One Year Ago…

I came to iNovia over a year ago as an Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR). By now I thought I would be back in an operational role with one of iNovia’s many great early stage companies I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and working with.  So….what happened?

Since joining iNovia, I’ve dived deep into the local ecosystem, built relationships, gotten involved with some fantastic events, and completed three investments based on iNovia’s thesis of “backing great entrepreneurs”. As a result, these companies are gaining huge traction and benefiting from my support as a business partner, not as an operator. I’ve also had the chance to connect with many other entrepreneurs and learn the inner workings of a VC fund – an extremely enriching experience.  I do not regret a minute of the effort invested to date. After all, time is the scarcest resource we have.

Looking ahead, I want to further support these entrepreneurs and invest more time and capital in making them successful. I want to help build BIG COMPANIES. I want to continue to help build the Quebec tech ecosystem and show hard results. To prove my commitment, I’m proud to announce that I’m accepting the role and responsibilities of a Principal with iNovia Capital. What does this mean? On a day-to-day basis it doesn’t change much, I’m going to keep working my tail off for what I believe and the entrepreneurs we back. I’m also committing as an investor into the fund, with an eye on some additional upside. Like any entrepreneur, upside and returns are a very strong motivational factor.

I could not have made a better choice than joining iNovia last year as EIR.  It was the perfect time and place to see tons of opportunities and should I have wanted to join one of the companies I’ve met along the way, iNovia would have supported my decision 100%.  I respect the team here a lot for all they’ve been sharing with me as well as the support I’ve received and, of course I respect the entrepreneurs that we are backing as they are the reason why iNovia exits! I guess right now I just love too much what I am doing with iNovia to do it any other way.

David 

Start-Up CEOs make millions of decisions

The job of startup CEO is all about making decisions. Lots and lots of decisions.
We tend to focus on and remember big decisions — over-emphasizing their importance in the grand scheme of things. But the trick to being a successful startup CEO is mastering the art of micro-decision making.
Micro-decisions are small decisions — the type that we make tens or hundreds of times per day. And startup CEOs have to make more decisions than most people. I often think about how important all those micro-decisions really are, and how the best startup CEOs consistently move the ball forward, inch by inch, through the power and leverage of micro-decisions.

1. Micro-decisions are all about delegating. As a startup CEO you can’t do everything yourself, it’s impossible. So you have to delegate effectively and quickly. Remember: Indecisions kill start-ups.
2. Micro-decisions are about prioritization. Startup CEOs have to prioritize their own tasks and time insanely well, but also prioritize for everyone else too. You have to prioritize on-the-fly, and recognize when something warrants a micro-decision versus more attention.
3. Micro-decisions are about getting things done. An unproductive startup CEO will kill the company. Startup CEOs are often the visionaries, but you have to balance that with flat-out, hardcore, getting shit done.
4. Micro-decisions are combined to make a difference. You’d be surprised how small decisions can make a big impact. String together a few small decisions and suddenly you’ve had a huge influence on where things are going.
5. Micro-decisions can’t be ignored. You can’t ignore small decisions as unimportant. And you can’t delay them either. They have to be quick, pulled together with an overall master plan, and executed on.

Startup CEOs have to make millions of decisions. In large part, their job is to act as the final decision maker on things. That likely includes all the major decisions on vision, product strategy, go-to-market strategy, financing, etc. But just as important are all the micro-decisions that have to be made to keep a business operating and pointing in the right direction. You might think that a startup is all about moving from major milestone to major milestone in a crazy, rollercoaster sort of way (and to some degree that’s true!), but it’s really much more about taking individual steps (often many at once, in parallel), plugging away – decision-by-decision.

The Best-Performing CEOs in the World

by Morten T. Hansen, Herminia Ibarra, and Urs Peyer

A lot of people have blamed short-term thinking for causing our current economic troubles, which has set off a debate about what time window we should use to assess a CEO’s performance. Today boards of directors, senior managers, and investors intensely want to know how CEOs handle the ups and downs of running businesses over an extended period. Many executive compensation plans define the “long term” as a three-year horizon, but the real test of a CEO’s leadership has to be how the company does over his or her full tenure.

This article contains the first ranking that shows which CEOs of large public companies performed best over their entire time in office—or, for those still in the job, up until September 30, 2009. To compile our results, we collected data on close to 2,000 CEOs worldwide.

It may come as no shock that Steve Jobs of Apple tops the list. However, our ranking does contain a few surprises. You’ll see some relatively unknown faces at the top. The inverse is also true: Some obvious candidates in terms of reputation don’t make the top 50, which we’re printing in this issue—or even the top 100 or top 200. (To view the top 100 and access a list of the top 200, go to hbr.org/top-ceos.) In fact, our list overlaps very little with lists of the most-admired or highest-paid CEOs.
 The Top 50 CEOs
Top 100 CEOs Slideshow

When we analyzed the data to see which factors increased the likelihood that an executive would rank high, we uncovered a few more surprises. Although one might expect context to have a big effect, we found a wide diversity of countries and industries represented among the top performers. The CEO’s background did matter, however, as did the situation left behind by his or her predecessor.
Our data highlight the great extent to which CEOs account for variations in company performance, beyond those due to industry, country, and economic swings. That drives home how important it is to use objective, long-term measures to assess CEOs and to inform CEO searches and succession planning.

How Did We Judge Performance?

To create our ranking, we identified the CEOs of all publicly traded companies that had made Standard & Poor’s Global 1200 or BRIC 40 lists since 1997. Considering companies from Brazil, Russia, India, and China in our research was critical, given the growth in emerging economies. To be included, a CEO had to have assumed the job no earlier than January 1995 and no later than December 2007. (See the sidebar “How the Ranking Was Created.”) That’s one reason why you won’t find CEOs such as Jack Welch, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates here. They all took the helm before 1995, though they probably would have done well if included.
 How the Ranking Was Created

All told, 1,999 CEOs made our first cut, and of those, 731 were still in office on the date we stopped measuring performance. The entire group represented 48 nationalities and came from companies based in 33 countries. The median age at which these executives had become CEO was 52, and those still in office had an average tenure of six years. Only 1.5% were women, and only 15% of the CEOs worked for companies based in a country that was not their country of origin. It is still not a global labor market for chief executives.

Study: Inc. 500 CEOs Aggressively Use Social Media for Business

Fast-growing companies are particularly visible on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, according to a new study.

For the third consecutive year, the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has conducted a study that looks at the usage of social media among Inc. 500 companies. The 2009 results confirm that America's fastest growing private companies adopt social media marketing initiatives at much higher rates than other companies, and that interest in social media has grown since the first study was conducted in 2007.

Conducted by researchers Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson, this year's study looked at 148 of the 500 companies on the 2009 list. As was the case in each of the past two years, respondents were asked about their usage and familiarity with six types of social media tools, including blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, message boards, and wikis. According to the study, social media usage by companies on the Inc. 500 has grown in the past year, with 91 percent of companies reporting that they use at least one social media tool, compared with 77 percent of companies surveyed in 2008. Of the six social media categories covered in the survey, the one that continues to be the most familiar to Inc. 500 companies is social networking, with 75 percent saying that they are "very familiar with it."

To account for the rise in popularity of newer types of social media, the researchers also asked managers at these fast-growing companies about their interaction on sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace. Not surprisingly, many of these entrepreneurs have already embraced these sites as part of their business strategy, with Twitter being the most widely used among them, drawing activity from 52 percent of the respondents.
While Twitter and other social networking sites have seen significant growth in comparison to previous years, interest in some older social media tools such as message boards and podcasting has declined. But despite a decline in interest in some tools in 2009, many companies that have not yet incorporated social media in their business operations say they intend to do so in the future. For example, 44 percent of companies without a company blog say they plan to start one, and 36 percent intend to use some form of online video.

Eric Mattson, CEO of a research firm named Financial Insite and one of the head researchers in the study, believes that the high reception to social media among Inc. 500 companies is significant for several reasons. "Inc. 500 companies are focused on doing anything they can to grow faster and social media is an innovative tool that may give them an edge over their competition," he says.
Additionally, he thinks it is meaningful that the sample group consisted entirely of private companies. "There is less implication for private companies using social media – they don't have to worry about the stock market going up or down based on someone's Tweet," Mattson explains. "And often in smaller organizations, there is more room for innovation because it requires less processes to adopt."

The specific ways in which the businesses surveyed use social media tools has also evolved. As in years past, respondents were asked if they were monitoring mentions of their company name or their brands on social media sites, and 68 percent said yes, compared with 50 percent just two years ago. Lastly, 34 percent of companies reported that they were using social media to communicate with vendors and suppliers; 26 percent cited Twitter in particular as an important vehicle for communication with outside partners. "From a big picture trend standpoint, these results show how prevalent and widespread social media is becoming in every aspect of business now," says Mattson.