StartupNorth

Category: Canada

  • XX Tech Founders

    Rochelle Grayson by Tris Hussey
    Rochelle Grayson photo by Tris Hussey

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

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

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

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

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

  • CIX 2010 Submission Deadline

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

    How are companies chosen?

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

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

    Who does the choosing?

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

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

    The first step is to Submit Your Profile!

  • The Next 36

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

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

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

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

  • Demos announced for DCT27

    DemoCamp lineup has been announced:

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


    DemoCamp Surprises

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

    Sponsors

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

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

  • Rypple raises $7m in new round


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

    We will post more as we hear it.

    Here is the official word from Ryple:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • David Crow is moving on from Microsoft

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

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

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

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

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

  • Where are the Canadian super angels?

    Boris Wertz asks where are all the Canadian super angels?

    “So when I check Angellist, the most important directory of angels in North-America and Europe, I only find 3 Canadian angels (of a total of 350 registered on the site), two in Vancouver (Danny Robinson and myself) and one in Edmonton (Kevin Swan).”

    While Angellist is not the comprehensie list of global angel investors, it is the best list of Internet and mobile investors around. It has folks like:

    There are angel groups in Canada. You can see the great work that our friend Bryan Watson at the National Angel Capital Association is doing to educate and advocate for angel investments, they provide a great list of angel groups in Canada. There are the efforts of groups like Maple Leaf Angels and the work of Randall Howard with the Golden Triangel Angelnet. And you can see the work that ad-hoc events like Founders and Funders to connect angels with emerging technologies and early-stage companies and founders.

    However there are less well know angels like:

    The thing that makes Angellist so amazing is the self-service nature of first person connection. You don’t need to know the right people. It provides one click, direct access to the key players in the economy of emerging companies. It’s something that is missing from the Canadian scene. The best part of Angellist is that Nivi and Naval validate and reference check all of the angel investors, so the wannabes are edited out. This is an edited list of the best angels actively doing deals.

    Here’s hoping that more Canadian angels take the time to complete their Angellist profile.

  • NextMontreal.com launches – "news and opinion on technology and startups"

    NextMontreal.com is going live today. It is the result of a push by Ben Yoskovitz to create a new source of information for the Montreal community after MontrealTechWatch went dormant over a year ago.

    Why now?
    When first thinking about this project, Ben wrote:

    When the site was active it provided a great deal of exposure to Montreal, and helped build a stronger community. There’s a lot going on in Montreal for tech startups and entrepreneurs, but without adequate reporting, too much of it doesn’t get the attention deserved.

    At that time, MontrealTechWatch had been more or less dead for over a year and the tech community was very quickly gathering momentum again.

    What about MontrealTechWatch?
    In the time since Ben began working on NextMontreal.com, Heri started blogging regularly on MontrealTechWatch again. I advocated for the community to restart MontrealTechWatch, so I was glad to see that. The existence of two community sites in Montreal will cause some confusion, but I think it is fine. Both sites compliment eachother, have very different operating models, and will most likely each find specific audiences within the Montreal tech and startup community.

    The role of community sites
    There is a broader discussion that we need to have about the role of community blogs in Canada’s tech hubs. We need blogs which aggregate people, ideas and events in order to showcase the activity in places like Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Quebec City and Atlantic Canada. There are cool things happening in all of these places, you just have to scratch the surface to see what is going on.

    Running a community site is hard though, and it takes dedication. NextMontreal will be testing a new model, which will hopefully bring scale to this concept and a broader set of voices to the community.

    No matter what, Montreal should count itself lucky to have so many people who are so passionate about making the startup community in the city thrive. Most do it for little or no direct reward, and those are exactly the people you want behind the wheel.

  • Hanging out in the City of Champions

    One of the first things that strikes you as you are driving in to Edmonton from the airport, besides how long the drive is, is the entrance sign to the city. It is declared the “City of Champions”, and it kind of takes you off guard. St John’s is the “City of Legends”, Montreal the “City of Saints”, “Toronto the Good”, the list goes on, but nobody seems to aspire quite like Edmonton aspires.

    We are constantly looking to Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver as the beacons of the Canadian startup community, but the truth is that those cities do not always carry their own weight when put up against smaller cities who are hustling to make things happen. Edmonton has an aura of wealth, there is money pulsing through this place, and like Texas before it, Edmonton has a pedigree of entrepreneurialism from those days. This city is punching above its weight. At least, that is the romantic view of Edmonton and Alberta in general.

    When you hit the ground here, it is evident something is going on. Cam Linke and StartupEdmonton are at the center of what has been happening. Cam started running Democamp‘s in Edmonton in 2008 and has gone on to throw LaunchParty‘s, StartupWeekends and other events. Without hesitation, we can grant him the title of “David Crow of Edmonton“. . . (“Don Quixote de la Mancha” ?)

    I had a chance to grab lunch with Cam today while I was in town. We talked about what he is working on, what is happening in Canada and what we wanted to get out of GROW in a few weeks. He also gave me his list of Edmonton’s most promising startups. Here are some of my favorites:

    Fotojournal. A blog platform for photographers to showcase their work. It feels a bit like Flickr did in the beginning in that it is something that aficionados “get” at this point, but photo journaling could be the next evolution of the basic sharing we see today. People love to tell stories, and some people love to tell them with their camera. (See also: Clustershot from PEI)

    Beamdog. An app store for games for the PC. This is taking ambitious to a whole new level in competing with Steam as a distribution platform. They have an impressive number of games in their catalog as of now, but in the absence of large scale distribution deals with publishers, my guess is that it will be tough to get mainstream content. Cam pointed out that they really have the beginnings of a killer app store platform however, and there are a lot of opportunities for them to slide horizontally, or to focus on specific niche’s in gaming. It will be a cool company to watch as I think we will see them iterate a few times.

    Yardstick Software. An employee training and test administration platform. Enterprise HR is a tough market historically, but things are definitely changing. HR departments are making more of their own purchasing decisions these days and consumerization of IT and cloud computing trends are playing out quickly in this market. My guess is that these guys are already doing pretty well. (See Rypple, Toronto)

    Empire Avenue. Buy and sell your friends (I just bought a lot of RANNIE). Empire Avenue is an explicit mechanism to assign value to the objects and people we interact with on the web. In a way we are all doing this everyday: We friend and unfriend people, we subscibe and unsubscibe from newsletters and other things that affiliate us with companies, and we share links and bookmarks. Empire Avenue lets you put a stake in the ground and buy shares in something you think will rise in value. I’ll be honest, I still don’t have it figured out, but it seems just crazy enough that I want to follow it. After I signed up, it was fun and the first few things I needed to do (buy some shares in friends) seemed clear. The rumor is that they have closed a first round and it will be announced tomorrow.

    Edistorm. An online whiteboard for groups of people. “Edistorm takes the metaphor of sticky notes on a boardroom wall and brings it online allowing anyone – anywhere to brainstorm with only a web browser.”. A neat app, the product execution seems good and the price is right for the customer. They have done everything right so far, but I can’t figure out the market side of the product/market fit.

    Other Edmonton startups include

    Smibs -“business network and software products help you connect, share, collaborate and get things done the smart way.”

    Tooq – Contractor and Small Business Toolbox

    TeamRemind -“A simple and effective way to organize your team. Make sure everyone is up to date” (See: YourTeamOnline and Teampages)

    Newspond – Techmeme like intelligent aggregator. (See: Rogers Ventures funded Thoora — might be a good acquisition for Thoora actually, considering they are looking for experienced relevance and ranking developers edit: they were at least)

    Democamp and Launchparty regularly attract 200+ people here and Cam will be organizing the first Founders and Funders dinner this fall. There is talent and ambition here. Smart investors will get on a plane and take a look at what is happening.

    City of Champions? I’m willing to believe it.