Over the past few months, as I've sat on numerous airplanes, I've had a chance to play with some of this stuff ... and it's been a ton of fun. However, beyond the sheer enjoyment of creating music, we as mobile app developers can learn a lot from our counterparts in this space. I often marvel at the cunning way in which these developers have created stunning and efficient user experiences. Trust me, it's really worth taking a look ...

Making music is not something I get a chance to do very often, and it's not something that I'd argue I have a huge amount of skill at, but these applications greatly facilitate the process of taking an idea from your head to the real world in a way that I don't think has been possible before.

In a way, these tools are doing for music creation what digital cameras have done for photography ... democratizing it.

Happy New Year!

Abstract

The quest to build value lies at the heart of every startup’s mission … value for customers, value for investors … even value for employees. It’s what startup CEOs must focus on every day, and it can hardly be called a trivial exercise.

In this “view from the trenches”, Mark Ruddock will reveal the lessons learned from over 10 years at the helm of of two VC backed startups … Journeys that he led from seed investment to successful exit.

Just watch the following iPad commercial to see what I mean.

To quote Dogpatch:

But we are much more than a physical space — we are a community of like minded entrepreneurs who share a spirit of “open source entrepreneurship,” the idea that, particularly at the very earliest of stages, we all benefit by fostering connection points between and amongst entrepreneurs and startups.  Whether it is sharing space, sharing ideas, sharing referrals, networking, or just hanging out, we all thrive on the flow of ideas, people and relationships. So, in addition to a workspace, we also use the lab frequently as a meeting place — for dinner events, brown bag lunch talks, workshops, conferences, symposia and good ole’ pizza and beer nights.

It's also a wonderfully subversive way for Polaris to meet and build relationships with great young entrepreneurs, often at the very earliest stages of their businesses.

Here's a look inside the Dogpatch Labs facility in San Francisco.

For more information on Dogpatch, click here.

Pitching Your First VC

Here's an excerpt from JS Cournoyer's post this morning talking about the key assumptions driving the fund:

1- The cost of getting a company from idea to the validation of the business model is now 10X less than what it was 5-10 years ago and is no more than a few hundred thousands $ for consumer Internet companies and less than $1M for companies targeting the enterprise:

a) The evolution of opensource platforms and development frameworks means that software or web services that used to take a team of 6 people over a year to build now takes 2 people less than 3 months. In addition, software infrastructure costs are zero (operating systems, databases, etc.)

b) Because of the cloud, hardware costs (servers, storage, bandwidth) are now directly proportional to utilization, meaning that startups can get started for less than $100 per month;

c) There are now many platforms with more than 100 million active users that are seamlessly accessible to third party apps, software and web services providers including Facebook (500M +), Twitter (200M+), Iphone and ipod touch (more 250M+), Android (250K new activations per day), Google search and adwords, Google Apps, Gmail, Salesforce AppExchange, Amazon, etc. These platforms allow companies to transact with their customers with one click in many cases. Combined with a blog and media industry dedicated to technology, it now costs very little for a startup with a good product to get access to customers.

2- M&A is the new R&D and talent recruitment: The IT market is maturing. To maintain historical growth rates, midsize and large companies have to diversify their service offering. These companies have all been built under a different development and innovation model and cannot innovate at the speed that is required today. In addition, mobile and the web are now important parts of every consumer facing company’s business but they can’t recruit the young talent that would rather work in startups. They have to resort to M&A to acquire new product lines and talent through smaller acquisitions in the $5M-$100M range. Google alone has made more than 20 this year. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, stated in an interview with GigaOM they have only made talent acquisitions so far in their short history.

3- The access/proximity to capital is not a competitive advantage anymore. Now that startup costs are getting close to zero, being in the valley and having access to capital is not a condition for success. What companies need is enough capital to get to market validation from people who can help connect them to funding, business development and corporate networks. This is what we do. Although most of the seed funding activity has come from the San Francisco-Silicon Valley area, other pockets such as New York, Boulder, Chicago, Seattle, Research Triangle, London, etc. have emerged. In Canada, Montreal, Vancouver and to a certain extent Toronto are booming.

4- The rise of the Super Angels is having the effect of increasing the size of the seed rounds in the US and driving Series A and B valuations to stratospheric heights. I believe this will have the effect of increasing the number of US VC funds that come to Canada for early stage investment opportunities.

 

His slides can be found here ...

The rise of the angels