Troy Angrignon - Adventure Capitalist

About this site

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 09:51:09 -0800

This site contains my general blogging, published articles, and information on speaking dates where I discuss how business, technology, and finance can be used to create an open, healthy, and environmentally and economically vibrant society. Please feel free to contact me at troy at troyangrignon dot com to rant, discuss, or have me speak at your organization.

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 2 / "It's all about the infrastructure" by Debra Chrapaty, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Operations Group

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 09:44:02 -0800

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

"It's all about the infrastructure" by Debra Chrapaty, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Operations

The cloud sounds romantic but it's 1.5 million pounds of batteries, 1 million pounds of steel, 300 miles of cable. Not so romantic. (Image courtesty of Niall Kennedy's Flickr photos)
Opex and Capex are THE KEYS: If your revenue goes up a hockey stick....and your CapEx and OpEx curves go up with it...you haven't succeeded

[finally!! Somebody else is talking about this!! This is super critical in SaaS. It's easy to make a company deliver apps over the web. It's hard to do it in a way that you can serve a lot of people cost effectively and make more profit as you scale.]

Scale: can you scale up to 3.5GB/minute TOMORROW?
Reach: Microsoft is running services in 235 countries around the world
Servers: This is critical

configration optimization: go for standardization / optimization
Density: watts/square foot is important; drive density up by 200% you can drop power costs 40% (!).
Storage costs: There has been an 85% drop in a Terabyte of data THIS YEAR.
Technology evolution: staying on the curve helps you be operationally efficient.

Data center critical success factors. (there are more but she wouldn't share them)

connectivity: critical
location, location, location (close to connectivity and supplies and resources and people)
materials and equipment: (if you buy a million pounds of steel and steel prices go up....you have a $5M bill)
trades and labour: we have waited months for an electrical person
power:

we now count in terms of megawatts not square footage. That is a key metric.
30-40% of your power usage is COOLING!!!! so build green!
looking at solar - it's incredibly important to us
Opening a data center in Quincy Washington that is completeley carbon neutral

Additional useful links:

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 2 / A Conversation with Jeff Bezos from Amazon.com

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:14:11 -0800

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

A Conversation with Jeff Bezos, Amazon

S3 and EC2 are storage and processing. They should not be very interesting. So why are people so excited?
Because the time from concept to delivery has been collapsed. We removed server hosting, contract negotitation, server infrastructure, etc.
We have removed the "muck"; You come up with an idea, you wade through the muck, and then eventually you get to working on the fun parts.
And then when you come up with your NEXT idea you have to go through the muck all over again.
up to 70% of your time, energy, and dollars for web-scale apps goes into undifferentiated, heavy lifting and "muck"
We want to swap the 70/30 to 30/70 (undifferentiated muck / differentiated work that makes you stand out). That will free up 40% for more creativity and differentiation!
Web scale computing should be elastic; fast; always on; rock solid; simple cost effective; pay per use.
It is being used by Xerox Global Services (S3, Simple Queuing Service and E3), Second Life; PowerSet (Natural Language Search) - now using EC2 as their back-end infrastructure;
Tagline: "We make muck...so you don't have to."
"We have been a low-margin, high volume business with aggressive cost structures for 11 years. I feel that that is the best and most defensible model because it doesn't have a soft underbelly that people can come after aggressively unless they're as good at it as you. "

[For a long time I have been trying to come to terms with conflicting approaches. I now see that Dan Pena's model (>80% margin or don't do it) is great when you're consolidating an industry and need to do cashflow lending to buy the companies you are acquiring. And given that his goal is to consolidate, aggregate, and then re-sell, that model makes sense. Bezos' approach (which is also the Dell / Wal-mart approach) is viable when the intention is to build the business up and keep it. I have to admit that I hadn't considered that operational excellence in minimizing margin could be a defensible strategy but it makes sense now.]

Battelle: Why are you doing this? Bezos: We think this is a great business and we're good at it. We have three businesses: consumer facing, seller facing business, developer facing business. The consumer/seller businesses drive our revenues. The developer facing business will one day have significant impact.

[I'm surprised that Battelle would ask this question but as the emcee, it is his job to ask the obvious and/or painful questions. Maybe that's why he's asking it. It only makes sense that Amazon, having developed this core competency, would turn around and resell it. Jay Abraham has a long set of principles, one of which is, figure out what your company has become really good at from a practices, systems, and technologies perspective and turn around and resell THOSE in addition to your core business.]

Fulfillment by Amazon is a very simple service. We have a global network of fulfillment services. You can ship something to us and we'll receive it. We get it. We stow it. And then you can send more calls to us and when you do, we'll pick those out and we'll send those things to you. We're giving pay by the drink, variable cost fulfillment to the marketplace. This allows developers to use us by writing software, to treat this 10 million square foot network of fulfillment centers as a peripheral device like a printer.
Battelle: Sun tried to do grid computing before and failed. You are succeeding right out of the gate. Why? Bezos: We have a policy of not talking about other companies. But I'll talk about S3. We think that there are three reasons it is succeeding: it is pay-per-use, it is self-service, and it is VERY simple for people to work with.

[The shadow space of that statement is that Sun's attempt was none of those things...which was true. It was heavy to implement, heavy to negotiate the contracts, and relative to S3 - very inflexible. S3 is to Sun's grid as Google's AdSense is to Doubleclick.]

Battelle: what is your cost of power? Bezos: Our biggest costs are not power, servers, or people. The largest cost is the opportunity cost of not fully using our facilities. And the same goes for our customers. The rest of the world is building data centers that they're only using on average 17% of the time. People are buying 747s and parking them 83% of the time! This doesn't make any sense.

[This goes to the heart of the Abraham principle above. Not only does this type of service mean that Amazon is running at near 100% asset efficiency (or more, since they're making money on them?), but their customers can run at near 100% capacity as well, rather than at 17%. Higher asset efficiency = higher shareholder value.
[Mike Cannon-Brookes and I were joking that it would be fun to build a company and take it from concept to bizplan to website to goods to online ordering to application development to online fulfillment to peer-based service and support....in 24 hours. Sounds ridiculous but with the number and type of services now available, it would be do-able.

Hybrid Mini Cooper does 0-60 in 4.5 seconds, has top speed of 150mpg, and can get up to 80mpg - woohoo!!

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 09:52:19 -0700

This car rocks. I'm a big fan of this type of vehicle design where the drivetrain, rather than using one engine that transfers power to the four wheels, simply uses one power source at the core that transfers electrical power to an electric motor at EACH wheel.

Thanks to Justin Thomas for his nice blog post about this awesome car.

Why is $10/gallon gas a great thing? And what does it have to do with evolution, adaptation, and local economic growth? Everything.

Troy Angrignon — Wed, 10 May 2006 10:10:00 -0700

I think I have found the magic number. Every fifth article from Mark Morford is so brilliant, insightful, and articulate that I need to post most, if not all, of it here for my readers. Today is the day for another.

In one fell swoop, Mark has managed to hit on a whole bunch of my favourite subjects: the environment, structure driving behaviour, adaptation, complex system effects, social policy, cultural behaviour, global policy....he has hit it all.

The archive of his writings can be found here. The current article is below:

Bring On The $6 Gallon Of Gas
It would revolutionize America. It would make us all better humans. But could you handle it?

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree?

Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV owners. Everyone else, 10 bucks a gallon, across the board. Eleven for premium.

It would take some finessing. Maybe also give a price break to some truckers and trucking companies (so vital to the overall economy), but not so much to global delivery companies (FedEx, DSL et al.), because not doing so would force them to raise shipping rates and force you (and me) to reconsider buying everything online and hence will encourage you to shop locally once again, thus reviving a stagnant local economy.

Voilá -- gas crisis, oil crisis, warmongering agenda, pollution issues, road rage, traffic congestion, urban decay, oil profiteering -- all completely almost totally somewhat solved. Or at the very least, dramatically, gloriously shifted toward ... I don't know what. Something better. Something more humane, less greedy, more sustainable. Could it work? How outraged and indignant would you be to have to pay that much for gas? How long would that feeling last?

Take it one logical step further. Set up a national system whereby if you want to buy a vehicle that gets less than 20 mpg in the city, you pay a $1,000 Global Warming Surcharge and that money goes straight to a local organic farm, or school, or environmental think tank. And if it gets under 12 mpg, make it three grand, plus a slap to your face from a small, angry child. Got yourself a shiny new Hummer? You pay five grand extra, you can only buy gas once a month and all the truly beautiful women of the world will shun you like Charlie Sheen (oh wait, that already happens). See? Revolution is easy.

What, too far fetched? Too implausible? Not at all. Sure, 10 bucks a gallon would be extremely painful for a while. Citizens would wail. Commuters would scream and stomp and die. But then we would do what we always do. We would evolve. Adapt. Systems would quickly transform, habits would instantly shift. It would be easier to implement than the goddamn mess that is Medicare reform, far easier than Lots of Children Left Behind, more viable and livable than the toxic existence of Homeland Security and the disgusting Patriot Act.

But of course such an idea is also, right now, absolutely impossible. It will never happen -- not 10 bucks, not six, not even a buck more per gallon -- and not just because no politician anywhere on either side of the aisle has the nerve to come out and suggest that Americans might actually need to drive less and conserve and make a change in their gluttonous habits. This is, of course, absolute death for a politician. Tell Americans what to do? Dare to suggest that they're doing something wrong, or that their behaviors are dangerous and destructive and irresponsible? Are you insane? This is America! We're flawless!

No, the primary reason such reform won't happen is because, simply put, we are the most entitled nation in the world, perhaps in the entire galaxy. Americans are trained from birth to believe we deserve as much as we desire of every exploitable resource on the planet, be it water or natural gas or oil, coal or salmon or steaks, Big Macs or diapers or iPods or bizarre varieties of blue ketchup. It is, in a word, perilous. It is also, in another, slightly more devastating word, our downfall.

Look, I adore cars. I adore driving and I cherish open roads and smooth horsepower and a musical exhaust note and I fully believe most German automotive engineers should be sent gifts of candy and Peet's coffee and porn. I would, like most everyone else, be absolutely loathe to give much of it up.

But you know what? Big freaking deal. I could learn to live without so much. I like to think I would be able to step back and see the bigger picture, realize what is and isn't absolutely essential, what does and does not absolutely define my identity and my life, modify accordingly and laugh/shrug/sigh it off in the process. In other words, I could make it work. And so could you.

Ever been in a citywide blackout? One that lasted for more than a few hours and stretched on into the night? Ever see people suddenly shift gears and become astoundingly helpful and polite and sharing? Happens in a matter of moments. Disasters do it. Katrina did it, on a scale we haven't seen in years. Sept. 11 did it, emotionally speaking, before BushCo whored that tragedy and turned it into the most vile political poker chip in American history. Shocking change brings people together. Brings out the best in humans. Or at least, makes you rethink what's truly important in your life.

Another example: You know what would happen if guns -- all guns, everywhere -- were banned outright tomorrow? Well, right off, nothing much. Criminals would still commit crimes. Lawsuits would skyrocket. The NRA would shoot itself in the face in screaming protest. Crime rates would dance all over the map. It would be a little ugly.

But then something remarkable would happen. Over a short blip of time -- say about 10 or 20 years, as gun manufacturing ceased and the culture of gun violence died down and our favorite death object was less visible in the news and in video games and on TV and in every aspect of modern life, well, guess what? Guns would begin to disappear. From the culture, from the drug dealers, from the streets, from public consciousness. They would turn into a sad relic, like eight-track tapes, like the bubonic plague, like the Miami Sound Machine. Think 20 years is too long? BS. It is but an eyeblink, a twitch, a faint toe spasm in the great long orgasm of time.

This is the unappreciated, under-reported magic of the human animal. We are infinitely adaptable. We can accommodate far more than politicians and pundits and the morally knotted Christian right would ever have you believe.

Ten bucks a gallon. Imagine the mad scramble by carmakers to invent new ultra-gas-sipping, enviro-friendly technologies. Imagine communities coming together for ride-sharing and mass transit. Bike sales would skyrocket. Walking shoes would be the new bling item. We would mourn the loss of cool car culture even as we celebrated the birth of, say, moped culture. Telecommuting would explode. Sure, the superrich would still tool around in their bloated Escalades, oblivious to the world around them, thinkin' the world is their dumb bitch.

So what? The rest of us can simply roll our eyes and laugh, evolve and sharpen and sigh, and wonder what great change we can embark upon next.

Border wars: Plumbers union fights green building because the waterless no-flush urinals will "spread disease". Um, don't you mean they will spread "less work for plumbers?"

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 13:23:14 -0700

I'm intrigued by stories such as this one in the ABC News about the plumbers union in Philadelphia who claim that no-flush green urinals are a health threat. I wonder if the union sees them more as a health threat to the UNION DUES than to the USERS.

Does anybody have any information on negative health effects of waterless urinals??

Hey NASA, we're going to call it the Vancouver-levator. (or how Vancouver's geeks and visionaries will build the space elevator that allows us to leap into the solar system.)

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 10:47:41 -0700

Space Elevator illustration by Kenn Brown and Chris Wren from Mondolithic
(Vancouver's own brilliant illustrators with a global fan base!)

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Steven Jones, the leader of the UBC Snowstar team - a team of UBC students who are entering the NASA Beam Power and Tether Strength Challenges - two contests that are used to encourage research and development in technologies that could be used to build a space elevator.

The challenges are held during the Elevator Games in Mountain View California by the Spaceward Foundation; a group dedicated the development of a Space Elevator. The technologies that are required to win the competitions will have many uses and one of those will be in the construction of a long cable in stable geosynchronous orbit around the earth that will allow for equipment and people to be transported to space on a space elevator at a fraction of the current cost.

In the 2006 NASA Beam Power Challenge the team has to provide a robot that is at least 10kg and capable of climbing a 60 m cable in 60 seconds but it can not have any batteries or other stored energy on board. All of the power must be transmitted wirelessly from the ground by a beam source that the team also has to provide.

In the 2006 Tether Strength Challenge teams must create a 2 gram cable that forms a continuous loop with a circumference of 2 meters and is stronger than the cable supplied by Spaceward that is allowed to weigh 3 grams. UBC Snowstar is one of the few teams in the world to have experience at the Elevator Games through their participation in 2005 and in the Beam Power competition they were given the only award at the competition: "Most Likely to Win in 2006".

The New York Times just ran a great story which the Snowstar team uploaded onto their site in a PDF.

If you are interested in helping Steve and his team by sponsoring them, please contact him directly at info@snowstar.ca.

30 Days of Sustainability: Sustainable Homes

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 06:47:45 -0800

Here are the details on one of the first Sustainability Cafés:

When: Monday, March 6, 6:30 - 8:30 pm
Where: BCIT Campus (CHBA BC, Building NW5), 3700 Willingdon Ave, Burnaby, BC

SUSTAINABLE HOMES

Description: What do you consider a “sustainable” home? What do you need to get there? Where is “there”? An innovative dialogue hosted by the Sustainable Building Centre and the Canadian Home Builders’ Association of BC.

Moderator: Helen Goodland is the Executive Director of the new Sustainable Building Centre on Granville Island and is a LEED accredited architect with over 15 years of experience in green building design, education and construction.

Please visit http://www.sustainablebuildingcentre.com for more information.

The First Annual "30 days of sustainability" has launched in Vancouver!

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 22:13:11 -0800

(If you are looking for the 2007 event information, please click HERE.)

I am very excited about our launch of the 30 Days of Sustainability. For the month of March, Vancouver will host a cornucopia of events and activities, all focused around bringing sustainability to our lives and our city.

One key component of the 30 Days of Sustainability is a dynamic, interactive website, which also launched on March 2nd, 2006. To learn more about the 30 Days, check out http://www.30daysofsustainability.com.

Special features of the website include:

a comprehensive event calendar, listing the dozens of workshops, sustainability cafes, speakers, and so much more taking place through the 30 Days;
a collection of photographs that will be taken by attendees at events all month;
A What's New section that lists all of the news updates;
an interactive 30 Questions section, where a new question will be posted each day, and the public will have the chance, along with our panel of sustainability experts, to discuss actionable things we can do to advance sustainability.

This website is our primary tool for getting the word out about all the exciting events taking place this month. Please take a minute to forward it far and wide to your sustainability / environmental / social change networks, and encourage others to do the same.

Thanks so much!

19th Annual Angel Forum (Vancouver, Canada) comes to a close

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 21:22:36 -0800

The 19th Annual Angel Forum came to a successful close this afternoon. Thirty-six companies in the software, manufacturing, communications, internet, and medical device sectors presented to 70+ investors over the course of a full day of sessions.

Each presenting company was given 10 minutes to pitch their company, market, team, market problem, solution, and investment needs to a group of prospective investors. Then the investors had a Q&A period with the entrepreneurs.

In addition, we had some excellent presentations:

* Bull Housser Tupper spoke on Intellectual property protection, employment issues, and term sheet negotiation;
* PriceWaterhouseCoopers spoke on Top 10 tax issues for startups
* The TSX Venture Exchange spoke on how to go public

Thanks everybody for a great day and we look forward to seeing you all back here in Fall!

Rocketbuilder's new Ready to Rocket 25 list has been released. This is the best of the best of the emerging technology companies from Vancouver and across B.C.

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 06:00:00 -0800

I attended the Ready to Rocket 2006 session this morning, which was sponsored by Rocketbuilders , a Vancouver based market strategy and consulting firm that helps technology companies capitalize on market opportunities.

The presentation started with an overview of the successes from 2005. Next, Geoff Hansen presented an IT Outlook for 2006. This was followed by the Ready to Rocket 25 for 2006 and the "Ones to watch" - 40 emerging companies that might graduate to the full "Ready to Rocket" Top 25 in 2007. Along with those lists, Price-Waterhouse Coopers presented an overview of the M&A and IPO activity across North America for 2005, and Bill Koty, a professor from UBC presented a brief overview of a newly released Premier's Technology Council report titled "Ahead of the Future" which gives a series of scenarios and predictions for B.C.'s technology economy development from 2005-2020. The summary notes are below along with some of my opinion at the bottom.

NASA should be in BC - we launched a lot of rockets last year.

Some interesting notes came from this session:

2005 was a breakthrough year on the Rocketbuilders list.
These companies were successful because they had a laser focus on a niche market.
Key highlights of the 2005 list include:

PureEdge Solutions Inc. (Victoria, BC) was acquired by IBM
Over 45% of the 2005 Ready to Rocket companies received new investments
100% of the 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 30% revenue growth
Over 60% of 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 100% revenue growth
Over 35% of 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 200% revenue growth

2006 - the rise of the phoenix

Here were some of the highlights of the predictions for the year ahead;

general projections seem to predicting that companies will increase their IT spending 5-6% across the board this year
SMB spending is double that and includes factoring in old hardware replacement cycles for hardware purchased before the collapse.
there is a trend away from cost-cutting measures and back to the value creation side in terms of prioritizing projects.
Key Themes that have been identified for 2006:

Choice: give the user what they want, where they want, in the form they want (Tivo, xFM)
Make it easy: make it simple to learn and use
Safe & Secure: ensure that they can store their data safely and people will trust you with that data
Search is king: there is a lot of work to do here
Microsoft Office enablement: now that Microsoft has opened up the APIs, companies are succeeding by building things that integrate into Microsoft Office, even more than they were before.
Storage is still hot: Networked attached storage companies (for example) are growing at up to 300%/yr
Make it portable: give people the ability to stay mobile: Blackberries, iPods, xFM
Ensure compliance: people are going to spend 30% of their IT budgets on compliance

For more information on the 2006 IT Outlook, contact Geoff Hansen at Rocketbuilders at 866-824-8785 or at gchansen@rocketbuilders.com.

Ready to Rocket 25 2006 list

Some interesting notes came from this session:

For the 2006 list, the selection team had great difficulty keeping it DOWN to 25, which meant that the Ones to Watch list expanded to 40 companies.
There were so many interesting technologies coming up that Rocketbuilders considered launching an "Interesting Concepts" category...but didn't
Success factors. The Top 25 shared some key success factors:
they were heavily verticalized (we had 5 Financial service companies and 4 Healthcare companies on the list.)
they were well-funded to grow
Some of these companies are approaching $5 - 10M in revenues - a point at which they become a LOT more interesting as acquisition targets.

Here is the direct link to the Ready to Rocket 25 List. But they are here for review as well:

Abebooks
AirG Inc.
Axonwave Software Inc.
Bycast Inc.
Caelo Software Inc.
Colligo Networks Inc.
Convedia Corporation
Eyeball Networks Inc.
FinancialCAD Corporation
Flowfinity Wireless Inc

GaleForce Solutions Inc.
GenoLogics Life Science Software Inc.
IronPoint Technology Inc.
In Motion Technology Inc.
Layer 7 Technology inc.
MAKE Technologies Inc.
NewHeights Software Corp.
ResponseTek Networks Corp.
RewardStream Inc.
Sxip Identity Corporation

Tantalus Systems Corp.
TAP Solutions Inc.
TenDigits Software Inc.
Vision Critical Inc.
Vivonet Inc.

The Ones to Watch

This list was presented but the final list will not be out until January 13th, 2006.

Lane construction finally complete - traffic now moving slowly towards IPO exit lane

In this 2005 review of M&A and IPO activity across North America presented by Randy Garg of Price-Waterhouse Coopers , there were quite a few interesting tidbits:

The IPO market has finally been resurrected.
$100B of private equity was present in 2005.
Private equity funds are becoming more active in M&A (25% of $100B or 25B) which is a new development.
Local companies are going public...but not necessarily on the TSX. Some have gone to London or to the USA. This is a new development.
Debt and subordinated debt as financial instruments have started to appear and this is a new development which is being enabled by the fact that newer companies have (gasp) revenues that can support the debt and are more financially solid and lendable from a cash-flow perspective.
Public companies are going private again in order to lower their costs, and simplify their operations because the costs of compliance are huge (up to 30% of IT spending per above notes, not to mention other back-office charges.)
Rule of Thumb: if you're looking to get acquired, make sure that you have audited financials
BC and Canadian companies are now on the U.S. radar but our prices have gone up and our currency has gone up, leaving us as less of a bargain than before.
The major M&A deals are still predominantly cross-border - U.S. companies buying Canadian ones or vice versa. There was very little activity in Canada between Canadian entities.
M&A is still a revenue purchase decision for companies. They are buying revenues, not necessarily technologies. Once a company crosses the revenue barrier, there are a LOT more suitors.
$5M seems to be a baseline deal size.
2006 is poised to be the best year yet for M&A activity!
There is a ton of money out there - $100B raised in the U.S. in the Private equity markets in 2005
therefore money is not the problem
finding good deals and good teams are the problem
M&A is still the preferred route of exit when compared to IPO, but IPOs are now back as options.

I'd like a micro fuel-cell powered proteomics machine for gene therapy web research

William Koty of UBC presented some of the findings from the Premier's Technology Council report on Emerging Technologies titled "Ahead of the Future". It evaluated 39 emerging technologies, boiled those down to a short-short-list of 12 Emerging technologies and then presented two almost contradictory charts - one from the academics and one from the industry advisory board. It was long on research methodology and somewhat short on conclusions.

I am hoping that they will do a follow-on or that it will feed into a larger discussion where they do indeed flesh out the scenarios that they discuss very tentatively in the report.

At the end of the day, what did they really say?

If I had to summarize the session, I would say it like this:

The tech industry is ramping up again. A lot of people had that gut sense but the numbers now prove it.
We are building some really kick-ass companies here in B.C.
Those companies are growing again.
M&A activity will be at an all time high in 2006 and the IPO markets are opening up again as exit routes.

"Your playing small doesn't serve the world"

We build good companies here that are very capital efficient and that are still attractively priced for acquisition. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It brings money into the economy, it gives local entrepreneurs access to global acquisitors' systems and training and talent, and spawns more entrepreneurial ventures. A year or two ago, one of the local entrepreneurs hosted a VEF event titled something like: "Why acquisitions are gutting B.C.'s economy." The resulting talk though had every one of the entrepreneurs on the panel saying that their acquisition was a good thing and that in fact it had had a net positive benefit across the board on a bunch of different things. I remember the host lamenting at the end that he should have talked to the panel BEFORE naming the talk.

Another key point was that we are finally starting to grow our companies again to a decent size We need to keep thinking bigger. Even the statement that they are growing to a decent size is deceiving since we are referring to companies approaching $10M/yr in revenues, which is laughable in the U.S. But it's a starting point. If you are an entrepreneur, don't say, "We're going to dominate the lower mainland", say "We're going to dominate the western world" or the whole world for that matter.

I am always reminded of the quote that was incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela but which was actually written by Marianne Williamson in her 1992 book, "Return to Love":

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of god - your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of god that is within us. It is not in just some of us. It is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

B.C. entrepreneurs would do well to think about that and learn from it. Our playing small doesn't serve the world. So get out there, think big, and serve the world.

Thanks to the good people at Rocketbuilders for the invitation and for all the hard work in putting this together!

The 10th Annual IT Financing Forum was a huge success!

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 08:09:06 -0800

I just spent two days at the IT Financing Forum and will likely be putting up some notes soon. But the quick summary is that it was a great two days with many wonderful conversations, a good overall mood, some fantastic learning, and I met quite a few new people from Vancouver as well as from Seattle and from the valley. There were some excellent companies presenting to two rooms of venture capitalists, as well as some informative and very entertaining panel discussions. More to come later...

I really should just syndicate Morford's column straight into my blog: Mark comments on the insanely huge progress we have made in fuel efficient vehicles this past 30 years

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 10:44:18 -0700

Here are some of the gems from this week's excellent article:

My mother, she had this car. It was ...

Canada goes to hell! Legal pot? Legal gay marriage? Universal Healthcare? (from Mark Morford)

Troy Angrignon — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 08:49:45 -0800

Many of you know that one of my favourite columnists is Mark Morford, who writes for the San Francisco Gate news. This is this weeks rant on Canada's policies versus those of his own government. It's a fantastic read and nice to see that at least one American is aware of what is going on outside of his country. I have posted the entire article below because it is so brilliant but it is also available on Mark's archive over here.

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Did you hear the screams? Did you feel the menacing chill? Did you see the black and ominous clouds, moving north?

Did you sense, in other words, the very presence of Satan himself as he laughed maniacally and tossed around bucketfuls of ultrathin condoms and little travel-size packets of Astroglide like confetti while riding his Harley Softail up to Toronto or maybe Edmonton to join the ghastly and sodomitic celebrations?

Because it's happened. Canada's high court just ruled that the government can, if it so desires, redefine marriage to include gay couples, which it has declared it will do almost immediately, thus solidifying Canada's place as the chilly yet mellow and gay friendly and hockey-riffic epicenter of all known hell.

It's true. It's rather amazing. Gay marriage will be completely legal in Canada very soon. It's been oddly ignored in much of the U.S. media and hasn't really been much discussed among those in the terrified red states except when, deep in the night, from their respective lumpy twin beds, they whisper to each other across the room as they pop their Ambien and stroke their portfolios and curse their very genitals: oh my God what's wrong with those freakin' Canadians?

I mean (they continue), I thought they loved red meat and brutish sports and manly hunting. Are they all just freaks and perverts now? Have they been sniffing too many elk pelts? Is it something in the clean and plentiful water up there? Something to do with those weird French-esque people in Quebec, maybe?

I knew we should've been paying more attention to that border! Didn't I say so, honey? Didn't I say we should keep an eye on those northern weirdos after they dissed the Iraq war and legalized pot and sort of went about their happy and calm Canadian business whilst we here in panicky red-blooded America chewed our own karmic legs off in a paranoid and jingoistic rage? Hippies and perverts, I said! Save a few bombs for Ontario, George, I say!

Let us now do the naughty math: Canada has roughly 32 million inhabitants, of whom about 75 percent are over 18, of whom it can be loosely estimated that anywhere from 2 to 8 percent are gay (depends, of course, on who you ask).

All of which translates into a ballpark figure of anywhere from 1 million to 2 million gay Canadians of legal marrying age who will now eagerly laugh and kiss in the streets and confound poor reactionary born-again George W. Bush, and they will flash their wedding rings at parties and annoy all the single people, all while proving for the umpteenth time that love knows no gender limitations or legal restrictions and will trump your whiny sanctimonious religious puling any given Sunday. Heathens!

It's getting more confusing by the minute, isn't it? I mean, Canada now has legal pot and legal gay marriage and universal health care and no known terrorist enemies and a relatively successful multiparty political system. They also have, according to U.N.'s Human Development Index, one of the highest qualities of life in the world. All coupled with a dramatically reduced rate of gun violence and far better gun-control legislation than the U.S., despite having the exact same per capita rate of gun ownership and gun-sport enthusiasm.

What the hell? How is this possible? Why aren't they scared to death like whiny red-state Americans? Why don't they want to kill each other along with anything that might threaten their access to televised hockey and cheap beer and yummy poutine?

Aren't they aware of what's happening in the world? Don't they know they are openly hated for their freedoms and their cafés and their vinegared french fries? Aren't they human, fer Chrissakes? Oh, red states. How confused and irritated you must be.

After all, unlike the U.S., Canada backed the Kyoto Treaty (along with 165 other heathen nations). They also spend more per capita on education and less on health-care overhead than the U.S. They have a $10 billion federal surplus, a new record. They are not, as of yet, abusing the hell out of their vast natural resources (freshwater, huge forests, oil and natural gas, mineral deposits, etc.) and embarrassing themselves on a global scale every single day and making a mockery of their constitution or their citizens' civil liberties. What the hell is wrong with them?

Yes yes, I know, Canada's universal health care is flawed and not always of the best quality, and a great many Canadians think their prime minister is a bit of a schmuck and they hate paying taxes and of course they can be all profitable and progressive when they don't have a massive bogus unwinnable war to pay for, one run by a ravenous and fiscally idiotic federal government, and they only have one-tenth of our population and one-fiftieth of our desperate consumeristic gluttony. They have it easy, right?

Remember, Canada is boring. Canada is rarely in the news. Canada has no massive belching socioeconomic engine like America does, what with our NASCAR and Hollywood and Fox News and bad porn and the absolute best medical care on the planet despite how only a tiny fraction of us have access to it while the rest languish in bloated abusive HMOs and poverty and disease and 40 percent of us have no access to health care whatsoever. Take that, Canada! Oh wait.

We hate gays and love guns and think pot is evil but hand out Prozac and Zoloft like Chiclets. Meanwhile (as "Bowling for Columbine" so beautifully illuminated), Canadians leave their doors unlocked and don't feature violence and death on every newscast and still value community and diversity and discussion over solipsism and protectionism and a general hatred of foreigners and the French. See? We rule! Oh wait.

All of which makes you wonder: how many more countries will it take? How many more nations will have to, for example, prove that gun licensing works, or that gay-marriage legislation is a moral imperative, or that health care for all is mandatory for a nation's well being, before America finally looks at itself and says, whoa, damn, we are so silly and small and wrong? Is there any number large enough? After the announcement that gay Chinese and gay Russians may legally marry and grow lovely gardens of marijuana as they all get free dental care, will America remain terrified of nipples and queers?

Canadians. So mellow. So laid back. So gay. So not producing any truly superlative modern-rock music or ultraviolent buddy-cop movies and not actively siccing Wal-Mart or Starbucks or Paris Hilton on the rest of the world like a goddamn cancer. They're just so ... nice. And boring. And calm. And solid. And friendly.

And they simply beat us senseless on the whole open-minded, progressive thing. Kicked our flag-wavin' butts. Trounced our egomaniacal self-righteous selves and made the red states look even more foolish and backward than the whole world already knows them to be.

They did it. Canada made the whole gay marriage issue look effortless and obvious and healthy, and a massive black rain of hellfire did not pour down upon them and the very idea of hetero marriage did not immediately explode and their economy did not unravel like all the sneering cardinals and right-wing nutballs screamed it would. We must ask, one last time: what the hell is wrong with them?

Oh wait. Maybe we should rephrase. What the hell, we should be asking, is wrong with us?

Listening to Robin S - Show Me Love (Stonebridge mix) from the album "Club Sounds Vol. 27 CD2"

Skipping photovoltaic cells and converting solar power directly into hydrogen will be another path to alternative energy

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 07:28:02 -0800

Here is an interesting article from Wired Magazine about a company called Hydrogen Solar that can convert solar energy to hydrogen at about 8% efficiency. They are currently undergoing trials in Guildford, England.

Energy: The newest VC swarming target. Kleiner Perkins leads the way.

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 08:03:39 -0800

It is a known fact that VCs "herd" - they all follow trends and all invest en masse in industries and trends. I have never heard so much alternative energy buzz in my life, not even when I attended the Environmental Studies program at UVic many years ago. Look for increasing energy related deals to be done by VCs across North America. It seems like we are experiencing a true renaissance in energy research and hopefully this will allow us to commercialize some relatively low-cost alternatives in the next 20-40 years. Here in Vancouver, BC, Canada, we have one firm that specializes in energy related companies, called Chrysalix Energy Limited Partnership, however they are mostly focused on fuel cell and related technologies.

Solar power could match fossil fuel cost by 2011 by using Stirling engines that convert solar power directly to mechanical energy

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 07:56:54 -0800

http://www.eetimes.com/at/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=53700939&pgno=1. Interesting article. I don't know enough to dispute or add to the article. I do know that the Insititute for Biological Energy Alternatives (Craig Venter's new project) is looking at sea-life to find more efficient methods for solar conversion than is currently available through standard photosynthesis and that they are hoping to find solar conversion techniques with efficiencies above 50%.

Listening to Anyday from the album "Puddle Dive" by Ani DiFranco

Build your building like a termite mound for lower capital cost, lower running costs and therefore lower rents

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 24 Oct 2004 12:11:14 -0700

Andrew Zolli (again) points out a fantastic project known as the Eastgate building in Harare, Zimbabwe that was modelled on the termite mound (see biomimicry) and that resulted in 10% lower up front capital costs, lower ongoing running costs, and 20% lower rents for its inhabitants compared with the building next door built with a normal HVAC system. (That last bit is an assumption - the article does not explicitly state the next door building's heating cooling system mechanism.)

Massive Change - the future of global design

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 20:32:14 -0700

This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.

Counterpoint: biodiesel is ecologically expensive and not a solution to petroleum fuel use at all

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 09:35:45 -0700

Portland Indymedia (pdximc) has a long and interesting post on the ecological costs of shifting from fossil fuels to biodiesel in particular that is very interesting. In short, it states that we use 1 billion gallons of fossil fuel per day and that we only generate 1.5 billion gallons of vegetable oil per year. He posits that were we to shift radically from fossil to bio fuels, we would simply shift the burden over onto unsustainably producing the necessary bio feed stocks - feeding human food to cars as it were. He finishes by saying that looking for another fuel - any fuel - to continue our unsustainable energy usage patterns simply props up a flawed energy usage culture for a little bit longer, while shifting the costs around to another place, making us feel better, and gaining some air quality.

Of course, all energy sources have pros, cons, weaknesses, strengths. And of course, varying outputs per dollar invested and varying environmental, social, and cultural costs.

However, I am going to explore this topic more in future postings. It is an interesting counter-point to my recent thinking about the benefits of biofuels.

20% of U.S. cars will be hybrids by 2010....and 80% by 2015. Now if we can just make them bio-diesel/hybrids, I'll get really excited.

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 01:39:10 -0700

Wired talks about the demand outstripping supply for both diesel vehicles and hybrid vehicles in the U.S. and how that will likely lead to diesel/hybrid vehicles. The problem is that diesel is still fossil-fuel based, stinky, sooty, and toxic.

VW has also publicly declared that they are reversing their stand on hybrid cars and will be releasing a hybrid very soon although they are unsure if it will be gas or diesel based.

And a Booz Allen Hamilton report claims that 20 percent of U.S. buyers may convert to hybrids by 2010...and 80 percent by 2015.

Hopefully, we will put bio-diesel into those diesel/hybrid cars (something that you can do without modifying the engines.) Sure, bio-diesel costs a few cents more but if your car is getting 85mpg (like the SMART car), who cares?

Self-powered mobile fly-eating robot eats and digests flies for power using microbial fuel cells

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 11:27:13 -0700

Okay, so it has to use human poop to attract the flies and it still can't actually catch the flies - it has to have them fed to it's little mouth - but all the same, the interesting parts of this equation are:

• it is self-powered
• it uses microbial fuel cells to generate its own electricity
• it stinks like poop so you're probably not going to use one anytime soon.

Isn't technology great? Imagine writing the grant application for this baby:

Applicant: "Okay we need ten million dollars because we are going to use human poop to attract flies to an artificial venus fly-trip thingy that will swallow and digest the flies, which it will then use for energy."

Department of Homeland Silliness: "Does it counter terrorism? Can you attract terrorist flies? Or can it digest terrorists? Or can you use terrorist poop?"

Applicant: "Ummmmmmm......sure........yeah.......I'm positive it can do some of those things."

DHS: "Right, here's twenty million and let me know if you need more."

Cool toy: Segway 4 wheel Centaur - Okay, forget the SMART car, I want a Segway Centaur

Troy Angrignon — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 15:47:21 -0700

This looks like a blast! Check out the video of somebody goofing around on the prototype Centaur. It uses the Segway balancing technology to allow the user to do perfectly balanced wheelies. What a blast this would be to have around town! (I'm thinking that the posties will like this one WAY more than the 2 wheeler.)

Centaur jousting or polo anyone?

buzzword alerts: bioreactors and microbial fuel cells

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 07:16:29 -0700

I am extremely interested in this field of bio-energy and am excited by all the possibilities of using microbes to convert solar power into useable hydrogen as well as to store energy similar to traditional batteries.

Here is a great Wired Magazine article on some of the upcoming possibilities.

Dilbert's Ultimate House

Troy Angrignon — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 23:00:29 -0700

If you have a love of architecture, green homes, virtual reality, and Dilbert, and you have a good half hour to waste spend, I recommend that you visit Scott Adam's new Virtual home tour at http://www.dilbert.com/duh and be prepared to be blown away. The house design was the result of thousands of Dilbert readers collaborating with Adam's to create Dilbert's Ultimate House. I think the results are stunning. I hope to build a house one day that is as well-suited to my needs as this house is to Dilbert's.

The Smart Car comes to Canada - 85mpg on the highway, 6-speed automatic, traction control, rear-engine, rear-drive. WOW. I love this thing

Troy Angrignon — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 11:09:45 -0700

I saw one of these Smart cars down at the Concord Festival on the weekend and had the chance to sit in it. It was incredibly roomy up front for the two passengers. I totally fell in love with this car. There is not much room in the back. Less in fact than I had behind the back seat in my old Jeep TJ. But the car is just so damned cute. I wonder if you can mount bike racks on it at the back???

It has an inline 3 cylinder rear-engine turbo diesel that gets 85mpg (hwy) / 65mpg (city), uses a clutchless automatic 6-speed, and comes in several different models ranging from $16,500 to $22,000 in Canada. They are being sold through the Mercedes network across Canada.

I hope they sell millions of these things to Vancouverites. Wouldn't it be great if we were all driving these tiny little things around town?

Then, wouldn't it be even better if we were filling them with bio-diesel for zero-toxicity, clear, clean emissions?

Want more information? Visit www.thesmart.ca.

The accidental rise of the universal power adapters: USB and Firewire

Troy Angrignon — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 11:42:59 -0700

Martin Tobias over at Deep Green Crystals mentions this morning his geek fetish for a new device called the Firepod.

He then goes on to say that this is cool because it is a cigarette plug in that breaks off to a USB and a Firewire cable, each of which can be used to charge his cell and his iPod.

That made some synapses fire and connect (perhaps more slowly than everybody around me?) and I realized that the need for the old cigarette adapter with all the funny ends may be at the end of its life. Most new portable funky devices are connected somehow and usually by either USB or firewire as in the example above. So as long as you have a small cigarette to USB/FW and an AC to USB/FW adapter with you, you can charge all of your devices no matter where you are. That's a very tiny, but very cool thing. Less power adapters floating all over the place.

Toronto pulls freezing cold water from the bottom of the lake to cool buildings, lower carbon emissions, save on power costs, and source drinking water

Troy Angrignon — Wed, 18 Aug 2004 07:49:53 -0700

This looks like an interesting energy project being opened in Toronto. Enwave Systems has built a three pipe system that pulls low-temperature water from the bottom of the lake Ontario, extracts the coldness from the water (the process is not mentioned), and then puts the water into the drinking supply.

I would be interested to know the net effects of this system since they obviously still have to have a large pumping station running anyway in order to pull the water in. Some of the benefits that are listed on the Enwave site are:

▪ Uses 75% less energy than conventional chillers

▪     Eliminates more than 59 megawatts from Ontario's electricity grid
▪     Removes 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air - equivalent to taking 8000 cars off the road
▪     Reduces ozone depleting refrigerants (CFC's and HCFC's) [by how much???]

It's an interesting project. I look forward to reading more on the actual implementation and real-world results.

There is a photo gallery of the construction process here.