Vancouver Pixel Crafters

I am putting together a Processing workshop at the Hive this coming Thursday (April 4th). The workshop will run from 6pm to 10pm.

The focus is to introduce designers, artists and people who are not super technical to the Processing framework. We have a nice group put together so far - a lot of different creative professionals with a few programmers to help out. 

There is approximately 10 seats left. The workshop is by donation to help cover the cost of the space (suggested $20) - if you are broke I would rather you come than give me any money. Any money past the cost of the space will go towards beer and/or pizza.

I will talk and do some demos for about an hour and then we will all build stuff. You will need a laptop to attend.

I think that is it… get at me if you want to come. I can be reached at christopher.luft@gmail.com

The leading event dedicated to enabling companies to succeed in SaaS and Cloud applications. Five keynotes, five tracks, 26 sessions, four workshops. Tracks include “Integrating Analytics and Community into Your Services;” “SaaS Finances and Operatons” (including M&A and key metrics), “Marketing and Selling SaaS and new track, Wearables/M2M and Cloud Applications. Main sessions on key SaaS business benchmarks, pricing and discounting, sales force compensation, selling Cloud professional services, SaaS and the integration of wearable technology and much more.

Complete agenda at: http://www.softletter.com/pages/market_and_selling_saas_agenda.shtml

Register at: http://www.regonline.com/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=1188589

Special Bonus — Every attendees will receive a free copy of Rick Chapman’s latest book, “SaaS Entrepreneur: The Definitive Guide to Succeeding in Your Cloud Application Business.” A $49.99 value. Read excerpts at http://www.saasentrepreneur.com

Earlier last month, an event called How To Talk To Your Lawyer was host by Martin Ertl of Contractually.

Audio of the event has been uploaded to SoundCloud.

Roland Tanglao was also kind enough to create notes of the event:

• Martin Ertl, recovered lawyer, founder at: Contractually and Navarik - SAAS for the oil industry
• Talking to lawyers for entrepreneurs can be scary
• Dispelling fear and confusion
• How do you find the right lawyer?
• How do you figure out how much it’s going to cost?
• Disclaimer: Talk to your own lawyer, don’t rely on this talk!
• Lawyers can help you and add important value to your business
• Context:startups, consulting businesses, growing your technology company
• How do you find a lawyer?
  • Ask people you trust for recommendations.
  • Make sure you find a lawyer who has experience and expertise that you need
  • Going to lawyer who doesn’t know about startups to ask for startup advice is wrong
• When do I need a lawyer?
  • When you are at the point of taking investment
  • When you have other co-founders and want to nail down business deal with co-founders. When giving out equity, when quitting your job to work on the startup. When hiring employees etc.
• Startup special situations
  • you want to go to the few lawyers who specialize in startups; who understands the issues, how to setup properly
  • not general purpose business lawyers (Martin can give you a list)
  • this will save you money
  • good sign: lawyer has an AngelList account (good sign that this person is a good lawyer)
• Meet with at least two lawyers
  • just like hiring
  • look for personal chemistry
  • is there good communication happening
  • meet with them at an office or coffee
  • half an hour to an hour is a good time frame
    • specific advice is not important but fit is important
    • ask specific questions you’d ask key employee or key service provider (how did they get into startups, why are they a lawyer)
• Emerging trend in places like San Francisco to have a standard legal package for startups (in Vancouver $5-6K)
• A good lawyer like a good doctor will refer you sombody else if you need help beyond their expertise
• How is a law firm structured?
  • typically partners who are owners/shareholders in the business
  • partners share in profits and decision making
  • most partners are responsible for bringing in their own clients
  • firms especially larger farms have a pool of associates who are full fledged partners typically earlier in their career who don’t get profit share
  • rates vary depending on associates, $200+ for associates, $400 for partners (Vancouver costs, NYC and SF, etc are more expensive)
  • track time by 6 minute increments (cost = hourly rate * cost)
  • expenses incurred on your behalf are passed on (e.g. incorporation)
  • do you want to meet associates you are working with? yes absolutely, don’t neccesarilly know those associates ahead of time; you should meet and/or chat with associates
• structure of your company
  • Again, fixed fee packages are coming in (e.g. $5K for incorporation, NDAs & other initial employee docs, initial shares, stuff you need up to first financing)
  • better to keep your company following a standard structure (e.g. simple vanilla structure so that acquisition is easier)
  • e.g. multiple classes of shares probably means you are doing it wrong for a tech startup i.e. you want a simple vanilla corporate structure
  • special cases like family trusts result in significantly higher legal costs
  • i.e. off the shelf legal stuff is probably better
• How to talk about fees
  • if your lawyer won’t discuss this openly, red flag!
  • Always get an estimate just like engaging any other service provider
  • Have certainy and clarity around budgeting legal costs like any costs
  • Some lawyers are more inclined to give and be held to estimates
  • Some feel that you can’t nail down fees because you don’t know what you don’t know
  • You should however be able to get estimates based on current understandings and assumptions or a certain phase of a legal project and be able to get updated estimates as situation develops
• How do we give good requirements to lawyers?
  • you should be clear in your mind about your goals, what you want to achieve
  • if it’s a business deal, know the business, time committment, equity split, vesting, whether you will raise financing or not, etc - the more you thought through what you need the better
  • write down the key points of the business deal you are thinking of do in plain english for the utmost clarity, potential legal issues, key questions, risks that should be addressed, etc.
  • look up key terms like reverse vesting, i.e. do your own research especially talking to other entrepreneurs
  • lawyer’s job is not to hand hold you
  • if your business depends on which side of a legal framework you fall on, get that clarified
  • it’s your business, it’s up to you to make decisions (but of course understand nature of risk; how likely, consequence of risk, etc)
  • lawyers can explain issues and point out risks but they don’t tell you what to do
• Lawyer’s duties
  • loyalty to you
  • confidentiality so generally don’t need to sign an NDA
  • competency
• Retainer Agreement
  • generally a retainer not asked for from startups (but common in other areas of law)
  • formal acknowledgement that they are working for you (but not needed)
  • a retainer of $1500 is not unreasonable
  • complicated litigation: not unreasonable to ask for $3000 or $5K
• Managing your lawyer
  • clear communication
  • followup
  • make sure you are not the blocker so keep things moving, good organization, communication, responsiveness and followup save money
  • be professional and pleasant of course!
  • use Basecamp? use some other tools? A: manage it like any other project; you might only want to consider lawyers who are willing to consider online tools.
  • don’t be afraid to get on the phone to resolve small things quickly that can cascade out of control
  • project management for lawyers is no different than other areas of your business
• Lawyers in Vancouver or elsewhere?
  • might make sense for certain domains or industries e.g. film industry might want laywer in LA or NYC to plug into their knowledge, connections and network
  • if you are actually setting up an office some place else, you will have to deal with issues like employment issues and local legal entity in that juristiction, again get recos for lawyers from other entrepreneurs and places like AngeList
• ASAP in the life of your company, you need to align vision, compensation expectations,etc with co-founders and early employees; legal paper work can’t help this!
• Reverse Vesting & Vesting = vesting to founder or early employee takes effect over a time period - intended to deal with people who leave early; those terms vary e.g. 4 year vest with a 1 year cliff means shares vest over years but if you leave in 1st year you get nothing, after 1st year you get 25% or you can get full deal but stuff is clawed back if you leave early
• If you don’t intend to raise money, then vesting, cap tables, etc. aren’t as important
• Need a lawyer to make agreements enforceable and somebody i.e. a lawyer who says the company is defendable
• If you have IP, you need a lawyer (no reason not to do this economically combined with standard agreements)
• As a single individual, you don’t need to incorporate but once you involve other people you need to get shares and incorporation right
• Mr Burns vs. Ralph Wiggums (Simpsons reference!)
  • Who are you agreeing with? Dealing with large enterprise in a large deal is different than a small deal with a small business; you may be able to negotiate small deals your self (may be able to negotiate and get lawyer to document up agreements after you have prepared bullet points of the deal i.e. term sheets). Ralph Wiggums
  • If you are dealing with Mr. Burns with army of lawyers you need resources including legal ones to negotiate deal - not concerned with final paperwork but know that on the way you have the legal and other expertise to negotiate that complex deal; i.e. at outset and throughout negotiation not after
• NDAs
  • can deal with use including non compete and non solicit and who owns info and what use can be made of it
  • in web software world, not much proprietary
  • but in other areas e.g. hardware or life services, NDAs can have serious consequences; not trivial!
  • maybe you should get others to sign up your NDA first :-) !
• Standardize and automate legal documents as you grow your business
  • develop checklists for dealing with legal documents and issues so you know when to consult with lawyers e.g. bullet points to review when looking at an NDA
  • just like you want to automate other parts of your business like engineering side
• Keep entities with multiple people as simple as possible
  • it gets complicated if you want to do personal consulting on the side
• If you are already a company without a lawyer how do you transition?
  • Fund a lawyer to do exploratory / discovery (put together a due diligence package for your lawyer and tell them what to focus on )
• Conflicts
  • lawyers will want a list of people involved in company so they can do a “conflicts check” i.e. in some cases the lawyer might not be able to act for you, gets complicated with large companies because lawyers may have acted for an entity of a big company you are in conflict with before your company
  • your interests are not the same as co-founders so even though lawyer may have drawn up agreements for all founders as part of drawing up stuff for the company, if there’s a dispute, your lawyer may ask you to get independent advice
• Competition
  • depends on nature of competitor
  • in Canada, conflicts check doesn’t flag competitors

Hi All,

There are four upcoming tech events that need some community support to get off the ground.  If any of these are appealing to you, please get in touch with the organizer directly.

Startup Grind The team from Startup Grind just completed a successful run in the Valley (http://startupgrind.com/) and are looking to replicate the magic in Vancouver.  They had some heavy hitting speakers in SFO including: Clayton Christensen and Steve Blank.  If you are interested in joining this project fire Cheryl an email at: me@cherylm.ca 
Startup Weekend Vancouver The next edition of Startup Weekend is coming up in May and the Lead Organizer, Yaniv Talmor will need hands on deck to make it awesome. This is a great opportunity to tap into the investment and established startup side of the community by working with and reaching out to the tech community.  More info on Startup Weekend: http://startupweekend.org If you are interested get in touch with Yaniv at: yanivt@gmail.com 
(Also rumours that there is another Startup Weekend happening at the end of March… details when they come in) 
LadyCoders The crew from http://ladycoders.com/ is looking to come up from the States to do an event here in Vancouver.  In their words, LadyCoders “In these seminars, we give attendees the tools they need to find, get into, and be happy in tech careers.” If you are interested in helping out with this, please get in touch with Kelly at: kellymiller@hotmail.com 
Sports Hack Day I just got back from Sports Hack Day (http://sportshackday.com/) Seattle during the Superbowl and had an amazing time hacking on APIs from ESPN and others building sports related apps and visualizations.  Would love to bring the event up to Vancouver in May or June, probably around the hockey playoffs.  If you are interested in helping out email: jesse@id8.ca 
Talk soon

Jesse

ps.  The folks at the Vancouver Hack Space (http://hackspace.ca) are putting on an Arduino and Pi workshop Thursday Feb 21st at 7:30pm (because there isn’t enough already going on that night!).  If you are interested in checking out some hardware hacks, you should check this out: https://vancouver.hackspace.ca/wp/2013/02/04/raspberry-pi-python-webide-gpio-pins-blink-sketch-tuesday-feb-5th/

Hey fellow entrepreneurs,

Some of you may have already heard about FounderDating (no, it’s not romantic), but for those of you who haven’t I wanted to let you know about it. FounderDating (FD) is an invite-only, online network for entrepreneurs to connect with cofounders in Vancouver and elsewhere. Why FD?

• High Quality - members are carefully screened for quality and readiness (no recruiters, etc.) Applications and members’ identities are confidential, but a few of the folks who are part of the network are former founders or early employees from: stackmob, Salesforce, Zynga, Loggly and Gilt just to name a few.
  
• Balanced - 50% engineering & 50% non-engineering

• Reach- FD’s online network allows you to connect with people in your city and beyond to share ideas and begin building something you’re passionate about.

• No Idea Necessary - FD is about the people, so you don’t need to have an idea, just be ready to work on a serious side project

The deadline is Feb 27th, so apply now. http://members.founderdating.com/application

Cheers and feel free to reach out to me off-list with questions.

Hey guys,

If anyone is interested in working on some serious side projects or collaborating with other entrepreneurs, there’s an online curated network called FounderDating that’s accepting applications by February 27th for Vancouver.

Here’s a link with more information: http://bit.ly/WjXq5K

Cheers,

Benji

Hey guys - Derek (the founder of Startup Grind) is looking for someone to possibly start a chapter in Vancouver. It’s a pretty cool and growing community (their SFO event last week has Clayton Christensen, Steve Blank, and a few other big wigs), if anyone is interested, or know someone who is, shoot me an email andreimpop(at)gmail and I’ll connect you directly.