The one person every tech entrepreneur should know now

He ends our conversation, as I have come to expect, with a list of startups I should talk to. Not just one, not just three, but seven firms. Some of them are startups in which he has a professional stake, while others are just ones he’s watched as an industry observer, but he speaks with equal passion about them all.

If I follow up, I know I can just tell them David Crow referred me.

Though they may have global ambitions, startup communities often have the feel of a small town, where everyone’s worked with everyone else, or gotten money from the same source. There’s a sense of neighborhood. In Canada, and Toronto in particular, the startup community could almost be thought of as Mr. Crow’s Neighborhood. Not only does he seem to know everybody, but he’s worked in almost every facet of the business, from entrepreneur to venture capitalist to consultant and blogger. When you ask him about what he does right now, however, you can almost hear him wincing on the other end of the phone.

“I’m getting really sick of the ‘evangelist’ title,” he says, even though he admits that what he’s evangelizing -- the importance of getting the actual products in front of customers -- is critical. “Product marketing skill sets are so rare, they’re like a mythical unicorn in this country. I’m basically helping startups to build out product teams and figure out how to improve their product processes and build better software.”

Crow carries the evangelist-in-residence title at OMERS Ventures, the VC arm of one of Canada’s largest pension funds, but that’s just one gig. He also serves as a mentor with MaRS’ ICE practice, writes for one of Canada’s longest-running blogs for tech entrepreneurs, Startup North (which he co-founded) and sits on the board of directors or advisors for nearly a dozen other firms.

Though he’s obviously bullish about the prospects of starting a successful tech firm here, Crow sees the product marketing gap as a symptom of the larger challenges that keep our entrepreneurs from becoming the next Google.

“A lot of the incubators provide good education about entrepreneurship, but in a 12 or 16-week process it’s hard to grow a company,” he says. “We don’t have a history of product-led companies. We see a lot of companies where they have an engineering culture. Others have a very sales-focused culture, but neither of those tend to have the product or marketing skills you need.”

That said, Crow has no envy for those who choose to focus their startups in Silicon Valley. “I choose to live here,” he says. “It’s an amazing country, an amazing city. What motivates me a lot of the time is there’s no reason that we shouldn’t produce world-class companies. All I’ve tried to do is take the stuff I’ve seen in Austin, Texas or Silicon Valley and bring them back and try to do them here.”

Joseph Puopolo is one of the entrepreneurs who has benefitted from that knowledge. The founder of PrintChomp, a print services marketplace based in Waterloo, Ont., said he brought Crow onto his board of advisors early on, primarily to offer what he described as an “unvarnished version of reality” about his ideas for the company.

“A lot of founders really need to have a sounding board for their ideas, but I need people who can be honest,” he said. “David was the person who I could talk about marketing, strategy, direction, and I knew he would tell me if we need to tweak this or we needed to tweak that.” Crow has also given guidance as PrintChomp has pursued “the funding side of the equation,” Puopolo said.

Having co-founded his own successful companies (like Influitive, which focuses on digital marketing for B2B firms), and after working for industry giants like Microsoft, Crow has a unique background to provide help in this area. His underlying message is compellingly simple: If you can help another startup, do it. Make a phone call, pass on an idea, offer useful feedback.

“It happens to be that part of the value I create is just being noisy, talking about things,” he says. “Others write code, build companies, contribute more to the overall health of the ecosystem.”

I’m not so sure, which is why I think it’s time the Canadian startup scene make a little bit more noise about David Crow.