Toronto Entrepreneur

If a startup has more than 1 founder, it needs an office. It needs a place with a short commute, where you can talk (not scream). You obviously need comfortable furniture with free reliable wireless internet. The place should also allow for cell-phone reception. And finally you need somewhere that you can spend long hours, without having to constantly buy something (like a coffee shop).  In Toronto’s case specifically, since it’s so damn cold, you’d really want to be near the subway station. If that matches your needs, then read on, because we have found this place in Toronto.

We have had several offices in the past year. We started off at one of my partner’s apartment and after about 1-2 months, and not really having comfortable furniture we decided to move the operation. My other partner’s parents had kindly accepted to give us one of their rooms in their basement. We worked there for another 2-3 months but the basement had several problems. The commute was long, we had a tiny little window and the lighting wasn’t enough. The cell-phone reception wasn’t that great either. We finally decided to move the operation once again and this time we found the right place. North York reference library, 4th floor.

The reference library is fantastic for many reasons. They have good furniture (if the chairs were more like Yonge & Bloor’s reference library it would be much better). We have an amazingly large window looking out at Mel Lastman square. It’s right out of the subway station and there are several coffee shops, eateries and a food court. You’ll never have to step into the cold if you want something. I strongly recommend Cafe Supreme (they have great, healthy food for both breakfast and lunch). There are also areas on the 4th floor where you can go and talk. The beauty of those areas is that you can talk but you cannot scream. Yes you will end up screaming many times when you get involved in heated conversations. We literally spend 10 hours every day at the library and we get a lot of work done. Oh by the way you can bring food and/or drinks into the library as well. If you find the location somewhat inconvenient or you rather sacrifice the view for better chairs, then I’d recommend the Yonge & Bloor reference library.

One quick note. You’ll notice that I have added several buttons to each post, which allows you to share them through your favorite bookmarking or social networking channels. Please kindly share them, so that more people can give me feedback. More feedback will really help me get better at writing what you’d care for.

Yours truly,

Rokham Fard

I’ve been involved in the Toronto startup community and I’ve realized just like any other profession, entrepreneurs should be connected with each other. It’s fundamental for entrepreneurs to see beyond their own projects and ambitions and see what other entrepreneurs are spending their time and efforts on around the world.

I’ve made it my mission to get connected to entrepreneurs across the world and I’m calling out for your help. Whether you’re an entrepreneur yourself, or you work for one, or even if you know someone who is an entrepreneur, please kindly leave either their name, twitter, blog, or facebook etc. account for me as a comment so that I could connect with them.

I am hoping not only will I be connected to these great people all over the world but perhaps I could be a connecting point where many of them would meet each other. So please be kind and do me 2 huge favors:

1. Leave the info of any entrepreneurs you know as a comment.

2. Forward this post through your channels so that I could find more like-minded people.

Your help is much appreciated.

Rokham Fard

If you’re in an academic environment, you probably have wondered from time to time whether more IQ would help you along the way. It obviously depends a lot on the discipline you’re in but there are many cases where you’re right and having a higher IQ would help. A startup is different.

Having a better IQ will definitely help in a startup and is crucial if your startup relies on sophisticated algorithms such as Idee, a Toronto based startup which specializes in image recognition. Idee has recently come up with TinEye, a search engine for images online. Not every startup’s technology is as sophisticated as Idee’s though and technically speaking, you can get smarter over time but you cannot really increase your IQ. Increase your EQ instead.

I believe if you’re starting a startup, having a better EQ over an IQ will really go a longer way. Understanding social relations and being able to connect to people will really take you a long way in the startup world. Being able to think on your feet, will help you take long leaps. Those who can think well on their feet can close a deal a lot better and convince someone to join their team a lot easier. I have just started reading How to win friends and influence people but this book has been recommended to me by over 5 people and it definitely is a fantastic start to getting better at social relations. You can increase your EQ.

The beauty of EQ is that you can definitely increase it over time. If you like to increase your EQ, try to be more sociable and make this a mission for yourself. Every time you find someone new and interesting try to figure out their strengths and make sure when you walk away from them you can at least name one thing that they could be really good at. More importantly keep in touch with people who impress you and try to get to know them better. I am against keeping in touch with someone who might be of some use to you at some point in your life. I think there are enough interesting people out there that you can find people who are actually someone you’d like to be around, so try to keep them close. Remember every social interaction you have, is an opportunity to build a relationship and increase your EQ so target your efforts towards your goal. Email, tweet, status update on facebook, photo update on flickr, blog post, comment on a blog post are all various forms of social interaction these days. Never lose sight of your objective and use these tools to reach your goals.

Be the dumbest person in the circle of your friends. You definitely aren’t dumb, but you don’t want to be the smartest person in your circles of friends. Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you and learn from them. Don’t hate, appreciate. It’s not always that easy to be surrounded by people who are smarter than you. You might feel inferior and not up to par with them. A trick that I have learned over time to make myself interesting to the rest of the people is to learn something from one friend and apply my learnings to another friend. When people see you do something that impresses them, they usually associate that quality to you and therefore you look smart to them. And the beauty of this exercise is that you’re not immitating anyone, you actually have learned that skill. Having older friends is usually very helpful as well.

If you have an older friend or sibling, try to spend more time with them. Try to be part of their circle of friends. You can learn a lot from their mistakes and if they’re kind enough, they can give you a lot of priceless advise. Let them know what you’re planning to do and ask for their advise. People in this country are dying to give you their opinion and if you listen hard enough, you can learn good pointers. Don’t forget though, whichever of the above approaches you take, never lose sight of your objective; starting the next big Canadian startup

Yours truly,

Rokham Fard

Research is a great way to get started with anything. But the real question is when do you research and more importantly how long do you research. Coming from UofT has really framed my thinking academically. Like everything else, being academic has its pros and cons. But for a startup you cannot be too academic and you need to mix that with enough agility. You need to realize research never ends unless you end it and get to do some real work. Research can really daunt you in any stage of your startup. You might spend too much time figuring out what features should go into your product. You might end up spending way to much time in the design, or perfecting the business plan or even in your implementation. I was having a conversation with some friends tonight on whether J2EE is better or PHP for developing a social networking web-application. My answer was PHP simply because it’s more agile and therefore it suits a startup environment better.

Having an academic background can constantly force you to feel insecure as if you haven’t done enough research but the nature of a startup is so that you cannot purely approach it academically. A tech startup is all about building stuff, putting it out there, getting user feedback and building upon those feedbacks. You basically have to accept that you will make mistakes and you will learn not to make them again. You cannot avoid many of those mistakes by simply doing more research. I recently watched a presentation by Dharmesh Shah which he gave at Business of Software, and he said “if you’re not ashamed of your first release that means you waited too long.” The presentation was really great and I think if you’re interested enough to read so far of this post, you should definitely watch it. The point is that you will make mistakes and why not make them earlier than later. Your early adopters are usually forgiving enough.

So make sure you start with research but don’t get stuck in the details because as I said in one of my previous posts the devil is in the details. Once you figure out the skeleton of what’s next on your agenda, then go ahead and bring it to life. You can iterate over it later and make it better. Us entrepreneurs tend to get tired of research after a while and it sort of slows down our motivation. We’re all about getting things checked off the list and making them work better and better.

Yours truly,

Rokham Fard

Many people believe sharing your idea with people will result in great feedback and no one is out there to steal your idea. WRONG! They promote that thought in university courses and there are people who evangelize this. Sharing is great but you have to choose who you share your idea with. Sure many people are not out there to steal your idea, but there is one or two people. Also maybe someone will tell your idea to someone else and they might find it interesting and take it away from you.

So I’m going to tell you a real story that our startup went through to show you what I mean. In this story I will keep the person and the company involved anonymous for privacy reasons. So we were at a specific stage of our startup that we needed to hire a contractor to do a little piece of our work. The project was literally a 2 week project and required a certain skill that we didn’t have. So we started putting out ads and asking around among “friends”. Finally a “friend” who I’d known for about 3 years and I knew had the skills came through. I was very happy about that person because the nature of the project was so that we were forced to expose a lot of our business to them. So we ran my friend through the idea of our project briefly. We needed to get some work done before we were able to outsource the little piece to my friend. So things didn’t work as scheduled on our end and we missed our deadline by two weeks. I called my friend and asked if we could meet up to go through the details of the project and start working on it. My friend had accepted a position at a startup by then and was unable to take on the project. I wasn’t told about the company or what the company did.

We, just like any other startup were constantly keeping an eye on our competition and one day a little google alert appeared in my gmail account. It was a job posting by one of our competitors, which I’m not going to name. What really grabbed my attention was the URL the job was posted at. It was on UofT’s job forum (which I was familiar with), so I clicked the link and read the job posting. At the end of the posting I came across a user name which was very familiar to me. The user name was part of the email of my “friend”. I couldn’t believe my eyes. So I double checked the email and I was right. But that wasn’t enough proof so I had to log into my student account at UofT (my user name was g6camus after my favourite writer Albert Camus — If you are looking for one of the best existential novels of twentieth century, check out The Fall) and `finger` that user name. Guess who? Yes it was my “friend”.

I was really shocked. My friend knew what our project was about and was supposed to work on it with us. Now my friend was on the opposite team? That was a scary moment. So I did some further investigation and realized that my friend was part of a startup which is funded by the same company, funding our competition. Scary enough if you ask me.

So lesson learned is that if “friends” or people you know can do things like that, believe me there are strangers who would do worse. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share your idea with anyone because that is plain wrong and will not let you grow. You just need to be careful whom you share your idea with. Share it with those who have a high potential of being useful in your company. They at least might worth the risk.

Yours truly,

Rokhm Fard