StartupNorth

Category: Nova Scotia

  • CVCA – Global Customers, Investors and Acquirers – October 15th, 2008

    I will be speaking at the Canadian Venture Capital Association’s upcoming professional development day on October 15th. I will be on a panel with Rob Lane, from Overlay.TV and Maggie Fox from Social Media Group.

    Our session description is

    ?Going global” is no longer an option for many companies. It is a necessity. This session will examine issues and strategies in building international networks that will lead to business opportunities and enhanced returns. Learn how to link into international networks of customers, partners, acquirers and investors to better position your companies for global success. The role that social technologies can play in fostering these global networks will also be discussed.

    Other sessions include “THE BIG PICTURE ? KEY STRATEGIES FOR CREATING ESSENTIAL INTERNATIONAL NETWORKS” with Jennifer Brooy,Vice President, EDC Equity and Rajiv Pancholy, Chairman and CEO, TenXC Wireless as well as “RELATIONSHIPS WITH GLOBAL SYNDICATE PARTNERS AND ACQUIRERS ? THE VIEW FROM HOME AND ABROAD”

    It looks like a good day and if it is typical of CVCA events, the biggest value will be in having a chance to hang out with some of the other attendees who tend to be other startups (the smart ones go to CVCA events when they can afford them) and funders.

    The half-day event is $299 for non-CVCA members if you attend in-person in Toronto, and $70 if you watch it from one of the simulcast locations in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Fredricton or Halifax.

  • Rick Segal announces tour dates [lessons for VCs]

    Rick Segal is going on tour. The idea? Get the message out there about what he, and other VCs, are looking for when they evaluate new opportunities, and help entrepreneurs get a better understanding of what VCs try to do. He will also be providing some useful tools, like sample term sheets.

    This comes as there has been more publicity about the performance of private Venture Capital funds in Canada, and a significant amount of discussion about whether or not it is a good idea to start a company in Canada.

    There is definitely a perception out there of VCs in ivory towers who expect everything to come to them. This is in stark contrast to the attitude that most entrepreneurs encounter when in the valley or elsewhere with a strong VC ecosystem. You get used to seeing VCs out at practically every community event, listening closely and watching as entrepreneurs grow. Those traits are rare here. As someone said to me recently “In any other business, if you complained you had no customers, everyone would tell you you are an idiot. We need to get out there an hustle, we need to find those customers.”

    What Rick is doing is an example of how you can get out of your tower and start mingling with the plebs. The fact is, Canadian VCs aren’t poaching all sorts of great deals from other places, instead they rely on Canada to produce investible startups, and the best way to recognize that is to get involved and to take a long-term view. Venture Capital is only one piece of a big picture, but it is critical that VCs begin to mature along with our Angels and Entrepreneurs.

    There has been a significant amount of anti-VC sentiment in the Canadian startup community and it is probably more related to a feeling of VCs being an unknown than anything else.

    Here are the dates that are set up so far, starting on the east coast

    • April 14th Morning – Halifax NS
    • April 14th Evening – Moncton NB
    • April 15th Evening – St John’s NF

    If you want to register, email rick at jlaventures dot com with “VC Roundtable” in the subject.

  • mesheast.com – East Coast Startup Blog

    picture-2.pngMeshEast is the latest entrant on to the Canadian Startup blog scene. I was excited to get an email from Lisa Rousseau, who is also working on her own startup, to see that the east coast would finally have a local startup blog. Lisa is going to have some work to do in finding and profiling those elusive east-coast startups, but my guess is that she will find more than enough to get started in her home province of New Brunswick.

    So please, head over to MeshEast and subscribe. We have been covering some of the bigger happenings on the east coast, but there are always a lot of things we just can’t cover. We are working on our own profile of what is going on in Atlantic Canada, and so far I have been excited about what I have seen.

    We have been trying to do as much as we can to encourage local blogs that will cover smaller regions in more detail. Montreal is the luckiest with MontrealTechWatch, which is run by Heri (who might be the hardest working blogger in Canada these days), and Ottawa has StartupOttawa, which is really starting to pick up steam. There are some gaps to fill, so if you are passionate about startups then it is time to get off your butt and step up to the place. I can think of dozens of local blogs I would love to see: Waterloo, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, and the Prairies all come to mind as the biggest gaps out there.

    So get started, and get in touch. We want to help!

  • Nova Scotia Startup Competition

    Innovacorp, a Halifax based quasi-governmental funding, assistance and mentoring organization for startups is running a startup competition for companies, or soon-to-be companies, based in Nova Scotia.

    Each first place zone winner will receive a $100,000 prize package of a combination of cash and in-kind contributions and each second place zone winner will receive a $40,000 prize package of a combination of cash and in-kind contributions to be used towards the establishment or further development of their start-up ventures. Prize packages will include support and resources in the form of expertise (i.e. legal, accounting, marketing, human resource services), funding and seed investment to be used by winners to develop their start-up businesses.

    At the end of the competition, one provincial winner will be selected from among the five first place zone winners, and will be awarded a $100,000 seed investment from InNOVAcorp?s HPiTM Microfund.”

    In places with less private-sector startup activity than cities like Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, these competitions play a significant role in getting potential startups to come out of their shell. The bonus for this competition is that, unlike most competitions of this nature, the prize is significant enough to truly launch a new startup.

    They have divided Nova Scotia in to 5 ‘zones’, with significant prizes for the winner and runner up companies in each zone, with one final competition to determine the provincial winner, who gets a 100,000$ cash investment.

    Are you in Nova Scotia? Get off your butt and start building that startup! We will be following this very closely and will try to profile as many of the competing companies as possible.

  • Work Hack – To Do List

    Work Hack LogoAre you a GTD Junkie? Work Hack might be the To Do List you?ve been looking for? Rami Nasser, of Halifax Nova Scotia, had simplicity in mind when he designed this web based To Do List, which has the look and feel of a whiteboard.

    Recently launched, the site already has a number of potentially useful features: RSS feed, drag and drop arrangement of to do items, and best of all no registration is required to create and access your to do list.

    I have a feeling the already simple site (a plus) will become even simpler as Rami iterates on the design. All in all, the site is well on its way to accomplishing what it sets out to do, and already counts over 10,000 users from around the world.