It has come up in conversations recently that the Quebec government has significantly  enhanced their provincial portion of the SR [...] read more »

In my last post,  What’s in the Deadpool?, I listed the various types of companies that had entered the  TechCrunch  deadpool from 2007 to the present. Now let’s take a look at the most common reasons for entering the deadpool.

First I should declare a few things:

Deadpool members are failed companies that have been reported by and entered into the deadpool by TechCrunch. [...] read more »

If you read TechCrunch with some regularity then you've probably come across the deadpool at some point. The deadpool is the tag TechCrunch gives companies when they have either closed up shop or if TechCrunch decides the future direction of the company can only lead to utter failure. Once in a while I peruse the deadpool to examine its inhabitants. I do this because just as it is important to understand why companies succeed it is also helpful to understand why companies fail. With that in mind I decided to compile the list of companies that entered the deadpool in 2007 and 2008 and perform [...] read more »

Development process is another area that can be a major barrier to a successful acquisition.   Methodologies used by development teams are a bit like fads.  The methodology comes in style, teams are formed around them and then like that pair of pants that you can't bare to throw out, the methodology continues even though it is no longer in vogue.  The results is that  there are a lot of different processes in use at different companies with major and minor differences between them.  When you consider the differences (and similarities) between the Waterfall, XP, and Agile methodologies, among others, [...] read more »

Let's start with job titles. At first glance this seems simple. In a smaller environment, people very quickly learn the capabilities of each of their team mates.  You usually don't need a lot of gradation in job titles. For example, junior, intermediate, and senior software developer will often suffice. These days though, I'm seeing pretty much everyone calling themselves senior software developer once they have a couple of years of experience.  As an experiment, in my last company I called everyone a software developer to see how that would fly and it went over quite well.  In fact it was useful [...] read more »

  Last week I attended one of the CVCA’s professional development events in Toronto (full disclosure I am a member of the CVCA professional development committee). The topic for the session was “Going Global” and quite honestly, despite the line up of high profile folks, I was expecting the event to be similar to other events on this topic, filled with motherhood statements about the benefits of going global with very few suggestions on how to pursue a global strategy. I was wrong. In fact, there were many valuable insights and suggestions. I’ve attempted to filter “some” of the content through [...] read more »

Over the years I have been involved in a dozen software acquisitions and I find that each one teaches me something new about the process.  It is good to see the process from both sides to get a real understanding of what actually goes on between each of the acquisition teams.  The one thing that seems to be  common is that most of the time, money and effort in an acquisition is spent on the corporate and technical side of things.  Naturally, these are important areas and they do need a lot of attention, but there is one key area  that universally seems to get minimized: the people side of the [...] read more »

I have been writing for some time about the lack of available equity funding for Canadian software companies and how bootstrapping can be the preferred choice for many companies.  As the US financing of VC's drops off even more (see below - and note that this is Q3 - before the mess on Wall Street - imagine Q4) things will only get worse in Canada.  Unless you are a very successful serial entrepreneur, have a boat load of patents,  or have rich relatives that can lead a round,  my advice to most Canadian software CEO's is - don't use your valuable time chasing VC.  Spend it selling your produ [...] read more »

The Life Balance Game

Though the matter is linked to the board game Trivial Pursuit it is by no means a trivial matter.

Today's subject is often whispered, but seldom talked about in a business context - How do professionals manage their careers, family and personal objectives in these demanding and turbulent times?  The reason for the whisper is that employers are demanding more time and attention from their teams- work is gobbling up a significant share of the available time and driving a life balance that is dangerously unbalanced.  Employees are concerned if they dial back [...] read more »

During my time as the head of HR at a successful semiconductor company I was constantly challenged to re-engineer our HR procedures.   Often, our final approach was quite different than the methods commonly taught and historically used [...] read more »