StartupNorth

Month: August 2011

  • Lean Startup Tools

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    Back in May, Nat Friedman wrote about the tools used in setting up Xamarin. They include a great set of basic tools for getting a startup off the ground with very little investment. We have seen a lot of startups using a similar set of tools and I thought that we’d compile a list of the tools that we’re actively using (and some of the others we evaluated). There are the tools and blogs listed by Steve Blank that include many

    Landing Pages

    We’re big fans of WordPress at StartupNorth. We’ve powered StartupNorth on WP since the beginning. The combination of WordPress, Premise, and the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin is a pretty powerful combination for creating mutliple sites and landing pages to test your landing pages. But we’ve also developed a sweet spot for Vancouver’s Unbounce, it took us less than 5 minutes to have 2 landing pages and a domain set up. We’re big believers that you can use Adwords and Facebook Ads to quickly create a landing page to test ideas before writing a single line of code.

    Analytics

    We primarily use Google Analytics and WordPress Stats for StartupNorth. We’ve been working with startups and using a KISSmetrics and Mixpanel to measure activity on their web properties and applications. Make sure you read Ash Maurya’s 3 Rules to Actionable Metrics to understand how the analytics can be used in combination with split testing and/or cohort analysis to better track your optimization before product/market fit (What do you measure before product/market fit? – check out Ash’s conversion funnel and metrics).

    Mailing Lists

    We haven’t been as proactive in building a mailing list for the StartupNorth community as we probably should have been. I’ve used have started using MailChimp because of the quick integration to GravityForms and WooFoo, but have had very positive experiences using both Campaign Monitor and Constant Contact.

    Billing and Accounting

    What is amazing is that both of these companies are local to Toronto. We use WaveAccounting integrated with our bank account and PayPal for tracking expenses, billing, and financial operations. And we use Freshbooks to bill for sponsorships. They are a must have in our back office. What we’re missing is a really easy to use and integrated payroll system (I hear that it might be coming).

    Human Resources

    For full disclosure, I’m an advisor to TribeHR. It doesn’t change the fact that they rock. It is the easiest way to get an HR system in place. And there is no better way to get feedback and help employees improve than Rypple.

    Surveys and Feedback

    We are actively using Survey.IO to gather feedback from users about the state of StartupNorth. It helps us figure out the state of our product market-fit, if there is such a thing for a blog about Canadian startups, fill it out and help us be better.

    Project Tracking

    We use Pivotal Tracker. We like them so much, we actively recruited them as a sponsor for StartupNorth. There are lots of other tools from project tools to issue tracking. Curious at what others are using.

    Source Control

    We use Github Bronze for our project hosting. Most of the code we work on is PHP against MySQL (see WordPress), though we have additional apps in development like the StartupNorth Index (which will be moving to startupnorth.ca/index shortly) but all are LAMP.

    Hosting

    Full disclosure: VMFarms is a sponsor of StartupNorth. However, their hosted VMs that are backed up and hot mirrored coupled with the outrageous “white glove” makes them a dead simple choice. We also use Rackspace Startups and EC2 for access to easy Linux and Windows VMs for development and testing environments.

    Customer Relationship Management

    We don’t have any strong recommendations. There are platforms like Salesforce that are fantastic and sales teams are used to. There is Highrise which is broadly supported with a lot of 3rd party tools. But so far, neither of these has been the clear winner for us. There is a great Quora question about “What is the best CRM for startups” that lists SFDC, SugarCRM and Highrise. There are a lot of choices for CRM including Nimble, Insightly, Woosabi, Capsule, Solve360,AppPlane, Batchbook, PipelineDeals, TactileCRM, ZohoCRM and many others.

    Conferencing, Screen Sharing & Telecommunications

    I’ve been using Calliflower for conference calling. It’s $5/call for up-to 5 callers, or for $30/month unlimited minutes and >70 participants, it’s a great solution. It is not a replacement for a office phone system.

    Google Voice and Skype have been the least expensive way as a Canadian startup to get a US phone number. This is great for me as an individual. However, this does not scale to an enterprise or an organization. I’ve been looking at Grasshopper, RingCentral and Toktumi, but I have yet to settle on a solution.

    SEO & SEM Tools

    This part of the list is pretty much cribbed from Steve Blank’s list of tools for entrepreneurs. Go read it for a more comprehensive list of tools beyond the SEO/SEM listing included below.

    What are we missing?

    I’m going to cover in the next post: discounted travel, conferences, business cards, design services, and other tricks for being relentless resourceful as a founder.

    There are a lot of online tools that startups are using to make or break their business. And there is a lot missing, monitoring like NewRelic, PagerDuty, Pingdom and Blame Stella for example. But I’m curious what are the indispensable tools being used at iStopOver.com, HighScoreHouse, CommunityLend, Idee/Tineye, Massive Damage, Empire Avenue, Indochino, Lymbix, Hootsuite, AdParlor, Locationary, Chango and others. What are you using? What gives you the edge in quickly and effectively gathering feedback to test your hypotheses?

  • The Mentor Manifesto by David Cohen

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    I am continually amazed at the horror stories I hear from entrepreneurs about finding mentors. About mentors taking large pieces of the company and not providing any value in return. It was great to see David Cohen’s The Mentor Manifesto this morning. It is great to see David take the time from his 11 cohorts at TechStars and try to explain “What does it mean to be a great mentor?”. This is an extension of his tips for entrepreneurs that includes how to Find and Engage Great Mentors as part of his top twelve startup tips.

    The Mentor Manifesto

    • Be socratic.
    • Expect nothing in return (you’ll be delighted with what you do get back).
    • Be authentic / practice what you preach.
    • Be direct. Tell the truth, however hard.
    • Listen too.
    • The best mentor relationships eventually become two-way.
    • Be responsive.
    • Adopt at least one company every single year. Experience counts.
    • Clearly separate opinion from fact.
    • Hold information in confidence.
    • Clearly commit to mentor or do not. Either is fine.
    • Know what you don’t know. Say I don’t know when you don’t know. “I don’t know” is preferable to bravado.
    • Guide, don’t control. Teams must make their own decisions. Guide but never tell them what to do. Understand that it’s their company, not yours.
    • Accept and communicate with other mentors that get involved.
    • Be optimistic.
    • Provide specific actionable advice, don’t be vague.
    • Be challenging/robust but never destructive.
    • Have empathy. Remember that startups are hard.

    I hope that I can live up to the manifesto for the companies I mentor at UW VeloCity, FounderFuel and those I’ve been working with in Toronto and Waterloo.

  • Trying to understand incubator math

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Jesse Rodgers who is currently the Director of Student Innovation at the University of Waterloo responsible for the VeloCity Residence & he is also the cofounder of TribeHR. Jesse specializes in product design, web application development and emerging web technologies in higher education. He has been a key member of the Waterloo startup community hosting StartupCampWaterloo and other events to bring together and engage local entrepreneurs. Follow him on Twitter @jrodgers or WhoYouCallingAJesse.com.

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    Incubators are not a new addition to the financing and support for startups and entrepreneurs. On the surface, incubators and accelerators seem like a low cost way for VCs and government support organizations to cluster entrepreneurs and determine the top-notch talent out the accepted cohort. The opportunity to investing in real estate and services that enable companies where the winners are chosen by the merits of the businesses being built. It feels like a straight-forward, relatively safe bet to ensure a crop of companies that are set to require additional growth capital where part of the products and personalities have been derisked through process.

    However, its not as simple as putting small amounts of investment into a high potential company. An incubator is a business and it’s sole purpose should be to make money.

    What are the basics of an incubator?

    The basic variables in setting up an incubator business are:

    • Cost of the expertise, facilities, services and other overhead
    • Amount of $ to be invested/deployed
    • Number of startups
    • Equity being given in exchange for cash
    • Return on the total investment

    There are cost of operations: real estate, connectivity, marketing, programs and services for the entrepreneurs, and the salaries of the individuals to find the startups, provide the services and build successes. These costs are often covered by governments, in exchange for the impact in job creation and taxation base. We’ve seen a rise in incubators that are funded on an investment thesis, where an individual or a set of “limited partners” provide the initial investment in exchange for an investment in the companies being incubated.

    How much do incubators cost?

    The goal is to efficiently deploy capital to produce successful investments. I’m going to explore how incubators make money by making a few assumptions based on the incubator/accelerator models we’ve seen in Toronto, Montreal, Palo Alto and New York.

    Basic assumptions:

    • Capital Investments: 10 startups x 20k = 200k invested with an assumed ‘post-money valuation’ of $2.2MM
      • This means you now own 9.1% in 10 startups each with a post-money valuation of $220k
    • Support Costs: 10 startups x $10k = $100k
      • This is the cost of real estate, furniture, telecommunications, internet connectivity, etc.

    Alright, we’re planning to deploy $200k and it need to provide approximately $100k in services just to provide the basics for the startups. We’ve spent $300k for the first cohort and and that is before you pay any salaries, host an event, etc.

    Additional costs:

    • People:
      • $100k per year salary for one person to rule them all. Call them executive director or dean or something.
      • Assuming you’re not doing this to deploy your own capital, the person or people in charge probably need to collect a salary to pay their mortgages, food, etc.
    • Events – Following the model set forth by YCombinator or TechStars we have 2 main types of events. Mentoring events where the cohort is exposed to the mentors and other industry luminaries to help them make connections and learn from the experience of others. The other event is a Demo Day, designed to bring outside investors and press together to drive investment and attention in the current cohort, plus attract the next cohort of startups.
      • Mentoring event: $1k for food costs with 25 founders
      • Demo Day: approximately $5k
      • Assumption: 10 mentoring events plus a demo day per cohort adds $40k.

    The estimated costs are approximately $340,000/cohort. Assuming 2 cohorts/year plus the staffing salary costs, an incubator is looking at $780,000 that includes 40 investments and a total of $4.4MM post-money valuation. If we assume that I’m a little off on the total capital outlay, and we build in a 30% margin of error this brings the annual budget to appromimately $1MM/year to operate.

    How do incubators make money?

    Incubators make money when the startups they take an equity stake in get big and successful. The best exits for an incubator come when one of their startups is acquired. Why acquired? Because the path to getting acquired path is shorter than the path to going public which would also allow the incubator to divest of their investment.

    Let’s do the math. If your running an incubator hoping to get respectable returns on the $1,000,000 you’ve laid out above, let’s say it’s not the mythical 10 bagger but a more conservative 3x, the incubator needs one of the companies to exit at near $30,000,000. It can be one at $30MM or any combination smaller than that totalling $30MM. This needs to happen before any dilution and follow-on funding for your cadre of companies. You have to assuming that they can make it to acquisition on the $10,000 and services you’ve provided. For more on incubator math, check out there’s an incubator bubble and it will pop.

    The bad news is that it isn’t as simple as that. Startups are not just something that exist in a vacum. There are a lot of unknown variables that can make or break an incubator.

    • percentage of startups that fail (or turn into zombies) in the first two years after investment
    • time frame return is expected
    • how many startups currently produce that kind of return annually
    • total number of startups that receive investment in any given year
    • total number of acquisitions in any given year
    • avg. number of years a startup takes to get to acquisition (because they aren’t going public)
    • avg. price a startup sells for (I bet those talent acquisitions drag the average way down)
    • what do VC’s currently spend on their deal pipeline?

    It is the unknowns that are where the gamble exists. You can tweak the numbers all you would like but assume startups have a no better fail rate then any small business. The common thinking on that is 25% of businesses fail in the first year, 70% in the  first five years? If just more than half of those companies are alive in one year you are doing well. If one out of those 20 is acquired in 5 years and you get 3x return do you succeed? Do you have to run the incubator for the 5 years at $1MM/year to be able to play the odds?

    Maybe this is why so many incubators focus on office space, it’s easy to show LPs what they are getting for their $5MM for 5 year investment, plus an impressive number of “new” startups that have been touched by the program (often without an exit, you know the way incubators make money).

    What am I missing?

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Jesse Rodgers who is currently the Director of Student Innovation at the University of Waterloo responsible for the VeloCity Residence & he is also the cofounder of TribeHR. Jesse specializes in product design, web application development and emerging web technologies in higher education. He has been a key member of the Waterloo startup community hosting StartupCampWaterloo and other events to bring together and engage local entrepreneurs. Follow him on Twitter @jrodgers or WhoYouCallingAJesse.com.

  • Apply for Strata Launch Pad

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    It’s no secret that Big Data is hot. At O’Reilly’s upcoming Strata conference in New York, a panel of VC judges will be choosing the top firms with a Big Data story, who will present on stage during the Strata Summit on September 22.

    I’m one of the organizers of Strata, and it’s a fascinating sector of the industry. New ventures live or dies by their ability to analyze data. Big companies can revitalize ailing product lines with data-driven sales. And elastic computing atop public clouds make new kinds of services possible.

    If you’re a startup with a story to tell around data, or an established business that’s disrupting its industry with a new approach, we’d love to hear from you. You can apply at http://strataconf.com/summit2011/public/cfp/176, but don’t delay! Applications close on Monday, August 22 at 11:59 PM.

    If you’re chosen, you’ll get access to the Strata Summit, gain exposure to hundreds of industry influencers, and get a chance to launch at the leading Big Data event.

  • Nina Sodhi returns and BluTrumpet launches

    One of the great things about the number of exits (be they big or small) since 2010, is that they are enabling a new class of veteran, serial entrepreneurs. The knowledge, the contacts, the street cred, the capital – the second time around can be easier than the first. And it should be good for investors, hopefully some of the returning class will go for building big companies with $100mm+ exits instead of “getting paid” with a $20-$30mm exit.

    Take for instance Blu Trumpet, who launched a few days back. Led by Nina Sodhi, former COO of Bumptop – who were acquired by Google in 2010, Blu Trumpet is the first company to launch out of IAC’s Hatch Labs mobile incubator.

    Hatch Labs, a joint venture with IAC and Xtreme Labs, today introduce Blu Trumpet, an app discovery wall that lets advertisers reach millions of devices with clean, user-friendly ads. Blu Trumpet uses sophisticated design to provide publishers a non-intrusive app discovery tool that users actually enjoy, an alternative to banners, and a more creative way to monetize any app.
    “At Hatch Labs, we know the mobile space and we really saw a need for a new type of mobile ad platform that caters to the new app economy,” said Nina Sodhi, CEO at Blu Trumpet. “That’s why we aren’t focusing on display or pop ups. Blu Trumpet gets integrated into an app’s tab bar, allowing users to find us when they are curious and interested. The consumer is happy — and the publishers and advertisers benefit from that.”

    Blu Trumpet offers consumers a new, non-intrusive way to find cool apps without searching through lists of a million apps through Blu Trumpet’s in-app ad platform, “the app wall.” While in a favorite app, consumers can view the Blu Trumpet app wall to discover new recommended apps based on those they’re currently using.

    “It’s like getting a tip from a friend,” said Karthik Ramakrishnan, Blu Trumpet Product Director. “Consumers avoid intrusive pop up and banner ads, and get to discover recommended apps they’d probably never find otherwise.”

    I think Nina Sodhi becoming a GM at IAC and CEO of BluTrumpet, along with her amazing bio (UW Elec Eng, Harvard MBA, VP at Merril Lynch, COO Bumptop, etc, etc), puts her up there in the elite rank of Canadian entrepreneurs. And hopefully her results at IAC and with BluTrumpet will push some of the other recent “exitees” to come back and fight the entrepreneurial good fight. For instance, Jeson Patel, Anish Acharya, Anand Agarawala – aren’t you guys all coming up to 1 or 2 years at Google.. isn’t that enough time to claim your prize and start something new??

  • Red flags

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    This is an unfortunate story that entrepreneurs should read and understand.

    We start companies for a number of different reasons. We want to change the world. We want to solve problems. We are unemployable. We are crazy. And we stay up at night worrying about taking care of our employees, our customers, our investors.

    So it is hard to understand how well regarded funds wind down companies without providing information to employees.

    Investor immorality: The strange case of Blue Noodle

    Start-ups fail all the time. But there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. This is an example of the wrong way.

    On Monday, most employees of social media startup Blue Noodle didn’t get paid. They called their lead venture capital firm, which wouldn’t discuss the situation with them. They called their former CEO, who refused to pick up the phone. They called their lender, who said to call the venture capital firm. And thus the circle began anew.

    “In my more than 20 years of working in Silicon Valley, I’ve been involved on more failed companies than I’d like to admit, but there is always an orderly win-down process,” says John Montgomery, chairman of law firm Montgomery & Hansen. “It sounds like the VCs in this case are treating the company like a car they abandon in a parking lot with the keys in the ignition.”

    Read on…

  • The Story of Quack.com and How It Changed the Canadian Startup Ecosystem

    A few weeks past I posted about the hockey stick growth of exit in Canadian startups. Well, let me give some interesting colour to some of the cause of that growth.

    Quack.com is a company that most of you probably know very little about, despite its relative fame in the hey-day of the dot com boom. Back in the day when I was a student at Waterloo, I remembered Quack.com coming on compass and having some great recruitment events at the local pub, The Bomber. That was the last I heard of them. Little did I know that Quack.com would eventually help permanently alter the Canadian eco-system.

    Quack.com was a Silicon Valley based company. They built a really cool IVR service, cutting edge stuff in 1998 when they were founded. Steven Woods was co-founder, CTO and Chief Product Officer at Quack.com. Dan Servos later joined quack as its SVP Alliances and Sales. In the year 2000, they sold to AOL for a hefty $200mm price tag. Big exit, even by that era’s standard.

    A few years later Steven Woods & Dan Servos were at it again. Classic serial entrepreneurs – Steven started another company, NeoEdge which Dan joined. Not quite as big a success as Quack.com, but not every venture leads to a $200mm sale of your company.

    Fast forward to 2008. Dragged from the startup world kicking and screaming, Google steals Steven Woods and hires him as site manager and engineering lead for Google Waterloo. You have to understand how big this is. Steven Woods is a 2x entrepreneur with a big, big exit under his belt, also serving as an advisor & investor to several startups. He is a big deal in Silicon Valley, let alone in Waterloo where he should be recognized as an entrepreneurial god. Only the duo at 295 Philip St hold more entrepreneurial street cred than him in Waterloo. Not only is his startup background a big deal, but he has a fricking phd in computer science. An immense example of reverse brain drain if I’ve seen one. Which is ironic, since Quack.com/Steven Woods was famously ripped as being a big cause of Canadian brain drain when they hired 50 Waterloo grads in 10 months before selling to AOL.

    Check out what started to happen shortly after he came to Google Waterloo:

    1. Google acquires Toronto-based company BumpTop for $30m.

    2. Steven Wood’s old colleague, Dan Servos, ends up as CEO of Social Deck.

    3. Shortly thereafter, Toronto-based Social Deck gets acquired by Google.

    4. Toronto-based Zetawire gets acquired by Google.

    5. Toronto-based Pushlife gets acquired by Google for $25mm.

    6. Waterloo-based Postrank gets acquired by Google.

    (and now Dan Servos lands as COO of Locationary. Hmmmmm…)

    Steven Woods & Dan Servos have been machines, invigorating the Canadian startup ecosystem with new possibilities. Via his role at Google, Steven Woods has provided a real source of opportunity for entrepreneurs in Canada to do something with their company other than “move to the Valley”. 6 exits probably at near $100m in total money in under 2 years. Dan Servos has provided huge leadership to Canadian startups like Social Deck, Locationary, etc. This should be massive motivation to entrepreneurs. If you have success, find ways to be like Steven Woods and Dan Servos and help the ecosystem continue to grow. Don’t be like this.

  • Aaarggh – VC Funds Are Drying Up?

    Yesterday and today I’ve been trying to make sense of two different data points that came out on the Canadian business scene.

    One data point confirms that we are having a banner year across Canada. Check out the numbers:

    * Q2 private equity deals worth C$5.7 bln in Q2
    * Total deal value more than in all of 2010
    * Deal volumes up 40 percent over Q2 2010

    (Side nostalgic note, I love that Berkshire bought Husky, it was actually my first co-op job and I have always had huge respect for Robert Schad – a giant amongst Canadian entrepreneurs)

    As you know from several of my posts on exits, this and this, the startup high tech scene are big contributors here.

    So, this means that we are returning capital on investments made into companies in Canada, right? Which means, since there is a healthy market for exits, folks should be willing to supply funds to VCs to start companies…. right?

    Well, according to CVCA, it looks like VC fundraising fell flat on its face.

    Smith said slow fundraising by venture capital funds was undermining deal-making, with new commitments sliding to C$132 million in the quarter, from C$308 million last year.

    “VC investment, which has historically been the catalyst for knowledge-based economic growth, cannot effectively do this job until we take determined steps to ensure more stability,” Smith said.

    Falling fundraising is part of a continuing trend.

    In 2010, new commitments fell 24 percent from the previous year to their lowest level in 16 years. They fell further in the first three months of 2011 against the first quarter last year.

    WTF!?!?! Did VCs forget to cut cheques to their LPs? Are the companies getting bought out not VC funded? Something feels out of whack here. Are there simply not enough fund-makers ala Radian6 to make a reliable return on investment? We are doing some digging to get to the bottom of this. It does resonate that entrepreneurs should focus less on VCs for funding and need to be looking towards angels & incu-ellerators for their early stage funding needs.

    UPDATE: This article from the Globe really outlines how VC funds have been in long decline.

    Year VC invested/Companies Financed
    1998 $1,511,000/807
    1999 $2,617,000/810
    2000 $5,876,000/1,007
    2001 $3,747,000/720
    2002 $2,583,000/663
    2003 $1,613,000/615
    2004 $1,677,000/545
    2005 $1,699,000/558
    2006 $1,701,000/406
    2007 $2,051,000/402
    2008 $1,406,000/388
    2009 $1,039,000/337
    2010 $1,129,000/357

    These numbers tell something interesting – apparently in Canada its gotten more expensive to start companies??? In 1998 $1.5mm resulted in 807 companies getting financed, while in 2008 $1.4mm results in 388 companies getting invested. What gives?

  • Show me the money

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    I love when entrepreneurs tell me that raising capital in Canada is hard (it is). I love it even more when they tell me that they think “they should move to Silicon Valley” because raising money will be easier (it isn’t). It helps me determine which entrepreneurs are too egotistical, too delusional, too uninformed to really be effective raising money.

    There is a venture capital scene in Canada. It’s different than the scene in Silicon Valley or New York City. But there are people making investments in entrepreneurs. According to the CVCA in 2010, there was $484MM invested in IT in Canada (2010 Q4 VC Data Deck from CVCA [PDF]) with $271MM going to software & internet companies. There are issues like US Funds making larger investments than Canadian funds (looks like $2.5MM vs $1.1MM average deal size) or that US companies raise more ($8.2MM vs $3.6MM). But these are just the nature of the game. There are structural issues. It could be better. But to say it is nonexistent, that’s just wrong or lazy. And both are bad qualities in early stage entrepreneurs.

    I was asked by an entrepreneur about who where the funders in Canada. Here is my short list of companies that are writing cheques or are in the process of doing diligence on companies, i.e., prepared to write a cheque. There are a lot of companies like OMERS that are stage agnostic, but I’ve put them in the growth side given their deal history (in the case of OMERS it’s $1.5MM in WaveAccounting).

    So if you think it’s easier raising money in NYC, Boston or California. My advice is get your ass on a plane and try. Because it isn’t as easy as you might think.

    But don’t say that there is no Canadian VCs or venture capital money. Because that just makes you look like a moron.

    Suck it up, it’s hard raising money. Maybe you should talk to the Canadian investors and figure out why they don’t want to write you a cheque!

    Seed ($25k – $500k)

    Growth ($500k – $5MM)

    Expansion

    Who else is actively placing money with Canadian startups? No grant money, we’ll do that in a separate post, but who else is actively doing convertible debt or equity placements? How to define active? Either >3 deals in diligence or has deployed more than $50,000 ($25,000/placement * 2 placements). That seems fair.

    Who did I miss?

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  • More GrowConf tickets via ShinyAds & Nokia

    Grow Conference - August 17-19, 2011 - Vancouver, BC

    Need a ticket for the Grow Conference?

    The generous sponsors of the Grow Conference are continuing to offer a few free tickets to some starving startups over the next week. We call this Conference Ticket – Ramen Class.

    Today’s tickets comes from ShinyAds.com and Nokia. These are two very different companies. One is the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world, the other is a small startup trying to get companies on to their ad serving platform. They see the benefits for startups to attend Grow.

    To win these passes tweet the following today:

    RT to enter! “Hey @nokia – Please send me to the @growconf #growconf in Vancouver http://www.startupnorth.ca/ .

    Tuesday August 9th, Grow Conference organizers will pick the winners who will get a pass for Days 2 and 3 at the 2011 Grow Conference. *Note that travel and accommodations are not included, pay for your own flights and hotels and drinks you cheap and resourceful founders.

    The Grow Conference is a unique three-day conference that brings together the top minds in business, entrepreneurship, technology, and capital to inspire and engage the next generation of disruptive entrepreneurs. It doesn’t matter if your business is on or offline, the next-gen entrepreneur knows where their customers are and how to engage them. Today’s entrepreneurs are creating new opportunities, disrupting age-old markets, leveraging technology on their path to being tomorrow’s leaders. The Grow Conference is bringing the best minds of Silicon Valley and Canada together to share lessons learned and inspire action. Be part of this entrepreneurial revolution as we work together to drive innovation for the future. GROW is more than a conference, it’s a movement.

    Follow #growconf on Twitter @growconf