StartupNorth

Year: 2011

  • CIX TOP 20

    This morning Rick Nathan, Robert Montgomery, and Chris Arsenault announced the 20 Canadian technology companies that have been selected to present at this year’s CIX conference. Many you’ve heard of, a few are well on their way, all definitely worth connecting with December 1.

    • Massive Damage – Founded by veteran app developers Ken Seto and Garry Seto, Massive Damage is building next generation location based massively multiplayer games for mobile devices.
    • Arcestra – Arcestra is a new cloud-based technology and business platform that streamlines commercial real estate transactions unlocking tremendous value for tenants, landlords, brokers, designers and suppliers in the multi-billion dollar commercial real estate market.
    • Vanilla Forums – Vanilla is open source community forum software that powers discussions on over 500,000 sites around the world.
    • Woozworld – Founded in 2010, Woozworld created and operates Woozworld.com, a Web 2.0 innovative social virtual world, specifically designed to answer the needs and expectations of tweens.
    • Wattpad – On Wattpad users discover a new form of entertainment where you can interact and share stories across text, video, images and through conversations with other readers and writers.
    • Infersystems – Infersystems has developed a proprietary, automatic predictive analytics engine based on non parametric statistics. The Infer RTB Optimizer enables marketers to effectively and efficiently optimize display media campaigns at the impression level in order to maximize CPA, CPC and/or profit.
    • Recoset – Recoset is a predictive analytics company that allows marketers to bring 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data together in real time and use economic models to make purchase decisions across multiple digital marketing channels.
    • ClearRisk – ClearRisk helps the insurance market by giving them a way to win in the mid market by providing the needed risk management solutions to medium sized companies.
    • Achievers – Achievers is an employee recognition solution that helps companies recognize brilliant performance and empowers employees to choose their own rewards.
    • Bitheads – An award-winning product development company that is creating a unique cloud-based solution for a large and emerging entertainment market.
    • Shoplogix – Shoplogix envisions a manufacturing industry where every manufacturer has access to the right information to make the right decisions.
    • True Voice – True Voice Technologies caters to organizations that recognize the importance of live conversation and how it can play a pivotal role in their business.
    • Polar Mobile – Polar Mobile provides media companies globally an industry-leading Platform that makes it fast and easy to launch branded mobile Apps across every smartphone.
    • Wave Accounting – Wave Accounting is the fastest-growing online accounting tool for small businesses around the world. Wave is 100% free, offers complete accounting made ridiculously easy, and is designed for the real-world needs of small business owners.
    • Nexalogy Environics – Nexalogy Environics is a leading Canadian provider of social media/ research technology and consulting services. Nexalogy takes the guesswork out of social data analytics.
    • Quickmobile – QuickMobile is a software development company that builds interactive, engaging mobile applications and mobile websites for audiences at conferences, trade shows, film festivals and other events.
    • Responsetek – ResponseTek helps organizations see the link between poor customer service delivery and retention and growth problems.
    • Nexj Systems – NexJ Systems (TSX: NXJ) is a leading provider of enterprise private cloud software, delivering customer relationship management solutions to the financial services, insurance, and healthcare industries.
    • TribeHR – TribeHR provides a Software as a Service human resources management tool for small and medium businesses to reduce the time, cost and aggravation resulting from managing human resources on a tight budget.
    • Evoco – Evoco is an enterprise class, software-as-a-service provider that integrates real estate management, project data management, and facilities management solutions for multi-location real estate owners.

  • The Untold Story of Kobo

    So I read most of the news this morning around Kobo and the links being passed around. Generally I was miffed. When folks in the startup scene complain about media doing a lame job covering entrepreneurial stories, this is a great example. The story being published in the media is “Indigo sells Kobo”, “Indigo builds Kobo”, etc, etc. All Indigo, all the time. Probably due to PR agencies spinning the story that way, and also due to lazy business journalism. Well, having chatted with a bunch of folks involved with Kobo, I have a different take on the Kobo story:

    Mike Serbinis

    If you are in the startup scene in Toronto and you have not heard of Mike Serbinis – shame on you. He is another example of an amazing entrepreneur in the community who has been wildly successful. The first company he started, DocSpace, was an internet leader in security. He founded it in 1997, and went on to sell it to CriticalPath in 1999, for whom he was CTO and EVP marketing for some time. Throw in a master’s in engineering, a few patents, and you can see why folks were pretty excited about his return to Canada, joining Indigo in 2006.

    The Indigo/Shortcovers/Kobo story is as such. In 2007, 2008 Serbinis starts lobbying Indigo about the coming sea of change called “ebooks”.

    In April of 2008, Shortcovers is created within Indigo. Shortcovers is an online ebook store and mobile app meant to work across the plethora of new smarter devices – Apple, Android, BlackBerry, Palm, etc. Access to books on any device.

    This date is important, April 2008. If you think this is just another dumb Canadian “me-too” play, you should look up the launch date of the Kindle. The Kindle launched in November of 2007. And Amazon blew the Kindle launch, and had no stock available until April of 2008. Every attempt before April of 2008 at ebook readers and online ebook stores had been nothing short of disasters, ripe with lost capital. Let me double down on this point:

    ebook Sales 2007-2010

    In 2007 and early 2008 it was NOT obvious that ebooks would be a big factor, and that Indigo should meaningfully go after the ebook space.

    So Mike Serbinis, within Indigo, stared at this in 2007/2008 and said “Indigo should enter the ebook space”. Wow – those are some big brass entrepreneurial balls.

    So they create Shortcovers. Shortcovers name was from their original “gimmick” in that they let folks buy books a chapter at a time. Shortcovers was a pure ebook store & software client. No hardware. They were originally intending to put their ebook app on as many devices as possible. No hardware. So somewhere in 2009, things change.

    Kobo is Created

    Serbinis then goes on to do the unthinkable. At some point in 2009, he see’s the only way for Shortcovers to get critical mass adoption is to launch its own hardware. Whattt????

    Shortcovers is a software company. Serbinis is a software exec – CIO & EVP Online at Indigo. Indigo is a brick and mortar retailer. They have ZERO hardware background. That’s a big-ass, high-risk pivot folks!!

    So he goes off with his “lets build a device” vision and convinces Indigo to spin them off into their own business, but also gets Indigo to cough up another $5mm as part of a $16mm round where he gets Borders, RedGroup & one of the most famous Asian investment firms around – Cheung Kong Holding.

    In early-mid 2009, it probably looked like launching a new ebook reader was a good idea. By the end of 2009 though, everybody and their sister was launching a new ebook reader. Check out this article:
    http://www.zdnet.com/photos/ces-2010-top-10-new-e-book-readers/382181. Everybody I know who went to that CES said “maannnn, so many ebook readers”.

    I remember talking to Dan Leibu, CTO of Kobo, who in early 2010 was nervous as hell about launching their own device. He said something to the effect of “if we had known so many ebook readers were going to launch, we probably wouldn’t have launched our own”.

    Kobo launched in July 2010, well after many of the above devices were in market. How did they do? The rumour on the street is that Kobo cracked $100mm in sales in its first 12 months. $100mm in revenue in its FIRST YEAR!!! They only raised $16mm in their A round and built a $100mm revenue company in 12 months. That is simply unbelievable. How about you other startups, have you done 10X your initial investment in revenue yet?

    And how did the rest of the industry do? Anybody know where the Skiff Reader, the Plastic Logic Queue, the Alex Reader, and so on and so forth ended up? Probably not with $100mm in sales and a $315mm acquisition.

    And that my friends is why I’m miffed at the coverage on Kobo. This is a wild and crazy story entrepreneurial story full of big risky moves. Its a story of an entrepreneur doing things that only great entrepreneurs can do – even making elephants dance. And its a rare story in Canada, and as such a story that deserves proper coverage.

  • FounderFuel cohort explodes onto the scene

    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.

    FounderFuel DemoDay #FFDemoDay by deniszgonjanin
    Photo by deniszgonjanin

  • The Changing Landscape of Venture Capital

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Kevin Swan (LinkedIn, @kevin_swan). Kevin has cut his chops doing product management at Nexopia.com before becoming it’s CEO. He moved to the dark side with Cardinal Venture Partners and is now a Principal at iNovia Capital.   Thankfully he is an MBA dropout and that’s why we like him. Follow him on Twitter @kevin_swan or OnceABeekeeper.com. This post was originally published on November 4, 2011 on OnceABeekeeper.com.

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    There has been a lot of discussion recently on the changing landscape of venture funding and what it is leading to. I thought that it would be worth digging into this a bit and, as most of the discussion and data is from the United States, put a Canadian spin on it as well.

    There are two driving factors that are shaping the current startup landscape – the extremely low barriers and costs to start a tech company and the availability of seed or angel funding. Now, I am the last one to think that there should be any barriers to starting a company, but you need to make sure you are not just starting a company because you can. You need to know what you are getting into and, if you plan to raise any capital, know what is lying ahead.

    The number of new startups we are seeing has been increasing at an alarming rate over the past couple of years across North America. Did you see Paul Graham’s recent tweet that Y Combinator was receiving an application a minute? All that starting a legitimate company takes these days is a couple of smart people with computers. Getting to the next stage is a different story though.

    The seed and angel funding market has exploded with many new “super angels” as well as emerging seed funds entering the space. It was joked that a Google engineer could quit, walk onto the street and get a $500K angel investment to start a company. This is not far from the truth as anyone in the upper echelons of web development and design talent has a good chance of getting seed money these days.

    Capital raised and invested by venture firms.So, what is starting to happen to all these companies? Well, like most startups, they need more money. Some need money to fuel massive growth – these rounds have turned into highly competitive financings and are attracting crazy valuations. However, most (~99%) are going to run out of money while showing some progress, but not enough to have VCs scrambling to write checks. To make matters even more challenging, VC fundraising continues to drop to levels not seen since before the dotcom boom. This scenario is even more alarming in Canada.

    Despite all these changes one thing still remains – it costs a lot of money to scale a company. Sure getting started is cheap, and that is great, but you are eventually going to need money to build a big business. If you are really fortunate you will be able to do this through sales, but few have that opportunity. The result is a large demand of startups needing Series A and bridge funding and a smaller supply of available funds. Many believe that this is a healthier environment as the returns of venture capital since the dotcom boom have been less than desirable as the industry became bloated. It is important to know that most VC funds have a 10-13 year life so all that money raised in the late 90s and early 2000s is just now starting to wind up.

    So what about Canada?

    Well, whether you believe it or not the border is becoming much less relevant when it comes to venture funding so Canadian startups (and VCs) are all in pretty much the same boat. The complaint most commonly heard in Canada is that there is not enough early-stage funding. I disagree. Great companies in Canada are getting funded and acquired. However, with the increased competition for Series A funding there are a lot of good companies that won’t be able to raise money. This does not mean that they won’t be successful, but they are going to have to take a path that doesn’t rely on venture funding. Unfortunately many don’t plan for this reality.

    With all that said I, like many, are concerned with the direction venture capital fundraising is going in Canada. While it is great that US funds are now starting to ramp up investing in Canada they usually do it alongside Canadian funds – such as the recent case of Union Square’s investment in Wattpad alongside Golden and W Media. Also, Canadian funds are valuable in actively recruiting US funds into local companies. While it is great having talented investors from the US active up here it does not replace the feet on the ground that are needed and Canadian investors fill.

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Kevin Swan (LinkedIn, @kevin_swan). Kevin has cut his chops doing product management at Nexopia.com before becoming it’s CEO. He moved to the dark side with Cardinal Venture Partners and is now a Principal at iNovia Capital.   Thankfully he is an MBA dropout and that’s why we like him. Follow him on Twitter @kevin_swan or OnceABeekeeper.com. This post was originally published on November 4, 2011 on OnceABeekeeper.com.


  • Everyday be hustlin’

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    AdParlorCongratulations 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.

  • Wave Accounting acquires Small Payroll

    Emboldened with financing from OMERS Ventures and Charles River Ventures, Wave Accounting is consolidating their position as a leading provider of SaaS business applications, expanding from accounting into payroll with the acquisition of Small Payroll.

    “Our intention is to do for small business payroll what we did for small business accounting. Namely, we’re taking something complicated, confusing and expensive for the small business owner, and making it ridiculously easy and affordable.”

    Small Payroll was launched in 2009 by Sean Walberg, an application developer in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He discovered a need for a straightforward, affordable payroll tool when he was faced with deductions for a caregiver he hired for his children. “I had worked at a big payroll company, so I understood what needed to be done. Even so, I found it to be a pain to use the government’s online calculators and then keep track of things on spreadsheets. And the payroll companies are too expensive, especially for the little guys.”

    Wave Payroll handles all the aspects of payroll that most small business owners will need, including:

    • direct deposit to employees’ bank accounts
    • calculations of wages and overtime
    • withholding deductions; and monthly remitting to the government
    • income tax forms (including the Canadian T4) and Records of Employment

    All the features will be included in a simple pricing model, for a flat rate of a few dollars per employee per pay run. Wave Accounting and Wave Payroll will operate as complementary but separate applications. Wave Accounting will remain 100% free. Wave Payroll is now in private beta.

    For an invitation to the public beta, sign up at: WavePayroll.com

  • Startup Weekend Toronto & GEW

    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!

  • Startup Blood Bath – What a Recession Feels Like

    Today looks like a bit of a blood bath on the markets, so I figured it is as good a day as any to talk about what an economic downturns feels like for startups. I was “fortunate” enough to launch a company the day Lehman collapsed in 2008 (Sept 15th!!), and got to see the first hand impact of the downturn. We also were raising a B round during that time.

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    Most media seems to paint the picture of this post-apocalyptic world where suddenly all funding disappears and everybody wakes up and the tide has gone out and everybody is naked. I disagree. To me, the downturn felt more like death by 1000 paper cuts, such as:

    • Your churn will climb. Partly because of non-payment, failed credit cards, canceled credit cards, etc. If you do churn reports, “cutting back” and “not feeling the value” will increase as reasons.
    • Suppliers/Partners will stop paying you in a timely way, some never. Your average AR period will start to run at first slightly longer, then much longer. You’ll probably need to hire a baseball bat.
    • If you have physical product, distributors/channel will send back inventory because they are getting rid of any “risky” inventory and focusing on basics, i.e. products & goods that move easily like toilet paper and milk.
    • Conversion rates will start declining for every marketing trick you try (except lowering price). And with that, cost of acquiring customers goes up. You’ll also probably just invest more into marketing as an initial reaction to declining customer counts.
    • Your ISP (or any low margin, commodity supplier you use) gets “acquired” by 3 different entities in 12 months and start having annoyingly regular outages.
    • Angel investors, or anybody holding debt, turn into vicious debt collectors. As terms reach they demand outrageous interest. Now you are paying 2 employees worth of interest per month.
    • You are forced to lower price, at first by small amounts, and then gradually more.

    So if you increase churn by 2%, increase acquisition costs by 10%, chop price/revenue by 10%, do you know what you have???

      A Broken Business Model that is Not Fundable.

    More good news, VCs and angels get caught in this churn. Exits disappear (2008 VC backed M&A was down 54% from 2007!!!) and with it RoI. Many “busted business models” appear in the portfolio, and soon they have to get written off. It gets nasty. VCs who are dying stop feeling like the Fred Wilson-ian brothers-in-arms company builders, and they start to feel more like debt collection agents. SELL YOUR COMPANY! MERGE WITH THIS CRAP COMPANY! LETS PARACHUTE IN A NEW GOLDEN CEO! PAYCUTS! WHY ARE YOU GUYS GETTING PAID?

    The Good News

    Here’s the first good news. Only two things on the planet can force you to die: 1. YOU – You Give Up & 2. Debt Gets Called.

    The second piece of good news. Some businesses do great at managing downturns. Why? Execution and a little luck. You can track all the little death by a 1000 paper cut stuff I listed above, see that the world is changing and manage it. If people stop paying you or start delaying on payments, you gotta get out there and do some hard nose collecting. If churn starts to rise because of credit card defaults, try to bill in new ways – use different billing dates, bill in multiple smaller chunks, etc. If you have to lower price, get a new product out or a range of products so you can defend average price. If you see it coming and are fast enough, you can react and your company can survive.

    The third piece of good news. All of this starts happening before big market moving catastrophes happen. Bad “paper cuts” were happening months/weeks before Lehman collapsed. In the summer of 2008 other startups I knew were having churn & credit card payment issues.

    There are a lot of folks who survived 2008/2009 and built profitable businesses around Canada. Would love to hear some of your thoughts.

  • Where are the Canadian VC bloggers?

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    I’m awarding Mark MacLeod (@startupcfo) of Real Ventures the Canadian VC Blogging Superhero Badge. Mark is producing world-class class content focused on SaaS Math including:

    This is content that every entrepreneur looking to understand the basic metrics and mechanics of a SaaS business should read. Mark is the one Canadian VCs producing must read, world class content. It is the first time a Canadian VC has been producing content since Rick Segal switched teams (we’re much happier with Rick playing for the entrepreneurs). Rick’s post on Inside the Process is still the de facto standard for understanding the fundraising process from a VC perspective..

    I keep wondering why more Canadian VCs don’t produce content.  It’s not like they don’t have access to blogging tools or the understand of how they should be used. For example, Inovia Capital uses their blog as a promotional tool for their portfolio and their activities in the community (not to pick on Chris, John, Kevin and team because they are really an amazing entrepreneur friendly firm that any entrepreneur would benefit from having involved in your company).  We have others like Boris Wertz blogging about his portfolio and his analysis of the industry including his support activities like StartupVisa Canada. It is just that in comparison to quantity and quality of US investors exploring the power of the medium to reach potential entrepreneurs. We have had some other interesting attempts like DigitalPuck.ca and The C100 to bring together Canada focused investment discussion. The other very interesting blog is Mark R McQueen’s blog (@markrmcqueen). But why are there only 2 Canadian VCs writing interesting content for the medium they are investing in?

    Using the terrible “the Canadian market is one-tenth the US market” you might deduce there should be only 10 interesting US VCs blogging. Bullshit. Larry Cheng provides a list of 100 VC blogs by traffic, some of which like Rick’s blog are no longer active. Here is my short list of 30 very interest US VCs blogs you should be reading (or at least on your radar).

    1. David Skok (@bostonVC)
    2. Fred Wilson (@fredwilson)
    3. Mark Suster (@msuster)
    4. Paul Graham (@paulg)
    5. Dave McClure (@davemcclure)
    6. Albert Wenger (@albertwenger)
    7. Brad Feld (@bfeld)
    8. Roger Ehrenberg (@infoarbitrage)
    9. Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz)
    10. Mark Andreessen (@pmarcablog)
    11. Chris Dixon (@cdixon)
    12. Jeff Bussgang (@bussgang)
    13. Nivi and Naval – Venture Hacks
    14. David Hornik (@davidhornik)
    15. Fred Destin (@fdestin)
    16. Josh Kopelman (@joshk)
    17. Will Price
    18. Bill Gurley (@bgurley)
    19. Mike Arrington (@arrington)
    20. Ed Sim (@edsim)
    21. Seth Levine (@sether)
    22. David Cowan
    23. Scott Weiss (@W_scottweiss)
    24. Bijan Sabet (@bijan)
    25. Lightspeed Venture Partners
    26. Mark Peter Davis (@markpeterdavis)
    27. Mike Hirshland (@VCMike)
    28. Larry Cheng
    29. Rob Go (@robgo)

    Maybe if you compare at the Q2 investment comparison it’s $7.5B by NVCA vs. $328MM by the CVCA where Canadian investment is 4.37% or the US VC market is roughly 23x bigger. It doesn’t matter. It seems that an interesting blog with insight and analysis of the market and trends is a requirement to differentiate and attract entrepreneurs in the US market.Why not here? Are Canadian VCs just lawyers, bankers and accountants with no real insight into market trends or company operations that can help entrepreneurs? I don’t believe that. So why are only 2 Canadian VCs actively blogging and providing insights? Is it that there is a limited number of potential deals and VCs already see every interesting deal? Is it that they are worried about competing against US led deals and don’t want to expend the effort to write a high quality blog? Do Canadian VCs not understand the medium?

    It doesn’t matter. This is an open call for any Canadian VC to become an active blogger on StartupNorth.ca we’d love to have you write insightful pieces about the funding, market and landscape to help educate and inspire entrepreneurs.

  • Wave Accounting closes $5MM from CRV & OMERS

    Wave AccountingLooks like US VCs are continuing to look at deals in Canada. Wave Accounting announced a $5MM Series A led by Charles River Ventures (CRV) with follow on participation from OMERS Ventures. It is great to see Devdutt Yellurkar (LinkedIn) looking north of the border. Devdutt has an amazing track record at CRV and previously at Rho Ventures, Sterling Commerce and Yantra Corporation. Guessing based on the press release that Devdutt will join Peter Carrescia (LinkedIn, @pcarrescia) from OMERS Ventures on the Wave Accounting board.

    Great news for startups, we’ve now seen Matrix Partners (TribeHR), Union Square Ventures (Kik & Wattpad), CRV (Wave Accounting), Bessemer (Shopify), Freestyle/Greylock/Embracardo (GoInstant) and one other Sand Hill Road firm all make active early investments in Canada. This doesn’t include the Canadians that have raised during stays in the Valley during YCombinator and 500Startups – Vidyard, Upverter (True Ventures), BackType (True Ventures), Kiip (True Ventures), Rewardli (500Startups) and others.

    This is great for Canadian entrepreneurs.