Does your startup need to be massive?

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and investor Howard Lindzon of StockTwits and SocialLeverage. He was born and raised in Toronto and has a soft spot for his hometown and Canadian entrepreneurs. Follow him on Twitter @howardlindzon or StockTwits @howardlindzon.

Some rights reserved Photo by Paul (dex)

In 2008, I was using every speaking chance I was offered to preach that there was never a better time to start a web business. I also put my money where my mouth was and invested in more companies than I could afford and started Stocktwits.

Let’s assume you followed the advice and failed. Most startups do. You were Lindzon’d. Sorry.

Good news…you learned a lot and the funding market, never easy, is more open than ever.

Better yet, the mentoring system and pool of talented angel investors looking to reinvest has never been wider and deeper.

Techmeme, Hacker News, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, LInked In, Twitter, Facebook and of course Stocktwits ….all better than ever for connecting, getting smarter about starting businesses and finding the right trends to ride. Y combinator may be too crowded, but Tech Stars, Founder Labs and Startup Weekends are open.

It is a little intimidating right now to take the first steps because of the bubble talk, startup revolution, competition and massive reach of the last group of leaders. There is not one Tiger Woods of startups, there are 5 you will ultimately stress yourself out comparing yourself too…Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Zynga and Groupon.

Don’t get caught up in the ‘I need to be Massive’ talk. It’s a trap. Take the ‘Massive’ lessons of geniuses like Reid Hoffman from this great post and than get to work on getting massive one step at a time.

The game of Risk and world domination is won from the corners of the world unless you can roll non stop 6?s. Don’t bet on that stuff and don’t pitch your investors on stuff they won’t believe.

Editors Note: This post was originally published on HowardLindzon.com on March 23, 2011 @copy;2011 Howard Lindzon. Republished with permission.

Our newest sponsor: VMFarms

Some rights reserved by Arthur40A

It was at StartupDrinks or the StartupNorth Meetup when I was talking with Christopher and Hany at VMFarms about our hosting woes. StartupNorth.ca had been offline for about 24 hours, and we were in the dark as our previous hosting provider was trying to recover from a disk failure. Now we don’t have particularly complex hosting requirements, but one of the requirements is uptime. We’d like our services to be available to entrepreneurs 24x7x365. Mind you we’re not willing to pay for 99.999% uptime (learn more about high availability). I would have been ecstatic with “three nines” aka 99.9% or 8.76 hours of downtime per year. But we had failed to meet that requirement at we were approaching 99.5% uptime and without a foreseeable solution we could hit “two nines” (99% uptime) if something wasn’t done by us or the hosting provider.

We have been very lucky. We had been able to host StartupNorth.ca on a shared hosting solution that allows us to operate our WordPress installation, StartupNorth.ca, a custom Django application, StartupIndex.ca, and some custom development (stay tuned) built in PHP5 + MySQL + Apache2 for $20/month. Cheap if you compare it to what we could be paying. It worked for a long time but I was in the dark and I couldn’t see a light indicating there would be a path to salvation.

I had met Christopher and Hany a few months before. I personally love the business. In fact, I think I pitch Scott Pelton (@spelton) a similar idea back in the summer of 2010. With Christopher and Hany there is a core team of experienced developer operations and network operations professionals that have cut their chops deploying and supporting high availability leading edge web applications at Avid Life Media (PHP, Rails, Django, etc.). At StartupNorth, we are big proponents of supporting our local ecosystem. We use:

Guestlistapp for our event ticketing,
Freshbooks for invoicing,
WaveAccounting for our accounting system,
Eqentia as a news aggregator.

There was no reason other than cost that we should have our server applications hosted with a non-local provider.

I approached Christopher and Hany with a proposition. The should sponsor StartupNorth, the sponsorship is an in-kind sponsorship. They provide hosting and support on their infrastructure. We add their logo to StartupNorth web site and page footers, plus we give them the opportunity to write a few posts. The posts aren’t meant to be marketing fluff. I’ve ask the VM Farms team to talk about their real-world experiences including:

their experience using different cloud services;
network architecture and application hosting for advanced web & mobile applications (think application server, MongoDB or Hadoop clusters plus relational datastores);
when/how startups should evaluate the different performance vs cost trade-offs in advanced applications (there’s nothing wrong with choosing AWS but when should you look for alternatives)

We are incredibly picky about our sponsors. We are even more picky about the posts and authors we ask to join us. We take our reputation and the commentary we provide about the Canadian startup ecosystem very seriously. We’re hoping that we can help educate entrepreneurs about advanced network infrastructure decisions and the impact these decisions can have on costs, performance and growth. And with the team at VMFarms, we have some partners that are experienced and capable of providing a unique 3rd party view of AWS, Rackspace, GoGrid, Azure, Linode, etc. and traditional hosting environments.

We’ve been on VMFarms for about 30 days now. We have had 2 outages in those 30 days. Both outages have been my fault. Hany and Christopher have been on the ball and responsive to help me diagnose, identify and fix the issues.

Upgrading WordPress 3.1 to 3.1.1 – the Unix user permissions and file access settings I configured on the web directory do not allow the FTP user to write to the web directory. WordPress automatic upgrade requires an FTP user (though we connect using FTP-SSL). I ssh’d to the server, wget the update and “tar -xvzf” to the wordpress directory. This overwrote the .htaccess file and broke the Apache rewrite rules. Resolution time: approximately 15 minutes (because I insisted on doing it myself).
StartupNorth.ca unavailable on April 19, 2011 – turns out we let our DNS registration expire due to an expired credit card. It was identified by 2 users (thank you William and Scott (@scotthom). Hany debugged in about 15 seconds and it required Jevon (@jevon) to renew the DNS registration.

The team at VMFarms have been fantastic. They are helping StartupNorth immensely. I’m really looking forward to some additional discussion about developer operations in startups (should be interesting given my network infrastructure does not yet include VMFarms – we’re github, Heroku and AWS EC2 + S3). I’m wondering what John Philip Green (@johnphilipgreen) uses at CommunityLend, Pete Forde (@peteforde) at BuzzData, Daniel Debow (@ddebow) at Rypple, David Ossip (@dossip) at Dayforce, Chris Sukornyk (@sukornyk) uses at Chango, and Mike McDerment (@MikeMcDerment) at FreshBooks use to host their different application layers.

ExtremeU 2011

Our friends over at Extreme Venture Partners have announced the recruitment for the Summer 2011 Cohort of the Extreme University. We written about the past programs:

The program has historically taken entrepreneurs that need to develop and grow. It has provided them with funding, space, education, access to some of the best entrepreneurs, marketers, business developers and engineers around. While the timeline for success has been different, the companies like Visibli, Uken Games, and Locationary have grown into 3 very strong, very hot Toronto based startups.

The 2011 Program has been updated based on the learnings from the past 2 years. Accepted entrepreneurs get:

Seed capital
Mentorship
Collaborative office space and shared resources
Shared Expertise
Network and Connections

We can argue about if this is fair market value or not, when compared to other seed programs. The Extreme Ventures team is revamping the details of the program. The changes take one of the best programs available and make it even more compelling for eager, resourceful entrepreneurs. It will really redefine incubator programs.

Why do I say that? Well I spent the first 3 months of development at Influitive living in the XtremeLabs space with the 2009 & 2010 cohorts. I chose to bring my startup and cofounders into this environment because it is the best in Toronto. There is an energy, a vibe of entrepreneurship, community, support and shared pain. There are world-class people like Fred Wilson that visit at the invitation of your office mates (thank you William). XtremeLabs and Extreme VP are launching world-class efforts like Hatch Labs with IAC will continue to bring the best in the world through the space. It is a great environment with the best people I have worked with anywhere – looking at you Farhan Thawar (@fnthawar) and Rick Segal (@ricksegal). All entrepreneurs can benefit from just being in the environment.

Who are they looking for?

We fund technology-oriented companies, with a focus on web or mobile-based software, but we are open minded to different ideas. We are looking for smart and fast-moving teams to participate. Typically all members of the two-four person teams will have strong technical abilities. We are looking for founders who have a unique understanding of a real customer problem and an innovative idea for solving that problem.

If you’re a startup looking for my personal favorite shared space and program you should consider applying to ExtremeU.