If you are in Halifax tonight, come to the Loose Cannon for StartupDrinks. This is the first of what will hopefully be a regular set of startup community events in Halifax in the coming year.
I’ll be there to meet some new people and talk startups.
Thanks to Jeff White for making this happen.
It’s time to for another Founders & Funders event in Toronto. I can’t believe it’s been 18 months since the last event in June 2008. The next event is scheduled for Februrary 15, 2010 in downtown Toronto. We’re looknig for a few good startups and a few good investors. We’ll be sending out invitations early in the new year, but we want to start with an open call for participation.
Founders & Funders is an invitation only social event for people that start high potential growth companies and the people that fund them. This means entrepreneurs. This means angel investors. This means venture capitalists. This means government funders. It is a curated dinner party. The idea is to get stuck at a table with others interested in emerging technology, growth companies. Have meaningful conversations beyond the usual conference hallway chatter or pitch sessions. The goal is to create stronger, more relevant connections between individuals in this community.
Founders of high potential growth companies. This means companies that are at varying stages of corporate development, ranging from the very new to the more established. Digital media. Internet. Software applications. Enterprise applications. Infrastructure. Data centre automation. Mobile. Clean tech. Yes, you should consider attending. However, you should be looking to raise capital in near future.
Funders of high potential growth companies. Venture capitalists in Ontario, Quebec, New York, Boston, California, and around the globe. There are attendees that are actively seeking capital, with outstanding track records and attractive valuations. Angel investors, definitely. You’re the backbone of Canadian deal. We’re reaching out separately to National Angel Capital Organization and to Maple Leaf Angels to invite investors (by active I mean that you’ve written an investment cheque in the past 18 months).
We’re asking everyone interested in participating complete an application. The goal is to gather enough details that we can share with others, i.e., founders details will be compiled and shared with investors, investor details will be shared with founders. (Yes, I know that form doesn’t specify this use of the data, each invited attendee will be asked this question and given the opportunity to revise their details. If we don’t invite you, the information will be purged after the event).
Microsoft has acquired Mississauga-based Opalis. Details are available on the System Center blog and on TechNet. Rick Segal provides a summary of the investor involved, Peter Carrescia at VenGrowth. VenGrowth had invested $3.6M in March 2004 and had participated in an $8.5M round in November 2005 with Sierra Ventures & BDC. It’s a story for Canadian venture capital and a great story for entrepreneurs.
It also demonstrates some of the main reasons companies like Microsoft make acquisitions: shared customers. There is nothing greater than shared customers to drive a potential acquisition. When a product offering fills a gap in a companies product line and there are shared customers, it becomes a much stronger conversation about acquisition.
“Opalis has over 300 satisfied customers today, including many of the largest IT Managed Service Providers, demanding customers who deliver IT as a business and expect solutions that deliver results for their customers…Combined with Opalis, System Center will be able to interoperate with all of those legacy tools so customers can take a ‘land and migrate’ approach with Microsoft versus a ‘rip and replace’ approach as they build out their next generation virtualized data centers” – Todd DeLaughter
Here’s hoping that the Opalis team will stay in Mississauga, however, Microsoft tends to like to have the talent in Redmond. Congratulations Opalis, VenGrowth and BDC on a win.
Crash Davis: Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls – it’s more democratic.
Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: [to himself] What’s this guy know about pitching? If he’s so good how come he’s been in the minors for the last ten years?
I guess this makes me Crash Davis, ten years in the minors, makes me wonder when my Waterworld is coming (so please make sure you take any feedback with the appropriate sense of pending doom).
“Open challenge to local startups to “pitch” for a meeting in a 140 characters or less in the comments (more realistically less than 420 characters – basically 3 tweets).”
In response to my Pitching Fastballs post on StartupNorth (reblogged), Trevor and Karim from Big Time Design have answered my open challenge, along with a bunch of others in the comments. Along with Scott Annan and Tim Harris.
big time Radar is: Discreet, targeted messaging; customers ask for it & you deliver via Live Messenger, Twitter, SMS, email & Facebook from one interface.
Big time’s management team consists of three guys from marketing, design and development backgrounds. Radar’s market opportunity is massive for anyone in the marketplace looking to use social media to sell, communicate and connect with their customers. Initially, we plan to focus on four verticals: retail, events, media and real estate. Our pricing model is segmented by number of users and selected features. We are currently in the beta phase (with very positive initial results) and are bootstrapping rather than looking for funding as our overhead cost is negligible.
This is a great approach to layered information. The piece that is missing for me is the separation between Big Time Design and Big Time Radar. I’m assuming Radar is a product offering of Big Time Design. That coupled with I’m curious at the benefit of the solution, i.e., it sounds like a multi-channel replacement for MailChip or Constant Contact, i.e., email marketing that uses social media for notification beyond just email. A little more clarity about how it fits with respect to these other offerings might be helpful.
Network Hippo is a smart address book for startups and professionals. It combines and scrubs contact information from dozens of sources, finds more info about them on the web and social networks, plugins into your email, and alerts you when – and who – you should contact. It’s a smarter, personal, social CRM. We’ll replace Highrise completely & Salesforce’s smallest customers.
I also like the one provided on Network Hippo’s home page , “Network Hippo is a powerful and unique network relationship application that puts your professional network to work. We help professionals and small businesses build their network, identify their most valuable contacts, remind them when somebody needs a call, and track deals for their business.” It’s very clear who the product is for, what the product does, and who are the competitors. I would like a little more detail on the differentiator, i.e., what makes Network Hippo special?
Star Return links out door media to rich media content on handheld apps via web services, while providing advertisers with solid analytics to evaluate effectiveness and viral affects of their campaigns.
I’m still not sure how Star Return links outdoor media to rich media content (I’m assuming that this is online content). I still don’t actually know what Star Return does. Jumping on the Interwebs, I find “We are Star Return. We allow you to download information to your mobile device, related to products, places, people and businesses.” and “Star Return puts a new twist on information access. Users – anytime, anywhere can now access information on restaurants, stores, products, sporting events, concerts, bands, real-estate and much much more.” My guess is that it’s bit.ly for billboards?
Being a startup is definitely a badge of honour these days. It always has been, but it seems to have taken on some whole new meaning. I think part of the reason is that starting a startup is now a more accessible dream than ever. You know the deal: cheap development costs, smarter money, more supportive communities.
There is a tipping point however. A point of no return where your romanticization of what a startup is goes form constructive to destructive.
So I am here to say that I have been staying up late, leaving the porch light on.
First, I have some ideas about what being a startup is not about
The first thing to remember is that everything you have been told about what startups should or shouldn’t do is all bullshit. Every industry, geography, product, and approach is unique and those are the primary determining factors in how you do business. Depending on the resources and opportunities available to you, you may have to do things completely differently than a startup located somewhere else. The people telling you that it is done “this way” or that way obviously haven’t done it before.
And then there is the fact that most of the people you are listening to are more successful at getting attention than they are at actually running a business. They are hyper networkers and quite influential, but they are not role models. Being a startup is not about being a personality. It helps, but it isn’t the endgame.
Don’t forget that partying != networking. It’s ok to go out and have a good time, but please do not tell yourself that it is business, no matter who you are rubbing shoulders with. That goes for conferences and the idea that being involved in “the community” is important to your business. Being in the community is important to you, but being in front of your customers is what is important to your startup. Learn to balance this.
So, what is being a startup about? I can give you some ideas.
Creating. More than anything, a startup has to be about creating something new. This is the primary part of the definition that separates Startups from Service Providers. Founders and early employees need to be willing to get their hands dirty in the clay in order to shape something unique.
Seeing. There is no science to being a startup, so your best bet is to get your paintbrush and play the artist. Anyone who takes a scientific approach to creating a startup may get lucky, but they won’t be able to handle the certain uncertainties of startup life. Being a startup is about designing a future for your product, company, culture and market that you will be able to realize, but the mechanics of which you are able to create as you go.
Discipline. This is an easy one to forget. Every flaw you have will be magnified under the lens of money, people and uncertainty. Stay focused.
Ignorance. There is always a reason why what you are doing won’t work. You need to learn to ignore the opinions and objections that don’t matter. Your job is to prove them wrong. Some advice just isn’t worth taking.
What is technopreneurship? I’m guessing that it’s technology entrepreneurship. The Government of Alberta Advanced Education and Technology has a program for “young entrepreneurs” (crap, I guess by the Alberta definition I’m now old). The program is a business plan competition run by post secondary education institutions and non-profit community groups. It’s a pretty cool deal to support the existing institutions.
The program essentially provides $20,000 to winners ($10,000 for high school students) plus “incubation services” and mentorship. I hope the “incubation services” and mentorship are provided without fees to the winners. Though with it looks like some of these services are financed through the Alberta Innovation Voucher Pilot Program, that offered vouchers of up to $10,000 or $50,000 to cover 75% of services by approved service providers. These programs are not directly related, but it does show a preference to a network of approved providers and funding redirection.
There’s a lot of great things going on in Alberta. How can you fault an organization that links to DemoCamp (BarCampEdmonton) as part of their networking advise for entrepreneurs? They are venture programs like AVAC Ltd. that are actively investing $79M in Alberta. You can see deals being done like Tynt Multimedia that included Montreal-based iNovia Capital on their latest $5M round, and Calgary-based CoolIT Systems. There is a lot of work with the Alberta Deal Generator, and the Banff Venture Forum that are driving interest and attention. And there are deep entrepreneur led grassroots efforts with STIRR in Calgary and DemoCamp in Edmonton.
KPMG will be hosting a free seminar tomorrow morning on Going Public.
Location: Westin Prince Hotel, 900 York Mills Road, North York, Ontario (Map)
Time: 8:00am – 11:00am
If your schedule is booked, but you are still interested in receiving a guide on Going Public, register online and a complimentary copy will be mailed to you.
Gain valuable insights from a TSX representative and CFOs who have taken their companies public as they share their outlooks on current market conditions and their experience on the challenges and successes of the going public process. Together with KPMG professionals in audit, tax, and advisory, they will highlight critical matters to be addressed at each stage of the process.
Commencing with a short presentation on listing with the TSX, followed by a panel discussion, this session will help you understand what going public means for your business and the key elements you need to consider, including:
– current market situation,
– how to know when your company is ready,
– the main challenges you can expect in preparing to go public and how to address them,
– critical steps in executing a successful IPO,
– governance, accounting, and tax reporting considerations to be addressed at each stage of the process, and
– what to expect after transition to life as a public company.This seminar is designed for active audience participation and will provide you the opportunity to ask the questions you want the answers to. Our objective is to help you make a well-informed decision and map out an effective strategy and path to taking your company public. All participants will receive a copy of KPMG’s guide on Going Public.
Don’t you just love the fact that folks are even thinking about going public again? Oh sunny days!
DemoCamp24 in Toronto is sold out, for those following at home, some live notes:
First up: Gary Vaynerchuk:
Greatest takeaway: big game is patience, way too many ppl give up right before it’s about to happen. If you don’t have the passion, if you’re not bleeding out the eyeballs for it you won’t make it, if it’s about cash you won’t make it. Patience and passion the pp theory. If you talk to ppl in their 90s they never say I wish I made more cash. The people who wake up in the morning who are pissed are losing.
What you can do is put down the wii, maybe not watch a lost marathon every weekend, you can start a company. That wasn’t true years ago. The fact that the internet, the most underrated thing in our society.
Question: How do you find your passion? Really hard. People roll up to me and say Gary what’s my passion? What am I fucking Yoda? What I can say you can’t be afraid of having more than one passion. Don’t limit yourself just skiing or rockclimbing, by doing that you limit your audience. We are in the personal brand business now, there are no editors to control who you are.
I never want to hear from people a 5 year plan? 5 years? 5 years ago there was no twitter, 5 years ago you needed a .edu to get into facebook. I react to what’s out there, I worry about what I can control.
Stickiness is important. You could get a trillion hits and it wouldn’t matter two foundations: quality content and customer service. Zappos is massively underrated. Zappos was the only competitor Amazon really worried about. Because Zappos wasn’t competing on price with Amazon. People cared more about Zappos. How many of you out there personally email to thank anyone who posts a comment on your blog?
First pizza, now on to the Demos:
Jason Roks – founder of guigoog now called zero.in thanking the DemoCamp Community and announcing his Angel funding which he closed thanks to his demo at DemoCamp22. PROTIP: close Angel faster with convertible debentures and avoiding the challenge of valuing your company.
GridCentric.ca – cluster computing demo. Virtual cluster. Normally when you scale out your cluster, you need to scale out the same machines, with virtual clusters you can add anything, you can even move the virtual machines while running from machine to machine. With GridCentric you can grow the scale the datacenter by instantly cloning running machines. Demo’s drawing a purple elephant on a paint app on one virtual machine, cloning that virtual machine and we see the same drawing app running on the new virtual machine. Idea: if you need a hundred machines you can scale them out to hundred virtual machines then throw them away when done. How does this compare to EC2? This is an EC2 on steroids for people who have their own clusters. Q: It is based on Zen hypervisor, modified with their control stack. Moneyquote: “I don’t want this to sound super nerdy.”
DataTO. Helps the city of Toronto prioritize and release data. Have a site like a dell ideastorm with digg-like interface for people to submit and vote on requests for the city to open data. Now that the city has opened data, they really need help because they don’t have resources to open everything at once. The whole site was built in a week (wow) with developer time (@thody‘s) donated by his employer Architech Solutions. This is a great cause. Since the launch of this service many other cities Paris, London, Ottawa, Victoria have expressed interest. Intention is to open source the project, contact @remarkk if you want to contribute to the project.
5BlocksOut solves the “lost in a big city problem”. It’s an online community where you ask questions or create missions like “where do you like going out for a drink?”. So far, looks like a gigpark crossed with digg for super local places and events. It also has a rather cute little hedgehog in the graphics. Other missions: I’m a hairy beast can you suggest a good esthetician? Indoor winter fun for little kidlets? site also let’s you drill down on hundreds of very local neighbourhoods, follow them and follow other “locals” twitter style. Request an invite, and metion DemoCamp to get a beta invite.
Datamartist is (another) excel killer for desktop data analysis. Let’s you build db queries using a combination of visual drag and drop blocks and excel-like formula expressions. It’s a scratch pad for data, merge sets, cut paste columns from various source, with quick visualizations like distribution or ven diagrams of what data from one set that can join to another. Pretty neat, $750 a license, if you need this, we guess you probably know who you are. Moneyquote “we’re very oldschool (we’re a windows desktop app and,) it has business model: you buy it from us”. bonus points: for non-profits, it’s free.
Equentia. is a news and, um, tag cloud aggregator of vertical news. Here’s an Eqentia portal for Canada Tech News.
Cadmus is a neat idea. It answers the question: “what has been talked about on twitter, on rss etc. since the last time I was online”. What it will do is aggregate, crunch down and thread conversations for you. Algorithm works by looking at how important is the source and how important is the content. Moneyquote: “yes you can filter out foursquare updates from twitter”
That’s all folks. Congrats and thanks to all the brave demoers. Time for beer.
I was reading Anil Dash’s New York City is the Future of the Web post over the weekend, and there is a great list of startups (and funders) based in NYC. The list is pretty impressive starting with the money folks including Union Square Ventures and Fred Wilson to Founders Collective and Chris Dixon. The startups Foursquare, Hunch, Etsy, Kickstarter, and 20×200. I was starting to think that the grass might be greener in NYC. But I was reminded of the great things going on in Canada when I was redirected to the 2009 Canadian New Media Awards finalists.
There is a great list of companies that are finalists for the CNMA. You can round this list out with the great list of companies announced as part of the CIX Top 20. There are a lot of great Canadian startups that continue to execute, find customers, and raise their profiles internationally.
These companies show the breadth of solution and corporate development of the Canadian startups. The startups are spread across the country, but entrepreneurs in Canada are building great things. Feeling good about the state of startups, hoping that Canadian funding scene continues to evolve, and that these companies continue to have the opportunities to change the world.
We’ve written about the awesomesauce that is VeloCity in the past, and about the Project Exhibition. They have renamed the event Start-up Day. Huge improvement. I’m hoping that the quality of the projects and demos continues to grow. Velocity offers students at Waterloo an opportunity to really see entrepreneurship as a potential career path. Like the cooperative education program, VeloCity is leading here. This is a great opportunity to see the progress of the current crop.
Velocity Start-up Day is a great opportunity to:
Startups should be heading for the day to find talent. Funders should be heading to see if there are any opportunities. I’ll be heading there to continue to support my alma mater and this program.
What: VeloCity Start-up Day
When:Tuesday, December 1, 2009 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM
Where:Student Life Centre
200 University Ave West
Waterloo, ON Canada