Randall Howard

Gotham in Kitchener: Waterloo Area Arts Truly Striving for World Stature

Last weekend, I attended Asphalt Jungle Shorts IV, a truly innovative and engaging theatre experience — one that you definitely shouldn’t miss. And, even better, AJS is performed right here in Waterloo Region. Downtown Kitchener, having weathered a down cycle and now in a major resurgence, has evolved an urban, hip, almost Manhattanesque kind of feel.

Multitalented Artistic Director Paddy Gillard-Bentley’s innovative use of site specific theatre builds on our unique urban environment in bold new ways. In her previous three installments, she allowed us to experience drama in such real world settings as a parking garage, a bar, City Hall, a store window, back alley, small parks and even a book store. Without giving too much away, I can say that Paddy has pulled out all the stops and presented a play in the most unlikely and crazy place I’ve ever seen. I’m sworn to secrecy, so you will have to attend to find out where.

Couple the intrigue of great locations with a globally selected talent pool and you’ll start to see what the AJS magic is all about. Although primarily directed and acted by best of the best from our local theatre scene, the plays are truly a reflection of the diversity of cyberspace, coming from Australia, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, Russia, United Kingdom (London), United States (Arkansas, California, Georgia, New York, Oregon, Washington,) and of course a few from closer to home in Canada. As the audience navigates through 13 plays in multiple locations, many boundaries are blurred. Is that a homeless person or and actor? Is the woman next to me an audience member or an actor? Is that a regular store patron, or …?

AJS rounds out other regional, multi-site arts events like the Open Ears Festival and CAFKA which, in turn, nicely complements a burgeoning convential arts scene, which tend to reside inside buildings like galleries, theatres, concert halls and museums. Collectively, these three festivals have significantly enriched our Third Place. The Waterloo area is renowned globally as an innovative community with several world class universities, a top technology cluster and newer world class think tanks such as Perimeter Institute and CIGI. It’s also pretty clear to me that, as our innovation capacity grows, so must the artistic capital grow hand in hand. Asphalt Jungle Shorts is a true gem in this growing artistic footprint for our region.

Scene from Asphalt Jungle Shorts

A point of disclosure, I’m a founding Board Member of Flush Ink Performing Arts which will propel Artistic Director Paddy Gillard’s already considerable achievements into a great new “Fringe Festival” called “Unhinged” and, in which should be no surprise, builds on her innovative delivery of site specific theatre. Like technology startups, the arts thrives and survives only on investment. I have been a sponsor of these activities from the beginning, both personally, and through Verdexus. I’m convinced that when you are initiated into AJS, you will want to be as well.

But, you’d better hurry as only four days of the run remain - 28, 29, 30 & 31 May, 2008. Reserve quickly at tickets@flushink.net or 1(519) 957 2228. More details at the Flush Ink Performing Arts website.

Bookmark to:

Indigestion from “Half Baked” Mobile Web Browsing

Yesterday, Chris Sacca (ex Googler extraordinaire, investor in the likes of Twitter and recent Tech Leadership Conference Keynote speaker) shot a provocative salvo across the bow of the Twittosphere. Many times Twitter is a true belwether, capturing the pulse of market dynamics. And, although saying this might not go down well in Waterloo, it struck a chord with me. Here’s Chris’s shot of wisdom:

“Surfing the web on a Blackberry is like trying to prepare dinner for four with an Easy-Bake” Oven.

Bookmark to:

Finding Negawatts Right on your Doorstep

Big “boil the ocean” issues (with apologies for the corny metaphor) like Global Warming overwhelm many people with their scope, long time scale and difficulty to solve. Predictions that human activity, which has of late been increasingly generating Green House Gases (GHGs) which in turn accumulate in the atmosphere and, by changing the heat retention of the whole earth’s ecosystem, cause our average temperatures to warm up, are now almost universally accepted as fact rather than just scientific theory.

In response, socially responsible businesses and individuals have started to buy carbon offsets which seek to provide an alternative reduction elsewhere, equivalent to the actual carbon they the purchaser of the offset produces. While worthwhile, most offsets are, in fact, delivered via the CDM part of the Kyoto Protocol in the absence of more pervasive emissions trading schemes. CDM, short for Clean Development Mechanism, invests in programs in developing countries which reduce GHG emissions.

But, what about reducing our emissions here in Canada and the United States? I’d like to share a best kept secret, namely the Elora Centre for Environmental Excellence (ECEE), a charitable organization of which I am the Board Chair and co-founder. Without a lot of fanfare, this organization was an early innovator of home audits which were aimed at improving our residential housing stock and working to both educate and deliver greater energy efficiency for homes (as well as water and waste). Originally, we pioneered a “Green Home Visit” just for our small community of Elora, Ontario which our current Executive Director, Don Eaton had the vision develop into a nationwide home labelling system. Don’s vision was for all homes to receive simple label of energy efficiency, say on a scale of 0 (heating the outdoors) to 100 (heated only by the heat generated by the inhabitants) which would provide:

• an objective standard that would drive a market for energy efficiency,h
• a system endorsed by realtors and contribute to the relative value of the home,
• homeowners would be directly educated in energy efficiency issues on the spot during the process of home evaluation and label production,
• an auditable and objective benchmark that would allow homeowners to better select contractors for upgrades (e.g. draftproofing, insulation, furnace, windows, etc.)

In the late 1990’s, Don was one of a group of experts who put this dream into reality, in the context of a Canadian federal government programme, called EnerGuide for Houses. The name “EnerGuide” was borrowed from a pre-existing and well-known Canadian government appliance labelling standard. Don Eaton became an icon of this program, by providing much of the initial training for hundreds and hundreds of Certified Energy Advisors over the years, through a national-wide environmental service organization, Green Communities Canada, of which ECEE is a founding member. Such is the level of Don’s expertise, that he’s been called to provide expert help in developing programmes in places like the UK and US.

EnerGuide for Houses grew quietly until May 2006, when the Stephen Harper government killed the program in what was clearly a partisan, and ill conceived, move. It was reinstated, as EcoAction for Houses last year, but only after the collateral damage of hundreds of trained Certified Home Evaluators being forced out of the system by the over 12 month funding chasm. But, that’s a story for another day …

To make a long story short, home efficiency from EcoEnergy programmes conducted just by ECEE (in the service area of southwestern Ontario shown on the map below) so far delivers 8 000 tonnes of GHG reduction per year over the about 16 000 homes we’ve audited. Taking into account the Canada-wide results, and remembering that the reductions are, in effect, permanent so each and every year the savings continue and fewer GHGs are emitted into our atmosphere.

Remember too that this is still an early adopter programme. Because the homeowner pays a relatively nominal sum, although mitigated by government funded homeowner rewards for energy reductionss and other cross-subsidies, it is far from universal. The most advanced communities have an audit penetration of approximately 5% while many are far lower.

Studies in Canada and the US, show that residential energy is the source of just under one-quarter of our GHG production, with the rest being transportation, industry and agriculture. So, taking market penetration much higher, to 30% or 40%, would make a real difference as we see below.

It is instructive to correlate the above case study in real GHG reduction with an article in May 10, 2008 Economist, entitled The Elusive Negawatt, “If energy conservation both saves money and is good for the planet, why don’t people do more of it?” Some of the key points made in that article are:

• energy efficiency is really the “fifth fuel”, after coal, gas, oil and uranium, as a practical way to satisfy growing energy demand.
• this fifth fuel of reduction and efficiency, also called “negawatts“, reduces rather than produces Greenhouse Gases, and enhances wealth at the same time.
• McKinsey Global Institute suggests that energy efficiency could provide half of the savings needed to for the world to keep GHGs to below 550 ppm in the atmosphere, a level suggested that would reverse or stabilize climate change.
• Some studies suggest a payback of 30% for many energy efficiency programmes, which is remarkable in itself.

If energy efficiency programmes are all goodness and light why aren’t they more pervasive? How do we get the production of negawatts beyond its early adopter stage?

It’s pretty clear that we need the right combination of committed governments, utilities and private sector partners working with environmental service organizations like ECEE that are providing the “real down in the trenches” work right at the homeowners doorstep. With such a tantalizing prize beckoning, let’s not wait too long to seize it.

Bookmark to:

Startups: A History of Location

In today’s knowledge-based economy, much discussion centres around the importance of clustering. For example, in financial services, cities like New York, London and Toronto have all benefited at the expense of smaller rivals (eg. Philadelphia, Paris and Montreal or Vancouver). Likewise, as entrepreneurial technology startups have spread around the world, the Silicon Valley remains a magnet and model for that magic blend of people, ideas and capital aspiring to create the next Microsoft or Google. Furthermore, in spite of the world-flattening ascendency of information technology over the last decade, in some ways, the forces of such clustering seems to have increased.

Being domiciled in Canada, and having built transatlantic technology companies over the years, led me to ponder Chris Anderson’s recent endorsement of distributed workface in which he “builds companies that are distributed because that’s where the best people are.”

So, what’s the stronger force: clustering or distributed teams? First, let’s dig a bit into history so we can follow this trend.

The 1980’s: Selling Software in a Pre-web World

In the late 1980’s, an otherwise bright, young MBA student advised MKS to conquer local markets (ie. Waterloo Region) before going national and only then to export markets. While this may have made sense in traditional industries, we had the good sense to ignore this faulty gem of wisdom. Instead, reckoning that a dollar spent marketing in the US would reach about 10 times the audience as one dollar spent in Canada, we rejected this advice and focused from day one on selling our first product (MKS Toolkit) into the US market. To provide some context to modern readers, in these pre-web times software companies put ads in the back of magazines with dealers with geeky names like Programmer’s Shop and Programmer’s Paradise, with a several month cycle from ad spend to results. It’s easy to forget that, in those days, software companies had a “manufacturing” group which duplicated diskettes and shrink-wrapped them in boxes with physical manuals. Our main tactic to overcome geography was to use a North America-wide toll free 800 number to mask our country of origin, at least for first customer contact.

In my case, it helped that I had my first software startup experience in the US while building Coherent. This gave me direct operating experience in the Silicon Valley from the beginning. While importing that model of company development back to Waterloo probably wasn’t a 100% fit, it did serve to shape our biases in company structure to a very large degree.

The 1990’s: The Israeli Model

As the 1990’s unfolded, better IT systems, lower cost telephony and the emergence of the internet, web (and its precursors such as AOL), created an environment that was ideal for what I call the “Israeli Model” of technology company formation. In this model, R&D and “back office” functions resided in Israel, while much of the sales, marketing and business development (ie. the storefront of the company) was in the US - typically in the Silicon Valley. Companies like Aladdin, Checkpoint Software and Mercury Interactive all are good examples from the 1990’s.

Why did this model make sense? Israel is a small country with a tiny home market, having a population of just over 7 million. At the same time, it is a rich country (22nd in GDP per capita) with extremely high educational standards and a military establishment that was pushing the boundaries of research into many IT-related disciplines. Thus, Israel was an ideal cluster of brainpower and ideas to create new technology startups. However, the market was elsewhere. Between Tel Aviv and San Francisco there is an inconvenient, and inescapable, 10 hour timezone difference and up to 20 hours of flying time. To help overcome this a bi-modal company structure evolved, often with half of the staff (the back end) in Israel and the other half (the front end) in the USA. It’s a time tested model that has proven remarkably resilient.

As a result, despite its apparent disadvantageous geographic location, today Israel is second only to America in the number of NASDAQ-listed companies, and the Economist says that “the country attracts twice the number of venture-capital (VC) investments as the whole of Europe”.

It may seem odd, given how close Canada is to the US, to suggest that the same model made sense for Canadian companies as well. However, especially in the 1990’s, these key business drivers were essential to MKS or any other Canadian technology company with global aspirations:

• corporate image: many Americans like to buy local, so having a strong (front end) presence in the US will definitely improve both the sales, and even investment and valuation, prospects of the company.
• senior talent: sales and marketing executives with expertise in the software industry were effectively nonexistent in Canada. MKS source both its VP Sales and VP Marketing from the US. It was a great choice that allowed us to access top talent from major competitors. Furthermore, these executives provided mentorship, by acting as role models for the Canadian-based employees.

This was a virtuous circle, in which better US image helped to increase company value, attract ever better talent and ultimately should provide long term exit options.

Why not split the R&D organization as well? Notwithstanding our adoption of the Israeli Model, MKS resisted moving to multiple development locations until the very late 1990’s. Ironically, being a company that sells software to manage multi-site development, the state of the art in telecommunications and software adoption was still too primitive in those days and face to face communications continued to be critical. However, as the internet and bandwidth continued to develop and once MKS embarked on a series of acquisitions across the US, we did invest heavily in the new, IP-based room conferencing systems to knit geographically dispersed teams. It remains clear that until very recently, a single location for development has been preferable, particularly in the formative, early stages of product innovation.

Best Practices Today

Today, we live in a business world that routinely accepts offshoring, virtualized management, distributed teams, etc. Tools like Basecamp, Enterprise Wikis, iotum’s rich conferencing, and even instant messaging for real time back channel, all make distributed innovation sessions (aka meetings) much more practical. What is most interesting is the fact that video plays only a very small part in all of this.

After years of evolving startup playbooks, we may be finding the right balance between the more traditional “Israeli Model” and the fully decentralized team as espoused by Chris Anderson. At Coreworx (Software Innovation), we moved the company to Waterloo largely to gain synergies, at a critical early stage, in what was then a 20 person team. So, there are clearly some benefits that remain from people interacting face to face and always will be. The most creative and innovative processes may well work best only when conducted in person. Further more, with the rise of mobile nomadism, less and less work seems to be conducted in the traditional office setting.

That being said, each year we seem to be able to achieve more by ignoring geography and building around the best talent. Conversely, I have a feeling that the convivial, chalkboard-centric environment at Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute may well be crucial to the breakthroughs in fundamental physics that institution will undoubtedly generate. What is your take on the necessity of clustering talent?

Bookmark to: