Kudos to the PostRank team. It isn’t easy to crunch over 2 billion pieces of data, make it look good and provide a great resource for a variety of audiences. Whether you want to learn more about engagement metrics, are looking for the best blogs for a particular topic, want to know who key influencers are or want see how your blog stacks up, PostRank Top Blogs of 2009 has something for you. I encourage you to check it out.

So how did Tech Capital do?

Not too shabby

The first thing PostRank did was introduce the Top Posts Widget (right column of this blog) and for a while I was comfortably in the lead until Jacqui leapt in front and took the top 2 spots. I’m not going to say whether she rubbed it in my face or whether I cursed under my breath, but I will admit there have been a few amusing exchanges because of the widget… all in good fun of course.

2 weeks ago things progressed to a new level of scrutiny when PostRank Analytics launched. This has enabled us to easily compare blog posts and track:

• Engagement over time – we can quickly see how posts are performing and where interest is originating from.
• Conversations – there is a great consolidated view of all the various conversations happening for a specific post. I particularly like this feature because you see activity from all the various social media sources including comments on your blog, tweets that reference the post’s URL and/or your twitter username, delicious bookmarks, etc.
• Google Analytics – Data from Google Analytics can be integrated to supplement the social media metrics with pageviews, average time, unique visitors, bounce rate, etc.
• Engagement Activity charts, Concierge Reports – of course there is much more but I suggest you go and check it out yourself.

PostRank says that 80% of a publisher’s engaged audience is commenting, tweeting,  bookmarking, recommending, etc. somewhere else on the web. Most websites measure traffic to their site using services such as Google Analytics but with so much activity happening offsite, a service like PostRank Analytics makes a lot of sense if you want a more complete view of how your content is performing.

It just so happens that for those of us at Tech Capital, it has the additional benefit of being a great way to determine who has the blog’s bestseller.

If you are looking for an opportunity in a growth technology environment, the following are some opportunities
you should consider:

AideRSS
AideRSS PostRank™ Technology measures audience engagement and provides integrated tools to enable you to customize your RSS subscriptions. Save time, boost productivity, and Read What Matters.  Some opportunities to consider:

• JavaScript Ninja
• Ruby on Rails/Web Developer
• Software Engineer

Some company tidbits – 11 employees, social media, online communities

ecobee
ecobee’s home automation platform allows homeowners to conserve energy, save money, and reduce their environmental impact. The centre piece of the ecobee automation platform is a more intelligent programmable thermostat which implements advanced control algorithms to reduce energy consumption and to shift consumption to off-peak hours. An opportunity to consider:

• Senior Embedded Software Developer

Some company tidbits – 17 employees, green energy technology, downtown core (T) open style loft office space (very cool!)

Metranome
Metranome is developing technologies, applications, and services for the  mobile video market.  Targeting global audiences, Metranome’s goal is to deliver deeply engaging and personal content to mobile users while supporting a broad range of mobile devices and wireless networks.  Metranome’s application for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch was released in September 2008.  Some opportunities to consider:

• Scalable Systems Developer
• Mobile Application Developer

Some company tidbits – 9 employees, cutting edge mobile video app development, new media, mobile/wireless

Covarity
Covarity is the leading provider of commercial loan monitoring software solutions.  The Covarity dashboard enables financial institutions to perform, the type of analysis typically done at the time of the origination of a commercial loan.  The Covarity dashboard commercial loan monitoring solution is applicable to banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions with commercial lending portfolios.  Some opportunities to consider:

• Software Tools Developer
• .NET Developer

Some company tidbits – 50 employees, SAAS, large enterprise application, revolutionary solution to commercial loan monitoring

If you are new to early stage I would highly recommend you check out both Joel on Software and Joel Spolsky’s recent post Another resume tip.  If you are wondering what it is like to work with an entrepreneurial minded company this is a great post to read. In short, you can’t be afraid to roll your sleeves up. Everyone has to!

For a complete list of opportunities visit Tech Capital’s careers portal.

1. Recognize that it takes a team to build a successful company. Companies typically start out with one or two founders, and no founding team is “complete”. We like to work with founders who recognize where they are strong and where they could use some help. As the team grows, management needs to focus on where the team is strong and capitalize on these strengths. At the same time, management needs to identify where the team is weak and hire to fill these gaps. A rapidly growing company doesn’t have time to try to strengthen or hide weaknesses.

2. Hire top talent. Of course. Easier said than done. How do you identify top talent? Are you willing to hire someone who is more accomplished than you? How do you convince these people to join your company? How do you make sure they stick around? We’ve invested a significant amount of Tech Capital’s resources to make sure our portfolio companies have access to and retain the best talent (80% of the money we invest in companies ultimately goes to the employees). We have two full-time employees at Tech Capital who focus on human resources programs and support at portfolio companies. From the get go, we help our companies establish HR management principles to ensure they are ready for rapid expansion and growth. Programs include: recruitment and retention of talent, development of talent, compensation strategies, management of organizational change, and general systems and processes.

3. Share the wealth. We encourage our portfolio companies to issue stock options to all employees. By giving employees a share of the company’s upside, employees have a vested interest in the success of the company. Everyone celebrates when the company is successful. Some of our companies also use variable compensation to reward employees for success on specific initiatives. For example, additional stock option grants for successful customer deployments or cash compensation for growing the company’s user base by a certain percentage. We do not subscribe to a “standard” compensation formula but we believe that employee ownership should be included in whatever form of compensation management chooses to adopt.

4. Spend money but make sure you spend it on things that matter and don’t waste it. We invest money in our portfolio companies knowing that they are going to spend it, and we want them to spend it to grow the company. The key is to use money as efficiently as possible so that the company gets to cash flow positive as soon as possible. Don’t waste money on fancy office space or expensive furniture and shop around for the best deals on travel etc. so you can pay your employees well, give them the tools they need to be successful, and have more runway.

5. Identify, focus on, and track metrics in all key areas of the business. The old adage “What gets measured is what gets managed” is certainly true. Metrics give all employees a clear view of what matters to the company and tangibly shows the progress the company is making. One of our portfolio companies has a large monitor in its development area that tracks one of its key metrics. Everyone in the company can see the impact of new product releases and the growth of the company — in real time. This type of visible metric is incredibly powerful for team motivation (and impressive when investors stop by…).

6. Focus on the “right” revenues. Generating revenue is very important but it is equally, if not more, important to make sure that the revenue you generate comes from your target market. Referenceable and relevant customers play a big part in technology sales cycles and are key for driving revenue growth, especially in the early stages of a company’s development. Having these referenceable customers also helps validate your business value proposition when you are speaking with potential partners and investors. Chasing revenue wherever you can find it may help keep the lights on but it can keep you from building your core business. If you are unable to secure revenue from your target market, you might want to reevaluate your value proposition and target market.

7. Move quickly but maintain a strong balance between planning and execution. One of our CEOs suggests setting annual goals and then working backwards to determine what the company needs to do each 30 days to ensure it meets these goals. The company executes over the 30 days, measures the results, adjusts the plan if required and then executes for the next 30 days. Monthly company update meetings provide a good “deliverable point” to keep everyone accountable (including the CEO). He also suggests having no more than four key, well-defined deliverables (three is best, easy to remember, no confusion) and that nothing else should be started until these four are completed. Along with this point, do what you say you are going to do, when you say you will do it. Or, “Underpromise and Overdeliver”. Clearly understand the abilities of your team and set realistic expectations about timelines on deliverables.

8. Communicate effectively with employees on a regular and scheduled basis. Continuing on with my last point, every employee in the company has a role to play in ensuring the company executes on its strategy. Communicate regularly with employees both informally and through scheduled company meetings (we recommend at least monthly) in which management clearly articulates the company’s annual goals, results from the prior month, and where everyone should be focused for the current month.

9. Knowing when to say “no”. There are so many paths for companies and employees to take in building a business but financial and human capital resources are always limited. How do you figure out which paths to pursue and which to say no to? Ask yourself these simple questions: “Does this [opportunity / feature / tool / resource / project / information / etc.] help us deliver on our key deliverables?” and “Does it provide a return on investment within [timeframe]?” Keeping people accountable for their actions and rewarding them for achieving goals makes answering these questions somewhat easier.

10. Encouraging innovation. A difficult challenge is finding the balance between focusing on the execution of a plan vs. innovation and new ideas, which always creates a pull in a different direction… One portfolio company maintains a constant dialogue so that every new idea that pops up is put on the table for consideration and evaluated along with everything else. Another company gets ideas and buy-in on product design from everyone in the company, not just the engineering and product teams. Their process includes full, company-wide, design reviews and prioritization sessions on each product release. A third company considers every new idea and rapid prototypes whenever possible. To support and encourage idea exchange, they have a 4′ x 8′ whiteboard for every developer.

11. Develop a culture of empowerment and decision making. Employees need to feel comfortable making decisions — taking risks / trying new things / experimentation is good. If an employee makes four decisions and one of these decisions turns out to be wrong, three were right! (and the company moves forward!) If employees are scared to make decisions, the company stands still. Trust your team and encourage them to make decisions.

12. Participate in community. When I speak about community, I’m referring to the community in which the company chooses to do business. I recognize that this is a vague definition but community is different for each company. Our companies participate in their industry communities — For example, contributing to standards bodies, joining trade associations, and speaking at industry events. They also participate in their local communities and believe that building a reputation locally is important for recruiting the best local talent. A company needs to be engaged with its community on many fronts to develop its reputation, get feedback on its products, cultivate relationships, build its team, etc.

This list is obviously not exhaustive, would love you to post your own best practices in the comments.

1.  What does LiveHive do? And what is tvClickr?

LiveHive creates interactive experiences that are tied to TV broadcasts. Viewers play-along with whatever they’re watching and socialize with other viewers watching the same thing. All a viewer needs is a PC, laptop, or mobile phone, and they can participate in the show by predicting what happens next, answering trivia, and voicing their opinion in real-time polls.

Synchronizing and delivering the whole experience requires a lot of technology - something we’ve perfected over the last 3 years and call the NanoGaming platform. Most of our time at LiveHive is spent working with TV networks, sports teams, and major advertisers to create custom NanoGaming experiences for their TV programming. Besides being a lot of fun for the viewer at home, we create some really amazing interactive advertising opportunities that give sponsors a true dialogue with the viewers.

tvClickr is the B2C side of our business in which we create similar interactive experiences, but we do it for all the top primetime shows on TV. We do this by bringing viewers together on Facebook to connect and compete while they’re watching their favourite shows.

2.  Who are your customers and what pain are you addressing?

With NanoGaming, we’ve had the luxury of working with some of the best companies in media. Historically, we’ve spent a lot of time working with broadcasters to make their sports programming interactive, but that’s recently grown into some other categories like reality TV and awards shows. One of the favourite parts of my job is that we get the chance to produce the interactive component for some incredible TV franchises like Monday Night Football with ESPN and Hockey Night in Canada with CBC… Anytime you get the chance to work with that calibre of programming, you know you’re hitting a killer pain point for the industry.

For the broadcasters, the pain we’re solving really exists on two fronts: First, they’re losing engagement with viewers who are no longer giving 100% of their attention to the TV. Broadcasters now share their viewers’ time with gaming consoles, PCs, and mobile phones. NanoGaming gives them the chance to connect with their viewers through a true two-way channel which has a direct and measurable link to more engaged and loyal viewers. The second part of the pain we’re solving is really an economic one. Advertisers are increasingly finding that the 30-second TV spot is not reaching their consumers… people are ad-skipping, or just not paying attention… And measuring an ad’s effectiveness has a whole host of challenges.

NanoGaming lets a broadcaster’s advertisers connect in a true dialogue with consumers, in a highly measurable way, for an extended period of time. Over the last year we’ve had a chance to brand our NanoGaming offerings under the flag of some of the top advertisers in the world including Coca Cola, Shell, Lexus, and Nissan.

3.  What have you developed for NBC/The Olympics

NBC is doing some really amazing things in their coverage of the Beijing Olympics. As part of their online package, they asked us to create their interactive companion piece to complement their broadcasts each night, something that would allow fans at home to actually predict the action as it was happening and compete with friends while they watch. The offering is called the NBC Prime Time Challenge sponsored by Coca Cola. For every arm-chair athlete sitting at home, this is a really great way to get engaged with the Olympic action each day, and as per usual, there are some cool prizes on the line. But from personal experience, I think bragging rights after kicking your friends’ butts is the best prize going!

4.  Where can we play?

We’re constantly rolling out new NanoGaming offerings, but you can always get an up-to-date list from NanoGaming.com. Right now, our Olympics package can be found at http://primetime.nbcolympics.com and we’ve got a CFL Football game sponsored by Nissan available at http://cfl.nissan.ca.

The nice part about tvClickr is that it guarantees top tier content to play along with every night, all year long. We cover the best reality TV like Big Brother and Survivor, dramas like Gossip Girl or Lost, and even one-off events like award shows or elections. All this action happens inside of Facebook with the tvClickr app, which you can link to from www.tvclickr.com.

5.  What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned over the past 12 months and how are you incorporating this knowledge into your product offerings?

We’re really doing some true-blue trailblazing stuff here at LiveHive, we’re the leaders in building this new sector of the market, and we’re learning a lot of lessons along the way about the right ways and wrong ways to create these interactive experiences. It’s embarrassing to say, but I think like a lot of companies, most of the hard lessons we’ve learned could have been picked up in the first class of Marketing 101. First and foremost: Listen to your users! We hire a lot of great product designers here at LiveHive, but more often than not, the great ideas come out of our user community. That’s the nice part about having a product that people love - your community of users is always wanting to help contribute to making the product even better. tvClickr is a perfect example of users getting involved in product development. We were hearing for months from users who wanted a much wider range of programming, they wanted it every night, and wanted it to tap into their existing social networks. Eventually we figured out that our user community was right, and we created tvClickr.

6.  Broadcasters seem to be experimenting with a number of digital/interactive technology solutions these days, what are some of the best practices you’ve developed in working with your broadcaster clients?

There are so many products online nowadays competing for a user’s attention… And we always want to get more than our fair share of that attention. So a lot of our best practices are focused on how to effectively target the best candidates for a particular offering, how to let them know about it, and then how to keep them engaged beyond that first visit. This targeting is something we’ve realized isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, and we’ve developed a set of tailored campaigns that have been really effective at keeping our community engaged over what may be many months that an offering runs with a broadcaster.

7.  Why do you think these broadcasting giants are turning to companies like LiveHive for new product offerings? Why are they not just building/deploying the products in-house?

There are a lot of moving parts in creating a synchronized interactive offering for TV broadcasts… There are really technical aspects to keep the content synchronized and timely, marketing aspects to build in the right viral mechanisms, and actual content creation challenges to match a show’s demographic to a particular mix of interactivity. Quite often, broadcasters have tried to pull together something like this on their own and the results have been pretty mediocre. Creating an interactive offering is quite different from creating TV content. Broadcasters are coming to us because they’ve witnessed our ability to pull together these complex projects, and they’re excited to leverage our expertise as part of their overall offering to viewers.

8.  What opportunities do you see on the horizon for LiveHive?

Digital media is an amazing environment to be working in right now… The landscape has changed more in the past 12 months than it has in the previous 12 years which has created an incredible number of opportunities and challenges that need to be solved. The opportunities that are most exciting to us revolve around changes on the distribution and consumption side of things.

People are more in love with media than ever, but they’re accessing it on different devices and in different ways than we were five years ago. The center of LiveHive’s mission is to make this media content more interactive, social, and ultimately more valuable. As more media viewing moves online, or onto devices like iPhones and X-Boxes, that mission doesn’t change, but the ways to make that content interactive most definitely do change. We’re spending a lot of time with our clients right now thinking about these issues. It’s a pretty exciting intersection to be at.

9.  What are some of the key hurdles you still need to overcome?

Over the past couple of years, we’ve spent more time than anyone else out there figuring out how to make TV content interactive and more social. We’ve really done a great job with sports, reality tv, and award shows - and we have the repeat business to prove it. But this type of programming is just a fraction of the content that’s on TV, and we instinctively know that viewers have the same passion and desire to socialize around other shows they’re watching, whether it’s late night TV, a primetime drama, or an afternoon soap opera. We’re still working on developing entertaining and compelling interactive elements for these show categories.

We often get asked about our portfolio companies — what they do, what stage they’re at, whether or not they have customers and are generating revenue, what the management teams are like … In an attempt to answer some of these questions, we’ll be posting a series of "interviews with portfolio companies" over the next little while. Hopefully these interviews will give you a feeling for the types of teams/companies we like to back and provide you with some insight into the companies’ market opportunities, products and culture.

Our first interview is with Rod Foster, CEO of Covarity. We’ve been working with Rod for years and Covarity is one of our oldest active portfolio companies (incorporated in 2001).

1. What does Covarity do?

We help Financial Institutions perform better by improving the management of their commercial loan portfolio to proactively avoid risk.

From a very linear standpoint, we automate the management of financial statements and the risk management process, as well as help reduce workload. Fundamentally though, Covarity helps Financial Institutions strengthen client relationships by assisting their borrowers in becoming better businesses with the information we provide.

Today, we are helping the borrowers of some very large banks, such as HSBC and RBC, as well as credit unions. We provide beneficial reports to these borrowers, we make it easier for them to upload their financial statements, we provide automation within the Financial Institution to get things done more efficiently and to detect problems earlier. Farther down the road, we’ll be getting into data management and risk and benchmarking and the requirements for XBRL reporting.

2. What makes the work at Covarity challenging?

Our business model is pretty groundbreaking, and I say that for a few reasons:

• One, we’re SaaS. For many people SaaS is not groundbreaking but it’s still relatively new.
• Two, the market we’re playing in.
• Three, the size of the deals we’re doing in the market we’re playing in is pretty significant. I’m not sure there are many SaaS businesses out there signing multi-million dollar, multi-year deals, and along with that comes complexities.

I’ll give you a really good example of how we’re breaking ground: normal software businesses build a product, ship the product, and they offer second and third line support. They train the customer to provide internal first line support. At Covarity, we build the product but we don’t ship the product, we deploy the product, so we do our own internal IT support and we also provide IT support for our customers. There’s no rule book, no history on how to staff for this type of support. We have no history on how many calls we’re going to get because we’re changing the way people do business. So we have to be able to strategize, implement and then adjust, without having history as a teacher.

On the technology side, we’re leading edge in .NET obviously, but the size of our application and the complexity of the rules, combined with offering a SaaS model with custom capabilities is pretty challenging. To support this, we are totally dedicated to investing in the right tools and technology… and people.

Working here is also challenging in that we demand a lot from people. You have to think, you have to produce, you have to be smart because you’re working with very smart people. Our employees really respect each other.

3. How do you make sure the employees at Covarity are enjoying their work?

We spend a lot of time making sure people clearly understand the company’s goals, how we’re doing against the goals, and how each individual contributes to achieving the goals. We communicate through monthly update meetings, through performance reviews, those types of things. We’re very transparent. Communication is important.

We celebrate our successes for sure.

On having fun at work, we have the "Call of Duty" every night at 5:30pm. On Friday at 4:00pm we have a toast, and we’ll leave it at that . We have a games room with a pool table and a foosball table.

We often have fun things like the 7 day countdown on the last release. During the last 7 days of our release, when stress was high, we did an event-a-day to break people’s minds away. It went along the lines of a rhyme each day, sort of like a Cat in the Hat thing:

Day 7… Sandwiches
Day 6… Sweets
Day 5… Frosty ice cream
Day 4… Flowers and chocolates to bring home to spouses
Day 3… Donation to Sick Kids on behalf of the company which, interestingly enough, was the one I got the most positive feedback on from individuals
Day 2… We have a standard order from Cameron’s on release day
Day 1… Wine and cheese party to celebrate

A couple of people came to me and said they’d go home at night and their significant other would say “So… What’s Covarity doing tomorrow?”

Outside of work we do things like Laser Quest which we rented every Monday night for the winter. We do paintball and other social events, and we encourage involvement in charities and the community.

And… We have the Covarity Stanley Cup. We have a cup where at the end of every release, every developer and tester involved in the release gets their name put on the cup and we drink out of the cup. We just started this with the last release but we went back and added every release from day one. It was funny watching them drink out of it — there was a line up!

4. What opportunities do you see on the horizon for Covarity?

Entrance to the US. And we have the potential to be the standard in the Canadian marketplace. Standard may be a strong word but we’re going to have 50% of the Canadian market that we’re able to address by the end of this year so we’re very much dominant in Canada.

On the horizon, making our solution more strategic by including benchmarking and risk analysis, and leveraging our data management capabilities. We help people capture data today but the future is all about using the data. And that to me is really exciting. You think about what has happened in the US with the credit crisis, and how we can help people avoid that the next time. That’s pretty exciting.

5. What keeps you up at night?

We have a tremendous amount of growth going on. Making sure that we are keeping things simple. Making sure that we have our priorities, that people understand the priorities, and that we are aligning our resources to the priorities. Making sure that the right people get the right information at the right time.

I say "keep things simple" because as you grow quickly and you have lots of moving parts, things can get very complicated very easily. We recognize that we have to change and we change appropriately but we don’t make it difficult.

6. Tell me one interesting fact about Covarity that most people don’t know…

One that we’ll let people know? I don’t know if it’s interesting or not but "we have attitude". All of us. We’re confident about what we can accomplish. We have a ‘confident’ swagger (not cocky) going on over here. I will say that for sure.

7. What’s the biggest pressure that a VC brings to the table?

The demand for continued growth. You can’t stop. And I look at that as a positive but it is that accountability. You have someone who is tied to your business but not day-to-day and they often ask the questions you don’t want to ask. But they force you to look at yourself in the mirror. They force you to be honest with yourself.

8. Anything else you think deserves mention?

If you believe in what you’re doing and are passionate about it, and if you have someone who’s passionate and is going to put their money where their mouth is, it still makes it very very difficult, it’s not easy, but you can do it.

Hire good people. Hire talent. And make sure you get good supporters. Focus.