StartupNorth

Category: Startups

  • Ontario Startups…On A Train

    [Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Brydon Gilliss. Brydon has held a number of roles but most recently he is the driving force behind lots of awesome in Guelph including a coworking space, ThreeFortyNine; a personal accelerator, Startupify.me; events, DemoCampGuelph; and a startup, 20Skaters.] 

    Have you ever wished for just another minute or two for that elevator pitch you delivered? What if, instead of an elevator ride, you were locked on a train with that investor?

    Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide!

    For the third year running, the Ontario Startup Train is back on July 9th. We will have several private, chartered cars on a VIA train with first class service and our own bar car where we’ll host our on-train events. We pack the train with startups, investors, and various players in our startup community and travel together to attend The International Startup Festival in Montreal.

    “The concentration of the opportunities and discussions on the train blew me away. By the time we got to Montreal, referrals were flying.” Lloyd Longfield

    Tickets include first class travel to Montreal from Toronto, our on-train activities, full conference access, and time in our Ontario Startup Tent at the festival to showcase your startup. If you already have your festival ticket, we do have train-only tickets.

    Get your ticket now before the train sells out, again.

  • 9 Tips to Network Your Way into a VC Job

    [Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Jared Gordon . Jared is an Investment Manager at IAF and is a lawyer by training (though we don’t hold that against him). The post summarizes Jared’s experience in both finding a gig at a Canadian VC fund and his conversations with others about these elusive positions. ]

    CC-BY-20 Some Rights Reserved Photo by Robert Couse-Baker

    It is that time of year again, when my inbox fills with requests for coffee from graduating students asking for two things: “How do I get a job in venture capital?” and “How do I get a “biz dev” job at a startup?” I always appreciate the initiative of people reaching out to me, but I thought I would share some tips to maximize everyone’s time.

    Getting a job in venture capital is hard.

    It is not impossible. But it is very hard. If you are the kind of person who is interested in venture capital, you will probably ignore anyone who says the problem you are trying to solve is hard. If you are the kind who is committed you will also realize it is not about the money. We do it because we love working with startups.

    There are not many funds out there, but at least that narrows the focus of your search. To give you a better idea, there are maybe 10 non partner venture capital roles in all of Canada. Everyone I know in venture capital has worked many years to get here. It requires drive, energy, time and a lot of networking. In truth, the only way to get a job in venture capital is networking.

    The Difference between PE, IB and VC

    The journey prepares you for the job once you get here. People I met with along the way are people I now do business with on a daily basis. Also, the job hunt is a chance to demonstrate to the community what kind of person you are and what kind of value you add.

    Before we jump into the tips, there is a difference between PE (Private Equity) and VC (Venture Capital). Beyond the huge difference in compensation, VCs spend a lot more time understanding the dynamics of specific markets and verticals than they do on financial analysis. In PE you spend your time building and reviewing financial models. When working with startups, you spend some your time crafting financial models, however, the calculations and models are very different.

    There is no template for working in VC

    Some basic tips on how to network your way into venture capital are listed below. These tips are about how to get in front of the people you need to get in front of and how to make the most out of that meeting. There is no template for working in venture capital. Some of us have advanced degrees some don’t. Increasingly, having spent time at a startup is becoming more common. Having strong technical talent is a rare but desired commodity. If you can identify how technically hard a problem is, that will set you apart.

    9 Tips to Getting a VC Job

    1. Don’t send a message over LinkedIn – This one is my primary pet peeve. A lot of the job of being a VC is being able to find information. Every investor’s email is available somewhere.
    2. Warm intros work best – Did I come to speak to your class? Did I come speak to your friend’s class? Do we know anyone in common? Anything you can do to create a connection between us will make me want to spend more time helping you.
    3. Don’t be scared to cold email – Cold emailing is a great skill to learn and have. You never know whose interest you might catch unless you try. Why not reach out to Fred Wilson? A partner at Kleiner who went to the same school/has the same interests as you? I find the cold emails that work best have great subject lines and can bring attention to something I, and the person I am emailing, have in common.
    4. NO FORM LETTERS – These are just insulting. You should be spending at least twenty minutes crafting each email. The person you are trying to get in front of has a linked-in profile/about.me page/bio somewhere. Use that information to show them that you value their time and advice enough to put some work into getting the meeting.
    5. Be persistent but not annoying – When I do not get a response from a warm intro, I follow up after a couple days. Some people have poor inbox management skills and stuff falls to the bottom. It is nothing personal. The person definitely saw your email and it shows persistence and that you value someone’s time when you follow up. With cold emails, if I do not hear back I will wait a couple days and send a quick second try. If I hear nothing, I leave it be.
    6. Be clear in your ask – The clearer and more direct you are about your ask, the easier it is for someone to know if they can help. Nothing is less appealing than a note asking to “learn more about venture capital.” The internet has cast the profession wide open, with more information available online now than was available to VC associates five years ago. You can learn about everything from VC funnel management, what the average day for a VC is like to the difference between European and American style waterfalls. Examples of good asks would be: “You are an early stage VC. While doing my MBA, I mentored startups and participated in Startup Weekend. Can I get half an hour of your time to talk about how I can transfer what I learned in school to a job or what else I can do to make myself a competitive candidate?” or “I want your job because I like working with early stage startups. Are you hiring? Can we make some time to chat so when you are, or when you know someone who is, you think of me?”
    7. Once you get the meeting, don’t blow it – You have only one chance to make a first impression.I spent the first months of my networking journey wasting a ton of important people’s time. I would sit across from them in boardrooms, coffee shops, and their offices and talk about myself for an hour.It took a meeting with Jeff Rosenthal of Imperial Capital to set me straight. He would not remember if you ask him, because the meeting was so bland. Jeff ended our meeting with some advice. He told me that everyone who got a second meeting walked into his office with a list of companies they would look to invest in. They proved they were capable of doing the job they were seeking. You can do that too.Look at the person you are meeting with and what spaces interest them. Use Crunchbase and Angelist to identify some promising startups and why you like them. Be prepared to defend your thoughts. This discussion is more interesting (and fun) then hearing about your involvement in the investment club or student government. One person I met with had a presentation he had put together on three trends in technology that he found interesting and why. They showed they were capable of hitting the ground running on day one.
    8. Follow up is key – Always make sure to send a thank you and take care of any action items you might have left the meeting with. If the person you are meeting with did not follow up on theirs, no harm in waiting a couple of days and sending a polite reminder.Following up does not end with the thank you note. It is always great to hear from people you have helped along the way about where they landed or how their search is going. This becomes especially important when it comes to the last tip…
    9. Coming close to something? BRING IN THE BIG GUNS!! – When you know there is a position and you have met with someone at the firm or submitted an application, now is when the networking pays off. You can make up for a lot of flaws in your resume by having someone you trust recommend you for a gig. If you treat your network right and maintain good relationships, they will have no problem making a call to get your application moved to the top of the pile.

    This is where hard work pays off

    Mark Suster summed it up in a comment on a blog post by Chris Dixon:

    “The people who “sneaked into” the process were:

    1. great networkers
    2. great networkers and
    3. had other people contact me on their behalf (great networkers).

    But if you don’t have GREAT street cred already don’t hassle the VCs. Just accept that it isn’t likely you’ll get in without doing great things at a start-up first.”

    Chris Dixon agreed “Yeah, when I got my job in VC it was like a political campaign. I had one partner tell me ‘I’ve heard you[’re] a great guy from 6 people’ – which wasn’t an accident. I had done so many free projects, favors etc for VCs and startup and then I asked them to make calls on my behalf. It’s brutal.”

    The venture capital community is a very small tight knit community. And the number of potential gigs is very small. It is a lot of effort to build the relationships and connections to get a job working at a venture fund. (Before you even consider this, you might want to brush up on Venture Math 101 and figure out why you really want to do this).

    Additional Reading

    Here are some great posts from people with more experience and authority on the same topic:

    Still want some of my time? I am not going to tell you how to find me, but if you can figure it out, I look forward to chatting.

    Photo Credit: Photo by Robert Couse-Baker  – CC-BY-20 Some Rights Reserved

  • A conversation about MaRS

    Dan Debow (LinkedIn) kicked off a conversation about MaRS on the StartupNorth Facebook group. It is an interesting thread with views on the efficiency of our tax dollars, the applicability of building office towers to stimulate the innovation economy, and the relative utility of advisory services for startups.

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    Have you used MaRS advisory services or real estate? Do you have an opinion about the impact on your startup? Participate in the conversation.

    Post by StartupNorth.

  • When should startups pursue a patent strategy?

    [Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Bob Stratton and Andrew Currier of PCK IP  about patents and patent strategy for Canadian startups. And while “traction is the new IP”, this is one very cost effective strategy for startups, but is it the right one for you? ]

    Photograph JOHNNY CASH by Leopold Bloom on 500pxJOHNNY CASH by Leopold Bloom on 500px

    Seriously, patents? Are patents really an effective strategy for startups? It’s an almost Shakespearean dilemma for founders, to patent or not to patent.

    There is a real tension between the long term benefit which must be balanced against the short term need to manage cash burn carefully and the management time required for a successful patent program and the immediate need for focus on getting product out the door.

    Understandably, early in the corporate development lifecycle most startups choose to focus on building and shipping product and growing traction and revenues. We’ve heard that traction is the new IP. There are unintended consequences to this decision, that founders need to be aware of that have impact on the business down the road.

    The refusal to even consider patents can be left for another conversation.

    We present an analytical approach for founders to consider performing an upfront analysis of: “Are patents an important part of my business plan?? and “When do I start pursuing a patent strategy?”. Here are some starting points.

    Timing is Critical

    There are a couple of unpleasant patent facts that we must be considered:

    1. If you disclose the invention before filing a patent application, you lose the ability to patent it in most of the world.  (A short list of countries, including Canada and the US, forgive your prior disclosure for as long as a year, and let you still file a patent application before the expiry of that year);Prior disclosure is an issue because you may have to disclose your invention to a variety of people such as investors, potential customers, suppliers, etc. – who refuse to sign a non-disclosure agreement.It is also an issue because your successful launch of your product/service is a disclosure.
    2. The first inventor who files an application at the patent office blocks any subsequent inventor who files for the same invention.First to file is an issue as someone else can beat you to the patent office, at best blocking you from filing your application and at worst blocking you from running your business.  It actually happens that two or more people independently invent the same thing at roughly the same time, especially in the tech space wherein technological advances may suddenly enable a new product or business.

    In view of (a) and (b), pretty clearly the correct answer is to file “as soon as possible”, but patents cost money and start ups, in particular, should defer expenditures as long as possible until their valuation has increased, to make raising money less expensive.  Again the short term and long term are at odds with each other.

    Patents Cost Money, Defer or Spend?

    So, what do you do?  It depends? Or there is no easy answer. It requires a founder to be able to use their experience and interpret the market signals to make informed decisions about spend.

    Our suggested set of analytic steps is:

    1. Determine which aspects of your product/device/system/business might be patentable.
    2. Determine which of those aspects might be worth patenting from a business perspective.
    3. Determine when those patentable aspects will be first disclosed.
    4. Determine when you can afford to file patents.
    5. Compare 1, 2, 3 and 4 to identify critical dates (disclosure of invention vs. available funding) and decide what to file and when.

    Unfortunately steps 1-5 sound simple, but of course there is a fair amount of dependency upon specific fact situations.

    For example, you may have several possible inventions identified at step 1, but whether they provide a commercially significant advantage to your business (step 2) will vary widely and can be hard to predict given that your goal is to create an entirely new market and how that market unfolds is not predictable with complete confidence.   You may also require some professional advice to help with step 1, as it is not always straightforward to identify developments which are patentable from those which are merely clever.

    For step 2, some inventions may have a limited useful lifetime: e.g. the first implementation is web-based, but you expect that most of your revenue will be generated from a custom mobile app – once you can build and deploy it.  So, you may forgo protecting the web-based version to save the expense, knowing that you are leaving the possibility of web-based competitors in the future. Other fact-specific scenarios abound.

    Depending on the outcomes of steps 1, 2, and 3, step 4 can be made somewhat easier by deciding upon an appropriate filing strategy to manage the trade-offs between expenditures and protections.  For example, you may decide to limit the countries in which you file for patent protection and/or you may decide to “beat” a disclosure by filing a provisional patent application, rather than a complete application, to reduce immediate costs.

    You may also identify, at step 2, different classes of inventions: i.e. – those which are fundamental to your business and which should be patented as broadly as possible/reasonable and those which are mere “nice to haves” which can be deferred or allowed to be lost to manage costs.

    Seek Informed Advice

    We believe that the patent analysis is really just an adjunct to the kind of big-picture business case analysis that is necessary to achieve long term success.  Founders must know their market and have the vision to see that their startup investment has a real potential of a long term payoff.

    Founders are already faced with complex crystal ball gazing business decisions such as: What is my product road map? What investment do I need? Who should be on my management team? How can I monetize my product? Who is my competition?  Where founders don’t know the answer to these questions they seek out a number of excellent, unbiased resources to help them.  A patent analysis can be added to the other analyses both at the outset and at each milestone, and the results fed back into the planning process to best manage the path to immediate and to long term success.

    Reach out to Andrew or Bob for a conversation about your startup.

  • The Rise of Fashion E-Commerce and Man’s Escape from the Mall

    [Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Thomas Rankin. It is subset of his original post, which is a collection of thoughts and research compiled during some of the earliest exploration into the Dash Hudson business model. ]

    The Set-up

    E-commerce is on a rocketship, with clothing retailers and brands using technology to create new ways to engage with customers online. In fact, clothing and accessories is the fastest growing segment of e-commerce. A study done by Emarketer projects that online sales of clothing and accessories will continue to grow year over year at a rate faster than even the electronics and books segment, with sales reaching $73 billion by 2016.

    Don’t Forget the Dudes

    Despite the trope of women as fashion-obsessed shopaholics, men also have a desire to buy things they know they’ll look good in. However, most department stores and shopping malls are designed with the female shopper in mind, leaving men to fewer clothing options, particularly for those who are sartorially-inclined. This void, combined with growing presence of internet and mobile technology in fashion e-commerce, creates a perfect storm of opportunity for online brands and retailers that offer affordable, convenient, and fashionable options for men. According to research from Rakuten Linkshare, 83% of men surveyed prefer to shop online. Not only are men flocking to online retailers to get their new threads, but according to Chris Ventry, the general manager of Gilt Groupe’s GiltMan, men are out-shopping women by 20-30% in all areas of online shopping.

    Where the Boys Are: Men’s E-Commerce Companies

    A number of men’s e-commerce companies are cashing in on men’s interest in buying fashionable and trendy clothes online. Companies such as Frank & Oak, Bombfell and Trunk Club are at the forefront of offering a curated subscription service that makes shopping efficient for guys. Subscription commerce has proven popular with men who wish to avoid the complex decision making involved with shopping. Other online-exclusive fashion companies like Bonobos, Jack Threads, and Mr. Porter offer quality men’s fashion at various prices. Bonobos is for the guy who likes the crusts cut off his peanut butter sandwich, Jack Threads for the guy who likes crusty dive bars and Mr. Porter for the socialite upper crust. J.Crew is a well-known traditional unisex offline retailer that offers an expansive online selection for men. H&M, Uniqlo and Zara compete for the disposable fashion market at a lower pricepoint. Streetwear companies like Superdry, Saturdays Surf NYC, Need Supply Co., Union Made Goods, and Stussy offer casual and weekend wear for dudes that take their looks seriously. For the slightly avant garde, it’s all about the Nordic brands: Matinique, Norse Projects and Selected Homme are doing some of the best work in men’s fashion today.

    Beautiful Matinique people from Mantinique 2010 catalog.
    Beautiful people  from Mantinique 2010 catalog.

    Just Show me the Good Stuff

    Clearly the world has changed, as there are a growing number of fashion options for men. So many that it is easy for guys to get overwhelmed, like a child lost at Nordstrom. According to research from Rakuten LinkShare, 48% of young male shoppers between the ages of 18-25 are overwhelmed by the plethora of choices with online shopping. Refinement of those options is a serious challenge. A survey conducted by Dash Hudson indicated that more than 60% of guys aged 18-24 want social validation and recommendations before buying. This contrasts with women, where over 75% want to discover content on their own. Guys readily admit that they need help looking good, and want guidance on what to buy. For the sartorially interested male, the growth in popularity of social commerce sites has been a mixed blessing. Pinterest launched in 2010, giving consumers the ability to take part in a taste-based community that curates photos of fashion, food, architecture, hairstyles and many other things. Now social shopping companies like Wanelo, Fancy, Svpply, and Fab are making it easier for fashion-conscious shoppers to curate their style, draw inspiration from other users, and connect to their favourite stores and brands. A review of Alexa data shows that each of these shopping sites is much more likely to be frequented by female shoppers, something that is evidenced in their communities and user experiences.

    Mind the Gaps in the Market

    Despite the growth of men’s fashion e-commerce, there remains a great deal of room for innovation. Although social shopping companies like Wanelo and Pinterest allow users to curate their style, the plethora of available products can be overwhelming for the male shopper. Our research at Dash Hudson indicates that over 80% of men come to a shopping platform with the intent to buy as opposed to create content. The prevalence of dead and broken links in social shopping sites often interrupts the demonstrated intent. I am Jack’s complete frustration.

    Oops

     

    So close.

    New social marketplaces must solve the problem of enabling the customer to search great content and then convert intent into purchase. This is especially important in the case of the need and immediacy-driven male shopper.

    The Future of E-Commerce Is In Your Hands – Literally

    The trend of men shopping online will continue to grow with mobile shopping becoming the newest way to efficiently discover and purchase clothing. Mobile technology can capitalize on men’s desire to shop on the go, making the fashion e-commerce experience more efficient than ever. According to Forrester, mobile currently accounts for 5 percent to 10 percent of all retail transactions. Yet for most online retailers, the big story is that mobile commerce is increasing at a rate of up to 185 percent. For men’s retailers who have caught the mobile wave (ahem, Jack Threads) this is great news. The DDB Lifestyle Survey in 2013 indicated, of men aged 18-34, 30% use shopping apps on their phone and 24% typically shop for and buy items on their smartphones. In the age of the digital urban lifestyle, convenience wins.

    Final Thoughts

    Experiences need to become tailored to how men shop by getting the best, most validated clothing in front of the shopper for their final purchasing decision. As more social shopping experiences become tailored for men, and as better retail products are built for mobile devices, male shoppers will start to feel the warmth of a market that finally understands them. At the end of the day, it’s all about being the coolest version of yourself. Finally, guys are being given the tools that make it fun and easy for this to happen.

  • Announcing David Cohen’s Visit to Toronto and Waterloo, April 22-23 2014

    I’m very excited to announce that David Cohen, Founder  & CEO of Techstars will visit Toronto and Waterloo, April 22nd-23rd 2014.

    David Cohen PicTechstars is the largest accelerator network in the world, with programs running in New York, Boston, Boulder, Austin, New York City, Seattle, Chicago and London, UK.

    This is David’s second Canadian visit (he was a speaker at Startup Empire in 2008), but this time I’m going to take him around to a few startups and tech accelerators in Toronto and Waterloo.

    The two main public events that you don’t want to miss will be the fireside chat interviews, similar to the previous one I did with Albert Wenger on Oct 23rd 2013. David loves to interact with entrepreneurs, so we’ll be in for a treat during the Q&A period.

    Schedule Details

    • Toronto: April 22nd, 5:30PM-8PM. Location: OneEleven Centre, 111 Richmond West, 5th Floor. Register early at $9, before the price goes up to $11.
    • Waterloo: April 23rd, 6PM-8:30PM. Location: Tannery Event Centre at the Communitech Hub, 151 Charles Street West. Details will be posted on the Communitech Events page.

    As a preamble to this visit, I asked David a few questions:

    Q- Why have you decided to spend 2 days in Toronto and Waterloo?
    David: I’ve been hearing about the fantastic startup community that has evolved there, and I want to see it with my own eyes!

    Q- What important trends are you seeing in the tech/VC startup scene that young entrepreneurs should know about?
    David: I think there are now about 10 great startup communities in the world to build Internet startups. I won’t start a war by saying which cities I am referring to. However, part of my personal mission and part of the mission of Techstars is to bolster that number to 50 or 100. We can do it. The idea that you have to be in Silicon Valley is so passé now. Sure, that’s one great place to be. But there is widely available information about great startups starting in many other communities now, so it’s certainly not the only place these days. I love that our generation gets to drive this change.

    Q- Reflect on 2014 vs. 2007 when you ran the first program, and where Techstars might be in 2018?
    David: Well, in 2007 this was nothing more than an experiment. Could we use a little capital and a ton of intense mentorship and the support of an entire community to attract great startups to apply? It turns out we could. Would they be able to raise money? Yup, $500M and climbing. Would they be successful? Yup, 33 exits now and billions in portfolio value. It has far exceeded my expectations. We have taken the idea of mentorship driven accelerators to great markets in the US. I can see us expanding a bit internationally in the coming years. We are also helping amazing corporations like Disney, Barclays, Sprint, R/GA, Kaplan, and more by running accelerators for them as they “give first” to founders in their areas of expertise. We’ll do more of that.

    These 2 events will be sold out to capacity, so I’m inviting you to register asap, for Toronto or Waterloo.

    David Cohen’s Bio

    David Cohen is the Founder, CEO and Managing Partner of Techstars. Previously, David was a founder of several software and web technology companies. He was the founder and CTO of Pinpoint Technologies which was acquired by ZOLL Medical Corporation (NASDAQ: ZOLL) in 1999. You can read about it in No Vision, All Drive [Amazon]. David was also the founder and CEO of earFeeder.com, a music service which was sold to SonicSwap.com in 2006. He also had what he likes to think of as a “graceful failure” in between.

    David is an active startup advocate, advisor, board member, and technology advisor who comments on these topics on his blog at DavidGCohen.com. He recently co-authored Do More Faster with Brad Feld.  He is also very active at the University of Colorado, serving as a member of the Board of Advisors of the Computer Science Department, the Entrepreneurial Advisory Board at Silicon Flatirons, and the Board of Advisors of the Deming Center Venture Fund. He is a member of the selection committee for Venture Capital in the Rockies, and runs the Colorado chapter of the Open Angel Forum. His hobbies are technology, software/web startups, business history, and tennis. He is married to the coolest girl he’s ever met and has three amazing kids who always seem to be teaching him something new.

    Toronto Location

    OneEleven, 111 Richmond Street West, 5th Floor, Toronto. OneEleven is Toronto’s newest accelerator. It’s your chance to visit this brand new 15,000 square feet facility, dedicated to accelerate the commercialization of cutting edge research and development for the economic prosperity of the region.

    Eventbrite - Fireside Chat with David Cohen, CEO of Techstars

    Location

    OneEleven, 111 Richmond Street West, 5th Floor, Toronto. OneEleven is Toronto’s newest accelerator. It’s your chance to visit this brand new 15,000 square feet facility, dedicated to accelerate the commercialization of cutting edge research and development for the economic prosperity of the region.

    This event is organized by Startup Management and hosted by OneEleven. It is made possible due to a sponsorship of OMERS Ventures.

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    Startup Management is a knowledge resource for growing, scaling-up and managing startups.

    OMERS Ventures invests in companies with significant growth potential and market opportunities, seeking partners with a shared vision of building a vibrant knowledge economy.

    OneEleven is a unique centre for commercialization that will create the talent and technologies that shape our future in ‘Big Data’.

    Eventbrite - Fireside Chat with David Cohen, CEO of Techstars

  • Mesh 14 Hosted Startup Program

    I love Mesh Conference. I’ve called it “Toronto’s most important DIY conference“. It is an event that ebbs and flows with the opinions and interests of it’s founders:

    It starts like a joke, did you hear the one about the marketer, the lawyer, the journalist, the founder and travel guy? These guys are all successful in their own right. And they continue to bring together a unique viewpoint that is different than the corporate marketing events and tradeshows. This is something about the underlying currents at the intersection of technology, marketing, politics and culture. I’m hoping they continue to bring people who challenge  existing ideas and frameworks. (My keynote invite would go to Shanley Kane of Model View Culture.)

    One of the interesting additions to the program has been a separate startup track. I’d like to see a little more overlap in the participating startups with the audience and attendees interest. It is great to see early-stage companies getting local support to reach the Mesh audience. The Mesh 14 Hosted Startup Program provides:

    • Complimentary registration;
    • Demo Alley;
    • and 15 Minutes of Fame presentation.

    Apply Now | 60 days left

    Photo Credit

  • The children are our future

    We’ve been talking about how much support and infrastructure has changes for young entrepreneurs. When I graduated from the University of Waterloo, I did not know about startups. I looked at places like Interval Research Corporation, Xerox PARC, Advanced Technology Group as where new technology and innovative products were built and launched. When I thought about becoming an “entrepreneur”, it looked more like owning a sports store or being a consultant. I did not have role models or experiences that showed me the path to becoming an entrepreneur.

    I have been lucky to be a part of the creation of UW VeloCity. VeloCity happened because of a generous donation by Ted Livingston, the vision of Bud Walker and  the leadership of Jesse Rodgers. For me, VeloCity was that thing I wish I had as an undergrad, beyond the cooperative education. The simplicity and support that high potential growth, technology companies were something that I could do (sure I had a degree in Kinesiology, but I was building software on NeXT machines). I did not have context or exposure to founders and the “startup” mindset.

    It is great to see the support that IAF continues to offer Ontario entrepreneurs. The announcement of the Youth Investment Accelerator Fund is amazing. It was launched in 2013. We haven’t talked a lot about it as a funding source. But it is unique. The program invests up to $250,000 per company in technology-based startups founded by entrepreneurs under the age of 30.

    The program has announced it first investments that include:

    Go read Ian Hardy’s BetaKit piece for more details on the companies.

    I continue to be surprised at the level of support for Canadian entrepreneurs with the government programs. There are conversations that need to be had about the efficacy of the direct versus indirect investing and services model. And it seems like this is happening at many levels from the Venture Capital Action Plan. (This is a conversation that needs much social lubricant – bring on the whisky).

    I love seeing the changes and support of entrepreneurship as a career path with programs like UW VeloCity, Ryerson’s Digital Media Zone, UofT Creative Destruction Lab and others. The additional support of programs like the Youth IAF (and the IAF proper) where capital is deployed by real VCs to companies is fantastic.

    Keep up the good work Barry, Michelle, Scott, Jared, Rob and the whole team.

  • Get them out of the building: Travel support from Volta

    Graffiti at VoltaWhen Ben Yoskovitz moved to Halifax to join us at GoInstant he left the growing Montreal community and brought a lot of fresh perspective to what needs to happen in Nova Scotia to grow the startup ecosystem.

    The #1 thing he noticed was the successful startups were the ones getting out of the building and on to a plane. Spending significant amounts of time in San Francisco, New York or wherever you need to be is an important part of growing your network of people you can rely on to build your business.

    Today Volta is announcing a travel support program for startups. You have to be small (<10 employees) and young (<3 years old).

    This hits home for me. When I was living in Charlottetown and 19 years old I had my first attempt at a product startup, it was called Blogtrack. It had what seemed like an insane number of daily active users at the time, just under 10,000, and I had no idea what I was doing (still working on that). I also had no money really, certainly not enough to blow on a trip to Boston for Bloggercon. A guy named Lee Brammer at what is now called “Innovation PEI” offered to help cover some of the costs for the trip, which meant it was (just barely) affordable. It was, for me, an eye opening trip, eating dinner at a table for 4 with Dave Wiener, Betsy Devine and Dan Bricklin just about blew my mind.

    Anyway, the point is that sometimes you really need to get out there and just do something you might not have otherwise. Good things almost always come from it and the truth is that it can be hard to make up for sitting across the table from someone and really getting to know them.

  • The Unicorn Awards 2013

    Our friends over at TechVibes have posted a call for nominations for 2013 Canadian Startup Awards. This just screams that we also need an Ig Nobels/Darwin Awards equivalent.

    • Zombie Startup of the Year Award – Recognizing a Canadian startup that continues to live on the brains of its’ founders, but not customers.
    • The Snapchat Award – Recognizing a Canadian startup that won’t sell to Facebook, even if the offer was for more than $4B.
    • Stop the Gravy Train Award – Recognizing sketchiest use of tax payer money in our burgeoning startup ecosystem.
    • The Twerk It Award – Recognizing the media accomplishments of an exemplanary Canadian entrepreneur, who is getting as much coverage  as Miley Cyrus in 2013.
    • Keeping up with the Kanadians Award – Recognizing the startup that has watched previous episodes of startup reality TV but failed to comprehend the complex plot lines.

    We’ll be announcing the awards before Christmas…And we need your help. Send us a tweet, leave a comment, or just drop us an email with a suggestion for the awards. Or just leave an anonymous nomination.