Month: September 2010

  • XX Tech Founders

    Rochelle Grayson by Tris Hussey
    Rochelle Grayson photo by Tris Hussey

    An entrepreneur asked me last night, at StartupDrinks Toronto, if I knew any women entrepreneurs in Canada. Here is a list of entrepreneurs and advisors that I can think of off the top of my head. It also prompted me to reread Tereza Nemessanyi’s OpEd about women founders and the notion of an XX Combinator. I look at our events and many of my interactions with entrepreneurs and it is distinctly male, probably more specific it’s young males between 18-30 (the good news is that it’s no longer distinctly white university educated males it’s a mix of cultures and nations of origin though it’s still very male).

    “Much of what we think of as innovation is the creative tension between differing viewpoints” – Xerox PARC

    There’s a strong need to celebrate our differences. The diversity (and acceptance of differences) is one of the things that makes this a great spot for startups. The large number of cultures, ages, and other factors make for great teams and for opportunities for something special to emerge.

    Leila BoujnaneAnd I was thinking about my daughters, and reflecting about the great women entrepreneurs and change makers that I’m met recently (and some I’ve only read about). This list is by no means comprehensive, but it meant to help others find inspiration in the great companies being started in Canada. The list includes::

    I know that I’m missing a lot of founders. Let me know directly or help add folks in the comments.

  • CIX 2010 Submission Deadline

    Canadian Innovation ExchangeThis is your friendly neighbourhood startup spider reminder that the Early Bird Tickets and Submissions to Canada’s Most Innovative Company competition are due tomorrow on October 1, 2010.The 2009 winner was CognoVision and we’ve written about the finalists in the past. The goal is to provide value to all of the finalists and submission. Canadian companies in ICT, Cleantech and Digital Media are encouraged to Submit Your Profile!

    How are companies chosen?

    Companies are evaluated by a selection committee agains 4 criteria. Basically it’s the same stab in the dark we all make when picking investments. One of the key criteria is traction, i.e., there are more mid-to-later stage companies. But it’s less about company age and more about state of corporate development. There’s a preference to companies that are able to demonstrate traction (think customers, intellectual property, partnerships, etc.).

    • Quality of Innovation
    • Market Potential / Viability
    • Management / Industry Experience
    • Competitive Positioning

    Who does the choosing?

    Check out the 2009 selection committee, they are some of the most respected folks in the Canadian VC, academic and business circles. The list includes folks like:

    The team at Achilles Media has been extremely receptive to entrepreneur and community feedback. They have made changes to the submission process, the ticketing for finalists, and continue to try to evolve the program and benefits for submitting companies to up the value. The realization is that media exposure is a small part of the benefit to the CIX Finalists. They are doing a great job to make CIX participation a valuable decision for Canadian companies. The best part, if you have an idea about what would make CIX more valuable to you, send it to the Achilles Media team they are open to making things better. Make sure you check out the 2010 program and think about an Early Bird ticket.

    The first step is to Submit Your Profile!

  • The Next 36

    The Next 36The Next 36 is a new program at the University of Toronto that “aims to transform Canada’s most promising undergraduates into high impact entrepreneurs”.  The program is founded by Reza Satchu and Tim Hodgson. Mr. Satchu was the founder of SupplierMarket which sold to Ariba in 2000 (for a reported $581MM) and founder of StorageNow Holdings sold to InStorage REIT. SupplierMarket was a Sequoia Capital company and was eventually acquired for approximately $581MM. Mr. Hodgson was CEO of Goldman Sachs Canada and is connected on the finance and banking side.

    The program is aimed at identifying 36 high potential undergraduate students that are in entrepreneurship. It provides a program that includes:

    • Personal mentorship from Canada’s top business leaders and entrepreneurs (think Anthony Lacavera, Kevin O’Leary, Nadir Mohammed and others)
    • Support for the development of your own mobile app company
    • Combination of academic theory, business mentorship and practical entrepreneurial experience
    • A powerful peer network with 35 of Canada’s most talented and innovative students
    • $25,000 scholarship for each student selected

    It’s an interesting opportunity to build a mobile application, get a $25,000 scholarship, build the personal network with the most powerful business folks in Canada. It’s an interesting opportunity for the Next 36 team to partner with other local organizations like MEIC long with their existing corporate sponsors.

  • Demos announced for DCT27

    DemoCamp lineup has been announced:

    This is a great set of early stage Toronto and region (Waterloo) based startups. Some of the folks are getting their second shot at a demo. It will be interesting to see how far they’ve come from their launch. I hope that everyone takes the time to understand the need for “wow” in the demo. And remember the goal is not to heckle but to give entrepreneurs a chance to show what they’ve been working on, how they’ve improved and to get feedback.


    DemoCamp Surprises

    Anand Agarawala has stepped up with an EPIC DemoCamp sponsorship as a thank you for all of the support from the Toronto community and DemoCamp for helping promote and inspire Bumptop. We’ll take none of the credit for Anand and the Bumptop team’s hustle in getting acquired by Google, but we’ll enjoy the rewards at the next DemoCamp.

    Sponsors

    I know and appreciate everyone paying for a ticket. We don’t run DemoCamp as a business. We run it as a cost recovery event, that is, our goal is not to generate a profit (often we run at a loss). We couldn’t do this with out the support of our sponsors. There are some great local companies including:

    • Anand Agarawala and Bumptop! You have to be at DemoCamp from 4pm-6pm to find out what it is.
    • Eqentia builds the a semantic publishing platform for knowledge tracking & competitive analysis
    • XtremeLabs is hiring agile engineers and ui designers for the hottest mobile development company on the planet.
    • Microsoft BizSpark jumpstart your startup and speed up your time to market.
    • FreshBooks is the fastest way to track time and invoice your clients.
    • Mercanix develops tools that enable organizations and their people to do good work.
    • Rob Hyndman is the bee’s knees & the cat’s pajama. Startups looking for a lawyer. Start here.
    • Rypple builds social software that makes workplace feedback easy and fun.
    • Dayforce is the an enterprise software company in Toronto. Hiring dev, qa, ui and sales ninjas.
    • Kontagent is a Facebook Fund funded startup that is hiring rockstar developers in Toronto.
    • OCE helping commercialize the next generation technologies like Bumptop & Sysomos.
    • KPMG Information, Communications & Entertainment (ICE) practice helps startups to succeed in turbulent markets.
  • Rypple raises $7m in new round


    Rypple has gone public about their latest round of financing which appears to include Bridgescale. Bridgescale’s participation likely came through their acquisition of Edgestone. Edgestone’s GPs participated personally in Rypple’s initial angel round.

    We will post more as we hear it.

    Here is the official word from Ryple:

    Toronto, Ontario – September 29, 2010 – Rypple announces it has raised $7 million in financing led by Bridgescale Partners. Rypple makes social software that makes workplace feedback easy. Howard Gwin, a Bridgescale partner and former EVP at PeopleSoft, and Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management, will join the company’s board of directors.

    Additional investors include: Edgestone Capital Ventures, Extreme Venture Partners, Peter Thiel, Seymour Schulich, Roger Martin and Joe Sigelman. To date, the company has raised a total of $13 million in financing.

    “Employees and managers are fed up with HR software that sucks. They don’t want top-down performance software focused on process, not results. What people really want is frequent, useful feedback to do their jobs better. Rypple delivers this feedback so people can stay on track, learn faster, and consistently hit their goals.” said Daniel Debow, co-CEO, Rypple. “Our customers are innovative companies including Mozilla, Rackspace, and VivaKi (Groupe Publicis). Their employees use Rypple because they love it, not because they’re forced to.”

    “Rapid adoption social software is providing companies big and small with a significant competitive advantage,” said Howard Gwin, partner, Bridgescale Partners.  “Rypple is a key solution for companies today as it enables the process of continuous feedback. Their customers tell us that they have seen a noticeable improvement in employee engagement, focus, and performance since they started using Rypple.”

    “We were up and running within an hour of introducing Rypple to our organization. We were customers before we were investors.” said Amar Varma, co-founder, Extreme Venture Partners. “Our team’s love of Rypple was a big part of our motivation to get involved. People want relevant feedback at work and no other company can deliver it as easily and effectively.”

  • StartupWeekend Toronto recap – 200 people, 13 ideas and 5 winners

    This is a guest post by Chris Eben who, along with Karthik Soravanahalli and Ahmed Badruddin, organized StartupWeekend Toronto.

    Startup Weekend Toronto ended late Sunday night. While I’m still going to need a few days to reflect on the weekend, I thought I’d take a few minutes to jot down some thoughts…

    Given my initial apprehension about taking on the organization of this event, I couldn’t be happier with the way things turned out. What an amazing community of startup and tech professionals and enthusiasts we have in Toronto. Starting with the buzz that began weeks before the event, it was clear that Startup Weekend needed to come to Toronto.

    Friday night was quite something. A capacity crowd of over 200 people gathered at Ryerson’s amazing Atrium. I kicked things off briefly and explained how I got involved and what Startup Weekend is all about, immediately sensing the excitement from the crowd to start pitching and building new startups. But first we heard from Mike McDerment of Freshbooks about truly understanding the benefit you provide with your startup. Mike was followed by a great panel made up of Leila Boujnane, April Dunford and Sarah Prevette, moderated by Dan Martell who came in from San Francisco to help out. Mike sat on the panel as well. Lots of great stuff here – we’ll be posting the videos of the entire weekend when they’re ready.

    And then onto the pitches… We had 38 people come up and give 60-90s pitches. This was amazing. I was so impressed with the level of participation and the great ideas. At this point, I had no doubt the weekend would be a success. Then came what I like to call “organized chaos.” Voting on ideas followed by team formation. After the top 20 ideas were selected teams started forming over the rest of the night and following morning, resulting in 13 great ideas and teams, ready to get working.

    Now the whiteboarding, coding, strategy discussions, business model validations, etc started in full swing with mentors wandering around helping out the teams and some great insights from our Saturday night speakers (Mark Ruddock, Tim Smith and James Lanthier). After many all nighters, lots of food and coffee, and some beers, the teams were ready to start pitching on Sunday at 4pm.

    The pitching is where it all comes together. What a site to see 13 teams come up and show what can really be accomplished in a weekend-  often from ideas barely conceived until the Saturday morning, and with teams made of people who just met. Most teams actually had mockups or working code and even a few live demos. TadWanna even had 2 paying customers. While there were officially 5 winners (the top 3 as voted by the community and the judges, and 2 categories for honourable mention and the startup most likely to change the world) all 13 teams did something special.

    Congratulations to our winners! Task Ave. took 1st place and upwards of $25k in prizes. Schedify took 2nd, winning some great prizes and is already invited to pitch to the Ryerson Angel Network. In 3rd, RateHub is well on its way and has a complete new set of features for an already great web app. In our other 2 categories, Styllist got honourable mention with a really cool and working demonstration and N2O showed us how they will change the world with a Facetime app bringing doctors together from around the world.

    There were so many other great ideas and startups that I truly hope will keep going. This is an amazing time in Toronto – the community is vibrant and something is in the air. We’ve already seen the talent this city and country has to offer and I know that there is so much more to come.

    With such great feedback after the weekend, we’re going to do it again in April 2011. Mark your calendars and come out to build something amazing.

    A special thanks to my co-organizers. Ahmed Badruddin is the founder of Simpleafy, a GreenTech startup helping home owners track and better understand their energy consumption and discover ways to reduce it. He’s passionate about energy efficiency – check out his blog. Karthik Soravanahalli brought together the SIFE Ryerson team to make this event work. He’s killing it for Tim Smith at Gridcentric and finishing off his degree at Ryerson. And of course, thanks to all our amazing SIFE Ryerson volunteers!

    Thanks of course to Marc Nager from Startup Weekend headquarters in Seattle. He’s one of the guys responsible for bringing these awesome events to cities all over the world!

    If you want to talk to me about Startup Weekend Toronto, get in touch. I blog at The Low Post and am on twitter – @ceben and @startupwkndTO.

    Thanks to all our sponsors and to everyone who took part!

  • Year One Labs "Office Hours" in Waterloo, Toronto and Ottawa

    The Year One Labs team will be in Waterloo and Toronto tomorrow, September 28th for “Office Hours” and follow that up with a visit to Ottawa as well (on Wednesday.)

    “Office Hours” gives entrepreneurs the chance to meet the partners, talk about the program we offer and connect with fellow entrepreneurs. It’s extremely informal. We’re not doing formal pitches, but we do encourage entrepreneurs (regardless of the stage you’re at with your startup!) to pitch us and talk to us about your ideas.

    You can learn more on the Year One Labs blog.

    Here’s the quick itinerary:

    • Waterloo – Tuesday September 28th 1:00PM – 3:30PM (Velocity Centre – U Waterloo) RSVP
    • Toronto – Tuesday September 28th 5:30PM – 8:00PM (Jet Cooper offices – 20 Maud Street) RSVP
    • Ottawa – Wednesday September 29th 4:00PM – 6:00PM (Code Factory – 246 Queen Street – 2nd floor) RSVP

    If you can, please RSVP. But you don’t need to RSVP – all entrepreneurs are welcome.

    Year One Labs is an early stage accelerator. StartupNorth wrote a brief post about Year One Labs when we launched.

  • Contest: The Art of Management tickets

    The Art of Management - Nov 15, 2010 - Toronto, ONOur friends at The Art of Productions have given us 2 tickets to give away. There are tickets to:

    You can buy a ticket right away and get $50 off the regular price (you’ll pay $349) — just use the discount code SK23 and visit http://www.theartofmarketing.ca/promo/SK23 or http://www.theartofmanagement.ca/promo/SK23.

    If this sounds familiar, it’s the exact same deal as our friends at NextMontreal.com (so you can increase your odds of winning by entering at both sites ;-). And we’ll just borrow the

    How to Enter

    • Just retweet this post. That will count as 1 entry. Tweeting multiple times won’t help.
    • For a second chance, help us out by completing this form:
      [gravityform id=1 name=Chancefor tickets to The Art of Management title=false description=false ajax=true]

    November 15, 2010 – The Art of Management

    Management lineup includes:

    Both events look like great networking and learning events. As a startup, we like the chance for “free” tickets.

  • David Crow is moving on from Microsoft

    John Oxley outed the news tonight. David Crow, one of the partners in crime here at Startupnorth, will be off the payroll at Microsoft as of the 24th of September.

    David has spent the last 4 years going to bat for startups inside Microsoft. Anyone who has asked for his help knows just how relentless he has been in making sure that the best entrepreneurs got the support they needed.

    I’m happy to see David moving on. Not because of anything to do with Microsoft, but I just think 4 years is long enough for anyone to stay at a corporate gig. It’s time for David to get back in the game and to kill it.

    Having worked with Dave to organize dozens of events and to write this blog, I can tell you that he is rare in his focus and his ability to obsess with details while still keeping this big picture in perspective (and to remind the rest of us about why we are doing what we are doing).

    He’s not talking about what’s next yet, but I know it’s going to be great.

  • How to prepare for a C100 Mentoring session

    We gearing up for the next 48 Hrs in the Valley here at C100 global HQ. We’ve learned a lot from previous 48 Hrs events so expect a few surprises, to be announced soon.

    But in the meantime, a few dates for you to be aware of:

    • Sept 29: Drop dead deadline for companies to complete the application form
    • Oct 7: Selected companies will be notified
    • Oct 13: First draft of mentor deck due
    • Oct 27-28: 48 Hrs in the Valley

    I know what you’re saying, “What the heck is this Oct 13 deadline? We gotta hand in drafts of our presentations??”

    Short answer: “Yes!”

    The upcoming 48 Hrs will be the C100’s eighth mentoring event and after each one the mentors always told us the same thing, “We wish the companies were more prepared.”

    That is a strange coincidence, because the companies always tell us, “Damn, I wish we were more prepared.”

    Well, the good thing about the C100 mentoring team is you only have to tell us something seven times before we start to take immediate action.

    To make sure everyone feels they are properly prepared, we are asking… nay, demanding… that all companies complete their mentor decks and submit to us by Oct 8 for feedback by our crack team of mentor experts.

    To help you out, here are some useful tips on how to prepare you 48 Hrs mentor deck:

    • Think of the biggest challenge  facing your company and talk about it. What exactly do you want to get mentoring on? (In C100, we call this the “challenge statement” meaning, what is the biggest challenge  facing your company right now)
    • Don’t get bogged down in technology: Mentors want to talk about business issues, not about speeds-and-feeds
    • Don’t talk history: Mentors want to discuss the here and now, the long road you took to reach your current destination probably isn’t relevant
    • Be specific: generic presentations get generic feedback. Drill down into one aspect of your business, describe what is going on, and ask for specific advice and feedback

    Here is a deck template all companies should follow. Your deck shouldn’t be more than nine slides long:

    1)      Executive Summary: Short bullet points what your company does and what is your “challenge statement”

    2)      The Market: Give mentors background on the market your company addresses

    3)      What do you do?: How do you address your chosen market

    4)      Who are your competitors?

    5)      Short background on the team (emphasis on short)

    6)      Financial snapshot including funding, revenues and expenses

    7)      Challenge statement: This is the most important slide of the deck… what issue do you want mentoring on? Be very clear and specific here

    8)      Context: How did this challenge come about? How have you addressed similar challenges in the past

    9)      Importance: Why is addressing this challenge important? What would happen if this challenge was addressed? What would happen if it wasn’t?

    Trust us, follow this template and your mentoring session will be way more valuable than if you didn’t.

    The goal is always to make the mentoring sessions as useful and impactful as possible. So we at C100 will be asking the companies early and often to provide drafts of their decks so we can help ensure they are prepared for the mentoring session and ready to go.