There is a lot of crazy young talent kicking around. We’ve seen that great talent that UW Velocity is producing with Ted Livingston(@ted_livingston) at Kik. There are the Christopher (@golda) and Michael (@michaelmontano) at BackType. There is the stupidly awesome team at Extreme Venture Partners (@avarma, @fnthawar, @sundeep).
I thought I’d throw together a quick list of designers, developers and entrepreneurs that are young, hot, kicking ass and taking names. There is an amazing amount of talent in Canada. And this is who I’m watching because they are hot sh!t.
I am completely aware that this list is incomplete. But who are the tastemakers that are building the next generation of emerging technology companies that no one knows about in Canada. Help me find great talents that are under 40 (this is irrelevant, who are the entrepreneurs, designers and developers that are shaping things) and based in Canada.
[gravityform id=3 name=HotShit List Nomination ajax=true]
I am a huge F1 racing fan. And I was impressed to see a group of Ontario high school students participating in F1 in Schools at the Ontario Science Centre. It is an amazing concentrated effort to bring together partners and create an educational program for the succession of the people that keep Formula 1 teams building new innovations (that in turn inthrall an audience). The program is a multi-disciplinary challenge for students aged 9 to 19 years to design, build and race gas powered balsa wood F1 cars. What a great opportunity to build the next generation of engineers and designers that are interested in 3-D manufacturing, CAD/CAM, computational fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, engineering, etc. It provides a training ground to ensure that Formula 1 teams have an educated talent pool with practical experience and excitement.
It has started me wondering about the role we play in exciting the next generation of entrepreneurs. I remember reading that career choices are made by Grade 11 (source needed, I think it was in discussion around STEM careers and girls in IT from the Microsoft DigiGirlz program however I am not able to find the reference). Much of the work and research seems focused on increasing the number of girls that choose Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
In the US there is the work of the Kauffman Foundation that supports entrepreneurship through education, training, policy development and other activities.
“The Kauffman Foundation is working to further understand the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, to advance entrepreneurship education and training efforts, to promote entrepreneurship-friendly policies, and to better facilitate the commercialization of new technologies by entrepreneurs and others, which have great promise for improving the economic welfare of our nation.”
I really like how the Kauffman Foundation has divided up their Entrepreneurship Track: Youth Entrepreneurship; Minority Entrepreneurship; Higher Education; Capital, Markets and Economics; Knowledge, Training and Networks and Global Entrepreneurship. This division allows for the creation of programs, grants and offerings that support different strategic needs of each group.
I am really impressed with the efforts of the team at Communitech. They are doing a great job building the programs, partnerships, and policy work that supports the efforts of Waterloo Region. They have identified the gap left by many of the University focused programs like UW Velocity and Impact, by building and supporting the activities to attract and engage students before they make their post secondary decision. Communitech delivers programs like:
It is great to see that Waterloo Region really has an institution that is dedicated to supporting technology companies and startups. And is developing the necessary programs to interest kids in making STEM education and career choices. It shouldn’t be a surprise given that UWaterloo has a pioneered cooperative education program that revolutionizes the career experiences available to students.
There are other programs available that typically focus on post-secondary students We have programs like the:
I wonder who outside of Communitech (and maybe BCIC on the west coast) working on programs that support the development of entrepreneurship careers. Are there good global examples of entrepreneurship education and engagement for middle school or high school kids? Where can find other examples of what is working?
What programs can startups take advantage to find talent possibly with subsidies (yeah I can’t believe I’m saying that) to help develop the next generation of founders. The Government of Canada – Canada Business has a list of Grants, Contributions & Financial Assistance that is a great starting point for getting access.
Canada Summer Jobs – Hire a student in the summer, this subsidy could cover up to 50% of their wages.
What would be beneficial to startups is an agency that actively matches students and funding programs with my current business needs and stage of corporate development. Rather than relying on me to change my focus from product development, customer development, sales and marketing to educational program participation. It would be great if there was an member-driven organization like Communitech that was focused on making these programs accessible to me.
Who, how and what should be done to continue to build a culture starting with middle school and high school students to help encourage entrepreneurship as a career path? What do other startups want to see? I’m interested in hearing from John MacRitchie (@jmacritchie), Anand Agarwala (@anandx), Scott Pelton (@spelton), Brian Sharwood (@bsharwood), Lauren Friese (@LaurenFriese), Danny Robinson (@dannyrobinson) and others.
Why isn’t there a commuter train from Toronto to Waterloo? Ok, you might ask actually ask why Toronto doesn’t have a train from downtown to the airport but let’s leave that for a conversation with more educated politicians and policy wonks.
If the assumption is that UWaterloo is a top ranking university (possibly my alumni delusions that cause me to overlook UWaterloo’s non-placement on Times Higher Education rankings). And with more startups like Kik raising money with powerhouses like OpenText, RIM, MKS and Christie Digital. There are less reason for students to have to leave the reason. It makes it more attractive to rent an apartment for the year and stay in Waterloo to manage your costs on your coop program.
Maybe the argument is that the capital is better spent on more programs for entrepreneurs or road infrastructure. But it seems that one of the greatest assets to the Toronto startup community (UW Coop students and graduates) are disconnected by public transportation. I wonder what my UW alumni brethren like Farhan Thawar (@fnthawar), John Green (@johnphilipgreen), Amar Varma (@extremevp), Brydon Gillis (@brydon), Ali Asaria (@aliasaria), Razor Suleman (@iloverewards), Kunal Gupta (@kunalfrompolar) think about the need for better connections between Waterloo (assuming a stop in Guelph) and Toronto.
Tungle just made sense. Finding a time to meet is a huge pain. This may not be the sexiest, flashiest market, but it is huge. Every business person feels the pain.
Pivots
We didn’t have this term back in the early days, but Tungle sure went through some pivots. When I joined it was a peer to peer client a la Skype. And it was S-L-O-W. The service today bears little resemblance to that early product.
Data-driven
All startups but especially SaaS startups should be data driven. Tungle was no exception to this. We even built our own custom system (known as Knudderforce) and tracked daily, weekly and monthly stats. Those stats triggered many actions, automated outreaches, etc.
Luck
All good outcomes have an element of luck. I am sure there are many examples in Tungle’s case, but the one that stands out for me is closing our Series A funding in September 2008 just as Lehman Brothers crashed and the markets started tanking. If we had been only a few weeks later we might have had a much tougher time closing the round.
Focus, focus, focus
I’ve seen many teams get distracted as they grow. The CEO is off attending conferences, the company moves from market to market, etc. Tungle was laser focused on solving its’ users’ scheduling needs. At one point we were doing usability sessions every day. We reached out to every new user. We just stayed focused.
Platform
When we first were getting started, investors wondered if this was a feature vs. a product. Fast forward a few years and it is on its way to being a full fledged scheduling platform with APIs for other companies to use.
Strategic engagement
An ideal startup for me is one that can develop conversations with potential strategic partners as a natural part of its goto market strategy. This presumes you are building something that is important to the big players and assumes that you have a CEO capable of establishing and building those relationships. This was definitely the case with Tungle and this announcement is just a logical outcome of this reality.
The icing on the cake for me is that this is an all-Canadian deal. The Tungle team will be staying in Canada and continuing to make things happen.
Shared calendaring continues to be a difficult problem as you move to the edge of an organization. Just think about how difficult it is to see availability and schedules of people who are not on your GApps domain or your Exchange Server. Tungle gives RIM a leg up in having tooling like BBM and email and now calendaring that blurs the edge of the organization.
It was at StartupDrinks or the StartupNorth Meetup when I was talking with Christopher and Hany at VMFarms about our hosting woes. StartupNorth.ca had been offline for about 24 hours, and we were in the dark as our previous hosting provider was trying to recover from a disk failure. Now we don’t have particularly complex hosting requirements, but one of the requirements is uptime. We’d like our services to be available to entrepreneurs 24x7x365. Mind you we’re not willing to pay for 99.999% uptime (learn more about high availability). I would have been ecstatic with “three nines” aka 99.9% or 8.76 hours of downtime per year. But we had failed to meet that requirement at we were approaching 99.5% uptime and without a foreseeable solution we could hit “two nines” (99% uptime) if something wasn’t done by us or the hosting provider.
We have been very lucky. We had been able to host StartupNorth.ca on a shared hosting solution that allows us to operate our WordPress installation, StartupNorth.ca, a custom Django application, StartupIndex.ca, and some custom development (stay tuned) built in PHP5 + MySQL + Apache2 for $20/month. Cheap if you compare it to what we could be paying. It worked for a long time but I was in the dark and I couldn’t see a light indicating there would be a path to salvation.
I had met Christopher and Hany a few months before. I personally love the business. In fact, I think I pitch Scott Pelton (@spelton) a similar idea back in the summer of 2010. With Christopher and Hany there is a core team of experienced developer operations and network operations professionals that have cut their chops deploying and supporting high availability leading edge web applications at Avid Life Media (PHP, Rails, Django, etc.). At StartupNorth, we are big proponents of supporting our local ecosystem. We use:
There was no reason other than cost that we should have our server applications hosted with a non-local provider.
I approached Christopher and Hany with a proposition. The should sponsor StartupNorth, the sponsorship is an in-kind sponsorship. They provide hosting and support on their infrastructure. We add their logo to StartupNorth web site and page footers, plus we give them the opportunity to write a few posts. The posts aren’t meant to be marketing fluff. I’ve ask the VM Farms team to talk about their real-world experiences including:
their experience using different cloud services;
network architecture and application hosting for advanced web & mobile applications (think application server, MongoDB or Hadoop clusters plus relational datastores);
when/how startups should evaluate the different performance vs cost trade-offs in advanced applications (there’s nothing wrong with choosing AWS but when should you look for alternatives)
We are incredibly picky about our sponsors. We are even more picky about the posts and authors we ask to join us. We take our reputation and the commentary we provide about the Canadian startup ecosystem very seriously. We’re hoping that we can help educate entrepreneurs about advanced network infrastructure decisions and the impact these decisions can have on costs, performance and growth. And with the team at VMFarms, we have some partners that are experienced and capable of providing a unique 3rd party view of AWS, Rackspace, GoGrid, Azure, Linode, etc. and traditional hosting environments.
We’ve been on VMFarms for about 30 days now. We have had 2 outages in those 30 days. Both outages have been my fault. Hany and Christopher have been on the ball and responsive to help me diagnose, identify and fix the issues.
Upgrading WordPress 3.1 to 3.1.1 – the Unix user permissions and file access settings I configured on the web directory do not allow the FTP user to write to the web directory. WordPress automatic upgrade requires an FTP user (though we connect using FTP-SSL). I ssh’d to the server, wget the update and “tar -xvzf” to the wordpress directory. This overwrote the .htaccess file and broke the Apache rewrite rules. Resolution time: approximately 15 minutes (because I insisted on doing it myself).
StartupNorth.ca unavailable on April 19, 2011 – turns out we let our DNS registration expire due to an expired credit card. It was identified by 2 users (thank you William and Scott (@scotthom). Hany debugged in about 15 seconds and it required Jevon (@jevon) to renew the DNS registration.
The team at VMFarms have been fantastic. They are helping StartupNorth immensely. I’m really looking forward to some additional discussion about developer operations in startups (should be interesting given my network infrastructure does not yet include VMFarms – we’re github, Heroku and AWS EC2 + S3). I’m wondering what John Philip Green (@johnphilipgreen) uses at CommunityLend, Pete Forde (@peteforde) at BuzzData, Daniel Debow (@ddebow) at Rypple, David Ossip (@dossip) at Dayforce, Chris Sukornyk (@sukornyk) uses at Chango, and Mike McDerment (@MikeMcDerment) at FreshBooks use to host their different application layers.
The program has historically taken entrepreneurs that need to develop and grow. It has provided them with funding, space, education, access to some of the best entrepreneurs, marketers, business developers and engineers around. While the timeline for success has been different, the companies like Visibli, Uken Games, and Locationary have grown into 3 very strong, very hot Toronto based startups.
The 2011 Program has been updated based on the learnings from the past 2 years. Accepted entrepreneurs get:
Seed capital
Mentorship
Collaborative office space and shared resources
Shared Expertise
Network and Connections
We can argue about if this is fair market value or not, when compared to other seed programs. The Extreme Ventures team is revamping the details of the program. The changes take one of the best programs available and make it even more compelling for eager, resourceful entrepreneurs. It will really redefine incubator programs.
Why do I say that? Well I spent the first 3 months of development at Influitive living in the XtremeLabs space with the 2009 & 2010 cohorts. I chose to bring my startup and cofounders into this environment because it is the best in Toronto. There is an energy, a vibe of entrepreneurship, community, support and shared pain. There are world-class people like Fred Wilson that visit at the invitation of your office mates (thank you William). XtremeLabs and Extreme VP are launching world-class efforts like Hatch Labs with IAC will continue to bring the best in the world through the space. It is a great environment with the best people I have worked with anywhere – looking at you Farhan Thawar (@fnthawar) and Rick Segal (@ricksegal). All entrepreneurs can benefit from just being in the environment.
Who are they looking for?
We fund technology-oriented companies, with a focus on web or mobile-based software, but we are open minded to different ideas. We are looking for smart and fast-moving teams to participate. Typically all members of the two-four person teams will have strong technical abilities. We are looking for founders who have a unique understanding of a real customer problem and an innovative idea for solving that problem.
If you’re a startup looking for my personal favorite shared space and program you should consider applying to ExtremeU.
I started writing this post while working on my presentation for Enterprise Toronto‘s Small Business Forum 2010 on raising capital for high growth businesses. I’m by no means an expert at this topic, but there are a lot of basics that entrepreneurs and growth businesses can learn about both the type of capital and when to raise it. But Manu Kumar‘s (LinkedIn) must-read post (and the comments) about his Thoughts on Convertible Debt got me to thinking I would publish my list of resources. And Adeo Ressi‘s (@adeoressi) thoughts on Year of the Startup Default includes implications for entrepreneurs raising a lot of debt, because if Series A funding is more difficult to find than getting traditional bank loans or other sources of capital become more difficult with a large, even capped, debt load. There are a lot implications for entrepreneurs.
The starting point for my now almost 6 month old talk is the fantastic article by Bernard Lunn on Read-Write Web, The Capital-Raising Ladder, which defines the different types of capital that is available to startup companies and founders. The “ladder” concept is key in the article. Entrepreneurs generally have to start at the bottom of the ladder and work their way up each “rung”. Certain entrepreneurs can skip some of the rungs on the ladder particularly if they have had success in the past, i.e., it’s way easier for someone that has built a successful publicly traded company to raise angel or VC money than a student first out of school, but since much of this is a meritocracy it is easy for young entrepreneurs to demonstrate their ability to build successful companies and raise additional capital.
The implications of Manu Kumar’s post and Adeo Ressi’s are about the prevalence of startups raising convertible debt with angel investors because it is en vogue. Nivi (@venturehacks) has provided some of the best advice on founder fundraising at Venture Hacks and some good analysis of the impact and benefits of debt for entrepreneurs in his comments:
“Notes were good technology a few years ago but now there are better technologies like Series Seed that have many of the benefits of debt (speed, simplicity, less negotiation). And debt is pretty complicated when you really look at it. I’m guessing we’ll be back to equity in a couple years, for the better. But Series Seed and other equity docs need to be tested a bit more too.
2. You can work around this in two ways. The company can’t pay back the debt and it converts to equity at maturity. I always include these in debt agreements.” – Babak Nivi comment on Thoughts on Convertible Debt
The goal here is for entrepreneurs to have access to information to make informed decisions. I hadn’t thought about the impact that the potential debt load might have on Influitive’s ability to raise loans vs financing in the future.
The team behind Startup Festival (which StartupNorth is a Media Sponsor) has started the call for startups looking to pitch and launch at the festival. They are looking for startups in a variety of verticals, at a variety of stages of corporate development, and looking to raise funding or attention for their companies. It’s a great Canadian event that is guarranteed to have local, national and global investors and press attending.
You’ll be attending anyway, might as well get some great PR & exposure with attendees and speakers
StartupFestival is a great bridge between North America and Europe. And you’re considering accelerating your access to European markets
You’re actively raising funding and you want to get in front of the best investors and coaches in North America
You’re funnier than Dave McClure and Will Ferrell should produce a webisode for Funny or Die featuring “Your Startup Life” with Claire Daines having a reoccurring guest starring role
It’s nice. It’s concise. It’s clean. There is choice but it’s not overwhelming. It feels like there is a consolidated effort to make Montreal the hub for startups and technology in Quebec. There are other activities and groups but there seems to be a core group of influencers, activities, and events where high tech entrepreneurs can go to find others like them, potential employees, potential investors, etc.
I look at Ontario and I am concerned. We have what should be the building blocks for a great entrepreneurial soup. And we’ve seen some spectacular successes (Bumptop, Sysomos, Pushlife among others). But there is a lot of noise. Efforts divided between regions.
I’m not suggesting a “one ring to rule them all” strategy. There are grassroots efforts, there are provincial government efforts, there are local economic development efforts like:
It leads to the murky waters that are the entrepreneur community and support infrastructure in Ontario. There is no segmentation. There definitely isn’t self-selection. They use similar words to describe their activities: entrepreneurship, startups, technology, media, growth, etc. As entrepreneurs there is a paradox of choice about who to listen to, where to go for advice, support, mentorship and guidance.
We started StartupNorth as a way to document our experiences finding, using, evaluating other startups in Toronto and across Canada. It was a way to connect with others interested in startups, emerging technologies and business models, and to talk about the things in a context specific to Canada.
Waterloo = University of Waterloo + Wilfred Laurier University
Kingston = Queen’s University + Royal Military College
Guelph = University of Guelph
Halton Region = Sheridan Institute of Technology & Applied Learning
Durham Region = University of Ontario Institute of Technology
Hamilton = McMaster University
Toronto = University of Toronto + Ryerson University + OCAD
St. Catherines = Brock University
Sault St. Marie = Algoma University
North Bay = Nipissing University
Sudbury = Laurentian University
Ottawa = University of Ottawa + Carleton University
Mississauga = University of Toronto Mississauga Campus
London = University of Western Ontario
Markham = York University + University of Toronto Scarborough Campus
Windsor = University of Windsor
It’s interesting that California with an estimated population that is 3.7 times larger [1] than Ontario[2] has less innovation hubs than Ontario (12 in California to 14 in Ontario). (Sure from a per capita GDP calculation, Ontario is higher (Cdn$43,847 vs US$38,956) but it’s probably not entirely a relevant metric unless you’re a politician which I am not).
Photo by postbear eater of worlds – Some rights reserved CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
I’m wondering if rather than satisfising constituents with perceiving innovation benefits for votes, that we need to look toward innovation, education and economic growth programs that benefit citizens. I keep wondering what we are missing because of the existing programs and repackaging of programs for Ontarios entrepreneurs. Look at the job creation from a single venture firm, Union Square Ventures has portfolio companies with over 557 open jobs around the globe (128 are in NYC + Brooklyn). This is job creation. It’s focused on creating new positions, in a variety of rolls, that hopefully will attract new talent to the location.
Everyone loves to hates Toronto
Let’s all hate Toronto. It’s not uncommon for Canadians to dislike Toronto. But I don’t hear the same disdain for Montreal or Vancouver. But maybe that’s because I don’t live with their large gravity well pulling me closer. I choose to live downtown in Toronto because it’s where I want to be. I understand the lifestyle choices that others make to live elsewhere. There are days when the traffic, the people, the crazy, all get to me, but I love the collision of people, cultures, and ideas (go read Richard Florida for more thoughts on the Creative Class).
Are we missing an opportunity to raise the profile of Ontario companies because we don’t want to embrace the fact that Toronto is one of the major technology/media hubs? Are we diluting efforts by spreading the love and effort across 16 regions?
Details are still emerging but it sounds like another Toronto company has been acquired by the GOOG. We’ve been hearing that the purchase price is close to $25MM, hopefully that’s Canadian Dollars this week and not US Dollars.
Some rights reserved Photo by ALL CHROME
