Jesse Rasch

About This Site

My commentary will be very infrequent. Subscribe to the RSS or email feed for this blog if you wish to be automatically notified when new content has been posted.

Entrepreneurial History

Much of the focus of this site will be on entrepreneurship. Content will be largely drawn from my own personal experiences and those of entrepreneurs I know or work with - I will avoid theory and stick to real life examples. The range of topics will run the gamut from what I consider to be basic entrepreneurship to sophisticated company building strategies. There will subject matter of interest to both aspiring and serial entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurial Biography - Early Ventures

WORKING FOR "THE MAN"

The first and last job I would ever hold was as a junior forest ranger for the Ministry of Natural Resources in Cochrane, Ontario. I was 16 at the time. Cochrane is known for its polar bears and being the birthplace of hockey player and legendary donut purveyor Tim Horton.

Entrepreneurial Biography - WebHosting.Com

IT STARTED OUT SIMPLY ENOUGH

I had always been a computer hobbyist. I taught myself html and coded my first website in early 1995, prior to leaving for McGill. The site was for my father's achitectural practice. I built the site for him mostly out of my own interest in better understanding web development. That he was quoted thousands of dollars by a design firm to build a site also caught my attention. This was the era of static websites - web design was a simple task. This experience led me to the business I would start in my first year at McGill - DynamicWeb Design.

DynamicWeb was my first "virtual office" venture. Leveraging the great human capital available in Montreal, I assembled a team of contractors to whom I outsourced the website development work. My focus was on client acquisition. Using redirected phone numbers and mailing addresses in both Toronto and Montreal, I created the perception of a company much more sizeable than the actual reality (I worked alone out of my university dorm room!).

Entrepreneurial Biography - InQuent Technologies

OUTMANEUVERING THE COMPETITION

Any entrepreneur worth their salt is constantly thinking about how they can both defend and increase their market share. For us, the answer came courtesy an email from KPN, the incumbent Dutch telecom. They were interested in selling our products to hundreds of thousands of business customers they served in the Benelux region. They wanted to know if we could situate our web and application hosting platform in their data centers and integrate our software with their legacy billing, customer care, provisioning and operational management systems.

Naturally, we replied in the affirmative and ultimately won the contract. Next step was to figure out how to actually deliver a private labeled platform to them in the time-frame they had requested.  As we were developing the solution, we immediately recognized the potential market for "wholesale" web hosting was significant - almost all telecoms struggled to deliver a web hosting product set competitive with that of scrappy pure-play web hosts. However, what they lacked in product they made up for in reach - as a group, global telecoms had tens of millions of small business customers who trusted their brands and wanted a web hosting solution that could be bundled with their other telephony and data services on one bill.

Aaron Pereira: Serial Social Entrepreneur Par Excellence

My interest in promoting a culture of entrepreneurship is not limited to the for-profit sector. I've had the opportunity to befriend a number of social entrepreneurs over the past six years. These non-profit bootstrappers often follow a very similar path to their profit-oriented counterparts. While the parallels are remarkable, the hurdles to success are usually greater for the social entrepreneur. It is often far more difficult to raise money, foster an environment of economic efficiency, promote technological and operational change, and measure success in the charitable sector.

Primedia Acquires Modified from VerticalScope

Yesterday we announced that VerticalScope sold its automotive publishing division to Primedia. The acquisition of the Modified Automotive Group is a significant milestone for both VerticalScope and Rob Laidlaw, my operating partner and President of VerticalScope. Rob is a highly skilled media entrepreneur - in just four years he grew Modified from an idea into the fastest growing family of automotive publications in the highly competitive automotive market. Each Modified title redefined it's respective niche, bringing a new level of design, editorial, and marketing excellence to the market. My congratulations go out to Rob and everyone at VerticalScope who contributed to building Modified and its sister titles into the leading publications for automotive tuner enthusiasts.

UnVenture Capital: An Alternative Approach to Startup Investing

I was recently quoted in a story on startup fundraising where I was identified as a "Venture Capitalist". This is not the first time I've been incorrectly labeled a VC. I can see how the confusion could arise - my operating entity for direct early-stage investing is named "Aprilis Ventures" and our website homepage identifies us as the "venture capital company of angel investor Jesse Rasch". Since I'd hardly want my untraditional approach to seed and early-stage private equity to sully the reputation of ordinary venture capitalists, I thought it prudent to better describe the nature of my startup investing.