NeilCocker.com

Anyone who’s had coffee with me in the second half of 2011 will have heard me bang on about the poor scalable web startup scene in Cardiff. (The discussion about what actually constitutes a web startup has taken up a million blog column inches over the last few years, and I don’t think I can add anything to that. Let’s just say that for the purposes of this blog, I’m referring specifically to scalable businesses that are reliant on web technology to operate and grow).

I’ve always been a keen advocate of small, creative businesses, and indeed I’ve been paid by governments and other organisations to help them engage with the large networks of creatives that I’ve worked with and run events for. But it’s only since starting to seek investment for my own startup that I’ve realised how few “peers” we have locally, when it comes to similar scalable web-based companies. I have hundreds of friends who I can discuss the basics of business with, and the challenges of running a small enterprise. But who was out there that could teach me about acquiring tens of thousands of users? Who could I turn to when I needed some advice on getting investment for growth? Where was my peer network to chew over our business model for ideas?

And then I spoke to a friend in Boulder, Colorado, about the startup scene there. Most Europeans would struggle to pick it out on a map, and yet it was named by Business Week as America’s top city for startups. Heck, I’ve been to the States about 6 times (including Colorado) and I’d struggle to pick it out on a map. And no wonder, as it has a population of just 97,000. To put that in context, GILLINGHAM is bigger than Boulder. Yet this small town in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains had, for example, 11 startups that raised $57 million in the first quarter of 2010.

So, given that our city is 3.5 times bigger than Boulder, why did I struggle to find 6 founders of scalable web startups when I organised a startup dinner earlier this year? Either they don’t exist, or nobody knows they exist. But both of those scenarios are a problem. There’s lots of comparables between Boulder and Cardiff; they have mountains and lakes, we have big hills and the sea; they are only a few hours’ flight from their country’s biggest concentration of startups, and we’re only a few hours drive from London; the average temperature and rainfall in Boulder is, erm, well, let’s just gloss over that little fact….

I won’t go into what is perhaps a lengthy comparison, and the success of Boulder has already been much analysed by more qualified people than me. And none more so than Brad Feld, a tech investor in Boulder who writes extensively about startup culture. He is currently writing “Startup Communities: Creating A Great Entrepreneurial Ecosystem In Your City”, which sounds like the kind of book I want to read. On his new dedicated blog for the project (Startup-communities.com), he links to an open letter from Bala Kamallakharan who wants to do his bit to improve the Icelandic startup community. It’s an inspiring read, and gave me the nudge I needed to get all these ideas I’ve been having down on paper.

So, I’m happy for this to be a collaborative document of sorts. I’d like anyone involved in the Cardiff startup scene, or the ecosystem surrounding it, to be involved in helping drive whatever happens next.

Here’s what I’ve done so far. It’s not much, but it’s a start.

• An open Facebook group for more generic startups, and a private LinkedIn group very specifically for scalable web startups.
• I’ve hosted a private dinner for founders of web startups. I want to do more of these. Maybe inviting investors and other relevant parties along.
• I’ve had meetings with the Welsh Government’s Minister For Business Edwina Hart, and key staff members of Finance Wales (thanks to Walter May), pushing the agenda for web startups and passing on the message that government backing is usually too outdated and inflexible for our types of companies.
• I’ve asked questions.

Here’s what I think could be done next. You’re invited.

• A “Startup Council”. Or a board of sorts. Basically a group of likeminded individuals who meet quarterly (?) to discuss the issues affecting our companies, and maybe communicate this to government and other relevant parties. Maybe this board could help with the organisation of some of the following.
• Startup Accelerators for Cardiff & Wales – These are intensive programs, typically a few months, in which entrepreneurs and their startups are put through a business bootcamp of sorts, at the end of which they are hopefully investment-ready.
• More startup dinners.
• Meetups.
• Invite speakers / experts from outside Cardiff.
• We also need relevant mentors.
• Want to be involved? Just let me know in the comments below.

What Cardiff has going for it.

• Great quality of life. Mountains and sea within a short drive.
• Two hours from London.
• You can cycle from one side of the city to the other in 15 minutes.
• A world renowned university, and several other fantastic higher education establishments.
• A brilliant, talented, young, vibrant and creative population of over 300,000 people.
• Low cost of living (compared to London or Bristol).

What are the barriers?

• Too few of us? No excuse. If we always think like that then everyone will always leave for Bristol or London. There may only be a handful of relevant startups in Cardiff right now, but we can build a culture here that attracts more.
• Tech naivety of investors here. Cardiff has a strong creative & SME culture, but there are few investors I’ve met who have the knowledge or desire to get into new, disruptive business models.
• Welsh government support isn’t flexible or innovative enough to support these business models. I wrote about one such example just a few weeks ago.

Questions

• Is there a brain drain – is the entrepreneurial & coding talent leaving Cardiff?
• What can we do to retain it?
• What can we do to attract it?
• LinkedIn, Apple, Paypal, Twitter and others are setting up offices in Ireland. Why isn’t this happening 75 miles east in Wales? This is a serious question – I honestly don’t know. Is this a tax break thing?
• If so, what can the Welsh government do to encourage such companies to come here. How can they help?
• How can the universities etc be involved?
• Are there physical/geographical/infrastructural things about Cardiff that help/hinder things?

The fact is, even if everything goes perfectly and we get support from every angle, this isn’t going to happen over night. We have to do it ourselves, and can’t rely on support from the public sector. It will probably take years, if not decades, to make Cardiff a great city to create a startup. But we have to start somewhere, right?

I’m currently seeking investment for my company, and working ridiculously long hours already, so like everyone else I don’t have huge amounts of time. But I think a few hours a month from a few willing people and we can really start to make a difference.

Let me know below if you’ve got ideas, or want to be involved. Whether you consider this a rallying cry, a discussion piece, a call to arms, or a scream in the wilderness, I firmly believe in doing something.

Some more reading. Articles/blogs I’ve collected recently:

Guardian article about London’s Silicon Roundabout

Irish government spends 10m euros to encourage tech startups

Is Austin or Boulder better to start a startup in?

Has Tech City in London wasted £1m?

Why Berlin is poised to be Europe’s tech startup hub

Cambridge’s “Silicon Fen” shows off its wares

“Silicon Gorge” – the west country’s tech scene

NESTA – Who will promote Accelerators in the UK?

Why an investor abandoned a startup fund in Chile

What makes accelerators work

Edit: a few more links

The history of Canada’s Technology Triangle (thanks @Keeran)

Estonia’s flourishing startup scene

How Israel built its tech startup scene (thanks @GregBednarski)

How to be Silicon Valley (“nerds and rich guys”)

Build the ecosystem and they will come. Ireland’s success.

With very little notice, and a bit of fanfare, the Welsh Government announced a new £15m fund for business growth. In theory, any Welsh company needing £100,000 or more could apply for a fastrack grant.

As my company is currently seeking investment for about that amount of money it seemed like a perfect solution for us. An opportunity to get the cash we needed to help us grow, but without giving away a sizeable chunk of equity in our business. I applauded the government for access to this kind of funding. I read through all the press associated with the launch of this fund, and the relevant page on the government site. It seemed ideal.

However, when I finally had time to go through the documentation in detail I got to the bottom of the second supporting PDF, only to find that the grants were conditional on you already having between 50% and 80% of the project funding already in place, depending on where you are based.

In other words, if I want to apply for the minimum £100,000 for my Cardiff-based business (where funding is only up to 20% of a project value), I need to have £400,000 already available to me from another source. In the few days since discovering this, I’ve spoken to four people who were considering applying, but who had no idea that they would need to find the majority of the money themselves from elsewhere.

While I completely understand the restrictions often placed on the spending of public money, I think that the government need to be better at communicating the exact nature of the funds that they are distributing. The wording of the documents just wasn’t clear enough, and that important detail was tucked away at the bottom of the second document. It took 2 emails and three phone calls to discover exactly whether my company would be eligible. The indistinct map, and public-sector-buzzword documentation, made it nigh on impossible to work out what the exact financial and geographical criteria were.

And this doesn’t even begin to address the fact that this is clearly not a fund for small growing businesses. Which small business can spirit up the minimum £100,000 to match the £100,000 from the government (assuming they’re in an area where they only have to find 50% of the project value) in the 2 months between the fund being announced and the deadline. Raising investment privately is a lengthy and time-consuming business, and finding that kind of money in that short space of time is incredibly difficult. This is a fund which will only be able to be exploited by those companies who happen to have money in the bank already. It’s not going to help small, smart, agile companies who are trying to grow.

I’m happy that the government is attempting to improve the access to finance that is sorely needed by many SMEs, but they need to be better at communicating exactly who it is for, and how best to take advantage of it. The Digital Development Fund is another welcome addition to the funding landscape too, but with a maximum application of £50,000 and only being for as-yet-started projects, again it’s sadly not fit for most ambitious startups with an eye on growth.

Hello there. Let’s design our perfect band!

First up, I think we’d all agree that we’d want this theoretically perfect band to write their own music. We don’t want a Jedward or Steps, trotting out forgettable pop nonsense that will be forgotten as soon as it drops out of the Top 20.

And we want them to be real musicians, having spent years honing their craft, practising long into the night. Their talent and hard work should be rewarded, of course.

They should play live at every opportunity, right? We don’t want some miming automatons. We want to hear that real sound of instruments before all the organic warts and all have been compressed and post-produced out of it.

We’d want them to act appropriately. We all like a rock and roll badboy, but in general we’d want them to act with humility and good humour, and use their position of influence for good, right?

So, with that in mind, and assuming you’ve agreed with most of what I’ve written above, why are Coldplay one of the most hated bands in the UK?

They tick every box, and yet they seem to draw much more hatred than bland, pre-packaged pop like Boyzone. People like to paint them as humourless and pious, when they’re often humble and joke self-deprecatingly about their charity work. I always wince a little when I hear people say “I *hate* Coldplay”. I just don’t understand it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Coldplay fan. I’ve never bought a Coldplay CD, and I’ve never seen them live. But I’m amazed by the outpouring of genuine bile for a band that seem to, on paper, be the perfect band. It’s as if their success, having gone from a small band to a massive band playing their music to millions instead of a few, is something inherently evil. Surely if you don’t like a band’s music, then it’s a simple matter of not listening to them.

Many of us just seem hardwired to bring a massively negative emotion to front of our minds whenever we’re confronted with anyone or anything hugely successful.

“Obscurity is not a f**cking badge” – Hidden Track, McLusky

When Andy Murray was comprehensively beaten in the final of the Australian Open earlier this year I saw a flurry of tweets saying that Andy Murray should give up because he was “shit at tennis”. That’s the Andy Murray who has been one of the top handful of players in the world for the last few years. He may not be the most lovable character, but to say he’s “shit at tennis” is astonishingly stupid.

And Tim Henman, a man whose career winnings totalled over eleven million dollars, and who spent an entire decade ranked as one of the top ten men’s players in the world, was constantly labelled a “plucky loser” because he could never quite win a Grand Slam.

We’re a nation that loves the underdog. And that’s no doubt a good thing. But I think it’s often at the expense of supporting those who’re achieving great things at the top of their game. Our default mode is to have a negative stance towards anyone successful. There seem to be very few people or organisations that we champion unreservedly.

Finish reading this post on Plastik, where it was first published.

I’ve just watched “The Dragons Guide to Pitching and Presentation: How to Win in The Den”. Just thought I’d quickly write down the tips that were featured in the show. You never know when this info will come in handy, especially as it can be applied to all forms of public speaking.

1 – Make an impression

You only have one chance to make a first impression. Get their attention. Get them excited. Don’t overdo it though. It’s easy to be more style than substance if you’re not careful.

2 -Rehearse

This one is a no-brainer. We’ve all seen people dry up in excruciatingly embarrassing style on Dragons Den. So to make sure it’s not you next time – practice, practice, practice. Rehearse in front of a group. Know your figures inside out, and if you’re demonstrating a product make sure that nothing can go wrong. Prepare for every eventuality. Then take a sip of water, stand up straight, take a deep breath and begin.

3 – Don’t Offend Your Audience

Be polite. Listen to feedback. Don’t be over-confident (i.e. arrogant). Don’t offer business lessons to people who are clearly more successful than you are.

4 – Be Passionate

If you don’t believe in your product then it’s unlikely the person you’re pitching to will believe in it either. But it’s a tricky one to get right. Over-enthusiasm can result in putting off your audience and make them think you can’t separate what’s going on in your head and heart.

5 – Be honest and credible

Don’t try to be something you’re not. Don’t oversell. Be direct. Be honest. Don’t lie, don’t embellish, and don’t wing it. They’ll know. Your future investor must be able to believe in you, and trust you. The second they suspect you’re not being honest with them the deal is off.

So, if you have a solid business plan, and present yourself with these 5 tips in mind, you’re sure to make a good impression at your next pitch.

The perfect pitch?

Wondering which pitch the Dragons considered to be the best? It’s this pitch from Kirsty Henshaw of Worthenshaws Ice Cream.

Anyone who listens to me will know that I’ve been banging on about the startup scene in Cardiff for a while now, and think we could do with a little more cohesion. Whatever that means.

As a start, I’ve created a group on Facebook that’s just for entrepreneurs who run startups, or anyone involved with them, in Cardiff and the surrounding area.

It’s just a quick and easy way to get everyone together to begin with. I’m not 100% convinced by the functionality of FB Groups yet. It’s the first one I’ve created, and I’m just getting my head around turning off receiving every notification!

If you think it’s worthwhile switching to a Facebook Page, or another platform entirely, then let me know. I’m just keen on Facebook for now because it’s easy, requires little maintenance, and most people will be able to access it with one click.

Also, I’m keen for this to be a true community, and not just a group run by me, so if anyone wants admin status just let me know.

Join in here.

Any thoughts?

I recently gave a short talk at the symposium following the Atrium’s empty shops project. This is a write up of my notes for that talk.

I’ve lived in Cardiff for half my life. I’ve steadily fallen in love with the city since I first arrived and have been lucky enough to live everywhere from Cathays to Penarth and worked from Fairwater to the Bay. And as a result it’s the only UK city that I can ever see myself living in. Berlin, Tokyo, Melbourne and San Francisco all appeal to me. But I’d take Cardiff over London, Manchester, Birmingham or Edinburgh any day of the week.

It feels like a deeply creative, positive, ambitious city. I don’t want to anthropomorphise it too much, as a city is a complex mix of psychology, geography, sociology and history. But whatever it is, it’s working. Cardiff is a city that feels like it’s going places.

But at the same time, this recession is hitting the high street hard, with PricewaterhouseCoopers announcing 20 stores are closing every day in the UK. And Cardiff has shared as much of the burden as most. A wander around the first floor level of the Capitol Centre on Queen Street is a perfect example of this, with more empty units than occupied ones. But with ThinkARK doing a brilliant empty shops project last year, the Cardiff School of Art and Design using an empty space in Morgan Arcade for their degree show, and obviously the empty shop project by the ATRiuM, it seems clear that there’s scope to be using these spaces for something positive.

You can read the rest of this article at Plastik, where it was originally published.

A few months ago I wrote this open letter Philip Clarke, the Chief Executive of Tesco PLC, requesting that they review their advertising spend with the Daily Mail after the newspaper published a horrible piece by Richard Littlejohn that suggested we shouldn’t sympathise with the victims of the Japanese tsunami because we were once at war with them. A month or so after writing it I still hadn’t received a reply so sent a hard-copy to Philip’s office. I prefaced it with the following text:

Dear Philip,

This letter is concerning an open letter I wrote to you on my blog, NeilCocker.com, on the 23^rd March. In the days following its publication it was read by thousands of people, tweeted and blogged about by many more people, and I was interviewed for a number of articles. It also very rapidly rose to the top of most searches on Google for any combination of the words “Philip” “Clarke” “CEO” & “Tesco”. In other words, the first thing people see on Google when they search for you is this letter.

I received what can only be described as a half-hearted response from the team that runs your Facebook page and in the six weeks since I wrote it, despite you not being able to ignore the many hundreds of tweets you would have received, I have received absolutely no response from you.

So, I’m copying the open letter below in the hope that you will respond to a hard copy. But I’m adding a further request. Please don’t be one of those companies that thinks that just by having a Facebook page you’re “engaging with social media”. Responding rapidly, relevantly, and in full has always been the key to good PR. And that’s true of social media too, especially when an ever increasing percentage of your customers are using it as their primary means of communicating with the world. You wouldn’t ignore 1000 letter writers, so why are you ignoring a thousand people who are communicating with you through Twitter?

I received a written reply about three weeks later, which I have copied below:

Dear Mr Cocker

Thank you for your letter addressed to Philip Clarke, our Chief Executive, to which I have been asked to respond.

May I take this opportunity to advise you that we advertise in a great many places including websites, magazines, newspapers, radio and TV. Our advertising is never intended as an endorsement of the views expressed in any of the places where we advertise. Our advertising is solely intended to raise awareness of our products and services.

I am sorry you are disappointed we responded to your comments on Twitter via Facebook. As there are limitations in the amount of characters you can use to convey a message in Twitter, we felt a tweet with a link to our reply on Facebook was the most effective way of replying to you.

Thank you for writing,

Your sincerely,

Frances Hickling

Let’s address a minor detail first – I never received a tweet from Tesco. And as far as I’m aware the only post on Facebook wasn’t exactly a reply to me as it was to a friend of mine who’d posted my letter to the Tesco Facebook page.

But most importantly I’m disappointed by the fact that Tesco gave such an utterly, uttery pathetic response. The fact that they couldn’t see that they are, whether they like it or not, endorsing the Daily Mail. To endorse is to approve, support or sustain (or so I’m told by Dictionary.com). Whether they approve of the Daily Mail’s horrible rhetoric or not, I don’t know. But they are certainly supporting and sustaining it through advertising revenue.

The thing is, I was so disheartened by Tesco’s dismissive missive that I’d forgotten all about it and haven’t replied or, until this point, published it. But now with this new News Of The World phone-hacking scandal, social media appears to have caused Ford to suspend advertising with NOTW, and Halifax and NPower to consider their options.

So, the moral of the story is that we SHOULD be telling advertisers that we don’t want them to advertise with newspapers that spread messages of hate, or use dispicable tactics to get their stories. I can’t wait to see if this is the tipping point, where advertisers realise the power of social media and start taking it seriously.

The fire around this story is growing and as I sit here watching BBC News 24 there seems to be a new development every few minutes. And there’s no doubt that Twitter is fanning the flames.

I’ve been banging on about simplifying my life for a few years now, and it’s been a slow process. Too slow. I’m getting better at the ongoing stuff, but I still have loads of old, collected stuff that I need to “streamline”. Having moved house 5 times in the last 7 years I’ve naturally had to get rid of a lot of stuff, and as I am collecting less and less each year I manage to get closer to a certain minimalism I yearn for. Whether I’ll ever get there, or whether I’ll ever have something like emigration to give me a sense of urgency towards decluttering, remains to be seen.

So, after a recent move, and in an astonishing display of laziness, I thought I’d ask you, dear reader, for your advice on a few problems I currently face.

I have 4 hard-drives that I’ve collected over recent years from various computers and laptops that I’ve replaced. 90 percent of the time I transferred the files from the old one to the new one, but in some cases I didn’t have the time or facilities to do a full transfer, meaning precious photos and recordings are gathering dust. And they’re just one fumbled drop or housefire away from being lost for ever. So….

Question 1 = What’s the easiest way to get the data from 4 hard drives onto one hard drive, then have a piece of software go through the thousands of files, stripping out the many, many duplicates. I appreciate this may take a long time, but not a fraction as long as me doing it manually. I have the hard-drive caddies, but need the methodology and (hopefully) free software to make this work.

Speaking of photos, as an obsessive teenage photo taker I have hundreds and hundreds of photos from my youth, and a better photographic record of many of my friends’ than their families. But they’re all just in dusty albums and boxes. I want them all on a hard-drive where I can have them rotating as my wallpaper or something. At least that way they’ll get seen from time to time, and will be safe from the ravages of time.

Question 2 – What’s the cheapest and easiest way of digitising hundreds of pics. Buying a 6×4 photo scanner (if they exist) and spending a weekend going through them? Or are there any reasonable services locally?

As a result of my globetrotting DJ lifestyle (which makes it sound so much more glamourous than it actually was) I have a fair bit of various currencies from Dhirams to Forints to Yen. I’m unlikely to visit some of the countries again (Lithuania or Romania, lovely as they were, are unlikely to be visited again any time soon, for example), but it seems a waste of money to just bin them. I’m taking all the notes to a bureau de change, but still have a quarter of a ton of coins, which I don’t think they accept.

Question 3 – Any means of exchanging these coins for UK Sterling? Or maybe a charity that accepts them – I honestly have no idea if it’s £5 or £100 that I have.

Finally, I’ve just been given a brand new HTC Wildfire handset by the lovely Hannah, which means I can finally ditch my awful Nokia N97. But the problem is that my new handset is locked to Hannah’s network, which is different to mine.

Question 4 – How do I unlock my handset, preferably for free, and preferably without using one of the dodgy looking websites I’ve looked at. I vaguely remember downloading some software in the past to do it to an old handset, but can’t remember where from.

Any ideas or help you can provide via the comments, or email, will be very gratefully received.

For a small city it’s sometimes quite surprising how little we know about each others’ activities. So how can businesses remedy this in Cardiff?

A few years ago, I started a creative industries network and was often amazed that people in the very same sector, doing practically the same thing, occasionally even with offices on the same street, were completely unaware of the others’ existence. I like to think that NOCCI had some very small bearing on the increased cohesiveness and activity within Cardiff’s creative industries (I know that just within the Cardiff group we created jobs, allowed people to secure contracts, and even introduced people who later went on to start companies together) but there’s no doubt that social media has been the huge factor in helping people spread the message about what they do, and a simple retweet or ‘like’ from a follower can open you up to a whole new load of people.

I spent last weekend at Chapter, Printhaus and the Sundown Market at Gwdihw and there’s clearly now a strong creative scene here.

But what of Cardiff’s startup scene? Is there even a scene? Is something like that difficult to foster, considering you’re trying to engage startups and entrepreneurs from such diverse industries as taxi-fare calculating phone apps to ethical catering companies?

You can read the rest of this article at Plastik, where it was originally published.

I’m soon going to be meeting and interviewing some of Cardiff’s (and surrounding areas) entrepreneurs and startups. I’ll be editing the chats into nice bitesize podcasts for you to enjoy. But in the meantime I need a little help identifying relevant startups. I’m looking for innovative ideas, probably with a different business model to the usual.

If you know of any I should be speaking to then it would be fantastic if you could help me by letting me (but make sure you check the list first to see if someone’s beaten you to it).

Once you’ve done that, just click here and let me know which hot new startups I should be checking out.

Cheers!