StartupNorth

Author: Jonas Brandon

  • Ladies Learning to Code is Not About Women

    There is this small but fierce not-for-profit called Ladies Learning to Code. It has pretty straightforward but profound ambitions: “designed to help girls see technology in a whole new light – as a medium for self-expression, and as a means for changing the world.” (Girls Learning to Code camp).

    I started my first tech company while I was still in grade school. That experience changed the path of my life forever and I was able to do that because when I was in 7th grade I started to learn to program.

    My family couldn’t really afford a computer, so I used the ones in the computer lab at school a lot. There was a math teacher, Mr. Murley, who would basically be there to open the lab and help teach programming 24/7. I also had some neighbours who had a computer and I would stay there until midnight many weekend nights.

    Learning to code early on taught me a few things I am forever grateful for. I learned that I could create whatever I wanted. At that age and in that time you really did have the sense that you could change the world with a few hundred lines of code. All you had to do was find something that was broken or an idea that had potential and you could just build it. I think you can build even more today and because there are better ways to distribute you can have an amazing impact.

    A lot of navel gazing here, I know.

    There is no more important challenge for the tech community in the next decade than to find a way to make programming accessible to as many children as possible.

    We need to do that for a lot of reasons. We need future employees of course, and we need a more tech-savvy population to market in to, but we also need a broader and more diverse pool of ideas and inspiration.

    We need kids to believe that they can change the world so that they can grow in to adults who do change it. There may be no better way to enable them to do that than helping them learn to code.

    So, when I saw Ladies Learning to Code for the first time I had no small hope that this wouldn’t be just about teaching women to program. My hope  is that we can take the model that works for Ladies Learning to Code and that we can find ways to apply it to help make programming a less mysterious endeavour for every curious mind out there.

    It’s true that not every child will want to program and I am sure only a fraction will pursue it as a career choice. I also know however that no child who learns will be unchanged. They will learn that they can create something from nothing, that there is nothing they can imagine that they cannot build, and that every tool they possibly need is available and free.

    My home province recently took the X-ACTO-knife to the public school IT budget. As if growing up in the most rural province in Canada doesn’t make it hard enough for kids to pursue a future in startups, software development or IT, now there is a provincial government which is actively dismantling IT in education. (Note: Premier Ghiz– who the hell thought that was a good idea?)

    I have little hope that our governments will figure this out in the next 20 years and so while school budgets are slashed by uncompromising governments, we have a job to do.

    Ladies Learning to Code gets us off to a fantastic start, but the work is just beginning.

  • If you want to change the ecosystem you need to build an amazing startup

    At Founders and Funders this week we took some time to interview Dan Debow. It was a bit of a love-in I admit but that is just because I really love how much passion Dan has for helping those around him. He has made a big difference in a lot of people’s lives. I’ve benefitted from it and so have dozens of others in the Canadian startup community.

    One thing that Dan said really struck me. A little context might help though.

    A lot of folks have been working hard to build a startup ecosystem in Toronto. For over half a decade guys like Dan have been pouring energy in to helping anyone with an idea and a glimmer in their eye to start a startup. There are of course formal organizations that do this on behalf of the government, but the fact is that making Toronto a viable city for startups has been a mostly clandestine movement. People working on the fringes to do what they believe in.

    Sometimes you hear complaints about the ecosystem. Whether it is Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver or Halifax you can find complainers.

    “How can we fix the local ecosystem?”

    Dan said it best this week and he was clearly passionate about it: You can’t fix your ecosystem. Just get out there and build something great. More accurately he said:

     

    That’s your job. Your only job. Get out there and build something great.

    You can stop being shy, coy and tepid about it. Everyone around you wants you to do something great. They just want you to step up a little and say you are going to do it.

    I want you to do something great. I want you to put a ding in the fucking universe.

    Take your vision and make it even hairier, bolder and broader. Take your product and get obsessed with it. Change the world for people around you and every single one of us will step in line and push behind you.

    Dan did it and this week we got to shine the spotlight on him a bit. There are hundreds of folks out there pushing to do it. Stop worrying about the community. Go big and the community will be right there behind you.

    The next time we plan a Founders and Funders I want it to be you that’s up there telling your story.

    You can be next. JFDI

  • Founders and Funders Toronto – February 16th, 2012

    The last Founders and Funders dinner in Toronto was almost exactly two years ago. A lot has happened in that time and we thought it was time to sit down and break bread together again.

    The Founders and Funders dinners are a series of invitation-only dinners that are held across Canada several times a year. They are a sort of summit on the state of each community and we do our best to make sure that the best startups possible have a chance to meet the most respected and active investors who are doing deals in those cities. There is always a mix of locals and people who come in for the event as a way to get connected.

    We believe that if you cannot sit down and have dinner with someone, then you probably shouldn’t invest in or take investment from them. This is a great chance to apply a social filter to the dealflow in any one place.

    What is it?: An invitation-only 3 course dinner. Cocktails before, cocktails after….

    Who is coming?: The top investment-ready startups and active investors in Canada.

    Where is it?: Downtown Toronto

    When?: February 16th, 2012 at 6:30pm

    How much is it?: Tickets range from $125 (startups) to $500 (service providers)

    We are now accepting requests for invitations and the first round of invitations will go out this week.

    To apply please use this form >>

    We have also decided to include a brief fireside chat with Daniel Debow at this dinner. We rarely do this sort of thing at a Founders and Funders but 2011 was such a great year we thought it would be fun to look back on the ups and downs of Rypple through the years and how they got to their eventual exit, some of which was written about in Forbes this week.

    Daniel and Rypple have also been a big part of the Canadian startup community and he has also been an active angel investor recently.

    We are excited to hear what he has to say about how we can help build more great Canadian companies and how to build awareness in Silicon Valley when your HQ is back here in Canada.

    We hope you will join us as we kick off another great year for the Toronto and Canadian startup community.

    We will be announcing Founders and Funders dinners in other cities soon as well.

     

  • Shit, that was a big year. Now we make our move…

    2011 was an important year for Canadian Startups.

    We had some exits. Over $1bn worth. We needed that. The more important thing is that a lot of those exits were by entrepreneurs who “get it” and who are going to be re-investing in startups here in Canada.

    Now we have a handful of funds who have money to deploy. Many of you probably don’t remember the good old days when there was no money to go around. I once saw a startup panhandling on Queen St West to raise money for some Dell servers. No joke.

    This was also a big year because it was one of the first in which we saw deals getting done in Canada by US based investors. That’s good because it keeps us all on our toes and it forces local investors to compete on market-driven terms.

    The biggest problem now, as far as I can tell, is that we are out of excuses. There is money, talent, and the need to build more quality startups.

    So get to work.

    In the early days of Democamp there was an obsession with quality. I think it probably stemmed from our (Toronto’s) own insecurity with itself. There was no identity or real history to draw from, so we had to be careful to make sure that everything that came from the community was world class. It wasn’t always but we tried. We need to get really obsessed with the quality of stuff we turn out in Canada in the next year. No more being cheerleaders for mediocre shit. We need to be OBSESSED with setting the bar high.

    We need to go a step further now. We need to set the bar for world class. Now is not the time to slow down.

    Part of the problem is that we don’t have a single voice to tell our story. Techvibes is doing an amazing job covering EVERYTHING, but it doesn’t have personality. Startupnorth is editorial and a lot of preaching (like this post). That doesn’t help much either. I hope a voice emerges in the next year that has the time and economic model to really tell the story in Canada. It would be good if Mark MacQueen quit his job as a banker and just blogged fulltime. That guy has it right.

    If you are still reading, you should put your name in for the founders and funders dinner in toronto in February. I promise it will be good.

  • How a Canadian startup took investment from a european incubator

    This is a guest post by Patrick Hankinson, the CEO/Founder of Compilr.com a Halifax based startup building an online IDE which has almost 100,000 users. Patrick is also a co-founder of Tether.com.

    In early 2011, I met an entrepreneur and angel investor from London, at a Starbucks in my small province. He literally just took the red-eye from London, I could tell by his blood shot eyes. He wanted to know what I was working on and I explained what I was working on an “online IDE for programmers”. I could tell immediately he didn’t know what an IDE was…

    Talk about a pivotal experience. I was a programmer turned marketer, yet I still used very technical terms to describe what I was working on. The angel investor looked at me with a blank stare; he didn’t understand exactly what I was working on.

    After another couple of minutes of questions, I explained and tweaked my value proposition. He finally understood what I was working, but exclaimed that I definitely need to work on my non-technical elevator pitch. Naively, I responded I’ll never need to pitch to non-technical people.

    Now, I know that a non-technical pitch is critical. You may end up with non-technical investors like doctors, who will want to brag to their friends what they are investing in. You don’t want to put your doctor in a situation where they can’t explain exactly what you’re product does, killing viral potential. This is sometimes the case, because the investor is more in love with the team than the product.

    After this, he explained an incubator from London was putting a session together in New York. The incubator was called Seedcamp. I’ve never heard of them before, I looked at them online, saw they had invested in a several companies and were considered a European Incubator. They definitely didn’t have any credentials like Y-Combinator or Techstars. In fact, the only acquisition that I saw, to date had beenMobclix.

    I decided to apply to Seedcamp anyway since it New York was literally a 2 hour flight away (I had never visited New York, gave me an excuse). Plus it was at Google’s office in New York. Our product, Compilr, was definitely potentially a product to someday be acquired by a company like Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Facebook, and the list goes on. Any visibility I could get at this stage was definitely worth it.

    Compilr was accepted to present in New York to the Seedcamp list of mentors. We presented at Google’s office in front of 100 mentors or so. Presenting in front of 100 people was definitely not on my bucket list, but I got through it. It actually has helped in a lot ways. I’m definitely not worried presenting in front of 100s of people as much as I thought.

    The day after, Compilr was invited to pitch to some of Seedcamp’s core investors. The room had maybe 15 people but I was more nervous than the day before. In all honesty, I thought I blew it because I was being asked a ton of questions. I answered them all, but Carlos, one of the main guys from Seedcamp had asked a question and I got sidetracked with an answer, when someone basically said “Well, ok thanks for your time, we’ll be in touch.” I still feel like a total d-bag because I didn’t answer his question…

    At this stage I became defensive in my mind, even though I hadn’t received a yes or no to their investment. In reality, I didn’t care if I received Seedcamp’s investment or not. Personally, I was funding the company out of my own pocket, almost $150,000 a year, their small investment would only really marginally accelerate my company. I was hoping to get visibility in front of the right potential acquirers.

    A few weeks later, I was in total shock when Seedcamp told me they were willing toinvest in Compilr. Even though, I personally felt like I blew the follow up meeting in New York. When I told several of my advisors, most of them were eager for me to take the funds. While some opposed to the idea, stating the same facts I alluded to earlier, onlyone successful exit, etc…

    Our team decided to go ahead and take small investment from Seedcamp to use towards accelerating our business. Our end goal was that Seedcamp would present our company to potential acquirers like Facebook, Google to hopefully stimulate an exit, producing a positive ROI for them.

  • 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.

  • Week in Review

  • Week in Review

  • The Gravedancer Fund

    It’s painfully obvious and we should stop ignoring the facts: RIM is cratering and there is nothing that can be done to save them, short of firing the confused people who are running the show these days.

    I won’t comment on what exactly is happening at RIM, there are more than enough people doing that these days, but instead I think it is time for Canada to think about how to mitigate our losses here as the attrition continues. I am more interested in how we go in to damage mitigation mode. I think there is an obvious thesis developing for one or two new funds to camp out in Waterloo and focus on extracting the value locked up in RIM.

    A gravedancer fund would focus specifically on leveraging the talent and IP as it spins out of RIM in Waterloo. It would hasten the gutting, no doubt, but somebody has to do it and it may as well be someone based in Waterloo.

    So, who is going to raise the Gravedancer Fund and where do I sign? Waterloo is on it’s way to becoming the center of startup activity in Canada and the death spiral of RIM needs to be seen as an opportunity, not a threat.

  • Week in Review