Toronto Entrepreneur

Tangible work is your fuel to get through the hard times at a startup. If you’re a handy man you mostly work on tangible things at your work. If you are a philosopher or a theoretician, you probably work on concepts and ideas most of the time. But at the early stages of a tech startup you need to do both and you need to do them well. But what you have to keep in mind is that you need a regular dose of tangible duties in your work. That’s because in the early stages of the startup the only reward you get are those tangible tasks. You may not have a full product, and therefore no users. If you’re looking for investors and haven’t found any money, you have no money either. See there’s no rewards but those tangibles. So include them in your work diet.

Some good tangible tasks can include writing code, making connections at events, work on your presentation slides (if you’re looking seeking investment), start a blog about your company, tweet either about your company or even better, about the industry you’re in. Show people that you really care about what you’re doing. These tasks really help you feel rewarded and therefore you have some fuel to move forward. When people see you care, then they’ll care about you. Don’t forget though that coming up with strategies for various parts of your startup are very important and you should strategize well in order to succeed.

Have fun at work. You and your partners and your employees (if you have any) should feel excited about coming to work every single day. You know that excitement that corporate victims have on Friday afternoons for the day to end? That’s what I’m talking about. You may have to give up an hour of work for fun everyday but all the other 14 hours are going to be much more productive. Never forget that in a startup all you have is each other and people should energize one another. Make an everyday effort to make someone’s day. Buy people chocolate or their morning coffee. Fix that annoying bug and tell everyone the good news. Come up with fun, creative games (like chair hockey during Netscape’s startup days). If it’s a really cold and snowy day, and everyone is a bit down, get everyone together and go skiing for the day. Think of your startup as your baby. Wouldn’t you always try to have fun with the baby while you’d also make sure he was doing his homework?

Stay focused on what you’re doing now. Being in a startup really means doing 15 things at a time and these things aren’t fix bugs 1-15. That’s just one of those 15 things labled “fix the bloody bugs :)”. You should be organized but you should stay focused. You cannot think of all the things at the same time and do them well. Working on all these things is the fun part of being in a startup because you don’t do the same thing everyday. Startups are very exciting and excitement needs effort. A good party doesn’t just happen on its own. It requires a good amount of effort but it’s damn worth it. You see, us entrepreneurs have a tendency to measure our performance over short intervals of time. We ask ourselves what did I get done today? And we tend to value a task that is complete more than several half completed tasks. That’s just how we think, so stay focused to get tasks done. Then move onto the next task. And by the way that doens’t mean you’re not multi-tasking.

Yours truly,

Rokham Fard

In my previous post Pre-startup education part 1/2 I talked about educating yourself about the startup world by finding the right classes at your university as well as following good and relavant blogs in your field. In this post my goal is to point out some of Toronto’s startup events which have truly helped build our startup community as well as their importance in the community. I will also mention the use of some well known social networking tools and how you can leverage them.

Toronto can now claim that it has had a startup community for a couple of years. Being a part of these communities is crucial for your startup. You build very good connections, you will expand your thought frame, get to know about other great startups in your city/country and of course you may want to motivate others to join the community. This blog for example is a result of my interest to share my experience with all those who are thinking of starting their startup (specially those who are close to graduation) and don’t know enough of the startup world. I would like to make their life a little easier by helping them avoid the mistakes I made.

There are several great events that happen regularly in Toronto. First there are the local collaborative style events such as TorCamp, BarCamp, StartupCamp, ProductCamp and DemoCamp. These events are very engaging and really make you feel at home while you learn plenty of great stuff. The format is always as follows except for DemoCamp and StartupCamp: the day is divided to around 6 one-hour time slots. For every time slot there are 3-4 rooms available and each person attending the event can write a topic of their interest on a piece of paper and put it in one of the available slots. Then whomever is interested will attend whichever event they’d like. Now if you fill a slot with your great idea, it doesn’t mean that you have to give a lecture or anything, you just have to kick-start the conversation and bring up questions you might need answers for. Great group dynamics and you really learn from others experiences in these sessions. DemoCamp and StartupCamp are slightly different in that 5-8 teams are chosen to either demo their product or to showcase their new startup respectively. These are great events where you can learn from others experiences and you get introduced to new ideas/tools and of course people.

Then there are the more formal 1 or 2 day conference like events such as StartupEmpire which was held on November 13, 2008 in Toronto and of course the annual Mesh conference. These are more conference style get togethers and you’ll meet peoeple from various industries and positions. You’ll hear many great talks whether it is by angel investors, VCs, other successful startups or the CEO of craigs list. These are yet another great way to connect to people. You can still either purchase tickets for the upcoming Mesh conference or if you’re a student, you might be able to send them an email and see if you can volunteer for them. That way the event is free for you but you’ll have to help out a bit.

Now that you’re a participant in the community you should also take advantage of the great social networking tools that others have built so far. The two examples I’d like to point out are Linkedin and Twitter. Linkedin is a great way to build your professional network. Try to keep your resume updated and try to expand your community. This can really open your eyes in terms of the industry you’re in and the stuff you might be interested in. And twitter might seem like a not so very smart idea at first but believe me you learn a lot of interesting nuggets of information as you build your community on there. Make sure you also contribute your share of knowledge to your twitter community. If you find out about a new startup, event or anything else that you find useful, share it and people slowly will follow you. The better the content you provide the more people would want to know what you have to say, so be smart about what you share.

Yours truly,

Rokham