the RSS feed icon on that page! (that’s a hint in the direction of Sun folks…)

I was probably a little rant-y at dinner with Sandra over what I would LOVE to see Sun do: they feel like my old company Nortel - great engineers, really bad marketing, really bad at explaining / showing their value to the people that want to love them. Write me up some real world solutions / architectures around dtrace, OpenSolaris, ZFS, containers, etc. etc. - if you’re long on engineers, let’s see bi-weekly “solution” blog posts - either cool tech you want to talk about, or responses to questions on how to solve problems real startups are having. From my blog ranting we digressed into talking about how startups don’t really buy servers - they buy hosting. Hmmm, those Amazon Web Services credits sound more interesting, now…

Anyway, as I said before, it’s great that Sun has connected with such great people, I’m interested to see the stories they discover.

I’m going to be Twittering a few reactions to other companies in the IT Stream (Life Sciences and Cleantech are also presenting here in Banff). I’ll be using the #bvf08 tag, looks like a few other people using Twitter as well. More on the other companies in another post.

The day after tomorrow, James from AdHack and I will be heading up to the Banff Venture Forum. We’re both foodies, so our trip planning amounts to departure time wrangling so we can make it to Trufflepigs in Field, BC for lunch

AdHack is presenting in the IT Stream, plus will be present on the floor with a booth. I’ll be lending a hand at the booth and getting to know the other companies. I also hope to catch up with Brad Feld of Foundry Group aka Brad of TechStars that my last post was about: he’s the keynote speaker for the IT Stream.

Sandra MacDonald and Michal Berman will also be in town, representing the Sun Startup Essentials Canada program — which launched at the beginning of the year at Launch Party. I think we’ll do an ad hoc dinner in Banff at some point, watch Twitter* and/or blog postings here for updates.

After Banff, James and I will be spending the weekend in Calgary and have a couple of meetings booked already. I have an email out to the STIRR Canada folks to maybe help get the word out about a Calgary Tech Entrepreneur Meetup on Saturday night. For now, here’s a placeholder Upcoming event. Please sign up and let us know you’re interested, as well as suggesting a venue for Saturday, October 5th in Calgary.

*I’m using #bfv08 as my tag for the event. Watch Twemes to just monitor those postings.

TechStars is the incubator that we feel philosophically most aligned with. Their successes don’t hurt, either Danny is down in the Valley right now, and attended their Demo Day. Here’s Vator.TV interviewing Brad Feld about the TechStars model.

Danny actually spoke with David Cohen of TechStars a couple of weeks ago. One of the really interesting pieces of information was that 50% of founders / companies decide to stay in Boulder after the program is over. 50% of companies staying and running companies in a city?! Sounds like pretty fantastic numbers.

In other news, we’re putting together the details around a Canadians in the Valley event — if you’re interested, sign up for that Upcoming link and we’ll update the details as we figure it out. Dana Oshiro and Rebecca Reeve are Canadian ex-pats that were going to take Danny and I for beer when we went down for the Plug & Play event, and of course we decided to turn that into something a little bigger. Thanks Dana and Rebecca for playing along so far.