Discussion about Entrepreneur Commons on Social Edge (Skoll Foundation) is now live - please comment

The discussion regarding the Entrepreneur Commons as a new way to fund social entrepreneurs is now live on Social Edge (a program of the Skoll Foundation).


Feel free to go there and add your comments to the discussion.
And feel free to forward to anybody who could be interested :-)

How much of a Buddhist do you have to be to use Twitter?

From what I see, there are 2 ways to look at Twitter:
- an instant messenger for exhibitionists
- a tool to add another layer of randomness into your life

Now who would want to use this? Are you an exhibitionist? some people are... Or are you so bored, stuck and so lazy to work on it that randomness seems to be a nice way out?
Or could there be something else?

One interesting point to me clearly is the issue of randomness. And since I am a fan of management by statistics (and you should too if you have read "Out of the crisis" from Deming ), I am wondering whether it can be the base for a new system.

If you have read "The Secret", you will know that the world is like a big open catalog, and all you have to do is ask and you will get what you want out of it. Start putting yourself in the mood for getting it and it will come. Or if you are a Buddhist, you will know that the reality of life is that it is so complex that the world around you that you believe you are influencing is really out of your control, and therefore the best you can do is work on freeing yourself from the stress of it to be in the "Now" as good and as serene as can be, and good thing will come out of it, if not in this life certainly in the next one or the one after (I apologize for this shortcut description, but this is good enough for the point I am coming up to - if you want to know more, I recommend reading "The Monk and the Philosopher", a great read on the matter)

So now and given that we have no control (and twitter, and the web in general with its information overflow is what we are getting), but that even with things beyond our control we can get what we want, would it be possible that twitter is actually a great tool? Should we embrace chaos? As I am on Twitter (http://twitter.com/mdangear), and knowing I cannot read it all, should I spend the time even looking? What's in for me?

One interesting option is that chaos is the system in itself, and therefore when using Twitter I am just formalizing what happens in the real world anyway, similar to LinkedIn formalizing relationships that were established through networking before, and making an existing mechanism more fluid and more efficient.
If this is the case, all I have to do is follow as many people as possible, and hope that many will follow me. And then I will keep throwing tweet-bottles in the ocean, trusting that the ocean will throw back answers when I need it. Statistically the system could work given enough users... or not ?
How does it work for you?

It's 1995 again

It feels right just like if we were in 1995 at the edge of a new feast: I see web2.0 technologies being adopted by more and more companies, and people are starting to understand that it can bring hyperproductivity to the business. Platform architecture is getting organized, the discussions at Google I/O are a clear indication that there is hope in this area.
If anything the current slowdown creates opportunities: if web2.0 in the enterprise helps productivity, there is a real incentive for companies to seriously look into it.
We may have to wait until after the elections to see the real momentum, but time is ripe for startups now. It should be fun in the coming months...

The reality of fundraising

If you are considering trying to raise funds from investors (angels or professional investors), you should consider the following:

There are 2 types of investors really:

- the ones who know you (friends and family), and

- the ones who do not know you (angels, VCs, etc...)

Getting money from people you know will be the result of the history they have with you. They will be able to trust you as an entrepreneur and trust that if they like the plan you have you will be able to execute on it. I call it "opportunistic fundraising" and this is always worth considering this kind of investment money.

Talking to the other group is doing active selling, except that you are selling to investors instead of selling to customers. There are many issues related to selling to investors: - Investors have no pressing need to buy. They have a limited amount of money to spend, and you are just one among many presenting to them, so while you could be the hot project, the next guy could be that too. And time is on their side, because the more they wait, the more you will need the money and the better the deal potentially. This means your sales cycle is going to be very long, and while you are spending time trying to sell to investors, you are not selling to customers and therefore you are not helping the business itself.

- Investors are not customers, so the story you are building to please them may not be the right story for the market. I see many entrepreneurs try to fit their strategy within the perceived expectation of investors, with buzz words, the hockey stick, the minimum 50M revenue within a few years, and inflated funding requirement to be able to get into the VC framework. So selling to investors sometimes contributes to corrupting the initial plan, which is a good way to get into failure.

- Ultimately, having sold to investors may feel good as it can be perceived as a validation, except that this is not a validation from the market, and therefore does not guarantee success at all. All it does is make it more comfortable for everybody while waiting for more customers. But if the plan you have sold to investors does not work, you will be help responsible for the failure, which mean adjusting the plan later on will be costly to you as the entrepreneur, if not deadly. More difficult than adjusting your plan when you are in charge...

So I believe the best way to raise money is to go to friends and family, and then figure out how you can start generating cash from the little you were able to get there. The good news is that if you look at the top 500 companies of Inc magazine (companies doing between 7x growth for 3 years and 30x growth for 3 years), the average starting capital is 75k, and only 8% ever raised more than 1M. So even with a little you still have a chance to fit within that group of hot companies. This clearly beats have one chance in a 100 to be picked by a VC, only to be told then that you have one chance in 10 to really make it big.

Interesting presentation on Social Web need for normalization

Via my friend's blog: Miguel Membrado at Kimind

Entrepreneur Commons: short video presentation

Vator TV has opened a "Newsroom" where anybody can upload video to discuss about "Trends & News", "Lessons Learned", or present Interviews.
I am exploring this new channel as a way to share some of the experience I have accumulated on entrepreneurship.
Here is a first post explaining what the issue I see with equity at the seed financing stage, and how the Entrepreneur Commons fund can change the current dynamics.

Entrepreneur Commons discussion on OnTheCommons.org

http://onthecommons.org/content.php?id=2082

Testing IntenseDebate

I ran into IntenseDebate.com, which allows me to track comments, including comments I make on other blogs on which IntenseDebate is installed. Pretty cool service...

Entrepreneur Commons discussion on Social Edge

The Entrepreneur Commons will be the subject of a discussion on Social Edge (http://www.socialedge.org/ - a program of the Skoll Foundation) during the week of 7/29. The discussion was announced this week in the Social Edge newsletter as a coming discussion under the title "New Model for Angel Investment". Looking forward to an interesting debate...

How to change the world

Ever wondered what you could do to change the world?
Just decide, say it publicly, and things will start to happen.

This is the theory behind a lot of the recent (and not so recent) ideas that float around, things you can find in the self help book like "A New Earth" from Eckart Tolle, or "The Secret" from Rhonda Byrne, and concepts behind boudhism. The idea is that you have to ask, and start living according to this goal that you are trying to reach, and things will naturally start happening. A lot of this makes sense when you start thinking about it: you are what you do and things happen because of who you are. And it all starts with the story you tell to yourself and to others.

And now there is a chance to experiment with the concept as a way to improve the world we live in:
It is happening at http://www.neo.org : you can change the world by committing to some action in whatever area you choose to focus on. Then you can invite your friends, to let them know about your goal, so that they can be aware of it, and eventually help you achieve it. And then, because all this is happening in public, you will also naturally feel committed to making progress, and this public declaration you have made will help you keep focus during the good days and the bad days along the journey.

This type of website, trying to channel the individual energy into larger bigger world changing projects, is not new. I have seen several instance of similar concept.
But so far nothing that was so simple yet potentially so powerful: it is not voting for an idea somebody else had, or signing a petition, or subscribing to a newsletter, or sponsoring through donation, or pledging time as a volunteer like the many things I have seen before. It is a personal commitment to action. No need to state anything specific if you do not have a plan, but you need to define a mission for yourself, and then see how it feels.

There is an interesting parallel with the dynamics that can be observed in the Open Source movement, where developers commit to work on resolving an issue, and then their work becomes public as part of the open source process. The incentive in that case is to make the best possible work, because it is a showcase for what you can do, and nobody likes to look like a fool in public.

Will it be like Open Source, where a large crowd of remotely connected people with no formal organization (at least not in the sense of an institution that owns the work in itself) can accomplish something very complex and requiring a lot of resources of all kind?

Could this be a recipe for "Open Government"?

Will leaders emerge from this process?

I find the idea interesting, and since I am by nature a naive optimist, I want to believe that it will actually help make a difference.
Give it a try and let me know how it works for you :-)

"Strategy and the Internet" revisited - PPT

"Strategy and the Internet" revisited - Powerpoint Presentation

I have reworked my previous post into a PPT...

View the full size version from the SlideShare website

| View | Upload your own

$20B crumbs

You think $20B is a lot of money. Think again.

$20B is the amount that VCs invest every year.

But where does the money come from?
The reality is that VC funds get their money from Limited Partners, for whom VC investment is considered "alternative investment". This means that it represents a very small fraction of their own portfolio. Something that they do not spend as much of their attention on.

And where does this lead us?
More and more people (including partners in VC funds) agree that something is broken with the VC model. But nobody is doing anything about it:
- The Limited Partners are happy with the people they work with, they have invested their money but even more important they have invested their trust in them. So if anything can be done, they trust that these partners will work on the issue to fix.
- And then the VCs do their best, they apply their expertise, they keep feeding the system with startups that they think will make a difference, and their view of fixing anything is to do more of same except better. Maybe they will widen the scope of their investment, or maybe get into other types of investments so that they can follow the startups throughout their lifecycle. But the one thing they will not do is question too far the system that feeds them, specially when it works good enough that they can make a good living out of it (who would do any different really?).

So in the end, the VC model, however broken people will agree it is, is here to stay for some time, and until somebody decides to deal with the crumbs.

What is interesting is that $20B is also the amount that Angels invest every year of smaller size deal. And again, where does the money come from?
Angel money is the "mad money", the spare change angels invest in startups so that they stay involve with innovation and entrepreneurship (the passion, the energy) while not having to do the hard work. A very precious help for entrepreneurs, but is it money well spent the way it is done today? I have discussed this in a previous post, and entrepreneurs are not getting as much help as they could hope from there either.

This is the challenge for the Entrepreneur Commons (tm), trying to find the Limited Partner or the Foundation that will decide to deal with these $20B crumbs...
If you are or know one of these, please contact me.

Of Executive Search 2.0, and Community Building in general

Hackers know this and you may too: the web is a great resource for Social Engineering.

One of the places where you can gather a lot of information on people, beyond the obvious social networks, are blogs.

And one of the great uses of this content is for Executive Search: digging through blogs, you can get a very good feel for what a person does, thinks. And since the blog typically include a link to a profile, you can also easily access the blogger to engage a conversation and see if they could be interested in switching to a new job.

The beauty with this model is that it gives you access to all these people who have the right skills for the position you are trying to fulfill but have not posted their resumes anywhere because they are not actively looking for a job. From my experience they also are the best candidates, the one who do great where they are but would consider a change.

The experts are blogging, it is time for the recruiters to read these blogs.

And if you are into building a community in any vertical the same applies: I am amazed to see the amount of content available on any given topic, and the number of people interested in this topic you can get to through their blog. The web is the social network, LinkedIn and Facebook (and the many others) are lenses through which you can visualize communities of professionals or friends or experts, and then you can create your own custom lens with a blog reader.

More info on VC funds - and it gets worse...

I have shared my own observations of the VC investment world and the Angel investment world in previous posts on this blog, leading to the Entrepreneur Commons project.
And I have now also found (thanks to my Melcion partners) a very interesting study that shows that in addition to not being a good answer for entrepreneurs, VC investment is also not a good solution for investors (the Limited Partners - LPs - in VC funds). A must-read for anybody interested in VC investment:

The Performance of Private Equity Funds, by Ludovic Phalippou and Oliver Gottschalg - April 2007.

The first striking information from this study of 1328 VCs worldwide is on the returns that can be expected from VC investment:

• S&P500 +3% before fees
  
• S&P500 -3% after the management fees (typically 1% or 2% plus carried interest)

So investors investing in VC funds will make less than market, their investment underperforming the market by 3% on average.

But it gests worse:
The original assumption in the study is that performance of VC funds is related to Size of the fund, Experience of the management team and Past Performance. However a closer study shows that when past performance is included in the equation all the other characteristics lose their significance: Past Performance appears to be the unique explanatory variable for fund performance.
More specifically, it seems that the fund performance after the first 3 to 4 years is the main indicator of the performance that can be expected from this fund at maturity (typically 9 years). Not experience, and not size. If you compare recently raised funds to what more mature funds were doing at the similar early stage, then the conclusion of the study is that new funds have similar expected performance as the mature funds in the study. Again, there is no concept of size and/or experience being a parameter.

What it means is that it does not matter whether the management team has experience from a previous fund, the only parameter that prevails is what they do in the first 3 to 4 years of a given fund, which will be the real indicator of what can be expected in the end.
So while the concept of track record is comforting psychologically, the science does not sustain the idea that it will make a difference.
In the end Limited Partners are playing the lottery when they invest in a new fund, whether it is with a newly formed team or an experienced team.

In summary:

• Each new fund is a new fund, with only what will happen in the first few years to determine what kind of results can be expected
• And in the end what can be expected is less than market by 3% on average

One question remains: why are LPs paying all these fees (the 6% that take their average returns from SP500+3% down to SP500-3%)?
If this is to play the lottery and get a chance to finance the next Google, be my guest. But if this is to finance innovation, maybe there are other options.

If anything, this is one more justification for trying other cheaper ways of financing entrepreneurs: back to the Entrepreneur Commons, it seems that while it originally came out of issues identified with Angel Investment as a way for Angel Investors to try something that may give them a better return on their investment, it is also a good answer for Limited Partners currently investing in VC funds, who could be also interested in the potential of better return on their investment while still staying involved in the financing of innovation.

If you are a LP, I would love to talk to you...

MFIs: where to go next

If you do not have time to read Muhammad Yunus book "Creating a world without poverty", I recommend this article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review:


This is what I got from the article:
- I like to think about these things in terms of ecosystems, where there needs to be a balance between all players. And therefore there should be a cap on the overall returns that an investor can get from micro-finance, and the goal should be to keep these rates at a max that would be close to typical average market returns (S&P for example). This guarantees sustainability from the investor prospective, they are not "losing" money when investing in MFIs, but at the same time higher returns should be not acceptable because then other parts of the ecosystem are getting squeezed. What the investor gets for his money is that he will not loose, and then he is contributing to helping the poor by choosing to invest in the right places instead of going for the usual suspects (oil and guns on the stock market to be extreme).
This is where there is good co-existence between the 2 worlds within the larger global ecosystem, because the markets provide a good benchmark for what is reasonable. Then the decision from the investor prospective becomes a choice between getting high returns from companies whose impact on the world is not considered, or reasonable returns from companies who also do good somehow. An analogy here is what Peer-to-peer lending (prosper.com for example) is doing today, where people decide what level of return they want from one person/project or another. The good news from what I have read is that borrowers tend to get better rates there than from regular loans, because investors value good credit more than a bank would, and they are happy to keep their return "reasonable" if it can help these "good" borrowers.

- Once this is established, I see MFIs being a platform as 2 things (what the article promotes):
-- a blueprint, with processes and governance that can be applied to other under-served areas. This is what I think the examples in the article talking about Grameen Healthcare and Grameen Renewable Energy are about. This is horizontal growth, getting into other "markets" where similar recipes can be applied.
-- and then each individual MFIs is its own platform in the sense that it is a social network of people who work together and share a chart of ethics (the glue between these people) that guarantees the success of their effort. This social network as a platform can be expanded from the original mission to fulfill other needs of the people within the group. Call it vertical growth, expanding from providing loans to providing insurance for example. This is where the reinvestment of profits above the reasonable rate of return come into play.

Clearly a good way to grow from where we are with Microfinance to a better world overall. And very much in sync with the Entrepreneur Commons project I have launched recently :-)

"Strategy and the Internet" revisited

In these times when economic trouble seems to be looming (did you hear about budget cuts and rising cost of gas?), and when the hype over the web20 revolution seem to have been another mini-bubble, it is interesting to go back to the basics. And a good place to look is this article "Strategy and the Internet" that Michael Porter wrote in the Harvard Business Review in March 2001. The lesson from the article is that we should not lose the focus on strategic development and competitive advantage. It was true then and it is true now. But in the light of what has happened since then, a few things should be added to the previous analysis.

Here are some exerts from the article:
>>
The great paradox of the Internet is that its very benefits –making information widely available; reducing the difficulty of purchasing, marketing, and distribution; allowing buyers and sellers to find and transact business with one another more easily–also make it more difficult for companies to capture those benefits as profits. (...) The openness of the Internet,with its common standards and protocols and its ease of navigation, makes it difficult for a single company to capture the benefits of a network effect. (...) In general, however, new Internet technologies will continue to erode profitability by shifting power to customers.
(...) As all companies come to embrace Internet technology, moreover, the Internet itself will be neutralized as a source of advantage. (...) Established companies will be most successful when they deploy Internet technology to reconfigure traditional activities or when they find new combinations of Internet and traditional approaches. (...) Only by integrating the Internet into overall strategy will this powerful new technology become an equally powerful force for competitive advantage.
<<

This remains true if you consider the Internet as a technology, which seem to be the "lens" Michael Porter used when writing his article. But I believe that we need to consider also that the Internet has become more than just a technology, it is now also about people, the famous social networks that appear everywhere and are today the next hot thing, the "ConsumActors" as Xavier Comtesse calls them.
When Michael Porter states that "new Internet technologies will continue to erode profitability by shifting power to customers", he was not taking into account (who could at the time?) the value that customers can add, the famous "user generated content" that can actually help boost profitability instead.

The good news is that in the end, we can all agree that the answer is that "only by integrating the Internet into overall strategy will this powerful new technology become an equally powerful force for competitive advantage".
And for this, Xavier Comtesse (see my previous posts about his work here and here) is offering us 2 very powerful tools:

• A matrix to understand a market or how to deploy a product strategy that includes customers in the value chain
• And now a Value Chain 2.0, to add on top of the "Prominent Applications of the Internet in the Value Chain" that Michael Porter show in his article

This latest document (Value Chain 2.0) is a great way to clarify how we should consider the management of the ecosystem, by including both internal and external resources into the equation, and by considering how the data+knowledge should shared as the main strategy driver: the company as the underlying platform supporting one large ecosystem rather than a fortress of employees interacting with customers and suppliers. If you had any doubt that there is no other choice than to do it, now is the time to take a look again. Thank you Xavier for clarifying all this for us...

The Entrepreneur Commons™

After looking at VCs, and after managing the European American Angel Club for 2 years now, I have come to the conclusion that entrepreneurs are not really being served properly when it comes to seed funding. And I would like therefore to propose the concept of an Entrepreneur Commons to help with the issue.

Here is the story:

I have seen are roughly 3 types of angels:

• The super-angel, who has enough money to be a one-man show VC playing with his own money (and maybe money from a few friends). Either he is known by the VC community, and he is treated well by them because he can source good deals for the later-stage rounds, or he has enough money within his ecosystem that he can help entrepreneurs all the way through.
  
• The social type, who has money and like toying with the idea that he could invest and may do so one day. He likes attending meetings and talking about it, but the reality is that he never really invests in anything.
• And then you have everybody else in between these 2 types.

These last group of angels is facing a lot of issues with the model as it is today:

• Angels their put money down and they have no clue when it will come back (if ever). Typical time before a cash event is 7 to 9 years if you believe angels who have done it for a while
• When investing in early stage, they have no real data to figure out a valuation, so any equity deal is based on arbitrary valuations where somebody is getting a bad deal on one side (angel) or the other (entrepreneur)
• If the business requires additional funding, Angels are being squeezed of the deals by VCs, who impose liquidation-preference clause
• And finally because you are just an Angel after all and not a fund, you are limited in your resources and cannot really spread yourself into a number of deals that is statistically relevant.
  

So in the end, they are playing the lottery, and they know it. And because they are playing the lottery, they want the reward to be as big as possible if they win, so they tend to shoot for companies with a potential for return of at least 10x the investment.

From the entrepreneur side, this leaves out of the system a whole lot of very good startups with very promising businesses but not "hot" enough. This is even more critical these days when you see an emergence of "social entrepreneurs" who are interested in making money, but whose focus (and measure of success) is also to help the community one way or another. They are not really non-profit, so most of the time they do not qualify for grants, but they are not the 10x type either. Meanwhile they clearly deserve help.

The way I see out of this situation is the Entrepreneur Commons:
A not-for-profit social network of entrepreneurs providing financing for early stage company through debt guaranteed by a mutual guarantee fund. The financial risk is mitigated by the mutual guarantee fund. The risk on the "management" side is mitigated by the social network: loans are by invitation only, so you will have to be approved by your peers to get in. And the typical scalability issue faced by general partners in a VC fund (which causes the famous "funding gap") is also resolved by the social network: the size of loans and the number of entrepreneurs involved is no longer a problem, and if anything it helps stabilize the results of the group as a whole.

The project is starting to get some traction, and we have been getting a lot of positive feedback - the recent post from my friend Jessica is a good example of the reactions I get.
The goal is now to confirm the blueprint for this model, so that it can be replicated anywhere. We have started looking for funds so that we can make loans soon. Stay tuned...

It's time for geeks to learn about design thinking

One thing about Web20 is that it has clearly brought us to a commoditization of services.
With open source tools and with the decreasing price of computers, it has become very easy and very cheap to build a service in a few weeks. Along with that is the fact that if you have an idea, chances are that someone else somewhere else has had or will have soon the same idea. It is very common to see similar ideas appear within a six months window in various places around the world.
Ideas are all over the place, technology is cheap: online services are just another consumer product.

So how will you make your idea/service stand in front of similar others? My take is it's all in the design of it.
Not design as in cute logo or a weird name that you hope people will remember, but design as in thorough analysis of what users expect and how to best present your service to them. We are talking user interface, thinking about design in anything that will be presented to the consumer, and thinking about how they will use the service to make it as easy as possible for them, including intuitive, pleasant, and efficient. The kind of things Apple did for smartphones with the iPhone, a beautiful demonstration of the power of design to other manufacturers who were focusing on functionality without wondering why very little of it was really usable when they were sticking to the computer metaphor and its ridiculously complex navigation on small screens.

If you are thinking, or in the process, of creating yet another web20 service (and we are just seeing the beginning of the services that web20/30 will bring about), you should consider very seriously investing in design before you do anything. Design thinking will help you confirm who your audience is, how and what you should communicate with them and them with you, making it a complete and coherent experience. And therefore it will help you fine tune the product/service you will create. Or in the worse case it may save you a lot of time and money by allowing you to discover sooner rather than later that your idea was not that great after all. Doing anything else is keeping closer to playing the lottery, and hoping blindly that users will like what you came up with. Some are lucky and win, most don't.

Think design!

Non-profit as another step into participative democracy

I attended last week a very interesting seminar at the Stanford Center for Social Innovation by the Stanford Social Innovation Review and FSG on Evaluation for Foundations: how Foundations should measure the results of what they do so that they can learn from the process.
I had always been thinking of non-profits and foundations as charity organizations picking up issues where the government would not or could not go: environment, social matters, etc...
What I had not realized is how this process can be used in a very proactive way to get things done and act where politicians seem to be unable to do anything. What foundations do, when it is proven to work, can and should be publicized and shared widely so that their impact goes beyond the point fixes to benefit the population at large.

A striking example of this was how Tom Siebel worked on the Meth issue in Montana with his Meth Project Foundation:
- The government approach was a typical law enforcement one, resulting in the filling up of jails (50% of adult population in Montana jails is related to the meth issue) and no real progress on the ground: despite this effort, meth consumption was on the rise and kids were not really aware of the dangers of using it, some even though it had beneficial effect on memory, the whole thing costing the State about $100M every year.
- Tom approach of the problem was a marketing one: Meth is a product, and consumers are consumers, therefore the best thing is to reach them as you would reach consumers, and give them the relevant information that will allow them to make an educated choice when it comes to buying and consuming. The results of the ad campaigns (TV, radio, press) and after $15M between 2005 and 2006 was a decline in Meth use in the work place by 70 percent, meth related crime has decreased 53%.
Beyond fixing the meth issue in Montana, what Tom did is that he made a very interesing point: he picked an issue, devided a plan to resolve it, worked out the kinks and documented the process and results, and he is now licensing the "platform" to other States so that they can resolve the issue themselves in other places.

This is very close to what Muhammad Yunus is pushing in his book "Creating a Worlds Without Poverty" in the concept: real things come from people who live in the real world, and so the best way up is to have non-profit collaborate with for profit while governments just provide the infrastructure within which all this can happen.

While business with Web20 is starting to include consumers into the value chain (wikipedia, delicious, digg, google maps edits, etc...) there is no questions in my mind that the same can happen with government processes, where citizens can have a lot more impact than they used to: it is all a question of the data you can access, and how you can document what is being done.

The answer is in the network

Just ran into something very interesting that is proving one year after it was written to be as predicted where social networking is going:
Rich Gordon is right: with the proliferation of social networks of all kinds what will make the difference for me is not which destination site you can attract me to, but rather which data you are able to send to me wherever I hangout. So forget Facebook (or not if this is where I am most of the time), just find where the right place/network is for me and talk to me there. The future belongs to those who have the right social engineering tools to do this.
And if you want to get into this, eCairn is a good place to start: www.ecairn.com