Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

Dropped in yesterday for show and tell day at the Beal Centre. Having long been a fan of Alex and having had a number of friends participate at the centre, I was glad to finally be able to pay them a visit.

Interestingly, Tuesday’s traditional show and tell became something else. A propective client was in the room and amazingly no one minded at all that I sat in a while they pitched the client. After all, it was show and tell day. While nothing especially proprietary was being discussed, I had the pleasure to hear Alex give his pitch on what the Beal Centre is all about, the meaning of life (something they discovered just incidentally a few months ago) and several other of their recent insights. Some gem’s I thought I would pass on to you. These are as I remember them and therfore somewhat paraphrased and with my further comments in [ ]

• Now is not THE information age, we’ve always lived in the information age. DNA is information. [DNA is the ultimate meme]
• The meaning of life is the propagation of organization, whether it be organisms or organizations [and at the most fundamental, this is your primary purpose and the primary purpose of your company].
• One of the first questions people ask of a new technology is, how can I have sex with it? [think of one of the first applications of the electric motor and, er, the internet]
• A ball at rest is just a ball but it has the latent potential to bounce and roll. [objects/products/things/theworld have a static nature (what most focus groups would reveal for you), but what’s more interesting is the latent potential]
• Technology does not change behavior, it reveals behavior [for me this idea resonates significantly with web2.0 and social media, it’s not important that your site has tags, has social networking has feeds and blog integration etc. what’s important is the latent social behavior these tools enable. Understanding this is why flickr or upcoming.org works so well, not understanding is why so many other web2.0 bandwagon apps with their me-too tag clouds and such just look silly.]
• When forecasting the future, you can’t just imagine what would the world be like in 5 years with this new product with all else held constant. You have to have a model of the future where every thing else evolves synchronously as well.
• The world is not connected by the Internet, the world is connected by the ideas that we share on the Internet

There’s more, if you have an interest either professional or academic in this kind of thinking, I encourage you to get in touch with the folks at the Beal Centre yourself. Smart, creative people and so welcoming it’s spooky. Thanks for an enlightening and thought-provoking morning everyone. I’ll be back.

“we don’t invest in startups, we like companies that we can understand” – commented one speaker at the breakfast session on Alternative Financing held this morning at Goodman&Carr LLP.

The session was fairly interesting with representation from a wide range of finance providers from the trouble investment community covering the “whole” range from subdebt lending through asset based lending, equipment financing, inventory secured financing to private equity.

Beyond your standard I-banking equity and senior debt financing offerings, these do pretty much represent the gamut of alternate financing options. One type of institution though was conspicuously absent this morning: venture capital. Despite the difference in their vehicles, all of the institutions represented today pretty much seem to be chasing the same set of customers. here are the criteria, these lenders want to talk to you:

• Established company (4yrs+ history for due diligence)
• Experienced management team
• Consistent (and preferably growing) cash flow
• 3-5M (or better) pretax net income
• Financing requirements in the 3-10M range
• Target industries: manufacturing, wholesale, service and retail
• Typical scenario: Management buyout, acquisition, working capital for rapid growth companies

Not one mention of software or knowledge industries in general and no one talking about early stage financing. Now to be fair, this type of lending is no doubt, on a dollar value basis, exactly where the bulk of the corporate lending market is. Even in silicon valley, the bulk of economic activity is driven likely by established companies. However, all have to start somewhere and it’s startups that drive a great deal of innovation (especially disruptive innovation) within the economy. If the Ontario economy is to grow beyond manufacturing and the like, if Toronto is to become a leading ICT cluster, I’ll tell you one thing, it wasn’t happening in this room this morning.

There’s clearly a large gap between the where the ideas are developing and the money is in this city these days. A gap that I hope activities like BusinessCamp I hope will help to, at least in some small way, start bridging.

I wondered when this was coming. For years now Scoble has been putting a human face on microsoft, and singlehandedly has done a monumental job of building and rehabilitating Microsoft’s brand image amongst the internet community. But this story too is a cautionary tale for corporate blogging. What happens when the personal brand of the corporate blogger and the attention they receive begins to outshine their role within the company. Who’s brand is your corporate blogger building?

In this case though, Microsofts loss is surely to PodTech.net’s gain. Best of luck to you Robert in your new adventures.