Admittedly, most of the best have little interest in dealing with the LCBO. I suppose you too would think twice about selling wine to Ontario and its internationally feared state monopoly. Imagine this business scenario: First, you hold back an allocation for your Ontario agent in the hopes of getting an order. Then comes the expensive shipping of samples for evaluation if the initial tender is accepted. Then you’ll wait months for the order to be confirmed, then a few more months for the order to picked up, then a couple more months for actual shipping. Then you’ll pay $125 per wine type for the mandatory LCBO lab fees (and risk the entire shipment being rejected and returned at your expense, or simply destroyed). And then, you’ll patiently wait another few months for your payment, that’s if, of course, if the shipment sells well. If it doesn’t, the LCBO might arbitrarily put it on sale without telling you or the agent and deduct the difference from your payment. And don’t forget, all the while, you have buyers lining up at your cellar door, cash in hand, to get their allocation. What would you do?On the other hand, large producers with volumes of commercial wine to sell scramble to get an audience with the LCBO. Nothing could be easier then having one large customer take a whacking shipment of your everyday plonk in one go. And, you have a ‘state guarantee’ on your payment! It’s not like the LCBO is going bankrupt anytime soon or will disappear into the shadows like some shady Shanghai dealer.No wonder we see so much average wine. 

Its like we just don’t understand the way world works.  This is not good news for producers, but actually they find other places in the world for their products – and like water, flow where the business is better.  No one is sitting on piles of excellent wine they can’t sell, they are just going to markets that deserve them. Not to Ontario.  Not to you.  You have chosen differently.  You have chosen this model.

To get a sense for how perverse our approach to alcohol sales look no further than The Beer Store.  Again, a regulated monopoly for selling beer in Ontario – retail restaurants – with the most bizarre ownership structure imaginable. Surprising to most people in Ontario, unlike the LCBO, The Beer Store is actually private.  It is owned 49% by Anheuser-Busch (yes, Budweiser), 49% Molson Coors (Molson was bought by Coors in 2005) and 1 % by Sleeman Brewery (bought by Sapporo, Japan).

So say this with me: 

100% of the legislated monopoly in beer distribution and sales in Ontario is owned by 3 foreign corporations.

It’s not that different from legislating WalMart as the only legal distributor of durable home goods.  In fact its identical.

Why in this age of advertising and retail sophistication does The Beer Store look more like a recycling centre?  Because its not a retail store at all.  The Beer Store is not interested in selling *beer*.  That would imply at least passing interest in the product and the needs of customers.  An interest in developing the tastes and appreciation for its products.  Maybe even to opening your mind to new possibilities, featuring interesting new items, or introducing you to new beers you may not know about – even some made by the 25 Ontario Craft Brewers with truly exceptional products despite being structurally segregated from their local market.  This style of business development is anathema to The Beer Store.  what the store is designed for is primarily recycling and ordering one of the top few national beer brands – and lets face it that’s not exactly the good stuff.

As reported by the Toronto Star, in 2007 the Ontario Craft Brewery association (OCB) wanted to either acquire shares in The Beer Store or be permitted to set up their own competing chain. Premier McGuinty responded by saying that his government would not even consider any application to form a competing chain, and that his government would not consider compelling The Beer Store’s shareholders to sell any shares, although some Liberal and Conservative backbenchers have said they would expect The Beer Store to at least negotiate in good faith with craft brewers who made a serious offer. The Beer Store responded by saying that it was not considering and would not consider selling shares at any price…that in the event OCB did get to set up a competing chain, they would refuse to stock their products there.  Ouch.

So to those that travel the world, say to europe, and are impressed by the varieties of local brews remember: we chose this too.  We willfully choose for Ontario to be second class with limited generic selection of over priced products.  Through our actions this is our expressed desire.

Cheers.

Friday April 23rd noon-9pm at the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo we’re hosting the community for live streaming event coverage of the conference happening in San Francisco.

Check out the speaker schedule and Register for free now!

Startup Lessons Learned is the first event designed to unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup. The goal for this event is to give practitioners and students of the lean startup methodology the opportunity to hear insights from leaders in embracing and deploying the core principles of the lean startup methodology. The day-long event will feature a mix of panels and talks focused on the key challenges and issues that technical and market-facing people at startups need to understand in order to succeed in building successful lean startups.

Join the startup community at the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo to share the ideas explored at the conference via the live stream.

This is an incredibly positive step since it frees capital to flow to early stage Canadian startups from US venture capitalists and individual investors.  That’s the win.  Previously, for US VCs all the lawyering and paperwork made doing a deal in Canada burdensome if not downright impossible since the filing requirements extended to the original investors into the VC fund and can number in the hundreds or thousands. Not to mention anything about funds of funds where the complexity compounds. This made the deal count low and pushed the deal size up, way up to a point where most US VCs only considered investing in a much later stage, lower risk and higher placement expansion round. This of course ads insult to injury since most Canadian “early stage” VCs have the risk profile of a pensioner.

Early stage investments in Canadian startups have been coming from from government grants and from individual angels and a growing number or organized angel networks. These groups have been carrying the load for what would be/could be an institutional investment industry here.  I recently watched companies pitch an angel network for million dollar rounds and was left wondering where the VCs were?

The audio for the webinar is available as well.

I have to admit that the victory is somewhat bittersweet.  Sweet because it is progress, bitter because it took so long to fix and there is so much more to be done.  I hope with this one step at least more young companies find the funding they need which will inevitably grow the ecosystem. Canada needs many more startups, more learning and evolution.  The best way I can imagine to learn it is to do it. Hopefully this will help.

I’m talking to some VC friends in Boston this week and I’ll hopefully get their take.  I’ll update when I have.

You often hear people focusing on the internal parts of agile.  Often these are the things the scrum master is supposed to facilitate during a sprint like daily stand-up etiquette, burn down charts, planning poker, retrospective games etc.  These are all useful tools but ignore the elephant in the room if you happen to be a startup: how to you build the backlog?

Even more, how do you build a backlog that will define and evolve a sustaining product in a profitable market before you run out of cash?!  That, my friends is the primary challenge of a startup and so many of the rituals of agile development alone wont hep you with.   I don’t intend to diminish the value of something I’ve spent the last decade learning and practicing, but in the last few years I’ve learned where it belongs relative to other important factors that can’t be ignored. If you’ve ever been the Product Owner I’m sure you’ll agree that it take a hell of a lot of effort to build and maintain a backlog including the efforts of many people.

There has been little in the way of process to address this fundamental challenge in a way that was as compatible with the style of agile development – at least until lately.  This is why LeanStartups and Customer Development resonated so strongly for me.

Don’t worry about “not doing it right” and instead focus on how you are improving.  Where were you int he past and where are you now? What’s next?  Focus on that.  Too many times people assume that because their agile adoption is imperfect they are missing some critical part or have generally failed.  You may be right!  But, it doesn’t really matter.  In my experience you shouldn’t wait around for the perfect process/team/org adoption to arrive.  Just keep moving and keep improving.  Plan on team cohesion around a workable process taking a year or so.  Most of that year will seem pretty wonky but go with it and don’t fret.  Don’t sweat the fact that after 6 month your velocity is still erratic, or your stories are too open ended, or your product owner doesn’t have a vision (introduce them to Customer Development!), or that you can’t keep your standups focused, or that you don’t pair enough, or that storypoints don’t map to reality, or that you have too many bugs that they trow off your planning, or that you can’t really ship every iteration, or that you can’t test enough, or that you test too much, or…

Take a breath and keep going.

Is your dev team immortalized on streetview?  I think not!

-Moshe Safdi

This poem is at the end of the Moshe Safdi’s TED talk video on his approach to architecture over his career.  It stuck in my head ever since.

I think Rick’s fundamentals are right but the mechanism is wrong.  Scrape together a few bucks to squander on training is a cynics take.   To me what I noticed immediately after moving back to Canada is simply the lack of game.  We don’t need special consideration we need more action. Problem is to get more action you need more VCs playing and more LPs willing to invest.    For cultural, population and scale reasons Canada can’t rely completely on domestic investment – and shouldn’t want to either.  It especially shouldn’t wait around for a few tens of millions to be handed down from the government in ham handed way as the primary LPs to local VC.  Completely wrong headed as well.

What Canada needs more than anything is more capital to work with.  We’re a resource rich country – in more ways than minerals and lumber.  I mean in skilled and talented people.  To scale and deepen the level of skill and experience you need to do it.  You do it by funding more companies and iterating more often.  We don’t have enough oxygen in Canada to do this and will always be chronically underfunding this critical emerging part of our economy.

Stephen Hurwitz recently articulated this much better than I and to a level of detail I’ve been craving ever since moving back from Boston and wondering what the hell was going on with Section 116.  His article titled: Reforming Section 116 – Key to Opening Canadian Borders to Foreign Venture Capital lays out the case:

The notion that Canada makes it simple for investment to flow outward but not encourage the other direction is in my opinion the single largest problem facing Canadian start-up founders (or would-be founders that fail to find investment).

By simply alleviating the administrivia surrounding this issue we can unlock the potential of billions of dollars of investment that is otherwise squandered or leaves for other more favorable places.  In this area I know of what a speak.  I’ve made that choice and met tons of fellow Canadians that did as well.

I’d place  abet that Section 116 is not a rational, thought out position with a purpose but rather a sloppy oversight that has yet to be corrected by people with interests in seeing entrepreneurs flourish in Canada.   If there was one thing we could do, wave a wand and change a single thing this would get my vote.

Fitting tactical level thinking (where agile excels) into a compatible strategic framework is a powerful combination.  I’m not sure of the distinction between the Product Manager Role and the traditional Product Owner as drawn.  It appears that the Product Manager is defined to be more strategic and have more market orientation.  I’m not sure I buy the separation in my world where companies are small and people are stretched thin but I can see it in larger orgs.  I wonder abotu it because the Prouct Owner stops being the “owner” of anything and really just a middle manager of sorts with dubious authority.  In my experience the way for developers to have confidence in a backlog is to have them build it or have market data.  Not sure I’d want that Product Owner job.

I liked XP as an engineer but from the business side of things found that it was limited to encouraging good engineering practices but not much else.  That’s when I learned about SCRUM – the agile methodology that adds the project management rituals that are compatible with the engineering practices of XP.  Great, I figured,  now I can really build cool products! Er…maybe.

Scrum is the way we run the AideRSS engineering group its what I’ve used at Mindreef and previously as well.  But, over the years I’ve realized that the toughest problem – the one that matters most and was consistently the most challenging – was figuring out what the product backlog should be.

The backlog is the answer to the question: “What is the most important work we should do right now?” it presumes that you could confidently make that list, and keep it up to date as things change – or at least articulate what you’re building and for whom.  Embedded in that assumption is why startups fail.  How do you really make the best backlog for your company?

XP and Scrum don’t have much to say – they punt.  Its by far the hardest part of the puzzle of shipping successful products and both recommend that you get a customer in the room and ask them to clarify what they want as you go.  Well, that’s fine as far as it goes but when you’re a startup and you don’t have customers yet you need a way to bootstrap and that can feel awfully chaotic and wasteful. What’s worse is that as you grow you’ve probably developed some pretty bad habits as far as setting priorities and strategy: like thinking you’re a genius – just because you got funded – and that genius is what allows you to *know* what the market wants.

Product Management is the generally accepted answer to the question above and though I love the folks at Pragmatic Marketing for their excellent offerings in this area, product management isn’t all that well connected to agile development, especially in a startup.

I recently listened to the VentureHacks podcast of Steve Blank’s talks at Stanford on the topic of “Customer Development”.  A blog post: “How to develop your customers the way you develop your product” links to resources that describe the idea.  Wrapping the iterative nature of agile development in another outer loop called Customer Development makes a ton of sense to me.  Its the first time I’ve seen an approach to the Market/Product fit problem that makes sense the same way agile makes sense to software developers.  I’m looking forward to digging into this some more and applying it to how we evolve at AideRSS.

Oh, some guy called Marc Andreessen things Steve’s book is nifty too.

Banks

Autos

Here are a few points that stood out for me:

• “Our economy is shifting away from jobs based largely on physical skills or repetitive tasks to ones that require analytical skills and judgment.”

• “…there is considerable pressure on governments to protect the past and to undertake bailouts – to preserve what we have during this time of uncertainty. But this protective approach can only forestall the inevitable. There is a better way”

• “This must be more than a government effort. … Businesses should make these choices for their own benefit, not in response to government directives.”

• “The evidence shows we rank well behind a set of peer regions in North America and  behind the best global peers in economic output per person – perhaps the single best measure of our overall economic prosperity. And in recent decades, we have seen our advantage erode from near parity with these global leaders”

• “Ontario is relatively prosperous; but our assessment is that we have settled for a level of prosperity that sells our province short. While it is not comforting to admit, we have in fact lost ground against the very best economies over the past twenty years…our citizens’ creative skills are less developed than those of the world’s leading jurisdictions”

Lots of this report is motherhood and apple pie, and sounds very unsurprising coming from Richard Florida who’s creative class evangelism is not new – Revenge of the Squelchers.  The sections “Raise the Creativity Content of Occupations” and “Capturing Ontario’s Diversity Advantage” highlight some critical insights: Ontario needs to more closely align its values with creative values.  There are no programs, incentives, tax reform or anything else that will overcome overly conservative and stodgy social attitudes.

“A place like Pittsburgh or Rochester can have substantial  technology, but will fail to grow if talent leaves, and it lacks the openness and tolerance to attract new people.”

Ontario needs to be a magnet for attracting talent not a place young talented creatives see in their rear view mirror on their way to more attractive places.  Address the brain drain problem!

Read about it on Michaels blog.

When I was in Engineering school in Ontario during the early 90’s there was plenty of talk about the declining status of the big three – as a 2nd year co-op student I clearly remember thinking that I wasn’t interested in going down on that sinking ship.  Over the years I was confused again watching the big 3 churn out crap year after year with impunity.  Over nearly 2 decades, whenever I’d get unlucky enough to land myself in a new rental car made buy the big 3 I was confused some more: who would willingly produce this crap?  And who’s buying it?  Why?

This is nothing new.  Its been going on for decades, literally.  Over the years our provincial and regional governments have leveraged the economic stability of our industrial sector by making deals with the big 3 to produce more and more of this crap in Ontario.  Every plant is seen as some sort of economic win when its really as healthy as a crack house. Its been short term, uninformed thinking that has now created the perfect storm catastrophe we will inevitably witness over the coming decade.  Now that the big 3 have gotten themselves in such a mess we’re confronted with this question of a bailout as if its a new problem that’s just been created.  That some how the big3 are somehow victim of greedy wall street banks.  I can believe that the credit crisis makes it more difficult to operate – but its difficult because the credit is so necessary and its so necessary because the balance sheet is such a mess and the balance sheet is a mess because they don’t sell enough product!

A bail out will fix this?  A bail out program filled with loan guarantees and labor strings attached will do nothing more than delay the inevitable and force this market into an even more unnatural place with yet more on its shoulders if it ever would recover.  When its well known that car manufactures can make better products for less i ts inevitable and propping up this artifice doesn’t do anyone any good. ($38/hr vs. $70/hr for big 3)  Even the Governator gets it.

Talking with a cross section of people on the subject the only reason I hear for supporting a bailout is to prevent the impact to the rest of the economy – its a hostage situation – not something to keep or fix. The fact that our Ontario government has the economy so tuned around a model that’s been broken and in decline for decades is plain irresponsible and bad governance.

It seems plausible to me that significant elements of the big 3 (or all of them) will be gone in the next several years, but automobile manufacturing will still be an economic mainstay.  I’m not sure why we feel the corporations of Ford, GM and Chrysler can’t fail – it happens all the time in my industry and its taken as a healthy sign.  Out with the old and in with the new.  It doesn’t mean the industry/work goes away it just means things change, and that can’t be all bad – especially for these guys.

I couldn’t help but notice that not everyone was celebrating.  It was a real life excercise in demographics.  Young black musicians were jamming on the street in an infectious, raucous improv band, middle aged women visiting from blue states were waving and dancing, white dudes in football jerseys and oversized beers were not so jolly looking.  After the obvious there were more nuanced layers of reaction.

Regardless – it was a great place to be on an historic night.I found myself on an unexpected rollercoaster of emotion from celbrating to welling up with tear.

There were several great talks.  My favorite was Damien Katz’s very personal story of cashing in his chips as a programmer @ IBM in Boston, selling the house, moving the family back home to Charlotte, NC to be nearer to family…all with any prospect of a job waiting for him.  I can seriously relate to that leap and it was inspiring to hear him relate the highs and lows that a change like that entails.  Damien says he knew peole worked on really cool projects and asked himself why he couldn’t be one of those people.  He took the leap and made it happen – with a wife and lovely baby girl besid ehim.  Apache CouchDB definitely counts as a cool project.  I love that Damien admitted to not knowing how to build CouchDB when he started.  But, he stuck it out and did it.  Props.

There were plenty of other highlights; I’m sure the live recordings of Zed Shaw will get noticed by the Ruby/Rails community.  I thought that was fun to watch but strangely self indulgent.  Maybe having 3 young kids at home has developed my appreciation for childish behavior – I enjoy watching them do silly stuff too.