That was just one of the more intemperate statements made earlier this week by Red Herring publisher and CEO Alex Vieux at his company’s Canada 08 conference at Mont Tremblant, Quebec. Vieux also slammed Canadians as “risk-averse,” told one VC he was lazy for having a lower pace of completed deals than the average Silicon Valley firm, and advised companies to avoid federal-government-owned BDC Venture Capital because one of its partners said he’d have to vet with a committee his inclination to invest in a company.
It was a strange way to court business and enhance a brand that has already been substantially damaged. The founders of the once-iconic technology business magazine ceased operations in 2003 and sold many of its publishing assets to Vieux, who re-launched the property online later that year and was back in print at the beginning of 2005. Things have not gone smoothly since - issues have been missed, the website has occasionally gone dark, the company was evicted from its offices in May this year, around the same time that it postponed its Canada conference by three months, and Red Herring has been a regular topic of cheeky Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag’s deathwatch.
There is no denying Vieux has a quick mind with an encyclopaedic recall of names, company details and every statistic relevant to the global venture capital sector; I’d expect little else of a Stanford Fulbright scholar and former Le Monde correspondent. But performing under a spotlight entirely of his own construct, Vieux was uniformly offensive, monopolized every question-and-answer session to the near exclusion of his fee-paying registrants, routinely insulted his interview guests, was self-aggrandizing and a shameless name-dropper.
Whether they left in a huff or just left, by the second day of the conference, more than half the attendees and almost all the VCs had abandoned Vieux to wield his caustic microphone without them. Indeed, by the time the last company presented at about 2pm yesterday, a good three hours ahead of the posted conference close, even Vieux was nowhere to be seen and I constituted fully one-quarter of the audience that stuck it out.
For the record, Red Herring approached us a few months back and offered me a free registration in exchange for putting a banner on our company blog. With some 50 startups supposed to be there, it was a no-brainer for me and, although only about half that number actually showed, it was worthwhile because I was able to connect with many fascinating new technology ventures. Few others, though, some of whom came from as far away as Vancouver, would share that conclusion. And if there is no Red Herring Canada 09, Vieux will have no one to blame but himself.