David Feldt Proud father. Entrepreneur. Builder. Catalyst. Accelerator. Guide.

Holiday Campaign: Help me raise $1,000 for charity:water

Starting on Friday night, December 11, I'll spend 8 nights lighting candles for Chanukah. Every year, I'm reminded of why these days matter. Because by a miracle, oil enough for one day burned long enough to last eight days. As with our faith, and as with many things in life, a little proved to go a long way.

When I found out that more than a billion people live without clean, safe water every day, I realized Chanukah was the perfect time to start a campaign. A little can go a very long way with water. Just $20 gives someone clean water for twenty years. And just $250 gives two families of six clean water. These are small amounts of cash to us. They are years of life for others.  Donate here!

My goal? I want to raise $1,000 by the time we light the 8th candle on Chanukah. But I need your help. Because of charity: water's innovative new business model, 100% of every donation funds water projects in the developing world, and each project is "proved" using GPS technology and photos and placed on Google Earth.

Together, we'll be able to see what we've accomplished.

Let's make our little go a long way. Donate here!

Happy Holidays!

Best,
David

The Dark Side of Open Data

There has been a lot of positive sentiment recently around the trend of releasing government data to the public. Some prime examples are Washington DC's Apps for Democracy contest and Toronto's OpenTO initiative. The noble intentions are to spark innovation, transparency and discovery.

However, here's a scary tale from the New York Times Magazine's Ninth Annual Year in Ideas highlighting the dark side of Open Data:

Happy Holidays! Time to light up our World!

As we approach the end of another year and the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it is time to celebrate our successes, express our gratitude and share some festive time with our family and friends.

It's also a time to reflect back and examine the challenges and obstacles that were offered to us. Did we learn, adapt, change and evolve? Did we overcome? Were we able to help others on their journey?

As we enter into the dark Winter in the Northern Hemisphere, this is the season of Light (Christmas, Chanukah.) It's our time to light up our World - to spread positivity and joy to our individual and collective networks.

In the Jewish tradition, this Friday night we will light the Chanukia, one additional candle every day for eight days. (Here are some insights into the power of Light.)

Whatever you believe or whatever path you follow, the central theme of "Lighting Up The World" applies.

Please join me in spreading some Light to those of us who are less fortunate by donating a few dollars to Charity:Water as they continue their mission of providing clean drinking water to the 1 Billion people who don't have it.

Happy Holidays to you and yours!

Top 10 Takeaways from Global Entrepreneurship Week

This past week we've witnessed a global celebration of the entrepreneurial spirit.  I haven't slept much all week as I've been busy networking, listening, learning and participating in a whole bunch of events in Ontario --- Entrepreneurship Week in the Waterloo area, the Ivey Venture Forum in Toronto and SproutUp to name a few.

What a magnificent time for entrepreneurship across the globe!

I've been energized and invigorated by the amazing personal stories of discovery, failure, heartache, passion and success of the following people:

• Chris Hughes (cofounder of Facebook, MyBarackObama)
• Ali Asaria (founder of Well.ca)
• Razor Suleman (founder of I Love Rewards)
• Tim Bray (cofounder of Open Text, father of XML and Search)
• Andy Macaulay (founder of Zig)
• Matthew Corrin (founder of Freshii)
• Mitch Wolfe and Emily Rayson (cofounders of bTrendie)

I love looking for patterns and extracting and distilling common themes in life and business and this week certainly has provided much opportunity to do that. Each of the entrepreneurs above come from different backgrounds, different countries and different environments but they all live and breath the following 10 themes:

1. Solving a personal problem in a way that is disruptive and adds meaning to the world - In my opinion, entrepreneurs who are focused on building a solution to a personal problem have a clear advantage over those who aren't . They have personal experience of the problem and they have built-in, natural  authenticity and a personal, passionate story they can use to rally their teams, attract investors and sell into the market. They've experienced something that got under their skin, drove them crazy with frustration and they said, "there must be a better way."

2. Having a global market for the product or service their building - an obvious one. Entrepreneurs look to achieve success at scale.  This is different from someone who starts a small business to serve a local market and has no desire to grow or expand beyond their local market. There's nothing wrong this that but it doesn't fit into the realm of entrepreneurship.

3. Hard work - by definition an entrepreneur is a doer who is self-motivated and isn't afraid of hard work.  In fact, an entrepreneur doesn't define what she does as work at all.  When one is aligned with one's internal mission and focused on achieving the milestones and tasks required to succeed, the "work" becomes a driving force, an all-consuming passion that becomes an obsession.

4. "Just Do It" - There's a place for planning and strategy but it is meaningless if it not executed.  True entrepreneurs get sh*t done and are naturally oriented to action.  We live in a world of action and to be successful entrepreneurs must be able to conquer their fears, move out of their comfort zone and execute. In today's world, it is far better to do, test, learn, measure and iterate that to spend time planning and strategizing.

5. Team, hiring and culture - Many of us have failed because we haven't had the "A" team; have hired the wrong people and have not built a culture of entrepreneurship.  This one is especially close to my heart.  A past company I built was growing rapidly (3x growth) and we needed to scale staff to meet demand.  We hired rapidly and indiscriminately and later almost lost our way as product quality fell, customer service suffered and profitability took a hit because we had not hired "A" players and had not built the right culture or processes. Razor Suleman from I Love Rewards and Matthew Corrin from Freshii both related their own experiences that mirrored my own past experiences.

6. Scarcity and abundance - Entrepreneurs thrive in an environment of scarcity: scarcity of time; scarcity of capital and scarcity of resources.  When startups raise too much capital (which would seem to be a good thing on the surface) they can often lose their focus and go down a path of self-destruction. There are many classic examples of this in the pre-NASDAQ meltdown of the late 1990s where VC money flowed in abundance.  Razor Suleman spoke about what happened at I Love Rewards in 2006 when they suddenly received several million dollars of VC money.  They had already experienced several quarters of positive cash flow and when the VC money flowed in, they decided to spend it on a cool new office space and new "cool stuff." Razor spoke about how destructive this was to his business and how they suddenly started burning cash and almost lost their way before course correcting themselves back to profitability.  Extreme discipline and focus is needed to counter our natural tendency to relax and lose focus when we're suddenly surrounded by abundance - it's a part of human nature that is hard to conquer.

7. Business model focused on profitability - many of the entrepreneurs spoke about their focus on getting paying customers; their focus on the numbers and their focus on tracking and managing the key business metrics to drive towards profitability.  In my opinion, I think it is very healthy that the current scarcity of VC money and the global recession has brought us back to the key driver of entrepreneurial effort - making a profit.  Some may disagree and say that startups need to focus on scale / building a user base / a community and that profitability will follow.  Both top line and bottom line are important.

8. Speed and agility - Tim Bray spoke about the need for speed and agility.  This is especially important in the world of Internet-based startups that are developing software platforms.  In today's world of open-source technology (e.g. Ruby on Rails), Facebook, Twitter and Ning, startups are able to build prototypes very quickly and build community very quickly. It's the perfect environment to do rapid prototyping, test, learn and iterate. Speed and agility are key competitive advantages that are being used to great effect. This also works really well in a scarcity market because you can get into market with a minimal investment. I recommend looking at Eric Ries and his "lean startup" philosophy to learn more about rapid prototyping and fast cycle times for both product development and customer development.  One of my favorite mantras is, "Innovation is failure sped up."  Success comes to those who can learn quickly from failure. The faster you can operate, the faster you can learn and the faster you can get to success.

9. Tie into the megatrends of the day, as many as possible.  Most, if not all, of the startups I saw this week are tapping into the 10 global megatrends discussed here.

10. Luck - after all of the previous 9, luck still plays a key part in whether an entreprise is successful or not.  It was very refreshing to hear Chris Hughes and others talk about the fact that luck played a key part in their success.  Howard Hughes' famous quote, "Wake up early; work hard; strike oil" is eternally valid.  The first two are essential ingredients for success and are in the control of the entrepreneur but the last one still has an element of luck attached to it.

The world is full of hungry, passionate entrepreneurs and I feel privileged and grateful to be living in this time of huge change and opportunity.

So, that's what I got out of this past week and I'd love to get your feedback and comments - do you agree? disagree? What would you add?

Company evolution and employee migration

I'm at Entrepreneurship Week in Waterloo waiting to hear from one of the Facebook founders (Chris Hughes, not Mark Z) and thinking about evolution in the corporate world.

• Microsoft has morphed to become the new IBM.
• Google is morphing to become the new Microsoft.
• Facebook is morphing to become the new Google.
• Twitter has aspirations to become the new Facebook / Google.

Twitter => Facebook => Google => Microsoft => IBM

Key employees / hot employees move in the opposite direction.

IBM => Microsoft => Google => Facebook => Twitter.

I think employee migration is a great (early) indicator of future corporate success.

La Senza (Canada’s Victoria’s Secret) is hotting up online

I was (pleasantly) surprised to receive this promo email from PayPal today:

It appears that La Senza is starting to apply some of the lessons learned by it's US owner, Limited Brands, north of the border. The owner of Victoria's Secret purchased La Senza for $628 million back in January 2007 and it has had huge online success with VS.

Interestingly, La Senza now has it's Twitter feed and Facebook fan page prominently displayed on it's homepage in an attempt to leverage the huge adoption of social media in Canada -- 75% of Canadians who are online are active users of Facebook (and Twitter.)

Given the email offer I received, it seems that the good people at La Senza have read the Razorfish report I tweeted about this morning which states that the key to engagement on social properties comes down to old-fashioned direct marketing techniques like offering discounts and special promotions.

Kudos to a prominent Canadian brand for focusing more of it's attention and marketing dollars in the digital / social media space.  It will be interesting to see how successful their efforts will be.

Now, to find that special gift so I can get my $10 cash back from PayPal! - Thanks La Senza and PayPal for the early Happy Holidays gift.

The Napsterization of the Ad Industry

Brands are increasingly looking outside of their traditional advertising / marketing agencies for new innovation and new ideas and the agency model is under threat.

We're so interconnected now and brands can source ideas from anywhere (at less cost) --- it's the "Napsterization of the Ad Industry" as I called it in a conversation with Ian Mirlin back in September.

We've seen brands like Unilever, Amazon, Frito-Lay and P&G pursue this "crowd-sourcing" model and AdAge wrote a great piece this week talking about Pepsi's latest "Dewmocracy" crowd-sourcing push:

"The trend of marketers relying on the wisdom of crowds to create marketing campaigns is escalating as PepsiCo turns over the choice of agencies for three product launches to the masses, ramping up the potential threat to ad shops bypassed or relegated to a supporting role in implementing the resulting efforts."

How have agencies responded?  The large multinational agencies are naturally afraid and many are following the same path we saw in the music industry and newspaper industry as technology disrupted their respective business models. They're burying their heads in the sand and rationalizing this trend as "mere experimentation." Ignoring this trend may well be a very dangerous non-decision.

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and others have enabled global social connectivity and shifted power on a scale that is astonishing.  And we're not going back. Twitter's stated goal is be the connective tissue for 1 billion people across the world.

This is part of a larger trend of transparency, openness and "free" markets, written about in a recent article in The Economist, entitled "A market for ideas."

Ian Mirlin made the following prophetic suggestion back in September:

"Someone needs to start a business whose purpose it is to utilize crowd sourcing in a way that balances the input of the crowd with the responsibility of conscientious brand management. Think of it as iTunes for the brand management business - a model which promises fair value for all."

Enter Victors & Spoils, a new #Crowdsource agency, founded by two former Crispin Porter senior managers:

"The way we see it, companies need an alternative to both current ad agencies as well as current crowdsourcing platforms. One that offers the strategic direction, engagement and relationship management that agencies deliver today, but one that also delivers the engagement, cultural relevance, results and return on investment that crowdsourcing {if managed and directed well} can deliver."

Global brands aren't the only ones utilizing this new model to great success.  Here's a personal example, albeit on a much smaller scale. After 15 years in the agency world, I recently embarked on a new entrepreneurial quest and founded JazLabs, Inc, a seed-stage business incubator. We just used 99designs (a design crowd-sourcing platform with more than 50,000 designers) to source a new corporate logo design for our company. I uploaded a brief and within 4 hours had over 10 creative design directions from people across the globe (Australia, France, Singapore and India). We provided feedback on the designs and within 24 hours, we now have full ownership of our new logo at a cost of $250.

How is this trend impacting your business?  Are you seeing the opportunities to evolve your own business model or do you feel threatened?

Listening and Giving Back : Hyundai Canada Experiments With Doing Good

Here's a great story of a brand who is listening, watching and responding via "a random act of kindness." This past week, Todd Jamison had his Hyundai totaled in a bizarre parking accident - see the video below:

Hyundai Canada was watching and listening and decided to do something about it:

We went to find the owner of the Hyundai that was the victim of the bad park job and as a random act of kindness, we gave the owner, Todd Jamison, a free car, a brand new 2010 Hyundai Elantra Touring! Todd said 'Wow' a lot and 'That's fantastic!' We gave a great car to a great guy. Smart is doing good. At Hyundai, we like a story with a happy ending.

Here's Hyundai Canada's response on Youtube:

Hopefully more brands follow the lead and realize that giving back is smart business and ultimately will lead to success. This may appear to be counter-intuitive for the uninitiated but it's proven to work.  Great brand building exercise by Hyundai: empathy, authenticity, openness, human voice, caring and great ROI.

Congrats to Todd on his new car and congrats to Hyundai Canada for their "random act of kindness." - Yes, "Smart is doing good."

The Dark Side of Cloud Computing

I've always been a big fan of the Cloud Computing concept.  The advantages of agility, cost and scalability are overwhelmingly appealing to both end users and IT professionals. Amazon has been one of the leaders in translating the concept / theory into practice with their AWS service. Many of today's successful Web 2.0 and social web sites have leveraged cloud computing to their advantage and utilize the AWS service.

However, there's a dark side to cloud computing ...

This past week customers with a Sidekick device on the T-Mobile network lost all their data when the network servers owned and managed by Microsoft went down. There's now a class-action suit pending.  Just when all seemed lost, today customers were luckily informed by Microsoft that their contacts lists could be recovered.

Google has recently had access issues for their GMail service.  Today people are having issues accessing Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.

As more and more of our personal and corporate data moves out to the cloud we should all be concerned with the following:

• How secure is it?
• How accessible will it be if/when there's a major event?

I’m tweeting more (a lot more) and blogging less (not at all) … Why?

I started my personal blog in late 2005. In almost four years, I've only written 158 blog posts.  I joined Twitter on October 21, 2007. In two years I've tweeted 2,868 times! 158 blog posts in four years vs. 2,868 tweets in two years. That's a 36:1 ratio between Twitter and this blog.

WOW!

I know this isn't really a valid comparison. A single 140 character tweet (or retweet) that takes a few seconds to create can't really be compared to a detailed blog post that can take several hours to write and edit.

So, what measure of value can I use as a valid comparison?

How about engagement / dialog?

When I look at two of the most successful posts I've written here and here (measured by comments and references made to them by other people out in the blogosphere), I feel that I contributed something of value to the community. Do my tweets contribute any value?  I guess they must to the 1,200 or so people who follow me on Twitter.

Is this a cop-out? Am I just too lazy to write more on the blog?

After some soul-searching it's clear that I love the sense of community on Twitter and the sense that I'm plugged into the "flow" or the stream. My blog is out on the periphery and it only gets between 0 and 100 visits a day according to Google Analytics.

So what do you think? Does this blog add any value? Should I shut it down? Or invest more time and energy to make it something of more value?  Your thoughts and comments would be greatly appreciated.