Author Archives: fundrazrs

One of the ways we intend to keep our cost of operations down is to run a globally virtualized organization. This means that we will source talent from a variety of locations in North America, Europe and Asia and use Internet collaboration tools and systems to coordinate our work.

The traditonal place to look for offshore programming talent is India. There is a large infrastructure in the country specifically designed to serve the needs of North American companies. The competition for this business is strong and, as a result, prices are low compared to NA costs of talent.

However…

India has been so successful at promoting this business that they are now suffering from talent shortages and talent poaching between firms. The distances involved between our team in NA and India makes it difficult to “see into” the vendors to determine some basics such as team member quality, team member satisfaction (which leads to team stability) and team efficiency. With the challenges now facing the Indian outsourcing industry, it is more important than ever that we carefully select our vendor and carefully monitor our project progress on an almost daily basis.

Our hope is that the downturn in the American economy will have positive (for us) side-effects in the offshore development industry by reducing the growth pressure and therefore the ability for team members to “jump ship” so frequently. Time will tell…

…

… was the title of a day-long seminar I attended at SFU Harbour Center. It was put on by the Vancouver Angel Forum and included talks by experts in many different areas including finance, insurance, litigation, corporate structure, angel and venture investment.

I had a number of key takeaways from the day. Some of them weren’t the most positive but I absolutely got my money’s worth from this event. I have a much bigger and broader picture of the duties and obligations of a director and of the general governance model used in business in Canada and the US. I saw how complex this area has become and how easy it is to get trapped into taking on liability even from the most innocent and good intentioned actions.

For example, I have to revisit my Advisory Board roles with each of the startups I’m working with to clear up some liability issues. More important to this venture I have to rethink my ideas of an Advisory Board to ensure I structure it in a way that doesn’t put anyone (the shareholders, the directors, the executive or the company) at unnecessary risk.

The biggest unhappy realization of the day is how much all this governance work takes away from the natural energies founders and CEOs have for their business. It is a huge burden on the team for a small company. I was not the only CEO, investor or venture capitalist in the room who expressed disappointment at this state of affairs. However, it is part of the game and must be managed…

The good news from this day is that, given what I am learning, we have a chance to make our company a poster-child for how to build a well organized, well executed and still very exciting startup in Vancouver.

That is a very satisfying thought…