In this series of posts we’re “grilling” the mentors of the Startupify program with the hope of discovering who is best able to answer a standardized set of questions. Points for accuracy and un-originality will be assigned. Actually we’re just trying to learn more about them .. the kind of stuff that doesn’t appear in boilerplate bios.

Let’s get going and welcome our second contestant: Rob Hyndman

What qualifies you to be a Startupify mentor?

I make the best pulled pork in Ontario, possibly Canada. Also, I have been advising startups about the law since 1995.

What hurdles/failures/lessons have you encountered along your professional journey that early stage entrepreneurs could learn from?

Running a law firm is like running any services business. You die every day. And get up the next day and do it again. You learn the value of perspective and the importance of sticking to it.

What excites you most about the Startupify program?

I love teaching. Helping people get to success or failure faster and for less $ is the shit.

What characteristics have you seen in the startups you’ve mentored in the past that you feel are indicators for success?

Adaptability. Brains. Persistence. Optimism.

In this series of posts we’re “grilling” the mentors of the Startupify program with the hope of discovering who is best able to answer a standardized set of questions. Points for accuracy and un-originality will be assigned. Actually we’re just trying to learn more about them .. the kind of stuff that doesn’t appear in boilerplate bios.

Let’s get going and welcome our first contestant: Brett Shellhammer

What qualifies you to be a Startupify mentor?

Over the last 3 years I have been an Executive in Residence with Communitech in Waterloo and the UW VeloCity program. I have seen over 200 startup plans & pitches. I have mentored or advised 50 to 75 of those startups directly.

I have a good network of contacts and connections in the GTA for startup resources from mentors, to programs to service providers

I co-founded my own startup, Organimi, in March 2012 and am living the startup life everyday.

Over my 25 year career I have worked in both large companies and startups or early stage technology companies. Organimi is my 7th startup/early stage company, but the first one that I’ve founded.

I spent 17 years in Silicon Valley where I’ve worked in both large companies and startups.

What hurdles/failures/lessons have you encountered along your professional journey that early stage entrepreneurs could learn from?

Many, many, many failures and lessons learned. I often use the phrase that “experience is what you get when you do NOT get what you want” and I have a LOT of experience.

I have found that “other people’s experiences” are not really that helpful for entrepreneurs as it is often the experience itself that causes the learning. My philosophy is not to “tell” an entrepreneur what they should do or how they should do it but to help the entrepreneur understand what to look for and how to recognize the patterns that emerge that can indicate problems and approaching failures. How the entrepreneur handles and learns from the problems and failures is what makes them succeed or give up.

As a mentor, I help steer entrepreneurs toward the brick walls they must get through, because the sooner they can overcome the biggest obstacles in their way, the sooner they can be successful.

What excites you most about the Startupify program?

I believe that the Startupify program is unique in that it is very complementary to all of the work that is going on in Ontario to help startups succeed and thrive. The Startupify program will help its participants prepare for startup life in a safe and supportive environment. The program will also prepare the participants to leverage all of the existing resources and as they exit Startupify they will be very prepared to engage and leverage the help available to them as they move to the next level of programs in the province.

I am also excited about Startupify participants coming in with the engineering & technical skill to create amazing new things because that is how I came to startup life. Starting out as a software developer then becoming a product manager then becoming a general manager and eventually an entrepreneur was a long process, and if we can help to shorten that process, that will be great.

The question I have been asked the most over the last three years is “do you know any really good technical co-founders?” so it is exciting that Startupify will be able to increase the supply of technical co-founders to meet the demand.

What characteristics have you seen in the startups you’ve mentored in the past that you feel are indicators for success?

One of the most important characteristics of successful startups that I have seen is “seriousness” and the complete belief in their products ability to solve problems and provide value to customers.

“Seriousness” also means that they understand how much hard work is in front of them and are determined every day to succeed. The ability to manage the “worry” and “self-doubt” that comes with every startup in a way that understands the risks and at the same time is not defined by them.

At the same time a sense of humor and the ability to not take one’s self too seriously while still operating the business seriously are great qualities.

BONUS: Which Startupify mentor are you most excited to collaborate with and why?

All of them! It has been a great experience so far in working with Brydon, Scott, Mike, Dave, Lisa, David and Candace in putting the program and curriculum together and the varied experience set of the group will be extremely valuable to the cohort.

I had the good fortune of working as an early mentor with the VidYard team a couple of years ago and have been a big fan of Mike Litt and Devon Galloway since that time. Mike has a way of inspiring young entrepreneurs through his experiences and attitude that I have rarely seen so that will be a great benefit to the cohort.

I have also had the pleasure of working closely with Mike Kirkup through all of 2012 and applying the things that he championed for the VeloCity program will be very valuable for the participants. In addition Mike is probably one of the top 10 guys in the world when it comes to building a partner ecosystem for a startup and that can be the difference between a world changing company and an “also ran”.

I’ve only met Mark Rodford once, but am really looking forward to working with him as well.

I had a great meeting yesterday with a new local business who are doing very well. It was great hearing their story, in particular how they had an idea and they just went after it. There was no 40 page business plan, angel investor pitches, mentor meetings etc. They had a simple hypothesis based on a real problem they’d witnessed. They came up with an idea for a solution, pitched it to a real customer and were on their way.

Once they had acquired that first customer they focused on serving them well and things progressed and grew naturally from there. I love stories like these because we don’t esteem them enough. Our business press is dominated by stories about the folks with the cash, the funders, the accelerators, the businesses that made it ‘overnight’. I’m worried we don’t esteem simple everyday businesses enough, which are the core of our economy.

Not every business requires an investor, a grant, or an incubator but every business does require a first customer!

Yes we need the crazies swinging for the fences but I don’t believe that we all have to target building billion dollar companies. Making up numbers here, for every ten people trying to create billion dollar businesses, we need a hundred creating million dollar businesses and thousands creating thousand dollar businesses.

These are not mutually exclusive. In fact the homogeneity of all founders swinging for the fences is massively risky or represents an opportunity, depending on your perspective. There may be a gap in the market place if everyone’s aiming for the massive pot of gold.

There’s also the question of leadership. There’s no question that a billion dollar company requires world class leadership. As Maxwell illustrates with his law of the lid, you are only as effective as your ability to lead. Becoming a great leader requires practice, experience. Yes you may eventually lead the NHL in scoring but today you need to focus on learning to skate.

Growing a business at a slower pace is allowed. It’s not an excuse to drag your feet or ignore growth opportunities but a more realistic pace offers a businesses leaders the chance to get their feet underneath them each and every day and scale well with their team, their customers, and their market. While we’re hoping for some crazy home runs, I’m just as excited about Startupify.Me churning out some good old everyday businesses.

This is partly a continuation post of our Stop Measuring Everything post last week.

Metrics and what we measure are powerful and dangerous. Data and metrics are noise, what happens when you overreact to noise? Poor metrics can kill an early stage company. We can’t mathematize startups and focus solely on the known while ignoring the unknown. It’s that unknown that could be your difference maker. If there was a metric for creating successful startups, we’d all be doing it.

“Frequent access to information can be harmful“, Antifragile

In some ways, early stage metrics remind me of codebase optimization. In software projects, I believe code should be optimized as a last resort. It’s a waste of time and engineering dollars to optimize a codebase before you know what you’re building. Is that permission to write crappy code and ignore the optimizations that will come later? Of course not, but you can’t make x better until you know what x is.

To clarify, my target here is single founders and small teams working on early stage products. As Mike says in the previous post, when team’s grow and a business becomes a business then metrics play a massive role in communications across your team, your investors and even your customers. Here I’m speaking in reference to early stage, product-market fit stages.

I also recognize that, as with pro sports, all the various startup nerds around startups crave their stats. Depending on who’s involved in supporting your venture, you may have no choice but to deliver your fantasy stats to your funders, government etc as they play armchair QB with you.

So, build great metrics and make sure you learn from the best but consider adopting metrics later, or metric procrastination, as a principle. Books like Alistair and Ben’s will help you pick a small set of metrics well and ignore the useless noisy ones. Make sure to limit your metrics to a finite set, ie drop some as you add more and build a real business before you worry too much about formalizing it’s metrics.

PS. I’ll be at Alistair’s Lean Analytics event in Toronto next week. If anyone wants to talk Startupify.Me or trains, let me know or just say hi?

There’s a cool thread in The Talent Code about how foot speed is determined by your birth order. Your chances of being fast increase if you have older siblings and the author backs this up with stats from current 100 meter dash champions and NFL running backs.

The point is that commitment, motivations and primal cues matter. People with older siblings are sent the primal cue “you’re behind — keep up!”. We tend to view attributes like foot speed to be gifts that we have or have not. What Daniel is hoping to illustrate is that success comes from practice + commitment. Commitment is less about a conscious decision than it is driven by some primal cue deep within us. You can’t fake it. You may not be able to simulate it.

It reminds me of ideas. I cringe when someone says “you’re an ideas guy”. That is not a compliment. I don’t argue the point but instead work harder to have that person say “you’re an execution guy” tomorrow.

Or when someone asks for input on their latest idea, I rarely comment on the idea itself but simply respond “what are you willing to risk for this idea?” or “what are you prepared to do to make this happen?” Ideas are worthless, ideas are powerless. Risk and commitment are requirements to create anything great. The measure of an idea is how many pounds of flesh you’re willing to give for it. The more you’re willing to risk, the more excited I am to help you!

Commitment + practice = the chance of great success

So Startupify is built to provide you deep practice in finding real problems that are solvable in scalable, accessible markets. That gets you the practice but where does the commitment come from? That comes from you, our cohort, which puts us in a seemingly unique position of needing to find and vet people by commitment not skills or degrees attained.

How much does this opportunity really mean to you? What are you really willing to do for this? We need to find people who will do whatever it takes to get into the startup game. I’ll be honest, I have no idea how we do that. Any ideas, please let me know??