Making Canada SAFE

It has been 9 months since PG announced the YC SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity). The Winter 14 batch included Canadians: Taplytics, Send With Us, Piinpoint, Minuum, Gbatteries and others. (There have been an increasing number of Canadian companies since Chris Golda and Michael Montano headed down in 2008. Maybe there should be a new drinking game: how many Canadian YC companies can you name?). This usually means a trickle down effect of culture, term sheets and deal structure. But I haven’t seen a SAFE used in the wild.

Until now.

Thanks to Aaron and Cobi at  Taplytics, Dan Debow, Jesse Rodgers at Creative Destruction Lab and Tom Houston at Dentons for providing a working draft for Canadian companies of Cap, No Discount SAFE.

I have also seen angel deals using Laberge Weinstein and Cognition LLP that are using the SAFE as the starting points Canadian companies (h/t @ddebow). It seems like we might have a functional alternative to convertible debt.

 

Make your own luck at CIX

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Next week is the Canadian Innovation Exchange. I sit on the Advisory Board and StartupNorth is an Association Partner. We are big fans of the event  and have watched over the past few years as CIX has gone through changes and growth. It continues to evolve both the CIX Top 20 as well as the event. The focus in 2012 is about providing meaningful content and experiences for entrepreneurs. This is a change from the past  where you might argue that the focus was on the investors attending. There is a strong focus on building an amazing event will attract amazing entrepreneurs, which in turn will attract amazing investors. And it the 2012 event looks to be very entrepreneur focused.

Entrepreneur Pricing

One of the bitches about this event used to be the pricing. There is a $199 entrepreneur ticket. Seriously, if you can’t justify the cost versus the opportunity to either see an amazing program or for the chance for random collisions with some of the best investors in the game actively deploying capital in the Canadian ecosystem.

This is your chance to hustle (see my comments about hustling at CVCA). Make your own luck. There will be people that buy products and the people that invest in companies at this event. Make something happen.

I love seeing Switch Video, an audience of VCs and companies that need video to grow their business. Bingo. Good hustle.

Buy a $199 ticket and figure out how to make serendity happen!

Entrepreneur Content

Where to start? Entrepreneur One-on-One with Jevon MacDonald . Sure he sold his company to Salesforce, but you know he started a blog, this blog. Jevon is a great guy. He has helped me with my thinking about startups in Canada, the role of venture capital, and with corporate development. GoInstant was around for a little less than 24 months, but I know that Jevon will be talking about the >5 years of hustle at Firestoker and Dachis Group before GoInstant. It should be a great conversation for founders looking for an understanding of how an amazing overnight deal.

The trade off is that if you go see Jevon, you’ll have to skip How Emerging Companies Can Think, Appear and Act Like they are Bigger then They Are which features Daniel Debow , Michael Hyatt , Yona Shtern and Razor Suleman . This is about how to strategically build a reality distortion field. Should be fun to learn the secrets of these 4 crazy entrepreneurs.

We spend a lot of time focusing on Lean and pre-product/market fit companies. But there are equally difficult questions about culture and growth at scale. There is a panel hosted by Howard Gwin and Derek Smyth with Dan Shimmerman of Varicent and Michael Harris of BlueCat Networks. This should be a good mix for companies that are in the scaling cycle. Given that apparently everything that Howard and Derek touch turns to gold: Varicent, Dayforce, Rypple and they have their hands in others Desire2Learn, Hootsuite, Vision Critical and others.

And there are US VCs. There is Mike Katz from Battery Ventures and Devdutt Yellurkar of Charles River Ventures (who invested in Influitive and Wave Accounting locally) and Alexander Kolicich of Mithril Capital Managment (and I don’t know the intricacies but Mithril is associated with Peter Thiel is associated with  Valar Ventures who invested in ShopLocket).

If you can’t find content that can help you, you’re doing it wrong.

It’s not about the content

Seriously, it’s not about about content. It’s about the hallway conversations. The random collisions. But you need to be there and you need to participate to have the chance for those things to happen. There will be a lot fo interesting folks in Toronto early next week, you should figure out how to have a collision. And make your own luck!

Register to attend CIX 2012

 

Jump into Bin 38: Founder Books

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Anyone remember the Bin 38 debacle? Well this is not anywhere near as interesting. Daniel Debow and a group of startup CEOs had dinner last week. They each shared their must read books for founders. Daniel shared the list on Facebook.

  1. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
  2. The Art Of The Start
  3. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk
  4. Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

  5. Guanxi (The Art of Relationships): Microsoft, China, and Bill Gates’s Plan to Win the Road Ahead
  6. ZAG: The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands
  7. The Difference Between God And Larry Ellison: *God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison
  8. Who: The A Method for Hiring
  9. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
  10. The Sciences of the Artificial
  11. I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59
  12. SPIN Selling
  13. How to Win Friends and Influence People
  14. The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business
  15. The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done
  16. Predictably Irrational Revised And Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
  17. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy
  18. Crossing The Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers
  19. Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs
  20. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
  21. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups that Win
  22. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
  23. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

What books do you think are essential for startup founders to read?

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