Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Zak Homuth (LinkedIn, @zakhomuth, Github). Follow him on Twitter @zakhomuth. This post was originally published on February 1, 2012. And like many startups, Upverter is hiring.

 Some rights reserved by wvs

Its winter right now, and that means for those of us in the north east its cold. We try to pretend its a good thing; that it keeps us focused. But the reality is we dont live and work here because of the snow, we live and work here because smart people love, more than anything else in the world [pg], to work with other smart people. And, make as many snow jokes as you want, but…

Pay attention to Toronto

Canada is the best country in the world to do business in [forbes], Toronto is the most multi-cultural city in the world [wikipedia] (suck-it NYC ;)), we get tax incentives for R&D [gov], and its the only city within an hour of one of the worlds foremost engineering schools [uwaterloo,coop program].

So, I say again, you should be paying attention. And if you’ve got your shit together you should be trying to figure out how to get a footprint here. Because believe it or not, we dont all want/have to be in the valley [fred].

All that being said, I still get this question a lot

There is a (very reasonable) expectation that YC companies make every effort to relocate to silicon valley as part of the program. And the fact that we have most of our operations in Toronto raises some eyebrows. My answer is really simple: The talent is here and it wants to be here. Sometimes I even go as far as talking about how much further our investment takes us when we spend it here instead of in the US, but at its root its a talent thing.

Toronto isn’t the only place in the world

Its true. I still spend a tremendous amount of time in the valley. And we have customers all over the world. Simply put there is no perfect place for everything. But if youre building a product business, or looking for talent, you could do much, much worse! Toronto is great for talent, and its a great place to live. Oh… and Im sure its not supposed to matter but like my good friend dave [blog] would say, “look at the scenery”.

But, its also a terrible place to raise money. Like I said, nowhere is perfect.

About Me

Upverter is my 3rd startup. I dropped out of highschool, and then university, both times to run startups. I’ve worked in Ottawa, Waterloo, Stuttgart, Bangalore, and Mountain View. I have never lived in Toronto before, so its a first for me, but we’re here because its where our team wanted to be. We are currently 7/7 kick-ass, and 6/7 Uwaterloo engineers who would just rather be here at home in Canada, than down in the valley. Oh, and if you’re smart, we’re hiring.

Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Zak Homuth (LinkedIn, @zakhomuth, Github). Follow him on Twitter @zakhomuth. This post was originally published on February 1, 2012. And like many startups, Upverter is hiring.

 Some rights reserved by miketippett

Ok, it makes me laugh every time I read GrowLab. The only way it could be better is when someone describes the GrowLab companies as “GrowOps”. They really did a great job in creating a corporate name that has a set of nuanced meanings (well maybe it’s not so nuanced).

Our friends from GrowLab are heading out on tour to find their next cohort. They are coming to:

• Toronto - February 13, 2012 Register
• Waterloo – February 14, 2012 Register
• Montreal – February 15, 2012 Register
• Edmonton – February 22, 2012 Register
• Calgary – February 23, 2012 Register

Sounds like an interesting night with Daniel Debow (LinkedIn, @ddebow), Debbie Landa (LinkedIn, @deblanda) and Jason Bailey (LinkedIn, @YVRJason) talking about startups, entrepreneurship, building companies in Canada, getting connected in the Valley, GrowConf, incubators and other fun things. The panel conversation is:

Are you an Entrepreneur or a Wantrepreneur?

What makes you different from other entrepreneurs trying to build start-ups? You are competing with thousands of entrepreneurs for the same resources, talent, and capital. How are you going to make sure that you attract the best people and funding? Is it about who you know or is it about how great your product is or the reach you have in the community?

In Toronto that I get to host the above conversation, it means that I’m going to have to represent for the “Wantrepreneur” side. Because there is too much awesomeness with Daniel, Jason and Debbie representing the “Entrepreneur” side. It should be a fun event and a great time for entrepreneurs to get or stay connected with each other. This is a great group to provide deep insight into the experience of building companies in Canada and selling them to Silicon Valley powerhouses.

Given the tour includes stops in Bucharest and Budapest, I can guarantee that someone will mention Summify (congrats guys).Also excited that Debbie and Jason will be joining us on Feb 16 for Founders & Funders.

Rob Lewis and TechVibes is reporting that ExtremeU (you can read our past coverage 2009, 2010, 2011) has launched a new Toronto based incubator that leverages their experience over the past 3 years. Mark Evans provides additional details that includes “$7-million in funding from Extreme Venture Partners, OMERS Ventures, Rho Canada Ventures, BlackBerry Partners Fund and BDC.”

Extreme Startups includes a who’s who of  the Toronto startup scene as mentors:

• David Ossip
• Daniel Debow
• Anand Agarwala
• Michael McDermentt
• Ameet Shah
• Albert Lai
• Leila Boujnane
• Ali Asaria
• Noah Godfrey
• Ray Reddy
• Rick Segal
• Salim Teja
• Derek Seto
• Nick Koudas

Congrats to Andy Yang, Sunil Sharma and Amar Varma in getting this thing launched. Plus how can this not be awesome with Andy Yang as Harold and Sunil Sharma as Kumar in Extreme Startupping.

The last Founders and Funders dinner in Toronto was almost exactly two years ago. A lot has happened in that time and we thought it was time to sit down and break bread together again.

The Founders and Funders dinners are a series of invitation-only dinners that are held across Canada several times a year. They are a sort of summit on the state of each community and we do our best to make sure that the best startups possible have a chance to meet the most respected and active investors who are doing deals in those cities. There is always a mix of locals and people who come in for the event as a way to get connected.

We believe that if you cannot sit down and have dinner with someone, then you probably shouldn’t invest in or take investment from them. This is a great chance to apply a social filter to the dealflow in any one place.

What is it?: An invitation-only 3 course dinner. Cocktails before, cocktails after….

Who is coming?: The top investment-ready startups and active investors in Canada.

Where is it?: Downtown Toronto

When?: February 16th, 2012 at 6:30pm

How much is it?: Tickets range from $125 (startups) to $500 (service providers)

We are now accepting requests for invitations and the first round of invitations will go out this week.

To apply please use this form >>

We have also decided to include a brief fireside chat with Daniel Debow at this dinner. We rarely do this sort of thing at a Founders and Funders but 2011 was such a great year we thought it would be fun to look back on the ups and downs of Rypple through the years and how they got to their eventual exit, some of which was written about in Forbes this week.

Daniel and Rypple have also been a big part of the Canadian startup community and he has also been an active angel investor recently.

We are excited to hear what he has to say about how we can help build more great Canadian companies and how to build awareness in Silicon Valley when your HQ is back here in Canada.

We hope you will join us as we kick off another great year for the Toronto and Canadian startup community.

We will be announcing Founders and Funders dinners in other cities soon as well.

Editor’s note: This is a cross post from the Upverter blog written by Zak Homuth (LinkedIn, @zakhomuth, Github). Follow him on Twitter @zakhomuth. This post was originally published on August 1, 2011, I was just negligent in posting it.

Who doesn’t love tech porn? And what’s better than an inside look at the architecture and tools that power a startup? That’s right, nothing. So we thought, why not put up our own little behind the scenes, and try and share a little bit about how we do what we do?

At Upverter, we’ve built the first ever web-based, the first ever collaborative, and the first ever community and reuse focused EDA tools. This meant re-thinking a lot of assumptions that went into building the existing tools. For example, clients and servers weren’t an afterthought, but instead a core part of our architecture. Collaboration was baked in from the start which also meant a whole new stack – borrowed heavily from guys like Google Wave, and Etherpad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave
http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/
http://techblog.gomockingbird.com/archive/5/2010

On the front-end, our pride and joy is what we call the sketch tool. Its more or less where we have spent the bulk of our development time over the last year – a large compiled javascript application that uses long polling to communicate with the API and Design Servers. When we started out to move these tools to the web, we knew that we would be building a big Javascript app. But we didn’t quite know what the app itself would look like and our choice of tech for the app itself has changed quite a bit over time… more on this later!

On the back-end, we run a slew of servers. When it comes to our servers, there was a bit of a grand plan when we started, but in reality they all came about very organically. As we needed to solve new problems and fill voids, we built new servers into the architecture. As it stands right now, we have the following:

• Front-end web servers, which serve most of our pages and community content;
• API & Design servers, which do most of the heavy lifting and allow for collaboration;
• DB servers, which hold the datums; and
• Background workers, which handle our background processing and batch jobs.

So let’s talk tech…

• We use a lot of Linux (ub) (arch), both on our development workstations and all over our servers.
• We use Python on the server side; but when we started out we did take a serious look at using Node.js () and Javascript. But at the time both Node and javascript just wern’t ready yet… But things have come a tremendously long way, and we might have made a different choice if we were beginning today.
• We use nginx (http://nginx.org/) for our reverse proxy, load balancing and SSL termination.
• We use Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org/) (which is a like Sinatra) for our Community and Front-end web servers. We started with Django, but it was just too full blown and we found ourselves rewriting it enough that it made sense to step a rung lower.
• We use Tornado () for our API and design servers. We chose Tornado because it is amazingly good at serving these type of requests at break neck speed.
• We built our background workers on Node.js so that we can run copies of the javascript client in the cloud saving us a ton of code duplication.
• We do our internal communication through ZMQ (www.zeromq.org) on top of Google Protocol Buffers
• Our external communication is also done through our custom RPC javascript again mapped onto Protocol Buffers. http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html/
• We used MySQL () for both relational and KV data through a set of abstracted custom datastore procedures until very recently, when we switched our KV data over to Kyoto Tycoon ().
• Our primary client the sketch tool is built in Javascript with the Google Closure Library () and Compiler ().
• The client communicates with the servers via long polling through custom built RPC functions and server-side protocol buffers.
• We draw the user interface with HTML5 and canvas (), through a custom drawing library which handles collisions and does damage based redrawing.
• And we use soy templates for all of our DOM UI dialogs, prompts, pop-ups, etc.
• We host on EC2 and handle our deployment through puppet master ().
• Monitoring is done through a collection of OpsView/nagios, PingDom and Collectd.

Our development environment is very much a point of pride for us. We have a spent a lot of time making it possible for us to do some of the things we are trying to do from both the client and server sides and putting together a dev environment that allows our team to work efficiently within our architecture. We value testing, and we are fascists about clean and maintainable code.

• We use git (obviously).
• We have a headless Javascript unit test infrastructure built on top of QUnit () and Node.js
• We have python unit tests built on top of nose ().
• We run closure linting () and compiling set to the “CODE FACIEST” mode
• We run a full suite of checks within buildbot () on every push to master
• We also do code reviews on every push using Rietveld ().
• We are 4-3-1 VIM vs. Text Edit vs. Text Mate.
• We are 4-2-2 Linux vs. OSX vs. Windows 7.
• We are 5-2-1 Android vs. iPhone vs. dumb phone.

If any of this sounds like we are on the right path, you should drop us a line. We are in Toronto, we’re solving very real-world, wicked problems, and we’re always hiring smart developers.

Reference

• http://www.eflorenzano.com/blog/post/technology-behind-convore/
• http://startupnorth.ca/category/under-the-hood/

Editor’s note: This is a cross post from the Upverter blog written by Zak Homuth (LinkedIn, @zakhomuth, Github). Follow him on Twitter @zakhomuth. This post was originally published on August 1, 2011, I was just negligent in posting it.

Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in December 15, 2011 on MarkEvansTech.com.

 Some rights reserved by Eric Constantineau – www.ericconstantineau.com

In the post I wrote earlier this week about the demise of Thoora, there was a comment suggesting that “Toronto failed Thoora” due to a lack of community support to make it a “winning formula”.

It was a puzzling comment because it suggests a community has an obligation to support a startup so it can thrive. This strikes me as an absurd idea because startups should succeed or fail on their own merits, and the ability to attract an audience near and close.

Sure, it’s good to drink the local flavour of “Kool-Aid” but only if a startup is offering a product or service that meets a need or interest. There are lots of local startups, including some that pitch me directly, that don’t resonate because nothing something interests me or the product/service doesn’t resonate enough to warrant further exploration.

It doesn’t mean I’m not supporting the local community; it just means a startup has a service that didn’t pass the sniff test.

At the same time, I do think Toronto’s startup community is extremely supportive. There’s no lack of enthusiasm, energy and a willingness to share ideas, feedback, resources, real estate and time to provide startups with a boost.

This has been a fact of life for the past five years, even before we started to see a flurry of startups appear on the scene. There has always been a strong, support community that has pulled together in different ways. A great example is tonight’s HoHoTo party, which has become a major fund-raising machine due to tremendous support from the community.

The bottom line is if a startup needs to rely on the community to make it, it also suggests what it’s offering can’t survive  without artificial support.

For startups, the market has to be bigger than its own backyard. It needs people to support it or not based on what’s being sold as opposed to a sense of duty or obligation.

Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in December 15, 2011 on MarkEvansTech.com.

Editors Note: This is a guest post by Chris Arsenault (LinkedIn, @chrisarsenault) a tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. Chris is the Co-Chair of the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX), a board member at the Canadian Venture Capital Association (CVCA), a Supporter of the C100, among other things. Follow Chris at chrisarsenault.wordpress.com or on Twitter @chrisarsenault.

 Some rights reserved by antmoose

The last few weeks have certainly proven to be extremely promising for Canadian Tech Entrepreneurs. Almost $80M of equity financing has recently been secured from some of the top investors in the world to help build our next generation of massive tech companies. It’s even more exciting when you realize that these funds are going to three especially young, dynamic and opportunistic companies, all of which are in our backyard!

Beyond the Rack

Yona Shtern, Robert Gold and the team over at Montreal-based Beyond the Rack (“BTR”) lead the way with a whooping $37M financing round that should propel the company to new heights yet unseen on the Canadian eCommerce front. BTR has quickly established itself as an eCommerce leader by showing the market that Canadian companies really do know what a “hockey stick” revenue growth chart looks like. The teams’ ability to build such a big company in such a short time frame has earned them our utmost respect. We initially met the team and reviewed their business plan in late 2008; by 2011, they were already ranked as one of the fastest-growing online retailers in the entire world. Yona was also wise in choosing his investors, be it industry specific angels or great VCs such as Panorama Capital, iNovia Capital, Rho Canada, Tandem Expansion, BDC Venture Capital, Highland Capital Partners, EDC and Montreal Start Up. If you aren’t a Beyond the Rack member, don’t wait – register now, and you’ll be impressed!

Shopify

Just down the road from Montreal is another world class eCommerce team. Ottawa-based Shopify recently closed a $15M second round of financing. Tobias Lutke, Cody Fauser, Daniel Weinand & Harley Finkelstein have developed an industry leading eCommerce platform that is already being used by thousands of leading online retailers around the world. The team, their vision and commitment to execution all combine to make Shopify one of Canada’s tech leaders in an extremely high growth global market. Unfortunately, we missed the boat on the opportunity to work with them, but our friends over at Bessemer Ventures, Firstmark Capital, Felicis Ventures and Georgian Partners were more than happy to come aboard. I’m expecting to see Shopify rise above the tide over the coming years and establish itself as a global leader in its space.

Fixmo

The most recent team to announce a substantial equity-financing round is Toronto-based Fixmo. Led by its founders Rick Segal, Shyam Sheth and Joyce Janczyn, Fixmo just announced a $23M round. This investment round included both existing investors (iNovia Capital, Panorama Capital, Rho Canada and Extreme Venture Partners) and an impressive syndicate of new lead investors: Silicon Valley-based Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Washington-based Paladin Capital Group and Hong Kong-based Horizons Ventures. While the company’s core vision has not changed over the last two years, the product development road map has evolved at a rapid pace. Within an extremely short time frame, Fixmo launched a series of Government and Enterprise products, acquired two companies (Conceivium Business Solutions and Chocolate Chunk Apps), established a series of key partnerships and practically jumped ahead of every other Mobile Risk Management solution provider in the market. Obviously, the founders didn’t do it alone, but the sheer fact that Rick was successful in attracting some of the best talent out there (Bruce Gilley, Jonas Gyllensvaan, Tyler Lessard, Lee Cocking, John Yuen and others) speaks to the long term execution ability and potential of Fixmo.

Ambition coupled with Execution

The average tech financing round in Canada is under $4M. Therefore, the aforementioned three companies basically raised as much cash as 20 average Canadian tech startups combined. Obviously, I get nervous when I see a company (portfolio or not) raise such a large chunk of cash. Why? It’s not because I like the small size of the average Canadian financing rounds. Rather, it’s because I think that too much money for a young business can be as bad as or worse than not having enough. $15M-$40M rounds for Canadian tech companies are amongst the largest we have seen this side of the border in over 10 years. That being said, I do also think that Canadian Tech Entrepreneurs are now entering a phase of Ambition coupled with Execution. We have lived through too many years of “lack of ambition”, quickly followed by “lack of execution”, not to mention the much lamented “lack of capital”. However, we are now seeing deals done where massive amounts of ambition and execution converge, and capital is becoming available to build large tech companies right here in our own backyard. With more companies able to raise the amount of funding they truly need to generate hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, not only we will stop selling our companies short, they won’t need to move down south. Hopefully other investors will note the phenomenon, and future startups won’t have as much trouble raising the capital both from Canada and into Canada. And that’s good for all of us.

At iNovia, when a massive opportunity knocks, we answer! I’m expecting to be sharing a lot more stories about successful Canadian entrepreneurs, and how they’ve built hugely successful companies here as they compete globally for resources, capital and market share. There isn’t much stopping the entrepreneurs driving Canada’s next generation of large tech companies, and for the likes of Beyond the Rack, Shopify, Fixmo and many others, this is just the beginning.

Congratulations to all the teams mentioned in taking important steps on their paths to success!

Below some article worth reading with regards the above companies:

• TechCrunch - Flash Sales Site And Gilt Competitor Beyond The Rack Raises $37 Million
• Financial Post - Montreal’s Beyond the Rack closes US$37M funding round
• GigaOm - Shopify raises $15M to expand online shopping platform
• Financial Post – Toronto’s Fixmo lands $23.4-million in funding from top VCs
• CRN – Security Vendor Fixmo Gets VC Boost

Editors Note: This is a guest post by Chris Arsenault (LinkedIn, @chrisarsenault) a tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. Chris is the Co-Chair of the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX), a board member at the Canadian Venture Capital Association (CVCA), a Supporter of the C100, among other things. Follow Chris at chrisarsenault.wordpress.com or on Twitter @chrisarsenault.

I can’t believe it was back in 2008 that #HoHoTO started. For the past 3 years instead of a Holiday DemoCamp or Festive Founders & Funders, we’ve sponsored and attended HoHoTO. (We’ve even helped document the shenanigans). So why the fuss about a holiday party?

Toronto’s High Tech Holiday Party – #HoHoTO

“Fortune favors the connected entrepreneur.” @jcal7 #trueuniversity via @hnshah

We talk a lot about what is going on in Silicon Valley and how to make Toronto better. We can look to Helsinki, Israel, New York, Boston, Austin, and other places. But we have a strong emerging high tech culture in Toronto (and across Canada, just check out the efforts in Montreal and Vancouver). There is a strong vibrant community in Toronto that actively seeks each other out. Maybe because it’s cold and we like to snuggle, maybe because in dark of winter it’s best not to drink alone. But there are entrepreneurs that are trying to do it in Toronto and they like to get together.

 Some rights reserved by smack416 (check out the Flickr Pool for #hohoto)

We have a great community that knows how to have a great time. And with HoHoTO the great time also supports a great cause.

What is HoHoTO?

We often joke about startups being “ramen profitable”, but for many this is not a choice. We are working with HoHoTO and the Daily Bread Food Bank we hope to improve Toronto. HoHoTO is a Holiday party to raise sorely-needed funds for Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank. It brings together the hyper-connected tech, marketing, PR, social media and startup communities  to raise attention and support around a core idea:

“People in our town are hungry – damnit – and we can make a difference.”

Here is the call to all Toronto startups, you should attend HoHoTO and support the Daily Bread Food Bank. It’s a great way to initial meet and connect with other readers of StartupNorth and give back to those less fortunate in Toronto.

It’s easy to sponsor, it’s easy to attend, it’s easy to donate.

Get Tickets Now!

PS this is a call out of our friends to match or beat our sponsorship/donation:

• Rob Lewis (LinkedIn, @robertslewis) at TechVibes - You know you want to beat us at something ;-)
• Erin Bury (LinkedIn, @erinbury) & Sarah Prevette (LinkedIn, @SarahPrevette) at Sprouter - We heard you’re flush with PostMedia cash…
• John Ruffolo (LinkedIn, @ruffoloj) and the team at OMERS Ventures - Really you haven’t sponsored this yet?
• Roger Chabra (LinkedIn, @rogerchabra) at Rho Ventures - I know you’re really a Toronto boy.
• Duncan Hill (LinkedIn, @dunchill) & Robin Axon (LinkedIn, @robinaxon) – Don’t call me the day of the event asking for a ticket…

 Some rights reserved by concheven

Congratulations to Hussein, Kristaps and their team at adParlor.

In case you missed it, Toronto-based adParlor has been acquired by AdKnowledge. adParlor is the second Canadian acquisition for AdKnowledge, who acquired Vancouver’s Super Rewards in July of 2009 for a reported $50 Million.

They managed to build one of “the largest [Facebook] Ads API vendor” and do it here in Toronto.

“We’ve established an office over here where we now have 11 employees, and we’re all based and comfortable in Toronto. We do have our business development manager in San Francisco way more than he’s here in Toronto.” - Hussein Fazal (LinkedIn, @hussein_fazal) on Mixergy

Even more impressive is that they built a site, that manages over one billion impressions a day, without raising outside capital. This is freaking impressive. I’m sure there was likely a combination of SR&ED credits, IRAP money, and others. Every entrepreneur should take note: A billion daily impressions without venture funding. Go read or watch Hussein’s interview on Mixergy, he talks about the 2 pivots for the company, the hard decisions, staying in Toronto. He doesn’t talk about all of the successes like the MaRS AlwaysOn trip, the CIX Top 20, but their relentless hustle and drive built a great business with massive traction.

“no one has hustled harder, stayed humbler, and executed better than him.” – Anonymous VC Comment about Hussein & adParlor

Thanks for building a fantastic example for Canadian entrepreneurs.

Startup Weekend Toronto is coming back for it’s third event in just over year. The city is making a name for itself amongst the global Startup Weekend community, having held some of the highest quality events, including last June’s which turned out to be the largest North American event held to date.

The city has lots of great events but that’s not what gets me excited. It’s the quality, innovation and momentum that Toronto’s entrepreneurs have that is inspiring. Personally, I never had any interest in running events but I liked the idea of Startup Weekend and was inspired by Startup Weekend’s CEO, Marc Nager and his the team… at least enough to agree to run a single event. Once you’ve been involved in one, it’s hard not to keep it going. The energy, enthusiasm and drive of everyone who’s attended the last two Startup Weekend Toronto events is infectious.

Last June’s event was a raging success with over half the teams still taking their projects forward and gaining some real traction 6 months later. Vizualize.me is the perfect story of the possibility of a single weekend. A brand new idea gets pitched for the first time. A group of strangers come together as a new team. In under 54hrs, the team iterates, refines, pounds the pavement for customer feedback, signs up over 10,000 registered emails and puts an awesome final presentation together to take first prize. What’s more impressive is what comes next! The Vizualize.me team decided to commit full-time and see where they can take this. As of today, they have over 300,000 registered users, have been covered in Mashable, Fast Company, TechCrunch to name a few, and have gone through a full private and now public beta program. Eugene Woo is actively speaking to investors as they run this startup out of the Ryerson Digital Media Zone.

November’s Startup Weekend will officially close Global Entrepreneurship Week Canada (GEW) and will be part of the Global Startup Battle with over 65 Startup Weekend events happening around the world during GEW. The winning team from each city event will compete against all 65 cities with a chance to win a trip to DEMO in Singapore. Toronto is going to impress the global startup community once again with a world class event. Check out the event details from the site and by following the action on twitter using #swtoronto .

There are still a few tickets left and StartupNorth readers can have them at a discount. See you there!