Year One Labs Completes its Five Investments

by Benjamin Yoskovitz | March 8, 2011

As mentioned the other day, we’ve completed our fifth and final investment. The five deals have taken about 6 months to do, starting in September 2010. Our plan has always been to create five companies in the lab this year. And with that complete, our attention turns towards helping our entrepreneurs build their startups as quickly as possible. The balancing act between recruiting startups into Year One Labs and working with the existing portfolio has definitely been challenging at times; and now we get to have a more singular, aggressive focus.

So what does this mean for other startups that still want to pitch us?

By all means, go ahead. We’re all about helping entrepreneurs, always have been, always will be. We will not however, be able to invest in your startup at this time. That may change in the future, but if funding is what you’re looking for immediately, we won’t be in a position to help. Still, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

There is a very good chance that our startups will be looking for talented people to join them. Two of our startups already have additional team members beyond the founders helping build their core products. If you’re interested in learning more about our portfolio and want to stay in touch about potential opportunities, please do so.

We are planning to share more of our learning about the process to-date, and certainly about how things go in the future. So stay tuned…

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Year One Labs Invests in nCentiv.es

by Benjamin Yoskovitz | January 26, 2011

Ncentive logoYear One Labs is pleased to announce its investment in nCentiv. It’s our third investment to-date.

The company was founded by Theo Ephraim and Kyle Seaman. Theo is an experienced web developer with a particular interest in interface design. He’s a recent McGill University grad where he focused his academic research on computer vision techniques to enable new methods of human computer interaction and projector-camera systems. Having said that, nCentiv has nothing to do with that (at least not yet!)

Kyle is as entrepreneurial as they come, having started his first business at 14. He’s been involved in a host of projects, from tourism to grocery delivery to technology. He also helped start Startupifier, a student-run organization to promote entrepreneurship across multiple universities in Montreal.

As with our previous investment announcements (Endloop X and Localmind) it’s very early and so we don’t have much information to share about nCentiv. The name provides some clues, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that changes at some point in the future.

Posted in HighScore House, Year One Labs | 6 Comments »

Google Hackathon recap

by Alistair Croll | January 24, 2011

Last Saturday, roughly 55 people spent the day at RPM, where we’re based, building applications. While a couple of participants had prepared in advance, most of the projects were thought up, designed, and presented within twelve hours. Google’s Sean Lynch, as well as some of his colleagues from Google’s Montreal office, were on hand to steer people through the intricacies of Google’s developer stack.

It was an amazing day, with a ton of effort and some really inventive new applications. In the end, we built eighteen apps. Judges, including Sean Lynch, Ray Luk, the Montreal Gazette’s Jason Magder, podcaster and event organizer Bob Goyetche, and Band of Coders’ Brydon Gilliss, had a tough job ahead of them. But they prevailed, awarding books and T-Shirts for a variety of achievements.

  • Evotune, where users vote for computer-generated snippets of music they like best, and genetic algorithms try to evolve the next great loop from the results. It’s live for you to try, and won the coveted “most rhythm” award.
  • Incidental Traveller, which picks a random destination for you and tells you about it.
  • My First Email, a really simple e-mail for tech luddites. This won the “largest font” award.
  • Wallpaper of the Week, which crowdsources desktop designs
  • Local Nose, using Google Earth to ask questions about a location (and reminding Y1L startup Localmind that competitors are always just a step behind you!)
  • Interpretdreamz, which shows and tells you the meaning of your dreams. Won the “unfortunately viral” prize, partly because the pictures it chooses to match the words in your dreams aren’t always easy to look at.
  • Stalk your Customers, helping local businesses better understand their clients and competitors. Built in a day by Localmind’s Lenny Rachitsky with the help of Briac Guibert, this won the “most easily monetizable” prize. Plus, it’s live and running.
  • Cabnearme, which helps you find the closest cab, fast. Also live.
  • Twitfinance, an experiment to see if Twitter chatter and stock prices are related.
  • Himalaya, a front-end for Google Analytics to make it easier to see who’s sending traffic to your site.
  • eeSenter, which uses tree views and App Engine to structure lists of data like bookmarks.
  • GTacts, which mimics etacts functionality within GMail to track and update contacts automatically. Built by folks who are about to become new residents of Year One Labs (stay tuned!) Tons of interest in using this to fix contacts from all of the participants, too.
  • GDocs Mail, a search tool to find and preview documents quickly across GMail and Google Docs. Built by the Dokdok team, who are residents of the RPM co-working space and recentl additions to the Real Ventures portfolio.
  • Cupid-meter, an experiment in sentiment analysis trying to show whether Montreal or Toronto is more romantic.
  • P2P Library, a way to scan, track, and share your things with your friends in a lending library. This team of brothers won the “we would use that” award.
  • Phrasealign, a tool for disambiguating formal translation.
  • Pocketcomics, like an RSS reader for online comics that crops and sizes them to mobile phone formats.
  • Nudgely, an email tool to generate lists of tasks and remind you about them in the future.

The event succeeded far beyond what we’d hoped, with dozens of people contributing time, money, and travel to make it possible. We’re already fielding calls about doing another one in the coming months, this time focusing on Big Data. We’d also like to thank Leila Boujnane and the rest of the crew who ran the #HackMtl event here a few months ago, for showing us how to put one of these together so smoothly; and Pete Taylor and Liesl Barrell for devoting their weekend to coordinating, feeding, and entertaining us.

(More shots of the event, in full size, are available on Flickr.)

Posted in Blog, Year One Labs | 7 Comments »

Year One Labs “Office Hours” – Meeting Entrepreneurs and Co-Founders

by Benjamin Yoskovitz | January 10, 2011

Year One Labs is always looking to meet entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs. We’re always interested in meeting technical co-founders too; people who have yet to start a company, may not have an idea they want to jump on, but are interested in running a startup. We have startups that need co-founders. And some of the most interesting, talented and passionate people are those that have yet to make the leap, but want to, with the right idea and team.

So that’s what Office Hours is all about. Every Wednesday from 9am-11am we schedule quick 30-minute meetings with entrepreneurs and potential co-founders. We’re happy to listen to your pitch, and we’re equally happy to just get to know you and what you’re interested in. So come meet us.

Here’s the sign-up link: http://y1lofficehours.eventbrite.com/

Pick a day and we’ll schedule a time. Most meetings are with two partners from Year One Labs. You don’t need to come with a polished pitch deck. If you’re interested in startups, want to run one (whether it’s your own idea or someone else’s) and you’re itching to get started … come meet us.

Posted in Blog, Year One Labs | 3 Comments »

Wanted: Technical Startup Founders with Python Experience

by Benjamin Yoskovitz | December 6, 2010

At Year One Labs we’re not passively waiting for people to pitch us startup ideas. We’re actively recruiting the best startup founders we can find. In some cases that will mean bringing new people together to build a startup team. Most of the recruiting we do is through our existing networks, but we can’t reach everyone all the time as quickly as we’d like. So we’ll be using this blog as a way of connecting to people, and letting people know that we are looking for startup founders for specific projects.

With that in mind, we are currently looking for technical startup founders with Python experience. The choice of Python is for specific reasons (happy to share with people we meet.) We’re looking for developers that want to start a company, and do it inside Year One Labs. We’ve been working on an idea, doing some early validation and want to get our nascent ideas into the hands of technical founders that can take ownership of the project and turn it into their own startup company.

I can’t go into a lot of details publicly about the project. It is a B2B application. We’ll be using Python. The end product will be targeted to SMBs. The target market is a bit more specific than that, but again, I have to be light on the details for now.

Bottom line: If you’re a great developer that can execute and iterate intensely, you have Python experience, and you want to start a company (inside Year One Labs), please get in touch.

Posted in Blog, Year One Labs | 2 Comments »

Clouds, analytics, and product management

by Alistair Croll | December 2, 2010

Last weekend, I presented to the folks at Productcamp Montreal. I’m a product manager by trade, and the world of product management has changed dramatically in the last ten years. Coradiant began as a consulting firm, then became an MSP, then a hosted monitoring tool (called OutSight), and finally the successful web performance management vendor it is today. The process of finding product and market fit took a decade—today, iteration happens much faster.

Two major shifts have caused this acceleration.

First, there’s cloud computing. IT as a utility removes many startup obstacles: there’s no up-front investment, and parallel experiments are cheap and easy. As advisor Jeremy Edberg says, “Most investors I talk to say they won’t even consider a startup that isn’t using cloud instances to run their site.”

But clouds alone aren’t enough. The second shift is analytics. Today, nearly everything can be analyzed: purchases, invitations, design preferences, content creation, location, and more. Where clouds make experimentation possible, analytics give us accurate analysis of the results.

This slide deck looks at these two shifts, and how they change the job of product management. Skip the introductory stuff and go straight to slide 22.

As the conclusion points out:

  • Getting features right matters less; knowing what’s not working, fast and getting out of the office matters more.
  • “We should” matters less; “what if?” matters more.
  • Your roadmap matters less; parallel experiments matter more.
  • Justification beforehand & business cases matter less; realtime cost/benefit of features in production matters more.
  • User groups and surveys matter less; real-world adoption & usage analysis matters more.

This is a bit controversial, since it contradicts many of the tenets of traditional product management; but there’s no doubt that a new breed of lean product managers can shake things up a bit.

Posted in Blog, Year One Labs | 2 Comments »

Toronto Office Hours on December 6th

by Benjamin Yoskovitz | November 30, 2010

I’m going to be in Toronto on December 6th for the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX), which is the following day. I’ll be on a panel at the event about startup accelerators. If you’re attending CIX, I look forward to meeting you there.

On December 6th, I’d like to do a quick Office Hours for Year One Labs while in Toronto. The guys at Mantella Venture Partners have been kind enough to lend me some space. I’m hoping to be there from 12:30pm-4:30pm.

So if you’d like to meet, talk to me about what you’re working on, and learn more about Year One Labs, please email me.

I’m the only Year One Labs partner going, so this won’t be an open networking event. I’ll try and schedule individual meetings with as many people as I can.

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Lean Lectures #2 – December 6th with Cindy Alvarez

by Benjamin Yoskovitz | November 23, 2010

Our first Lean Lectures with Ash Maurya was a big success. Lots of people attended and Ash’s practical guidance on lean startups and customer development was well received.

And now, we’ve got Lean Lectures #2 with Cindy Alvarez.

Cindy AlvarezCindy Alvarez (@cindyalvarez) is a Product Management guru. Currently she works at KISSmetrics. She’s been involved in product management for many years and writes some fantastic content about product management, customer development and lean startups on her blog.

Cindy will be talking about how to do customer interviews properly. This came up as a question / concern during Ash’s presentation. Cindy will be talking about how to run customer interviews, how to take notes, and how to learn and start drawing conclusions. I expect a lot of people’s questions on how to do great customer interviews will be answered.

After Cindy’s talk we’ll also have a roundtable discussion on real-world Lean startup stories from you, the practitioners. So please bring your stories, examples and practical know-how to the event.

Register for Lean Lectures #2 - Cindy Alvarez in Montreal, Quebec on Eventbrite

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Francois Lane Joins Year One Labs as an Investor-Mentor

by Benjamin Yoskovitz | November 19, 2010

We’re very pleased to announce that Francois Lane has joined Year One Labs as an Investor-Mentor. You can read his bio here.

Francois is well-known in the Montreal tech community. He’s been an entrepreneur for 15 years; his latest startup is CakeMail, a white-label email marketing platform. He’s also had successful exits in the past, including one of Canada’s first e-commerce stores. His expertise as a technical entrepreneur and bootstrapper will be immensely valuable to Year One Labs and our startups.

Year One Labs will rely heavily on our Mentors to work actively with our startups, providing valuable advice, contacts and hands-on help.

Posted in Year One Labs | 1 Comment »

Year One Labs Invests in New Location-Based Startup by Lenny Rachitsky

by Benjamin Yoskovitz | November 18, 2010

Year One Labs has made an investment in a new location-based startup founded by Lenny Rachitsky. Lenny is an incredible developer based in San Diego. He was Head of R&D at Webmetrics/Neustar, but is now taking the entrepreneurial leap and moving to Montreal. He’s always wanted to start a company, although I don’t think he expected it would be in Montreal.

Our work with Lenny is so early that we don’t yet have a name for the startup. So we can’t say much for now, except that he’s working on bringing meaningful, day-to-day value to location-based applications.

This is Lenny’s first startup, but through his years of work, side projects, incredibly quick turnaround times, passion and intensity, we know he has what it takes.

We’re thrilled to have someone with the calibre of Lenny committed to coming to Montreal and investing a year of his time with us at Year One Labs to build a startup.

Posted in Year One Labs | 10 Comments »

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