Jennlog

Wow, so this is my first post in March. I’ve been meaning to post but I’ve been busy with Statuspalooza and a number of other things this month.

I ended last month in California, working on a contract in Sacramento. I returned to Boulder on March 1.

The next week was a very busy event week for Tech/Start-up folks in Boulder with Open Coffee, Silicon Flatirons’ IP Law Panels at CU and the NewTech Meetup all occuring on Tuesday, then the Tech Cocktail event happening at The Foundry on Thursday.

On March 13th, the Boulder County Business Report published an article about the Boulder TechBootstrap project Patti Miller and I have been developing.

Statuspalooza took a fair bit of my attention and energy this month, because not only did I need a new work visa, but I needed a new passport. With the exception of a very grumpy US immigration agent (who felt I had misrepresented my experience to the US government in 2000 and therefore demanded that I re-substantiate my claim to work in the US on this application or be denied entry), it all went very smoothly.

Statuspalooza Tour 2008:

1. Tues March 18, 2008 - Afternoon: Arrive Toronto
2. Tues March 18, 2008 - Afternoon: Passport Photos taken
3. Wed March 19, 2008 - Morning: Passport Application submitted
4. Thurs March 20, 2008 - Afternoon: Passport Picked Up
5. Mon March 24, 2008 - Afternoon: US Visa Application Approved
6. Mon March 24, 2008 - Evening: Depart for Denver

I spent the week at my parents’ place. It was nice to relax for a while and visit over Easter, which I haven’t done in years.

There’s a Yallery update that’s about half finished that is meant to standardize our css implementation. I hope to create a more formal document structure that will enable an easier fix for Windows browser issues (mainly font sizing and layers). I’ve also spent some time looking into IE6 fixes and workarounds and concluded that there will never be an IE6-compatible version of Yallery, so upgrade your old nasty Windows browser.

Lastly, Billie the neighbor cat has gone missing. He hasn’t been by to visit in over a month and a half, so it’s been pretty lonely without my keyboard-hogging head-butting bud around.

This post answers the questions I was pondering in my Foreign Entrepreneurs and US Visas post last November.

In November, I was working full-time on Yallery dev, writing our pitch and talking with angels and VCs with one eye focused on fundraising and the other towards applying for an Entrepreneur (investor) visa as my TN-1 visa status expired in March 2008. I was also entertaining the notion of returning to Canada after nine years in the People’s Republic of Boulder if the fundraising and visa situation couldn’t be worked through.

Well, a lot has changed since November.

A couple weeks ago I created Boulder Tech Bootstrap with Patti Miller — a Wiki + Forum community resource and information sharing site for people starting and operating new tech companies in the Boulder-Denver region.

On the Yallery front, Michael and I removed the “Invite Wall” — and now anyone can view the art or create an account and share their own art (my personal Yallery Collector Dashboard is here: http://yallery.com/jennr). I’m considering it to be in a soft launch state while we continue development.

After a lot of great feedback, I accepted that Yallery was not going to interest investors until there was a demonstrable membership base and revenue (no matter how much I believe in the value and novelty of art relationships). Yallery is still a “project” and the revenue is still a far ways away — removing the Invite Wall will improve the membership base situation.

I also accepted that I could no longer afford to support myself while I worked full-time on Yallery and started to put out my feelers for consulting work. And so, next week, I start some product development & advisory consulting for a company just outside of Sacramento. It’s a short contract that may go longer-term if we gel.

What this all means is I’ll be re-upping my TN-1 for a year due to my new Management Consulting gig in California and will be sticking around in Boulder while I work part-time on Yallery.

And now that this has been sorted out, I can set some milestones for the year:

My Yallery milestones for this year will be to get it working correctly on Windows browsers, implement the revenue generation components of Yallery, grow the membership and start operating the marketplace features.

My professional milestones for this year will be to add the most value I can to my client’s products.

My personal milestones for this year will be to get out of debt, restart saving again and get out and enjoy friends, life and love more than I did while I was in startup mode.

It’s going to be a good year.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been visiting my parents for the holidays. I planned to do a ton of work, but in reality, it was nice just to spend time with them, see a few friends, have a few meetings and spend some time amazed at just how much Toronto has changed since I left it.

One example is the museum, where I met my mom to have lunch. Like the Denver Art Museum, the ROM has a brand new Daniel Libeskind crystal. It was dark and rainy, but here are a couple of pictures.

Unlike the titanium-covered Denver crystal, the ROM crystal was originally designed to have a glass shell. Most of the covering was changed to aluminum slats when the architects discovered that heavy wet snow falls part of the year. It felt smaller than the Denver crystal, but fun and interesting none the less.

Most of the crystal was occupied by the ROM’s giftshop (on the main floor) and their new and improved dinosaur exhibit (on the second floor). You can see how they built the crystal into the old, original building rather than as a new building in the case of the Denver Art Museum.

I’m rested, back in Boulder and ready to make 2008 my and my companies’ best year yet.

The contents of this post have been rumbling around my head now for a few months. As many people know, I am Canadian and I’ve been in the US variously since 2000 on a TN-1 work visa to allow me to provide Management Consulting services for the clients of a Boulder film and video systems integration firm named GWH&a (if you were at the first Startup Weekend, you were in their office).

As so much of my focus is on getting Yallery.com to market, I decided to limit the most recent visa renewal to only six months. This means my current US Work Visa ends in March 2008 and short of getting a new visa qualification, I’m going home to Canada.

GWH&a has been really really good for me. The people there are awesome and we’ve done some amazing projects together. When I first came to Boulder in January 1999, I’d just finished writing a report for the Canadian Senate on media over IP networks and was scheduled to chair a panel at Spring COMDEX in Chicago on “Integrating IP, Voice, Video and Data”, but I didn’t have much else going on. Wyndham and his clients brought me opportunities I would never have had, had I remained in Canada. I will always be in a huge debt to him.

But, I am an entrepreneur. I left my last “9-5 job” in 1989 (at a Canadian bank-owned discount brokerage house … I even took the Canadian Securities Course) to work full-time at my recording studio. I’ve always had the weakness of taking the chance on where my heart takes me.

I’ve never had the “big exit” that so many entrepreneurs dream of, but I’ve done okay. I’ve experienced some failures also. For example, in 2000 I began and then ended my last company with a personally guaranteed $80,000 line of credit plus my personal credit cards — all maxed — plus interest — and eventually paid off. Before that there was a company I founded with two others where no money was made at the end but the majority of our team and efforts survived together as part of a new organization — that was all I could have asked for.

I’m also a consultant. I am great at combining things, people and ideas together based on a desired goal. I love making things work. I love the society-changing affects of experiencing media over the Internet — I’ve loved it since the MBone and the announcement to the “rem-conf” mailing list about some new beta software called “Real Audio” from a tiny company named Progressive Networks.

My last solid consulting contract (and income) ended August 2005, by my request after many extensions. I spent the subsequent six months pondering opportunities and traveling a ton to visit friends, explore and decide what to do with my life — London, Seattle, San Francisco, Sydney (2x), Singapore, Toronto, Los Angeles.

After clearing my head, in March 2006 I began fleshing out the idea that would become Yallery.com. This would be the first Internet start-up that I’d done that would be based from one of my passions. I’ve been working on Yallery.com full-time since then, with some rare 1-2 week contracts as I am needed.

Legally, I would say that Yallery.com is more of a project than a company right now. I really want to make Yallery.com a US corporation, with operations in Boulder but without some type of longer term ability for me to stay and work here in the US, I’ve been holding off on doing any type of registration.

The US visa system has an entrepreneur visa qualification called an “E-2″ for “Treaty Investors”. Essentially, the US government wants you to bring “a substantial amount of money” to the US and cause that money to be spent on creating jobs for americans and in return you are allowed to stay in the US for renewable two year periods as long as you are connected to that business. Just what “a substantial amount of money” is to the US government varies depending on which Web sites you read, but it tends to average about $100,000.00.

There is another qualification called an “EB-5″ for “Greencard Investors”, which provides a greencard to 10,000 investors every year provided they each invest $1,000,000 into a business and create ten or more full-time jobs for at least two years.

So, to stay in Boulder and make Yallery.com a US corporation, I need to show the US government that I’ve personally invested at least $100,000 into Yallery.com. To make things a little easier, the INS/ICE will consider “sweat equity” as long as it is balanced by some type of third-party valuation and/or investment.

I do think Michael and I are at a point where we could receive an impartial valuation of Yallery.com that would place a value of my contribution to be above $100,000, but without some cash on the balance sheet, I think the US would deny me an EB-2 application. Bootstrapping isn’t much of an option.

So, today is the first day of what will surely be a stressful time. Will Yallery be a US Corporation? Will it be a Canadian Corporation? Will I go back to Toronto or take a chance on Vancouver?

Only time will tell.

(and if you need some technical management help, I’d be happy to engage for 1-2 weeks at a time as your project requires — Bootstrapping is some hard stuff!)