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:
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.
The one day bootcamps are being help in April and May 2011 from Halifax to London. The bootcamps are interesting, they provide entrepreneurs the opportunity to pitch and get feedback from trusted experts (yeah right I think I served as an “expert” in 2009 ;-). But it is a great opportunity to get a different set of eyes on your pitch. And it plays to the old adage, “how do you know when an entrepreneur is dead? he stops pitching”.
London: April 29th, 2011 – Cleantech, ICT, Life Sciences
Toronto: May 2nd, 2011 – Cleantech, ICT, Life Sciences
Ottawa: May 3rd, 2011 – Cleantech, ICT, Life Sciences
There is also the upcoming April 6th, 2011 11:30EST seminar with Mike Grandinetti (he’s also a TechStars mentor) focusing on “Lean and Mean Startups”.
April 6th: 11:30 EST (Upcoming Webinar – Soon)
Lean and Mean Start-ups – Presented by: Mike Grandinetti, Managing Director, Southboro Capital, Boston.
So you think you are ready? – 10 things you need to know before presentation day – A candid talk on presentations gone horribly wrong and how you avoid that – Presented by: Coby Schneider – Miller Thomson & Others.
These are great opportunities to learn about expanding into specific US markets. The DFAIT team brings key players to local markets and makes it easy to establish relationships that allow companies to grow. There are lots of opportunity to criticize some of the efforts, but the team at DFAIT have run this program for the past few years with varied success. It’s worth the time of startups actively looking to expand their customer base (this means that you’re beyond seed stage, you probably have customers, you have a product, you’re looking for a scalable business model) to explore how DFAIT can help.
The event is co-hosted by our sponsors and friends at KPMG are corporate partners helping DFAIT and startups. There are a lot of cross-border issues concerning corporate structure, financing, taxation and other where KPMG can leverage their experience to help early and growth stage companies.
The Web Startup Society at the University of Toronto is hosting a startup career faire on April 7, 2011.
This is a great opportunity for local startups looking to hire developers, interns, engineers, designers, and other smart problem solving kids from UofT.
Startups can apply to recruit, it’s $50 and the deadline is March 25.
Web Startup Society in partnership with Career Centre invites startups to apply for Startup Job Fair to be held on April 7th, 2011 from 1-4pm at Career Centre, Koffler Student Services Centre, 214 College Street, Toronto, ON
This application form will help us select which Startups would be eligible. A team of review panel consisting of someone from the career centre, a CS faculty member, and a KMDI member will decide which Startups would qualify based on two simple criteria.
We’re looking for companies that already have funding and have demonstrated the potential to provide a good level of job experience for student applicants. If you’re one of the companies that get selected, we request a $50 fee to cover the expenses of holding the event. If you have any further inquiries, kindly send an email to [email protected]. For more details, check out
It’s a great line up of speakers. I’ve seen Guy Kawasaki speak in the past. He hosted a conversation with Steve Ballmer at Mix08 in Las Vegas. And comedy ensued:
This is a giveaway. We have 2 tickets. The tickets have no cash value. Someone from StartupNorth will randomly select 2 emails submitted before 11:59:59 EST on Feb 27, 2011. There might be a skill testing question. Please only one entry per person. What’s an entry? Your name and email address. It’s our promise that we will always respect your privacy. From time to time we may email you to inform you about future events, or updates about the giveaway.
Entries are closed.
The promo code: LD27 gives you a $50 discount off the regular ticket price, or $100 discount for groups of 3 or more for The Art of Marketing March 7, 2011 event.
Danny Robinson (@dannyrobinson), Maura Rodgers (@maurar), Boris Wertz (@bwertz) started StartupVisa.ca as a response to the StartupVisa.com created by Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Shervin Pishevar, Brad Feld, Paul Kedrosky, Manu Kumar, & Fred Wilson in the US. The goal is to modify existing Canadian immigration policy to expedite the process for entrepreneurs and change the “minimum net worth of C$300,000 that was obtained legally” to include provisions for “Canadian funding of $150,000”.
Danny was giving me a hard time the other night because I have not signed or blogged about the StartupVisa.ca efforts (unlike Mark MacLeod, Financial Post, HackerNews, NextMontreal, TechVibes and others). I agree with the efforts in principle. I think changing the immigration policy to be more entrepreneur friendly would help Canada. My issues centre around the wording of the proposed changes. I am not policy writer, I am not a policy wonk. But it feels like the proposed changes do not meet the requirements of good policy. This is where the proposed US legislation feels more robust and complete. The provisions of the existing Entrepreneur program are great and include:
You must control at least one-third of the equity and actively manage a qualifying Canadian business for at least one year after becoming a permanent resident.
The business must have created the equivalent of at least one full-time job (1,950 hours of paid employment) for a Canadian citizen or permanent resident (other than yourself and your dependants)
I would like to see provisions that include:
a better definition of “qualified Canadian funding” – we’ve seen attempts at this in the past including FedDev efforts for Southern Ontario, the goal is to specify funding sources to avoid potential immigration challenges of related to regulating potential groups of investors
further clarification about immigrant equity ownership as related to the investment dollars. Currently the criteria includes a definition of ownership of a Qualifying Canadian business as defined by meeting any 2 of the 4 presented criteria around ownership, net assets, sales, income or jobs. It is unclear how the impact of pre- and post- money valuations potentially have on the ownership requirement. My concern is that including further investment could dilute the entrepreneur and make them ineligible according to the sales or ownership criteria already defined in the immigration policy.
I was also curious at the substantive change from $300,000 to $150,000. This reduction is fairly significant. The only reason I can think is that the proposed changes are about investment per person and not corporate investment. My guess is that this requirement is reduced given anecdotal evidence of current entrepreneurs and investment levels in their company from a single angel investor, i.e., this is the investment amount in the company divided by the number entrepreneurs to get $150,000. It’s just unclear how this number was derived.
So I agree with the efforts of StartupVisa.ca crew even if I think their proposal is a little too simplistic to actually function and requires the support of policy and immigration wonks (of which I am neither). What can you do? Read the Open Letter Regarding Startup Visa Canada and if you agree endorse the petition.
Our friends at Rogers Ventures are hosting a DEMO day with VentureBeat on January 13, 2011. This is part of a east coast swing that includes New York and Toronto. They are looking to finalize the presenting companies. If you are interested in being one (1) of the ten (10) companies make sure you apply to present.
The great news is that even if you don’t/can’t pitch for the full day session there are still lots of opportunities. You can join the social happening at the Century Room on King St W starting at 7:30pm. You need to register to attend.
It’s great that we’ve built a strong community of entrepreneurs, marketers, designers and developers in Toronto. It’s attracting world-class folks like Matt Marshall (@mmarshall) and Nate Werlin to brave the cold and snow (though still way less than NYC) and find great startups in Toronto. We even have DEMO alumni and DEMOgods like Scott Annan and Alec Saunders (though both are from Ottawa, hmmmm). It’s got me thinking we need to host another DemoCamp at some point in the near future. Stay tuned and I’ll see you on Jan 13th.
Our friend Howard Lindzon is back in Toronto on November 4, 2010. He’s having lunch with entrepreneurs.
Who: Howard Lindzon
When: November 4, 10:45am to 1:00pm
Where: POD 250 in the Podium Building, 350 Victoria St at Ryerson University
This is an open brown bag lunch. Come hang out with Howard.
Don’t know who Howard is? Seriously? He’s a rockstar. He’s crazy. And he’s an interesting guy as both an entrepreneur and as an investor. We had him at StartupEmpire back in 2008, he spoke at Mesh in 2009. He’s a native Torontonian who lives in San Diego. He’s just raised a $4MM C round for StockTwits.
He’s here looking to meet entrepreneurs. He’s going to share his experiences getting acquired by CBS, about raising money, and about building a compelling media outlet for investors (ps I love StockTwits it’s really a great example of what a modern Bloomberg looks like). The part that I love is that as Howard said “they can read about my successes, I’m going to talk about my failures”. This is awesome! I continually do a lot of things wrong, and I can’t wait to hear about the craziness of Howard’s mistakes. Because seriously his successes are awesome and that only means bigger fail and lessons learned.
Thanks to Karthik (@soravanahalli), SIFE, and William Mougayar (@wmougayar) at Eqentia for helping to make sure we take advantage of having world-class folks like Howard available.
The joys of starting a company and setting up the basics, you know things like finding a lawyer, getting articles of incorporation, shareholders agreement, business registration, employment agreements and setting up payroll for employees. It turns out that it has been since 2005 since I thought about the logistics of running payroll in Canada in any detail (BTW if some asks if you want to be in charge of running payroll, the answer is “<expletive /> NO”). The great news is that there is a solution for startups in Canada and it’s inexpensive. Well technically it’s free for companies with <5 employees and only $18/month for >6 employees.
The company is PaymentEvolution. It’s run by my friend Sam Vassa (@samvassa) and they were recently featured in the Financial Post. Despite the web presence that looks like it was last updated a decade ago, this is a new startup that is up and running and able to help Canadian small businesses with payroll.
Hallelujah, and it’s inexpensive
This is a great solution for startups. Basically the deal is there are no fees for the service, however, there are electronic banking fees are passed through to you as a user.
PaymentEvolution provides no cost payroll processing for smalls businesses with 5 or fewer employees. We’re serious – we don’t want payroll processing costs to encumber the growth of great small businesses. We’re small-business friendly and just want to provide a great service that allows these businesses to focus on what they do best. Like all our plans, we don’t charge extra for updates, the number of pay runs, or silly things like standard reports. We also give these firms the flexibility to pay their employees how they want – traditional cheques, direct deposit or even electronic funds transfer (fees may be incurred by the company’s financial institution).
This is just what startups need to process payroll and it’s cheap to boot.
This is great news for Canada, well at least Quebec until additional funds close. Real Ventures has launched today. With both JS Cournoyer and Mark MacLeod writing about the close of approximately $40MM of money that must be invested in Quebec. They are actively looking for seed investments in Quebec software, SaaS and Internet deals.
“We are seed investors in software startups based primarily in Quebec, though we will do deals in other markets. We like to be 1st money in and like to lead. We can do seed rounds in the six figures to get a product in market and can participate in series A follow ons for those companies that are hitting the gas pedal.” – Mark MacLeod
The great part about Real Ventures is the pedigree. The team is: John Stokes, JS Cournoyer, Mark MacLeod and Austin Hill. These are world class investors, entrepreneurs, executives and people who have had a hand in shaping policy, companies and entrepreneurs over the past few years.
The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario announced a new Investing in Business Innovation program. The program offers matching for early-stage venture funding. This is a $190MM running from 2010-2014.
There are provisions for startups and angel networks. Since we’re StartupNorth, let’s try to deal with the startup side first.
Startups who receive a termsheet from a qualified angel investor (as defined by the Ontario Securities Commission) or venture capital firm (registered with the Canadian Venture Capital association) are eligible to apply for up $1MM in loan from the federal government.
Restrictions:
Start-up businesses will be eligible for repayable contributions up to $1 million for no more than one third (33? percent) of total eligible and supported project costs.
An angel and/or venture capital investor(s) must be committed to provide at least two thirds (66? percent) of the cash contribution toward eligible and supported project costs.
In-kind contributions related to mentoring, networking, and other business skills cannot be considered as part of the angel or venture capital investor’s cash contribution.
A maximum of one project per eligible start-up SME can be funded under the initiative.
Direct eligible costs for start-up businesses may include:
Labour, capital and operating expenditures;
Materials and supplies;
Consulting and/or professional fees (limited to market rate); and,
Minor and non-capital acquisitions (e.g., software).
All project activities must be completed by March 31, 2014;
Basically there is federal government matching loans up to $1MM for startups that are raising angel or venture funding in Southern Ontario. This is a fantastic start.
It’s great for startups in Southern Ontario, it’s curious that the program is only available in Southern Ontario. Why not all of Canada? How are the repayment terms set? Is this a zero percent interest loan from the Federal Government? Does the term sheet have to be equity investment? Is convertible debt eligible? How do startups “demonstrate they are using business mentoring, counseling, or related services”?
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:
