..well, kinda

ETA for the Cape Town Teraco datacentre is end of January 2009. We are now taking orders and we are offering an early bird discount.

Contact me if you are in the market for datacentre space.

Teraco is the first South African company to offer datacentre facilities that are vendor-neutral. Our first facility in Great Westerford, Cape Town will raise the bar on the security, redundancy and efficiency of colocation services. This new datacentre will be a dense hub of connectivity and an open market to drive the growth of ICT services at a new pace. Teraco is a business focused on a single goal of building high quality datacentre environments. We create platforms for our customers and partners to add value, innovate and focus on their core businesses. Inside a Teraco facility you will find: Carriers, ISPs, Peering Point(s), Voice Exchanges, Storage Providers, Managed Service Providers (BC/DR), Corporate Businesses, Content Providers and Hosted Application Service Providers.

We are actively working on securing location for Teraco in Joburg. Naturally finding a site with enough electricity is the challenge. We’re busy looking at a site close to the airport at the moment.. but if you know of nice sites with ~8MVA available give me a shout.

I met with a major mobile content provider yesterday about taking space in Teraco CPT. A 14 cabinet deal. Impressive growth in the mobile space. They have nice toys.

See you at iWeek is September. With a bit of luck we should be taking orders for our Joburg site by then.

A few weeks ago I wrote a brief post about Teraco’s successful first round funding. The last 18 months have been a very interesting learning experience. I figured I’d share some general thoughts and experiences about the process of raising a large amount of money for a new business idea.

So, there I was, sitting in a restaurant one evening, in a private suite, with a group of about ten exceptional gentlemen, investment bankers, fund managers, experienced entrepreneurs and businessmen. You could say it was a celebration dinner. Smiles all around. Interesting conversations. Board meeting completed. Paperwork signed and sealed. The food is excellent. I select a good red wine off an impressive list.. and I’m thinking..

So this is what it’s like running with the big dogs.. people up there in the rarefied air.

Note to self: Let’s do this again.

Up to now, all the ventures I’ve been a founder of have been mostly organically grown and have not needed major initial capital investments. Amobia needed some starting capital to build its first network infrastructure and Blio for it’s PBX production, but somehow we’ve always managed to fund the staring phases by selling services.

Seeing a business raise a healthy initial investment, attract a solid team of people and find the kind of momentum Teraco has just makes you want to do it all again. Once you tasted it you want more, like that scene with the little girl asking for more in Interview with a Vampire.

A few ideas..

Choose your business ideas wisely

Something you realise down the line, one of those perfect hindsight items. Don’t just jump in and swim. Some ideas just don’t have the potential to make a big impact even though you are very passionate about them. If you think you have the most awesome idea.. write it down and read it again in a week. If you still think it’s awesome start figuring out if it can make serious money.

Take a longer term view. Business ideas can have a 1-2 year incubation cycle, just simmering and waiting for the right environment. Ask yourself if you are willing to put 3-5 years of your life into an idea before you start. Have the discipline to know when not to start a new project.

Get a good lawyer

You’ll need somebody to help you decode long boring legal agreements, draft deal sheets, edit and check legal documents, subscription agreements, shareholder agreements etc. Somebody you trust.

Write a good business plan

Keep notes. Keep refining your business plan. Work at answering the questions your investors will have. It’s not something your write over a weekend. It can take months. Don’t waste too much time with the big name consulting firms. They can give you advice, but they can’t write a business plan for you. Good business plans get written by the founders of the business.

You need a good financial model

Keep it as simple as possible. Something that can be audited without too much pain, not something that explores the final frontiers of spreadsheet limitations.

Get yourself a trust fund to keep your assets and shares in

Work on your elevator pitch

Have cash to risk. Place your bets

To be serious about this game, I figure you need about R1m of cash around, which you are willing to risk in getting a new venture ready for its first major funding. Make sure you are willing to invest your own money in your idea. You must be sold on the idea.

Go big or go home

I think it’s easier to raise R50m than R1m. Big ideas grab attention. Big ideas have less competition. Nobody is very interested in a really cool idea that produces a business worth less than a house.

Investment bankers are a rare breed

Interesting people. Quick to grasp ideas. Quick to move on to other ideas. Good at spotting value, very good at quantifying value. If you have a good idea, a good plan and the numbers make sense I doubt that you’ll need to do that much convincing. They’ll quickly let you know if they believe your story. There are a number of very good investors and fund managers around once you start looking.

Reputation

Reputation is very valuable. The investment community is well connected. People have to want to work with you again in future.

Learn to negotiate

Talking turkey is an art. Know when to stick to your guns. Take your time when the big moves get made. It’s ok to think it through and give your answers in a future meeting. People quickly learn your ways of negotiation. I think it’s constructive to be consistent. Logic, reasoning skills and being able to express your ideas are essential. Making sense is the best offense in any negotiation. Be creative in finding solutions or new angles to explore.

The slow lane

Don’t waste your time with people who don’t have money or don’t get the idea. I remember a few meetings with people where they kept batting the idea and I kept thinking.. “dude, I’m brining you the most awesome idea on a plate, just wake up and let your ego take a nap”.

Look around

You need to constantly be looking around for good ideas. Sometimes it’s a simple idea that crossed your path a long time ago that is the most powerful.

Teraco, our pet project for the last ~18 months to build South Africa’s first vendor neutral datacentres is now fully funded. Just finished signing all the paperwork. Nice to see a business make its way from “just an idea” to a serious infrastructure project.

Whoot!

More about this in another post.. time to go walk up Lions Head.

I missed my usual Sunday night blog post session. Let’s just say there was enough wine around at the time. Mostly been catching up after a busy weekend. Let’s see..

• I finished the Extreme Networks ECDP course. Next is ENA and then most probably ENS in Dubai.
• Worked on the Teraco switch fabric design and commercial agreements (talking turkey).
• Wednesday was an Amobia exco meeting in Stellenbosch.
• Thursday, watched Semi-Pro, Will Farrel is a god.
• Friday to Monday was Mia time. She’s a good partner in crime and a unique alarm clock… luckily she has a weakness for rooibos tea, Melissa’s rusks and Monsters, Inc. In that order.
• Friday afternoon, Mia and I visited Will for his birthday in Somerset West. Mia locked us out of his house for a while.
• Saturday, made Maltabella porridge and watched the rugby. Traveled to Franschoek for the Bastille day festival. Had lunch with WSE, Cath and Parri.
• Visited Haute Cabriere for sundowners, home of Pierre Jourdan. Awesome views. Great cap classique.
• Sunday, gym, swim, snack at Knead, ice cream at Sinn’s, Deer Park play area where we ran into Dorje. Mia says she wants her own blog.
• Had lunch at Greens with Jonathan and Lynnae.
• Sunday night we had a braai with friends in Llandudno. I suck at Scrabble.
• It’s been a challenging few weeks, but I’m lucky to have very supportive friends.
• Cape Town is a nice place to raise children.

On with the week.

Joe’s news items..

• Random quote of the week: “What on earth would a man do with himself if something did not stand in his way?” — H. G. Wells
• Looks like Teraco raised its remaining funding.
• Tuesday, Georg’s home cooked veggie soup and red wine evening.
• Wednesday, downloaded Firefox 3.0 and moved some furniture.
• There seems to be good interest in a Cape Town peering point again. About 11 networks have responded positively so far, including Google.
• Finally found a use for the DMCA. Facebook is pretty quick with removing copyrighted material.
• Thursday, processed some iWeek paperwork. Amobia and Teraco are now Gold sponsors. WAPA will endorse the Thursday morning wireless session and will have a stand in the iWeek exhibition area. If you have not yet registered, go here.. it’s free.
• The Blio PBX passed 100% of the TBR-3 tests including the optional parts. This completes the 4th and final part of the ICASA requirements.
• I attended the 1st Cape Town Pecha Kucha night. The wine was crap. The Moscow Mules were good. The talks were pretty decent.
• Friday and Saturday was Mia time. We went for a swim again. She fell asleep in the car as we drove to go watch some rugby. Mia slept on my chest for most of the game. Not bothered by any of the excitement around her. It really is a magic feeling having her take a nap like that.
• Saturday night was Andy and Georg’s house warming party. Must be Andy’s 6th house warming in two years. All the usual suspects showed up, including my personal shrink, who’s birthday it is today.
• Sunday, had fish and chips at the Waterfront and watched Kung Fu Panda. A fun movie.
• Walked up Lions Head just before sunset and got some panoramic photos of clouds rolling into Camps Bay and Cape Town harbour. Cape Town is Rome.
• I now have a dinner table (again). Guess I’ll have to have a dinner party soon.
• I also have an Ubuntu PC and SIP phone at home now.. all I need is a big LCD screen for movies.

Peace.

News from planet Joe:

• Teraco now has a commitment for 2/3 of required funding
• Entered Amobia in a business idea competition of sorts, should have some feedback by mid July
• Updated the SwimGeek front page
• Friday, went for a walk with Mia on a strawberry farm
• Saturday, gym, swim, food, family, fun and friends
• Sunday, Fathers Day was a complete mess, I was a complete mess
• Ever see people you know are on your Facebook friends list but you can’t remember their names? It’s happened twice now.
• Persuaded the admin of the en_ZA locale settings to use 24:00 time format and make weeks start on Mondays. The power of open source. If a small thing bugs you it can be fixed quickly.
• I’ve taken an interest in peering (internet exchanges) again after the JINX workshop. Busy tinkering with a few ideas.
• Added a Facebook page for Frogfoot
• I registered for this year’s iWeek conference. I’ve been invited to be part of a wireless panel discussion on the Thursday (wireless day).
• Weekend movies:
  • Elf: Good
  • Sex and the City: Not that bad
  • Hot Fuzz: Classic

Have a fun 4 day week. I can see I’ll need to be applying some selective amnesia jedi mind tricks.

Boiler? Yeah, until recently I also did not know what a boiler plate was. It’s PR lingo.

A boiler plate is a paragraph that describes a company and its products and gets included at the bottom of press releases. The idea is to capture the key attributes of a company. It’s like a poem about a business.

I’m busy refining some boiler plates.. what would you say are the most relevant ideas to include?

Frogfoot:

Frogfoot Networks is an independent technology company providing innovative internet services and open source solutions. Frogfoot’s service offering includes: Wifi Hotpots, ADSL, Linux Virtual Servers, VPNs and Web Hosting. Frogfoot was founded in 2000 and is based in Newlands, Cape Town.

More info:
www.frogfoot.com
0860 KERMIT

Amobia:

Amobia Communications, founded in 2005, is an independent network infrastructure provider. Amobia builds outdoor fixed wireless access networks. Amobia’s focus is on corporate branch connectivity solutions and high speed point to point links. Consumer services include cost effective wireless broadband internet access and wifi hotspots.

More info:
www.amobia.com
0861 AMOBIA

Blio:

The Blio Corporation, founded in 2005, designs embedded systems and builds cost effective, scalable and dependable solutions for the next generation converged public network. Blio offers innovative IP PBX telephony solutions and platforms for internet service delivery.

More info:
www.blio.com

Teraco:

Teraco Data Environments, founded in 2007, is an independent datacentre infrastructure provider and the first company in South Africa to offer vendor-neutral colocation facilities. Teraco is focused on building high quality datacentres for corporate businesses, carriers and internet service providers. Teraco’s business model creates a network value effect by building open and competitive environments where the cost of interconnection tends to zero.

More info:
www.teraco.co.za
0860 TERACO

WAPA:

The Wireless Access Providers’ Association (WAPA), established in 2006, is a non-profit industry representative body acting as a collective voice for outdoor fixed wireless operators in South Africa. WAPA’s primary objective is to ensure the sustainability of the wireless access services market. WAPA is positioned to be an interface between government, it’s membership and consumers and promotes self-regulation of the industry.

More info:
www.wapa.org.za

Some new toys arrived. Pics are here.

Extreme Networks BD8k core switch and two Summit series access switches. This is most probably the same models we’ll use for the Teraco switch fabric.

Also added some pics of setting up the Blio PBX demo kit.

I realised I’ve been blogging for more than a year now.. about 14 months.

I watched Into the Wild at the Labia tonight. Pretty good, a bit boring at times but a nice way to end a busy week. Definitely not a Hollywood ending. “Happiness is only real when shared”. Makes sense.

Monday I had a VC meeting. It’s a nice feeling to convince people that your idea will fly when they start out being very sceptical. I’ve been working on the Teraco Spec Sheet and Price List document since Monday.. it’s almost ready. Can’t show it to you just yet, maybe next week. The Teraco business plan is turning into an impressive document.

Tuesday I attended a full day WAPA strategy workshop in Noordhoek. Monkey Valley is a really nice setting to get away and single-task for a day. I think it was very productive.

Wednesday was mostly a Teraco day which ended a long negotiation phase.. and turned out being positive. Had a Frogfoot staff dinner at the Brass Bell. Always nice to visit Kalk Bay.

Thursday I visited Parliament, wearing my WAPA co-chairman hat. Had a meeting with Dene Smuts (MP), the DA spokesperson on communications. I’m happy to report there is a person in parliament with a clue. I was very impressed by her understanding of our industry. We mostly talked about the challenges our members are facing in the license conversion process.

Friday was a full day Frogfoot dev team design session. These sessions can be real mind benders, chewing on lots of complexity and distilling it into a plan. Always fun.

The Frogfoot Portal is the heart of our business.. it’s an automation and configuration management system, a network policy database, it manages IP allocation, (ADSL, Wifi, Dial) Radius, Timesheets, DNS.. etc, etc. You get the idea, we’ve been working on it for about 4 years now.

Frogfoot has written it’s own accounting system from scratch over the last ~14 months and we had to plan making it live before the new financial year. We built a debit order automation module last week. Some of the next steps are to better define a “product layer” to manage our LDAP tree, add an order queue, more product focused user interfaces, a product builder tool and integrate all this with our new general ledger.

Sounds like fun?.. makes you mildly sad you forgot all that accounting knowledge from school days.

Amobia is doing well.. we’re about to light up the first Joburg ring.

We added the new PBX to the Blio website.

This made my week.

Ok (fellow) crazy kids, must sleep now.

The brain-dump posting..

I watched The Darjeeling Limited tonight.. Wes Anderson’s latest movie. It was kinda entertaining, visually pretty good… but not nearly as good as Life Aquatic or Royal Tenenbaums. The short movie before the main movie was interesting (Hotel Chevalier).

Attended my first SPIN meeting last night. I guess you would call the people that go to this kind of thing “software process geeks”. A number of the topics were good food for thought.

Suicide Gorge was great fun. It’s a real gem. I was pretty tired after the walk, fell asleep before dinner. In some ways nice to be that tired. Man, was I stiff the next day.

The Blio PBX sales process seems to be gaining momentum.

Teraco is still looking for ~90 bars.

Looks like Frogfoot will partner with Extreme Networks. We’ll do sales and consulting and probably standardise on using Extreme switches internally. Why Extreme? Well, it’s carrier grade kit and they are focused on building switches. They have a very nice OS (with Linux ancestory) and they offer a good layer 2 redundancy protocal (EAPS), way better than STP. I think Linux people have an affinity to Extreme’s design and thinking: focused, efficient, stable. Can you guess the two opposites of my analogy?

WAPA released some very impressive wireless industry growth figures from the annual member census.

Frogfoot and Amobia are on the list of Individual ECS licensees asked to meet with ICASA in Feb.

We’ve started a project to integrate the Frogfoot Wifi billing engine with the Amobia outdoor wireless CPE devices.

I attended a WAPA Spectrum Analyser Workshop last week. It was fun to explore some of the deeper physics behind practical wireless lingo and day-to-day working knowledge. I learned lots of useful things about radio’s, antennas and EIRP (power) measurement. I think the vision and goal of self regulation (in ISM) will be a reality sooner than we think.

Ok, must sleep. Think I’ll walk around Lion’s Head early tomorrow morning.

I just got back from my walk around Lions Head. A few quick updates from the life of Joe:

• Sign up for the GeekDinner, Wed 28 Nov, 65 of the 80 seats are taken so far.
• I’m going to the bubbly fest in Franschoek with friends. Join us.
• The voice of reason: “The best intranet is Mediawiki”
• I updated my blog’s About page and added a link to my all new and groovy executive resume. Had to update it for the Amobia business plan.
• Amobia now has a PR budget and we’re having a 4 hour messaging workshop with our PR agency on Wednesday morning. Sounds like fun. Amobia also hired a new sysadmin two weeks ago.
• Actually old news, but the Frogfoot Xen product traffic cost has been reduced to 8c/MB incl VAT
• We’re getting ready to release version 1.2 of the Frogfoot Hotspot product. It’s getting very slick and well automated, with nice reporting. Growth stats look really good. Looking at stats for the last 7/8 months (since the beta started): revenue grew 12 times in last 6 months, number of accounts grew about 6 times, number of hotspots grew 3 times. This is obviously a small timeline, but still nice to see the momentum building.
• I’m on my way to a Teraco meeting now. We’re getting frequent and large scale enquiries about the datacentre project, locally and internationally.

This is one of those bullet point update posts. Seems I’m only really getting time to blog on Sundays at the moment.

• Amobia and Frogfoot Joburg Office

  We have office space and data-center space in Joburg now and we are busy setting up our network. We’ll start with two /23 networks and the usual recipe of border and aggregation routers, netflow probe, switches and Xen servers. All that remains after that is to setup some VoIP phones and we have a “shake and bake” office ready for the first three or four people.

• Teraco

  The Teraco data-center project is moving forward. Most of the infrastructure planning and shopping is done. This week involved mostly some spreadsheet jockey work on the financials and finalising the switch fabric design and purchasing. We have some cool 3D rendered views of the floor plan.

  Parts of the design have a bit of theatrical flair (:
  Picture the view walking into the reception area, looking past the plasma screens with all the environmental stats, past the stylish seating, through fire-proof glass (that’s only made in Belgium at about R8k/sqm or something like that) down the main corridor with a uniform view of row upon row of black server cabinets all the way to the back wall. The room is dark and the only light comes from the aircon floor grills. You get the space ship landing-strip picture, right? Now all we need is that movement sensor suspense effect from Aliens. (;

• Teraco Switch Fabric

  I’ve been spending a fair amount of time looking into Ethernet switch fabric options for the Teraco data-center in the last three/four months. It’s been painful. Most vendors still want to sell you 10yr old technology, ugly spanning tree solutions, mixed layer2/3 complexity for redundancy with very few giving any thought to solid redundant and rapid failure convergance layer2 (only) switching (which you would think is obvious). I consider myself a semi-expert all all the Metro Ethernet lingo and features at the moment.

  I looked at HP, Huawei, Cisco, Extreme, Juniper, Foundry and some lesser brands.

  We have not finalised the switch fabric purchase, so I’ll not say too much, but Extreme has some pretty cool kit. I’ll restrain myself from commenting on the state of the other brand’s offerings.

• Adobe CS3 Launch

  I attended the launch of Adobe’s new Creative Suite software a week or three back. It was supposed to be some Rock concert theme. They had to go stuff it up with hip hop acts. Why can’t they put a warning on the invite saying: “extremely lame music involved”.

  I did not stay long… but I can say two things..
  1. I’m a bit worried about the monopoly created in the design software world (A+Macromedia)
  2. You get the idea the Apple + DTP/design market is not that big judging from the reseller stands.

• GeekDinner

  The last GeekDinner at the Wild Fig was a great success. We’re busy planning the next one. The date is set and the venue should be announced soon. Go add your name to the list.

• Amobia Wireless School Connectivity Project

  The wireless schools project is moving forward. 75 schools have equipment installed. We are in the process of commissioning all the VPN links, adding email services for all the Tuxlabs and adding content on the WAN (like Wikipedia). The last step will be to add Internet access.

• Looking for Beta testers for our Amobia hotspot product

  Amobia currently has a number of Wifi Hotspots at our Potchefstroom franchise. We recently improved the system with quick signup tools, much nicer looking web interface, credit card and debit order payment options.

  I think we have an interesting business model. It supports franchising, non-variable cost to the end user.. which I think is cool, I don’t want to be guessing which hotspots are ripping me off. It uses a profit sharing model with incentives on traffic usage and sales transactions.

  We have a roaming agreement with Uninet who has about 800 hotspots in Cape Town.

  If you are in Cape Town or Stellenbosch and interested in the hotspot game, contact Amobia.

  I think the Wifi hotspot business is going to be fun in the next few years. Lots of room to innovate with interesting challenges and problems to solve.

• New Blio FXS/FXO modules

  Blio has completed the design and manufacturing of it’s FXO and FXS PBX modules.
  Yes, they are compatible with the Digium cards, made locally and much (much) cheaper. They will be on the Blio online shop very soon.

  

  The modules are designed for our Blio 1U IP PBX project, which is moving forward nicely. We are currently waiting for the final version of the (primary) “motherboard” PCX to be manufactured. We’ve already sold two PBXs (-:

• My first Ubuntu install

  You would think that I would have installed Ubuntu before now, but I’ve been a Debian man for the last 10 years. Two weeks ago I was pondering my options for a home PC (not for me).. Apple or Linux. Apple may have resulted in less “Joe the tech support guy” work.. but let’s face it, Apple just don’t have the moral high ground.. so Ubuntu won.

  I paid about 1/4 of the price of an entry level Mac and got more memory and disk space.

  After a minor initial setback with some dodgy Kingston memory I installed Ubuntu 7.04 in about 1 hour (while doing other things) and everything “just worked”.

  Over the weekend I played around with Ubuntu. I’ve never been a Gnome fanboy, but it’s not bad. You can pretty much configure anything with a right-click.

  Oh, and I can report the user(s) are also happy. I’m impressed.

  I think the time has come for the Wintento users to stop bitching and jump ship. If you look back in ten years and you can say “I switched to Ubuntu/Linux in 2007″ you may just save a bit of face. Like looking back on very bad fashion choices.. Windows people will have to deal with their children thinking they were complete retards for running Windows after 2007

  If that statement annoys you no end then I can only grin.

• My opinion on (not so) recent hype events

  Bullard has half a clue, at least he knows what a blog is. The rest is noise.

  De-Lille is not as far off as you think. I don’t agree with her ideas for fixing the problem, but “digital crack” is a concern. MXit, crackbook, 2nd life, world of warcraft. They all suck up lots of (possibly) productive time.. I guess it’s no worse than a generation of TV addicts, but I don’t think we should ignore the risks. I spent a good part of my life playing Civilization, looking back, I was pretty addicted. I’m not going to comment on her ideas for censoring blogs, ok, I will, she must be smoking socks with high polyester content.

  The aggregator wars… who cares?. Muti is pretty cool, I don’t really see the point in the others.

• Contemporary music sucks

  Maybe I’m getting old, but my head hurts from the music on kfm and 5fm. Why do they have to play this hip hop crap?. I just picture The Rat dancing to anthems of mindlessness.

  Thank goodness for the sane people at Radio 2000 who still have a clue.

  I’ve realised I can’t listen to the music in the Stellenbosch bars/clubs anymore, I think it’s part of the reason I stopped drinking. It’s just too painful.

• Google encyclopedia salesmen

  Now that we have Wikipedia, you don’t get door to door encyclopedia salemen anymore right? Kinda, but now we have the Google recruitment army contacting you two or three times a year to offer you jobs. They must have contacted the whole of CLUG by now, but I don’t see anybody flocking to Google. I have my reasons, but I wonder why none of the people I know are interested. I guess in some ways they have attained (do no) evil empire status.

• Metro Ethernet and Neotel

  We had a meeting with one of the technical people at Neotel last week. They seem to be doing good things. The Metro Ethernet market seems like an exciting ride over the next few years, SNO, municipality projects, more and more interest in digging up roads and putting down fibre. Interesting times for the Internet industry in Cape Town.

• Trip to, Sweden, England, France, Spain and maybe Prague and California

  Textbook midlife crises stuff.. go run with the bulls in Pamplona.. we’ll see, it’s not my idea, but it could be fun.. I’ll need to get a bit more running fit. I’m trying to plan a trip around my 30th birthday (in July). The catch is combining it with some business trips and nailing down some of the many variables for booking dates. Nothing confirmed yet.

• Endeavor

  I have a meeting with two people from Endeavor tomorrow morning. They seem to find and support “high impact entrepreneurs” in developing markets. No idea how they tracked me down, but it seems like a bit of an interview of sorts.

Must go to sleep now.