StartupNorth

Tag: cix

  • Where’s Waldo?

    I’ve written about CIX Top 20 Follow @CIXCommunity in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012. To follow my pattern here is my post for 2013. Full disclosure: I sit on the Advisory Board for CIX. 

    There are 3 core events in the Canadian startup calendar:

    There are other happenings and gatherings ranging from NxNE to HPX Digital to Mesh to the C100 events. If you need a reminder about the state of the Toronto startup ecosystem, make sure you check out my now 14 month old but still relevant post, Don’t Panic.

    Each of the above events is optimized for different audience needs. CIX brings the  viewpoint of Canadian investors (if you care). The advisory board is primarily venture capitalists (a few lawyers, a couple of CEOs and  one evangelist):

    • Roger Chabra, Rho Ventures
    • Boris Wertz, Version One Ventures
    • Mark MacLeod, Freshbooks (recovering VC)
    • Barry Gekiere, IAF
    • Joe Catalfamo, Summerhill VP
    • Justin LaFayette, Georgian Partners

    The advisory board is 44 people big. And approximately 30 are doing some form of investment. It’s almost 70% are actively making investments in technology companies. There is very strong Canadian VC and investor representation in the group that advise and plan the conference content.

    And it shows in the content, of the 67 scheduled speakers (as of Nov 14), 19 of the speakers are from the advisory board – that’s 28% of the content. (It’s even higher if you include partners and others from firms of advisory board members). If you want to know what Canadian VCs and investors are thinking, this is the best way to see what is important. They define this conference. They provide the content and the voices at the conference.

    So why go?

    CIX gives you insight in to the types of companies, IP and traction that Canadian investors are currently looking for. It is the barometer of the “high potential growth technology companies” in Canada. It will be interesting to see what everyone thinks are the hot companies and trends. The panels and policy discussions are the things that Canadian investors are grasping and struggling with. It will be interesting to hear the conversations.

    You might argue that as an entrepreneur you don’t care about these conversations. They don’t help you grow your business, build your product, or acquire customers. But they do provide you insight into the mind set of the people you are trying to raise money from. That might be the thing that gives you an unfair advantage in understanding their decision making process this year.

    I love that 2 of my personal investments Upverter and OpenCare made the Top 20. Full disclosure: My employer, OMERS Ventures, is an investor in 360 incentives. I’m also excited to check in on Breather, Bionym, Axonify, Hubba and others. The CIX Top 20 has turned out some of the best companies in the past 5 years.

    It is possible to make your luck at CIX (just remember the preferred method of connecting).

    Photo Credits

    AttributionNoncommercialShare Alike Some rights reserved by Jameson42

  • Make your own luck at CIX

    CC-BY-NC-SA-20 Some rights reserved by nhr
    AttributionNoncommercialShare Alike Some rights reserved by nhr

    Next week is the Canadian Innovation Exchange. I sit on the Advisory Board and StartupNorth is an Association Partner. We are big fans of the event  and have watched over the past few years as CIX has gone through changes and growth. It continues to evolve both the CIX Top 20 as well as the event. The focus in 2012 is about providing meaningful content and experiences for entrepreneurs. This is a change from the past  where you might argue that the focus was on the investors attending. There is a strong focus on building an amazing event will attract amazing entrepreneurs, which in turn will attract amazing investors. And it the 2012 event looks to be very entrepreneur focused.

    Entrepreneur Pricing

    One of the bitches about this event used to be the pricing. There is a $199 entrepreneur ticket. Seriously, if you can’t justify the cost versus the opportunity to either see an amazing program or for the chance for random collisions with some of the best investors in the game actively deploying capital in the Canadian ecosystem.

    This is your chance to hustle (see my comments about hustling at CVCA). Make your own luck. There will be people that buy products and the people that invest in companies at this event. Make something happen.

    I love seeing Switch Video, an audience of VCs and companies that need video to grow their business. Bingo. Good hustle.

    Buy a $199 ticket and figure out how to make serendity happen!

    Entrepreneur Content

    Where to start? Entrepreneur One-on-One with Jevon MacDonald . Sure he sold his company to Salesforce, but you know he started a blog, this blog. Jevon is a great guy. He has helped me with my thinking about startups in Canada, the role of venture capital, and with corporate development. GoInstant was around for a little less than 24 months, but I know that Jevon will be talking about the >5 years of hustle at Firestoker and Dachis Group before GoInstant. It should be a great conversation for founders looking for an understanding of how an amazing overnight deal.

    The trade off is that if you go see Jevon, you’ll have to skip How Emerging Companies Can Think, Appear and Act Like they are Bigger then They Are which features Daniel Debow , Michael Hyatt , Yona Shtern and Razor Suleman . This is about how to strategically build a reality distortion field. Should be fun to learn the secrets of these 4 crazy entrepreneurs.

    We spend a lot of time focusing on Lean and pre-product/market fit companies. But there are equally difficult questions about culture and growth at scale. There is a panel hosted by Howard Gwin and Derek Smyth with Dan Shimmerman of Varicent and Michael Harris of BlueCat Networks. This should be a good mix for companies that are in the scaling cycle. Given that apparently everything that Howard and Derek touch turns to gold: Varicent, Dayforce, Rypple and they have their hands in others Desire2Learn, Hootsuite, Vision Critical and others.

    And there are US VCs. There is Mike Katz from Battery Ventures and Devdutt Yellurkar of Charles River Ventures (who invested in Influitive and Wave Accounting locally) and Alexander Kolicich of Mithril Capital Managment (and I don’t know the intricacies but Mithril is associated with Peter Thiel is associated with  Valar Ventures who invested in ShopLocket).

    If you can’t find content that can help you, you’re doing it wrong.

    It’s not about the content

    Seriously, it’s not about about content. It’s about the hallway conversations. The random collisions. But you need to be there and you need to participate to have the chance for those things to happen. There will be a lot fo interesting folks in Toronto early next week, you should figure out how to have a collision. And make your own luck!

    Register to attend CIX 2012

     

  • The Royal Agricultural Winter Fair

    How many innovative Canadian startups are there?

    Earlier tonight the good folks at CIX announced a group of 20 who will be presenting at the eponymous conference on November 27. Congratulations: Frank and Oak, Scribble Live, Shopcaster, SiteScout, UrtheCast, Yactraq, Celtx, PenyoPal, Wajam, Sweet IQ, Livelenz, Payfirma, VidYard, Influitive, PrintChomp, 360pi, Viafoura, Nulogy, EmployTouch, and Jibestream.

    This list is a nice start, no doubt, but what the announcement immediately got me thinking is the following… there are easily another 200 startups (probably many more than that) worth recognizing, joining, financing, and cheering on.

    So this post goes out to all the hustlers and hackers across Canada who are burning the midnight oil. The founders who take it upon themselves to get out of the basement and face the hecklers at DemoCamp and other events. The funders who take their nth coffee meeting of the day with a bright eyed but green CEO to iterate on the deck together. And the early employees that take a chance on someone’s dream over the cushy corporate gig.

    We’ve lined up a discount to the conference just for you: CIXSTARTUP

  • Toronto Startup Event List Fall 2012

    Getting ready for startup event fatigue? Toronto is an active ecosystem (based on total activity in the Startup Genome database). But there are a lot of upcoming events, here is my inital tracking of Toronto startup events list for fall 2012. The question is which events to attend and which ones to stay heads down and work. An actual guide would breakdown the benefits of each of these events. But I’m being lazy, I’ll add some commentary around each event. Or please feel free to add events and commentary. I’ll update the post.

    And for those of you thinking about attending everything, go read Mark Suster’s Be Careful not to become a Conference Ho.

    September 2012

    October 2012

    November 2012

    December 2012

  • CIX Top 20 – 2012

    CIX Top 20 Canada's Hottest Innovative Companies

    We’ve written about CIX Top 20 Follow @CIXCommunity in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. So you’ll be shocked to find that I’m writing about it again in 2012.

    What is CIX?

    “The CIX Top 20 is an elite index of the most forward-looking companies in the Canadian innovation ecosystem, and connects the key players driving technology-based business both in Canada and beyond.”

    Who should apply?

    “The CIX Top 20 is open to any Canadian company working in Digital Media or Information and Communication Technology with annual revenues under $10 million.”

    Why do you care?

    These are some of the leading companies in Canada. Don’t believe me, past participants include:

    Alright, there probably is a correlation between the success of these companies and their CIX submission and attendance. But CIX is an amazing opportunity for Canadian startups to generate attention, drive awareness with investors and media, get input and feedback in a safe environment and start to build connections.

    “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” Wayne Gretzky

    Nothing is foregone conclusion, as in past performance is not an indicator of future success. But you can’t win if you don’t apply (follow the directions on the bottom of the page).

  • 2011 CIX Top 20 Nominations

    CIX Top 20 ApplicationWe’ve written about the work that CIX is doing in building Canadian Technology Accelerator with ties to the US. They continue to build a showcase for Canadian startups in a variety of emerging fields. They have recently announced the nomination process for companies to the Top 20 competition for 2011.

    Robert Montgomery (LinkedIn), Mark Greenspan (LinkedIn, @markgreenspan) and the team at Achilles Media has been working hard to deliver value to the startups that participate in CIX. And we’re seeing a number of past winners have success, traction and exits. Cognovision, the 2009 winner, was acquired by Intel. The 2010 winners included:

    It’s a great opportunity to get access to some of the movers and shakers in digital media and ICT in Canada. And hey, the press coverage doesn’t hurt either. The 2010 short list of 20 companies included an impressive set of digital media and software (ICT in larger player lingo), including:

    Hopefully the entrants for the 2011 cohort will be just as impressive.  If you are a Canadian startup working in Digital Media or Technology and have less than Cdn$10MM in revenue, you should consider applying.

  • 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!

  • We have maple syrup and 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.

    cnma-finalists-announced

    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.

  • CIX Top 20 Announced

    cix It’s a very interesting list of Canadian companies selected for the CIX Top 20.

    It’s a great showing for our friends at TechCapital Partners with Metranome, OverlayTV and PostRank in the list. As expected for a conference in Toronto there is strong representation from the the Waterloo-Montreal corridor with only D-Wave System from BC.

    There is a strong focus on software/web services (particularly focused on media) with CognoVision, GlassBOX Television, Metranome, Morega System, Peerset and Overlay TV in the media enablement space. And Dayforce, Enstream, IGLOO, PostRank, and Rypple in the web services space.

    It’s going to be an interesting dog and pony show.

  • CIX Top 20 – Showcase your Innovation

    CIX Top 20 Submissions are open

    We covered CIX in the past, and the Achilles Media team are hosting another great event in

    CIX conducts an exhaustive search for the most innovative ideas, products, services and companies in the country. Each year 20 technology and clean technologies are selected via a qualified Selection Committee to showcase their innovative product and services in front of the CIX community. Each of the selected 20 will be asked to deliver a seven-minute presentation live on stage at CIX.  Recognized industry experts will act as Judges, evaluating the merit of their product or service and giving constructive feedback and guidance. The CIX community present at the event will vote for the CIX 2009 Award for “Canadian Innovation Leader”.

    I’ve written a lot about CIX (Exchanging Innovations Canadian style, CIX Survey Says). This is a similar discussion on the 2 different models presented by TechCrunch50 and by Demo. CIX is a great event to connect later stage startups, investors, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Canada and the US at a local venue.