It’s only 76 days (July 11-13, 2012) until Startup Festival in Montreal (are you planning on a roadtrip?), and the team has announced a spectacular set of speakers for the event.

• Dan Briklin
• Dave McClure (@davemcclure)
• Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd)
• Lisa Gansky (@sharethemesh)
• Deborah Schultz (@debs)
• Craig Walker (@cwalker123)
• Sizhao Yang (@zamland)
• Cindy Gallop (@cindygallop)

If you don’t know who these people are, well you should. There are some like Deborah Schultz and Stowe Boyd that are some of the best thinkers about the role that new technology has on work, culture, experience, marketing and behaviour. Go read Debs’ “Dear Miss Manners: the Social Web – WTF?” or Stowe’s Work Talk Research including Data is the New Oil: From Privacy to Publicy. These individuals are talking about the social and political forces that will create the next generation of startups. They are simply amazing.

Did you know the Internet is for porn? Cindy Gallop gave a not to be missed talk at TED in 2009, Make Love Not Porn. She has been thinking about the role pornography, advertising and entertainment.

The rest of the schedule is bound to be equally amazing. I’m looking forward to my trip to Montreal. I hope you’ll join me.

Interesting my friends from Microsoft are hosting a screening of Ctrl Alt Compete which features our own Josh Sookman (LinkedIn, @jsookman) of Guardly and Brian Wong (LinkedIn, @brian_wong) of Kiip. It’s a documentary about building startups and the founders passion, fortitude and the shear insanity of doing this. Looks like a fun take, realistic take.

• Toronto – March 6^th 8:30am – 12pm Register »
• Montreal – March 13^th 8:30am -12pm Register »

Watch the trailer.

The movies takes a revealing look at the startup and emerging business scene through the eyes of five founders and their teams telling a story of the passion, fortitude and insanity that is bringing a startup to life. Microsoft believes tech entrepreneurship is fundamentally changing the world. The things that developers create; the ideas that they’re able to make reality; the tangible value they deliver is reshaping the way people live their lives every day. Building a startup from nothing to something is hard—REALLY hard.

Red Carpet Event for the Canadian Premiere of Ctrl Alt Compete Screening

Join a networking crowd of investors, community start-ups and entrepreneurial students for the first Canadian screening of Ctrl Alt Compete – a Microsoft movie documentary on what it takes to be a start-up:Passion. Fortitude. Insanity.

There are lots of tech startups out there taking their shot at changing the world. There’s no shortage of ideas. The infrastructure to build quickly is cheaper and more accessible than it’s ever been…there’s lots of capital floating around for the right idea. If only it were that simple! Building a startup from nothing to something is hard—REALLY hard. There is a “story behind the story” of just how hard it is to go from inception to reality and become the products and services that we use every day.

It’s a story of the power of people pouring their passion, drive and dedication into building something that changes the world—no matter how hard.

We believe that is a story worth telling and sharing.

At this premier screening event, you’ll hear insights from industry executives, Start-Ups from the cast and local leaders in the Start-Up community.

• About Ctrl+Alt+Compete
• Reviews
• Full Cast & Bios
• Startup Toolkit
• More Videos

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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.

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.

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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.

Disclosure: I am a mentor at FounderFuel, and I traveled  to Montreal in August 2011 to see most of these companies during the mentor matching. I’ve also mentored Willet as part of my role as Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EiR) at Velocity (@UWVelocity) in Waterloo. 

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I am/was impressed with the teams accepted into the 12 week FounderFuel program. Today is #FFDemoDay where after the past 12 weeks the companies get a chance to show the world what they’ve been working on. I love the art of the demo, it is so different than the pitch. I met all of the companies in August 2011 at the Mentor Matching Day, unfortunately I wasn’t able to travel to Montreal to see the demos today. It looks like the team at Founder Fuel is continuing Montreal Startup Up’s great track record of identifying and growing very early stage ventures.

I’m apparently having a bromance for the Real Ventures team.  John Stokes (@iamjohnstokes), JS Cournoyer (@jscournoyer), Mark MacLeod (@startupcfo), Allan MacIntosh and Ian Jeffrey (@ianjeffrey) are putting together programs and the funding to support a strong early stage technology ecosystem in Montreal. Keep up the phenomenal work guys.

The 2011 FounderFuel Cohort includes:

• Playerize
  Playerize grows social and mobile games by providing player installs from diverse channels at huge scale.
• OOHLALA
  A mobile platform that helps students take control of their college life by powering the events, conversations and deals on campus.
• Willet
  Willet is the missing step from social browsing into shopping, and converts the mindsets of people without intent to buy into paying customers.
• Vuru
  Vuru takes complex financial statements and distills them down into clear, transparent reports that show investors the fundamentals that matter.
• Seevibes
  The TV Ratings For Social Media Audience – measures engaged audience to provide relevant data that media and advertising industry need.
• BlameStella
  Is your Internet contrivance up to snuff? Find out with BlameStella, the future of Web Monitoring .
• PlayerTakesAll
  A viral campaign & referral management platform that enables advertisers to extend the reach of their marketing efforts by 50%.
• Wavo
  wavo.me is the easiest way to collect, manage and play the music and videos being shared on your social networks.
• Editola
  Editola uses the community to build the most accurate view of every news story. The best articles, videos and opinions, all in one place.

Apply for FounderFuel 2012

The spring 2012 FounderFuel session is scheduled to start on February 20th 2012, and applicants may apply directly online at founderfuel.com until January 7th 2012. An early review of candidates will begin on December 12th 2011.

Photo by deniszgonjanin

Nothing like the last minute planning around here. Ian Jeffrey (LinkedIn, @ianmtl) from FounderFuel is planning on being in Toronto today (June 27, 2011) and tomorrow (June 28, 2011). He is planning on meeting with startups and founders to share his experiences launching FounderFuel, the mentorship and incubation/acceleration plan for participating startups and to talk about tech startups generally. If you are interested in talking with one of the emerging technology company incubators/accelerators you should come and talk to Ian and learn about what is being offered in Montreal. There is a lot of choice in the marketplace for entrepreneurs, and the best way to see the differences are to connect with the people behind the scenes like Ian and the FounderFuel team. This is a great way to evaluate the program, get introduced to the people, and connect.

FounderFuel Jam Session

Date:

June 28, 2011

Time:

7 PM EDT – Presentation & Overview
8 PM EDT – Startup 1-on-1s and discussion

Location:

Camaraderie Coworking, 102 Adelaide Street East, Toronto, ON, Canada [map]

Register to attend:

• Count me in on Plancast
• Register Now »

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From the looks of Alexa Clark’s (@alexaclark) photo exposition at Camaraderie, it is a great space to host a startup. I know that Matt (@mattskilly) and Aron (@defrex) at Hipsell have their startup offices there. It is a great space for startups requiring a great work space, a central location, and the benefits of an enabled coworking culture.

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Some rights reserved by Stig Nygaard

Jake: Here’s the plan: we put the band back together, do some gigs, earn some bread, bang! We’ll have 5,000 bucks in no time.

Seems like I’ve been talking a lot about incubators, accelerators, catalysts, spark plugs, igniters and other programs designed to engage, educate and enable early-stage, emerging technology entrepreneurs. In the past 7 days, we’ve now seen the launch of new incubator/accelerator programs in both Vancouver and Montreal. The are 2 new programs both focused on bringing together the best talent, access to mentors, capital and networks beyond what many founders are capable of doing on their own. (Full disclosure: I am a mentor for FounderFuel).

Vancouver » GrowLab

GrowLab has risen out of the ashes of BootupLabs. It includes a spectacular founding team that includes a group of people many of whom I call a friend, and even more importantly they are a group I deeply respect. The group includes:

• Boris Wertz (LinkedIn, @bwertz)
• Deb Landa (LinkedIn, @deblanda)
• Leonard Brody (LinkedIn, @lbrody)
• Jason Bailey (LinkedIn, @superrewardsceo)
• Michael Tippett (LinkedIn, @mtippett)

The deadline to apply to the GrowLab program is June 15, 2011. Accepted startups and founders spend 3 months in Vancouver and 1 month in San Francisco with an intense mentorship program. The program also includes office space in both cities plus up to $25,000 in seed funding.

Montreal » FounderFuel

The FounderFuel is a new accelerator program with support from the team who started Montreal Startup and Real Ventures. It is a accelerator program that has been seeded with Cdn$2MM and has put together a great mentorship group that includes 85 entrepreneurs, executives, VCs, angels (and me). Ian Jeffery is the General Manager and the Partner at Real Ventures responsible for making FounderFuel work. I first encountered Ian as a competitor to his startup TinyPictures (I was running product at Ambient Vector/Nakama back in 2006). Ian successfully raised a big chunk of money and then proceeded to execute and eventually sell Radar to Shutterfly. I agreed to be a mentor just to personally ensure I get access to the team of mentors. It is ridiculous! The list includes >84 phenomenal leaders, executives, investors, entrepreneurs and people from Montreal and around the world. A sample of the awesome mentors (sorry for every I am leaving out):

• Patrick Lor (LinkedIn)
• Alistair Croll (LinkedIn, @acroll)
• Marc Alloul (LinkedIn, @MarcAlloul)
• Mike Shaver (LinkedIn, @shaver)
• Mark MacLeod (LinkedIn, @startupcfo)
• Howard Gwin (LinkedIn, @howardgwin)

The deadline to apply to FounderFuel is July 1, 2011. Instead of a 4 month program, the FounderFuel program is “12 intense weeks”. It is also a cohort based program that provides $10,000/startup + $5,000/founder in exchange for 6% equity. The program provide access to mentors, office space in Notman House, and access to a culture and ecosystem that has bred success in the past.

One Observation

My one observation about both of these programs is that Debbie Landa was the only female listed. It is a really difficult and sad state. There are great number of female tech founders and leaders in Canada. I am disappointed not to see:

• Leila Boujnane (@leilaboujnane), Idee Inc.
• Suzie Dingwall Williams (@suziedingwall), Venture Law Associates
• Maggie Fox (@maggiefox), Social Media Group
• Tara Hunt (@missrogue) & Cassandra Girard, Buyosphere
• Kristine Matulis (@kristinematulis), Firstround Marketing
• April Dunford (@AprilDunford), RocketWatcher
• Amber MacArthur (@ambermac), MGImedia
• Gosia Green (@heygosia), LearnHub

These programs need to do better on encouraging diversity and actively seeking out different viewpoints. The good news is that it is easily rectified.

Consider Applying

The deadlines for GrowLab and FounderFuel are approaching quickly. If you are interested in what hopefully is a world-class incubator/accelerator program you should definitely give careful consideration to these.

• GrowLab Deadline: June 15, 2011 » Apply to GrowLab
• FounderFuel Deadline: July 1, 2011 » Apply to FounderFuel

On the heels of yesterday’s acquisition of Tungle, BMC Software has announced today that they have acquired Montreal’s Coradiant, which was co-founded by Year One Labs partner Alistair Croll. We are happy that Montreal has managed to win something in the last few days.

The price is currently undisclosed, but the back of the napkin calculation tells me this was a monster one. Probably not as large as the recent Radian6 exit, but sources put this acquisition well in to the 9-figures territory.

This has been a long time in the making as Coradiant’s founding goes back to 1997 when Alistair Croll and Eric Packman founded NetworkShop.

I know that David just posted about the upcoming Startup Festival, but I thought I would add my own thoughts:

I have definitely been getting the feeling that the whole “startup conference” format is getting a little stale. The same formats in the same cities with most of the same speakers. The real benefit of any conference, the ability to spend time with smart people, is still enough of an incentive to keep us coming back.

So when Philippe told me about what he is working on for the Startup Festival in Montreal, I needed a minute to re-set my thinking. When I did that however, it was clear that this would be something new.

The announced lineup is looking great so far, but that is not the really exciting part. The entire format of the event will be much more fluid and engaging than a typical 1-2 track conference agenda.

Philippe is engaging with the community and opening up the event as a platform for other groups to throw in and create their own events and activities during that time. We (the royal We – Startupnorth) are looking in to doing our own event one evening.

I am excited about an event that is focused on openness and a shared sense of purpose with the community.

Our friends Philippe Telio (@ptelio), JS Cournoyer (@jscournoyer) and Alistair Croll (@acroll) have pulled together a spectacular festival in Montreal for startups. They launced today at AccelerateMTL and the speaker list includes great folks:

• Sean Ellis
  
• Howard Lindzon
  
• Dave McClure
  
• Tara Hunt
  
• Count me in on Plancast
• Register Now »

This is just the tip of the iceberg. A fantastic group of entrepreneurs, marketers, advisors and investors converging on Montreal at the very beginning of the Just for Laughs comedy festival (which looks to be happening July 14-31, 2011).

It is great to see the availability of capital being deployed by Jacques Bernier and the Teralys Capital team start to propagate out into the culture building events. The creation of YearOneLabs, Real Ventures, AccelerateMTL, NextMontreal, Notman House are all directly or indirectly beneficiaries of the capital available in Montreal. It might feel like these changes, conferences and programs happen overnight, but it has been a 5-7 year campaign from a dedicated group beginning with Montreal Startup, John Stokes and Austin Hill. This group has been laser focused on building a culture of high tech entrepreneurship and the necessary infrastructure from education, funding, investment, talent, culture, media and events to support the current and next generation of entrepreneurs. It is really a feat and accomplishment that has made Montreal a hotbed for new companies.