A lot of people were upset by the mysterious Kevin Curry's post on Techvibes, seeing it as sort of an ad hominem attack on the Vancouver technology community, not to mention a personal jab at some of its better known entrepreneurs. Mostly it reminded me of a joke a former colleague used to make in meetings when poking fun at how big Telco companies operated. He'd say "I'm not here to solve problems; I'm hear to point fingers and assign blame."
But I've been thinking about the issues raised in the article and the ensuing comments and I wonder if we're making this debate far too complicated. Perhaps the answer is more fundamentally to do with the thorny issue of actually defining the technology community and technology companies.
Here's an idea... How about we stop talking about the technology community altogether. In fact, let's even stop talking about technology companies and focus instead on the heart of the matter: the natural evolution of every business from idea, to start-up, to break-even, to glorious profitability. These are the different phases in a company's life in which it needs radically different kinds of support, leadership and, yes, community. The similarities between technology and non-technology businesses in their different life stages far outweigh their differences, but for some reason we've cordoned off tech businesses in the belief that they live and die by their own special set of rules.
Virtually every great company has achieved its success by creating an innovative product, but also by thoroughly understanding and executing on sales and distribution. Innovation can be as simple as making something more cheaply than anyone else, or as complex as creating an entirely new channel for sales. These are very difficult things to do, and historically the tech. community has neglected helping entrepreneurs garner a better understanding of how they're done.
Now you might say that it makes more sense to invest all of your resources in engineering and building a first-rate product than in what comes next. After all, isn't the job of the start-up first and foremost to make something great? Yes it is, but it's misleading to think of the product as being distinct from how it will get to market, and this false distinction contributes to what so many start-ups find themselves doing: running extremely fast only to arrive very quickly at the brick wall that is a product with no distribution. And worse still, no meaningful plan for distribution.
Investors and the technology community as a whole are often equally guilty of encouraging start-ups to defer or ignore anything other than the product, which creates a vicious circle of building things simply for the sake of building them. Which in turn produces a lot of companies and products that probably no-one really wants, needs or cares about. Which in turn provides lots of ammunition to those who like to sit on the sidelines and throw mud.
So perhaps the broken nature of early stage funding for Vancouver technology companies can best be addressed by not thinking of them as "technology companies" with their own special set of rules. Instead they are simply early stage companies that, like every other early stage company that's gone before, need guidance in understanding the different stages they'll have to go through to get from initial concept to commercial success.
Don't get me wrong, I like DemoCamp and Launch Party as much as the next person, and in the past I've even been foolishly critical of DemoCamp for opening the doors to non-tech businesses. But I'd like to see a more inclusive community, which accepts that, first and foremost, we're all in the early stages of building businesses, and our challenges are more to do with the early stage bit than the industries in which we operate.
It seems to me that this approach would do two things: open the doors for a whole heap of support and guidance from outside our own little circle; and silence the critics who see our insular nature as an opportunity to attack.
Dan: have to partly disagree with you - even though every start-up in every industry faces some of the same challenges, really great companies are usually only built if the investors and entrepreneurs deeply understand the industry they are working in. So opening up our technology community to other industries might certainly create some good new insight but I don't think it will create the level of deep industry knowledge we need to build great tech companies - for that we need strong, active an dcompetent technology community
An interesting take - I like the idea of looking at the problem outside of the realm of technology. I also like the idea of looking at the whole of the product, rather than simply the part which is "engineered".
When I was solely a developer, I lived in my little cube and thought "These people don't really know what they're doing". It's one of the reasons I left the engineering world: I had to go find out for myself what I was missing. And it turns out, there's a whole lot more stuff to a great product than code.
The classic "build something and we'll figure it out later" mentality only really works when the people building it are the same as the target market that will ultimately buy the product. In the web world if your target customer isn't a 20-35 male with an undergraduate degree in computing science, you're going to run into some problems.
So how do you avoid this?
Well, for one thing, go learn about product management. I'm not saying hire one, I'm saying go and learn all the other pieces that go into making a great product.
It's no coincidence that BC is having difficulties - the Premier's Technology Council has pointed out for years that BC suffers from a lack of marketing, sales, and product marketing/management experience. We've got great people to build stuff - but we need great people to shape *what* to build, and *why*.
@BW: I think we agree more than we disagree. Really the main point I'm making is that the tech community has been in some ways encouraged to be OK with having very little knowledge about sales and distribution strategies.
So even though investors and entrepreneurs need to have a very deep understanding of their product, if that understanding doesn't include how to get it to market then they're missing equally vital knowledge. And the technology communities that have formed in Vancouver and elsewhere do often behave as if these parts of the business plan don't apply.
It's true that at some point the internet will be such an obvious part of every business, that we stop calling all business that have to do with the Internet, technology companies. For example, is Amazon really an internet company? I think it's more of a strategy than than anything. Amazon is really a book retailer. Their goal is to sell a lot of books, and the Internet is a means to an end. But the fact is that there are no incumbent book retailers that *don't* have the Internet as part of their strategy now. Does that make them Internet companies too? I wouldn't think so, but why not? In general, I agree that the word technology is losing it's meaning.
BUT
There are too numerous differences to mention between starting an Technology Company vs a traditional non-tech company. Everything from the way you structure your corporation in the beginning, to which financing options are available to you, to the type of people you hire is different. Until there is a little more standardization for startups in other industries, we will really only benefit from surrounding ourselves with other people who are facing the same challenges that we do.
@Danny: As with Boris, I do agree with much of what you're saying, but there's also a missed opportunity here. As I see it, many tech start-ups miss out by not considering critical parts of their business plan, specifically sales, marketing and distribution. And very often they believe they don't need to think about these things precisely because they've defined themselves as a "technology company" and they are surrounded exclusively by others who are also NOT thinking about these things.
So I agree that it's important to surround oneself with others facing the same challenges, but the risk is you get a kind of group think happening that stops businesses from really vetting the viability of their plans.
In Bootup Labs I'm sure you're thinking about the importance of brand, marketing, sales and distribution, but I just don't think you can assume that the best insight into these areas of the businesses you incubate will come from technology folks.
Good post DG. Maybe you are right. Having worked in finance and resources, I've seen tech bankers in down times refer to themselves as everything they are not, 'Non-Resource' bankers. When times are good, their specialties become better defined "Consumer Internet", "Wireless" etc. The tech startup land has gone through difficult times. Darwin is testing this sector, just like he has with any other. It's tough starting a business, absolutely. But, it still is tougher to be a technology company than a resource company. Why? The capital is simply not as freely available to fuel the innovation and business development efforts we are so capable of doing. The good news though is that unlike the resource sector, less crap in tech will get financed.
