However, Jeffrey Bussgang recommends that these are the kinds of questions you should ask yourself:

• Do you have an idea that no one can talk you out of?
• Do you have a partner you trust with complimentary skills?
• Are you prepared to endure with modest or no salary for a few years?
• Are you bored with your current work environment/life situation?
• Do you perform best in the absence of structure?

If you can confidently answer these, why not apply for Pollenizer’s Startup Bootcamp 2011 (Sydney)?

There are two parts to our application process.

The first is a quick survey.

The second is a brief video pitch – Once we’ve received your quick survey information, we can email the link the video pitch.

Sydney, Australia, 14th January 2011 – Pollenizer today announced that it ranked Number 38th on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific 2010, a ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology companies in Asia Pacific.  Rankings are based on percentage revenue growth over three years.

Pollenizer grew 818.766 percent during this period.

“Making the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 is commendable in today’s highly competitive technology industry,” said Yoshitaka Asaeda , Deloitte Japan partner in charge of the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific program. “We congratulate on being one of the 500 fastest growing technology companies in the region.”

Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific selection and qualifications

The Technology Fast 500 list is compiled from the Deloitte Asia Pacific Technology Fast 50 programs, nominations submitted directly to the Technology Fast 500, and public company database research. To qualify for the Technology Fast 500, entrants must have had base-year operating revenues of at least US$ 50,000.

Entrants must also be public or private companies headquartered in Asia Pacific and must be a “technology company,” defined as a company that develops or owns proprietary technology that contributes to a significant portion of the company’s operating revenues; or manufactures a technology-related product; or devotes a high percentage of effort to the research and development of technology.  Using other companies’ technology in a unique way does not qualify.

Pollenizer has been named a Finalist in Anthill Magazine’s Fifth Annual Cool Company Awards, a national program developed in 2006 to recognise Australian companies that are doing things differently to bring about positive change.

Over 700 aspiring ‘cool companies’ were nominated for the 2010 awards, making ‘The Cools’ one of Australia’s largest business awards programs. The winners will be announced at an award’s function on Thursday 16 December 2010 and published on AnthillOnline.com.

“The Cool Company Awards are extremely egalitarian,” said James Tuckerman, Editor-In-Chief, Anthill Magazine. “Previous winners have included two-person start-ups, not-for-profit social enterprises, large private companies and publicly-listed corporations.”

“Judging takes into account far more than mere business variables, such as revenue and wealth. The criteria is geared to consider other qualities, from the disruptive nature of the product or service to the culture of the organisation.”

“Applicants either nominated themselves or were nominated by peers, work colleagues, family, friends and other ‘admirers’. A field of hundreds was examined (and cross-examined) before our judges were able to isolate three Finalists for each of our seven categories.”

The program will conclude with an end of year bash, on 16 December 2010, in Melbourne.

What are Cool Company Awards?

The Cool Company Awards was launched in 2006 as a way for Anthill Magazine to publicly acknowledge and celebrate Australian organisations that are doing things differently to bring about positive change. In its fifth year, the awards attracted nominations for over 700 organisations, making it among the largest business award programs in Australia.

What is Anthill Magazine?

AnthillOnline.com is a digital business magazine that celebrates creativity, inspiration and commercial ingenuity, providing a fresh, exciting and practical perspective on Australian business in a global world. It is among the Top 50 Business & Finance websites in Australia, as ranked by Nielsen Online Ratings, and is home to the Cool Company Awards, the 30under30 and the Smart 100. It’s where ideas and business meet.

In the first half of the 4 hour workshop we worked on customer discovery (micro-segments, customer values, creating 10 X value). We iterated on this process to create a focused customer development plan. See below. We then pitched the concept to a group of colleagues who liked the idea. That evening we ran a fun market validation exercise around the original business concept – Dares for Dollars. Mick copped a few cream pies in the face.

Customer Development Model

On Monday Chris and the team arrived ready to refine the model above and get cracking on an implementation plan. Within the first hour, the workshop ended. Chris had the weekend to think about his business and changed his mind. He decided he didn’t want to pursue the Pledgespace idea any further.

He failed. This is a good thing. For the modest cost of a Pollenizer focus workshop, Chris has saved himself time and money  building out an idea ‘to spec’ as he originally envisaged and one that he wasn’t passionate about.

Chris has gone through a valuable experience and it highlights that starting a web business and learning to be an entrepreneur requires an enormous head shift, discarding old mental models to learn new principals. It can feel a bit like you are in kindergarten all over again.

What did Chris learn about this experience? You can read below.

From Chris Gray, June 2010:

Hi Guys

I have had some time to think about stuff and reflect on the process and what I have learnt from meeting you guys in Sydney.

To be honest I found the entire process overwhelming.  This would be quite personal as I think it has allot to do with my background, environment  and support network as opposed to the process itself.

I understand the process (as much as I can after 1 weekend) and immediately saw the mistakes I had made along the way. I can still see the value in the concept but can also see the risks and challenges that would need to be mounted along the way and am not prepared to take them.

It comes down to what I said on the day, I don’t know or feel confident enough that I have a strong enough platform on which to build. If I had a history of activism, daring and change facilitation then it would be a different story.

The positive things (things I did like)

1. The feeling that there is MORE to life and the ability to actually make stuff happen
2. The importance and value of having a network and utilising that network
3. The awesome people (Mick, Luke, Jo, Lesley-Ann, Rob Antulov, Wayne Bosley) who I got to meet and talk to
4. The excitement and energy that the process gives you (you guys will never get bored J)
5. The idea that a business is about being dynamic, learning, pivoting and iterating.

The negative things (things I didn’t like)

1. The willingness to “Burn people” in order to learn.  I do understand this but am not entirely comfortable with the “smoke and mirrors” approach.  I like to be 100% transparent as a rule
2. The idea that you put yourself out there to be judged knowing you are wrong just to learn.  Again I understand now why it is necessary and love the fact that this is dynamic and exciting. But at the same time I don’t like to do stuff that I know is wrong, even if I can get something out of it.  It comes back again to the fact that I am transparent, genuine and honest. (Or at least I try to be J)
3. The feeling of being on the outside looking in.

Next steps for me …

1. Find some other people, build a new network that contains more successful, dynamic people such as yourselves
2. Find a concept that I know (not just love) and make it happen
3. Follow through on my ideas… too many times I have gotten almost to the “tipping point” and then bailed out

I would like to thank all of you guys for your time, input, honesty and feedback.

As far as my venture into the web startup world, I can honestly say that I enjoyed it immensely and definitely feel I chose the right people to talk to in Pollenizer.  I can see what you do, understand your approach and how you will continue to be successful.

Given an opportunity I would love to work with any or all of you in the future.

I hope to encounter and meet all of you in some capacity again

Regards

Chris

Mick Liubinskas’ reply to Chris:

Thanks Chris. Fantastic email. Greatly appreciated.

A quick note on ‘burning people’. It sounds worse than it’s supposed to. I guess the key principle here is that we know we’re not going to be perfect day one, so we might have to disappoint or not satisfy some people. There is a tendency to hold it back until it’s right, but the dilemma is that we won’t work out if it’s right until we get it out there in front of real customers.

This relates heavily to points 2 and 3 below.

Looking forward to your next venture and I hope we can work together in the future.

Thanks,
Mick Liubinskas

This week Pollenizer launched Startup Bootcamp to help people like Chris learn the principals of web business startups.”Focus or Fail, it’s that simple”…

Failure if part of life and business. As a community of new and experienced entrepreneurs, why don’t we start sharing more of these stories with our own community and see what happens.

Big thanks to Chris for being willing to share his experience with our community. If you are involved in the startup scene in Perth, get in touch with Chris, he’d love to hear from new and experienced web entrepreneurs.

You can contact Chris Gray on chris@madicus.com.

Pollenizer’s ability to access in-house expertise to service a broad range of client demands was evident in our work with consumer comparison website Getprice. It also made it the prime and only contender vying for the work.

Getprice CEO Chris Hitchen explains why it is important having specific skill areas available for hire within one company.

“You don’t want to have too many consultants or suppliers to whom you have to explain your business model,” he says. “You are also opening up your business and sharing very confidential information so limiting that to one supplier where you can get a range of expertise was pretty important for us.”

He maintains the web presents a variety of challenges and there aren’t that many businesses around who can consult at the level Pollenizer does.

There are plenty of people who have good processes and good analytical skills that can take you through various problems and get you to an outcome, but there aren’t that many consultancies that live and breathe online as Pollenizer does.

Managing Rapid Growth

Pollenizer’s first brief was to find a better framework for Getprice’s development processes. “We were growing very quickly, with a lot of projects and we needed a really tight framework around managing those projects,” Hitchen explains. IT infrastructure assessments flowed from there, asking the question: Do we have the vehicle that can carry us to where we want to get to, in terms of hardware, software and bandwidth and is our development process optimal?

The second area of expertise focused on the marketing and the consumer proposition and asked: Are we doing enough to meet consumer needs and how can we better engage consumers on Getprice?

Pollenizer also engages with the clients it works with. “Because they are coming in, typically not just for an hour or two but for days at a time, often over several months, they are very engaged and often have skin in the game as well,” Hitchen says. “They also bring an international perspective and part of that is an international network, which would be important for many businesses.”

Getprice is a comparison shopping engine which aggregates pricing information from more than 600 retailers in Australia and also provides information about service levels for different retailers, covering warranties, delivery time and charges, and product and service reviews. This service is available via an iPhone application, as well as online.

Getprice is all about helping someone to make the last few decisions about where they want to buy a product. Shopping anyone?

“As a start-up with limited funding and access to top talent, we were fortunate to cross paths with the Pollenizer team who could offer their services to our company, maximizing our chances of getting things right,” Linqia CEO and Founder Maria Sipka says.

“Phil Morle conducted a technology assessment and confirmed the challenges we ‘sensed’ were there and highlighted opportunities to take our product offering and engineering team to a new level.

“Over six months we launched two products much quicker than we were able to in the previous 18 months and our team developed a strong foundation of accountability and alignment.”

How It Connects

Linqia works by presenting relevant and interesting commercial partners to social networks who bring affiliate deals, advertising, sponsorships, content, new members, products and innovative technologies.

Key decision makers at social networks register to Linqia for free and specify what type of opportunities they are interested in receiving. Linqia approves commercial partners to present their opportunities to selected social networks which Linqia sends to the key decision maker via the marketplace.

As a start-up with limited funding and access to top talent, we were fortunate to cross paths with the Pollenizer team…

Maria Sipka, CEO, Linqia

I thought I’d do a quick video spoof of a race if some of the biggest Australian web businesses were in a horse race – who would win?

OK, OK, the quality is average, but it’s social media – it’s supposed to take 5 minutes! Isn’t it?

Some quick thoughts on one of the hardest things to do as an entrepreneur (or intrapreneur) – holding both a big vision and a brutal focus in your mind at the same time. They sound like contradictions and in many ways they are the endlessly feuding families of a new venture. You need to make them happy neighbours though.

You need a big vision.

To quit your job, convince your partner, convince your friends to give up some cash, to recruit great partners and team members, to nail the first pre-sales, to get the cheque from the investor and to continue to get out of bed four hours after you got in there with a big smile and energy in your veins – You. Need. A. Big. Exciting. Clear. Daily reinforced. Vision

But….

You can’t get to your vision in one step.

What if Microsoft said that we’re going to try and put computers on every desk straight away? You wouldn’t build an operating system and supporting applications.

What if Facebook wanted to be the worlds most active social network in one move? They wouldn’t have limited their first version to Harvard Students.

What if the USA said they wanted to get a man on the moon in a year? They’d just put someone in a plane and shoot them up there to see what happened.

You get my point. Big visions, like long journeys, take many small steps, a lot of time and plenty of meandering.

So you need to be focused. You need somewhere to start. Somewhere so small that you can deliver it with one person, part time and with $485 in your ‘spare cash’ fund.

And you’ve never done it before. Probably no one has ever done it before, so you’re going to get it wrong. And get it wrong. And again. And again and again and again. Then, but only then, are you going to nail it and explode. In order to do this quickly it needs to be really small. Tiny. Microscopic. Focused.

As Steve says in this post business success is a lot about momentum which equals mass times speed. You can’t win with mass (you don’t have any) so you have to do it with speed. The smaller, the more focused the less weight, the less distractions, the faster you move.

So you need vision AND you need focus.

How do you do it? Welcome to the challenge. :-)

OK, some thoughts from me.

1. Cultivate your vision. Spend time up front to paint it big and exciting. Something you’ll remember in the deepest depths of the startup rollercoaster and something which will guide your every little decision around focus without having to run it through ‘the mainframe’ to check.
2. Trust your vision. Once you have it. Trust it. Don’t pull out the plant to check the roots. Not even if people challenge it everyday (which they will). Have faith.
3. Have guts. Being focused takes courage. Picking one thing to focus on means saying no to at least 100 other ideas and options you have. It’s hard. It’s always hard. It gets harder the more successful you are because you know what you’re capable of and have more money to play/pray with. Make a choice and don’t look back…. for at least a year!
4. Externalise. You’re going to be in the pressure cooker day in day out. Your vision and your focus will both be beaten, pushed, shoved, blocked, mocked and distracted. Find ways to put both of them in an external mechanism where the discipline doesn’t rely on your emotions. Find someone you love and trust not in your core team and pre-book quarterly breakfast/lunches with them with just two questions.
   1. Are we going towards the vision?
   2. Are we really being focused enough?

Good luck with your arm wrestle of vision and focus. Please share your stories of challenge and success with me.

Barcamps are awesome because everyone sets the agenda and participates, not just a small group that the organisers have picked. So go to BarCamp Sydney 5 this Saturday, June 27th, 2009.

Long version

Recently I attended the Future Summit event in Melbourne (thanks Steve). A very important topic (the future of the planet) and a very qualified audience (people from academic, government and corporate who care about and work in jobs that heavily impact the future).

500 attendees.
2 days of time together.

What was the result?

About 100 hours of talking/discussion/debate.

Doesn’t sound bad does it? But that’s 1 hour for every five attendees? Hmmm. Why so low? It’s because it was run in the old style. Pick people to talk to the audience, the audience listens. It wasn’t all bad. There was a night cap session that was open and there was a lunch on the second day where you could pick your table based on interest and thrash around some ideas. Both of these sessions were great.

But overall, the summit was a few people talking to a lot of people. What’s wrong with this? It assumes that the most knowledgeable people are on the stage. The reality is that for most events, the people in the audience have as much to contribute to the issue at hand as the people on stage.

It also doesn’t take into consideration that with so much media available so quickly, it is actually very hard for the person on stage to say something which the people in the audience haven’t already heard.

So what could have they done? Even half talk, half open discussion would have produced;

500 people x 2 days x 6 hours of discussion = 6,000 hours of discussion.

OK, it’s not mathematically perfect but you get my point.

And that’s why Barcamps are awesome. The agenda, the formats, the discussion, the themes, the everything is decided by those who turn up. It ebbs, flows, explodes, dies, rocks, rolls and *is* because of the people. All you need to do is get some space, get some coffee and get good people there and the rest takes care of itself*.

And that’s why they are important. There is no filter between what ‘the people’ care about and what gets talked about. It’s about as raw as you get.

So get along to BarCamp Sydney 5 this Saturday, June 27th, 2009. It’s open, but there is a big push for stuff on the Future and Government 2.0.

But come prepared. Barcamps are a full-contact sport – not for spectators. If it’s your first time at Barcamp – you have to present! (not really, but you should and I like the Fight Club reference…)

I can’t wait. See you there.

You can browse through the last BarCamps here at BarcampSydney home or just by searching and finding things like these pics.

* By ‘takes care of itself’ I mean it takes a good chunk of work from a lot of people (specially JodieM and Ajay) and some healthy sponsorship from good companies.

Future Summit is associated with the Davos World Economic Forum, granting significant weight to it’s purpose. From it’s website, it sets out the following aims;

• Promoting business excellence by encouraging policy debate on global issues;
• Improving the quality of leadership;
• Enhancing Australia’s position in the region and the world;
• Encouraging Australian leaders to help improve the quality of life of all Australians;
• Encouraging Australia to play a responsible, and leadership role where appropriate, within the global community; and
• Exposing Australian leaders to international experts and key international leaders.

Ambitious, yes. And well worth the stretch.

So what am I doing here? What’s my role in this summit? I, and a number of my industry friends, were invited by the organisers of the Future Summit to both represent the digital world and to act as an amplifier. We’ve been tasked with blogging (like this) and tweeting (like this). Yes, Twitter is (so) hot right now, and it’s reasonably predictable that it would get on the list of ways to increase the interaction of the summit with the rest of the world. However, it still takes some courage. Twitter and blogging, and especially the very outspoken set of bloggers and twitterers that were invited is instant, public and often closer to a mob mentality than a structured debate.

I’m very glad they did. Not only is digital media the future of how people converse, it’s also the way that our future leaders already talk. The generation gap, while coming together in some ways, the difference in fundamental communication methods and speeds is one of the ways where the chasm is widening. Summits, forums, conferences and traditional, controlled media doesn’t engage Australians aged 15-30. By the time the plans discussed today come to fruition, it will be this group that will be our PrimeMinister’s (or Presidents), our CEOs, our Police Chiefs, our scientists, our teachers, our mayors and our parents. It’s important we take the conversation to them.

OK, yes, I’m not actually in that age group, and I think of the Twitter Posse here at #futuresummit only includes two people in that range. Hopefully by utilising some of the tools they use, we can increase the exposure of the issues and ideas from Future Summit.

Decisions are made by those who turn up. I’m glad I’m here and I’m glad that we’re reaching out to a broader group, and a younger demographic to work (hard) for an inspiring future.

It’s just started this morning. I’m in the back. Laptop open. Twitter open. Camera ready. And my ears tuned in and my mind open. Please spread the word and more importantly, participate. Speak up and have your say. I hope we can be positive, optimistic, excited and constructive. There is a lot at stake.