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.
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:
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.
We’re heading to Grow Conference in Vancouver. You should join us at the Portside Pub on August 14, 2013.
With our friends at Communitech, we are hosting Ontario Startup House during Grow Conference. The goals is to build a “house party” that highlights the amazing things that are going on in Ontario.
The details are starting to shape up, but here is the plan as it stands. We’re aiming to bring all things that are amazing and Ontario with us to Vancouver. We’ll be brining amazing startups, amazing founders, and amazing investors with us. We’ve managed to secure an amazing venue, The Portside PubFollow @ThePortsidePubGoogle+, in Gastown.
“On August 14, we’re taking over the hottest bars and restaurants in the historic Gastown area, home to Vancouver’s tech scene, and inviting you to host your very own “House Party” to show off the very best your technology community has to offer. All Houses will be within walking distance so attendees can easily move from House-to-House. Who doesn’t love a good house party?”
We are looking for startups and sponsors. We have great partners in Communitech, OMERS Ventures and we are actively looking for others that want to participate.We have the biggest and best venue for startups and founders to congregate during GrowConf. We’re aiming to bring the best startups, the best founders, the best beer, the best band, the best crowd to celebrate in Vancouver.
The event is open. We’ll have amazing startups, founders and investors hanging out – guarranteed. We’re planning a few surprises that should make for an exciting night.
Details
When: August 14, 2013
Where: Portside Pub, 7 Alexander Street, Vancouver, BC V6A 1E9
What: House party featuring the best startups in Ontario at GrowConf
Update: The event date has changed to June 10, 2013.
In partnership with Via Rail consider this your official invite to our Ontario Startup Train wine and cheese on June 10th at Union Station in Toronto. We hope to get all our train attendees, alumni from last year and anyone considering coming this year together to start connecting and meeting before we even board the train. If you haven’t bought your ticket, come out and meet us.
If you don’t have your train ticket yet, grab one now as we will sell out again this year. Our early ticket purchasers get dibs on spots for our on-train mentoring with the likes of Jim Estill, Zak Homuth, Brian Kobus and many more.
You remember the roadtrips of your youth, some with your parents, some with just friends. For our greatest roadtrips, we remember the journey the rest of our lives but often pause and think “where were we headed?”
“Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive”, ZAMM, Robert Pirsig
Last year we organized a roadtrip for startup founders and funders. We reserved our own car on a Via train and packed it full of entrepreneurs. Our destination was The International Startup Festival in Montreal for three full days of meeting, conversing, learning and working with a truly international audience of startup people.
This July, we’re aiming to have three cars, two passenger cars along with a bar car that we’ll use for our on-train events.
Startup conferences are very different beasts compared to their corporate cousins. People aren’t attending “because my boss sent me”. Instead the majority have spent what little pocket change they have to get there. The result is a conference filled with hustlers motivated to get a ton of value out of being there. We hope to help.
Instead of wasting your travel time, join us on the Ontario Startup Train and let’s get organized before we’re even registered for the conference. Our hope is to get you thinking and sharing what you need to get out of attending this conference before hand. Sharing that with other people on the train means it won’t be just you hunting for an introduction to Dave McClure or speaking to that potential partner you want to invite into your new project.
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Rick Stomphorst Follow @stompr who is a co-founder of Silicon Halton Follow @SiliconHalton. Halton Region is in the West end, it includes Burlington, Oakville, and Milton.Population is >500,000 people. I would have called it a bedroom community, but there is a strong set of tech companies like Ivara and Awareness Inc. We focus on Toronto, Waterloo, Montreal, Vancouver and Halifax but there are strong communities around Canada that have emerging tech startup communities.
Five years ago the state of the tech community in Halton was “virtually non-existent”. Polite conversations about tech startups would have met by shoulder shrugs, glossy eyes and guessimates of the number of startups in the low single digits (if not zero itself).
Asking those same questions today, and you’ll get a wildly different answer.
We have been committed to connecting high-tech entrepreneurs, companies and enthusiast. Two major vehicles for connecting the community are Silicon Halton (full disclosure: I am a cofounder of Silicon Halton) and HalTech. Silicon Halton was launched in 2009 by 2 people with 2 events. In 2012, it has grown to almost 800 members and 80 events. Silicon Halton is a grassroots hi-tech community of people who make a living, make meaning, and make things happen in technology in Halton Region. HalTech is an Ontario Network of Excellence Regional Innovation Centre providing education, advisory services and industry-academia collaboration programs and hosted an additional 35 events for entrepreneurs in 2012.
The primary focus of the events been education, building local connections and increasing exposure to local companies. At the Silicon Halton’s monthly meetups, one activity is to “get to know your members” where two entrepreneurs introduce their company. These two intros per month have translated into 24 tech companies connections per year enabling collaboration, shared resources, recruiting and other local opportunities. Additional events have been added to the calendar including DemoNights and PitchNight. Feedback from participants it that the ability to connect with other entrepreneurs and professionals has helped accelerate local companies and local ecosystem. Other Halton region events include contests like Pythons Pit.
The early stage nature of the community has included a focus on shared resources and co-working. The goal being to help connect early stage companies to the broader ecosystem and reduce the risks often associated with commercial leases and real estate during the initial startup phases. The discussion around co-working spaces including 2 at concept stage and a member created app, SpaceSurfers, for finding and sharing workspaces.
Halton has a strong educational resource with “the Harvard of animation schools”[1], Sheridan College, in Oakville. Sheridan has a strong history of great applied research in digital media, health and advanced manufacturing. It’s a great local talent pool that is easy for entrepreneurs to access through events like BIZTECH Career Fair or through campus the job posting service. [Ed. – I’m intrigues by the Bachelor of Interaction Design and the Bachelor of Game Design in providing students with design oriented skills].
Incomplete List of Halton Tech Companies & Startups
If you are in Halton Region consider joining Silicon Halton and get connected to other locals interested in high growth, high tech companies. Silicon Halton provides a platform for Halton tech companies and to enable a stronger ICT and Digital Media cluster in Halton Region.
Footnotes
“As Sheridan’s animation department continued to grow, it produced hundreds of animators into Canadian and international studios, at one point in 1996 being called “the Harvard of animation schools” on “a worldwide basis” by animator Michael Hirsh.” on Wikipedia
Editor’s Note: This post is written by Paul Vice. Paul works the OCE team to enable special projects. This includes community outreach with groups like StartupNorth and DemoCamp. OCE has been a proud sponsor of DemoCamp and other StartupNorth events for the last 4 years. We’ve written about OCE Discovery in the past and the support that OCE has offered local startups like Bumptop, Verold, and others is unparalleled. We are excited to be able to offer StartupNorth readers access to OCE Discovery 11 » see below for details about ticketing. – David
The Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) has teamed up with the StartupNorth team to present a special DemoCamp on May 19th at 3:30pm at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre as part of the Discovery 11 conference. It is a chance to put DemoCamp in front of a different audience, drawing all the Discovery attendees. In 2010 we had a standing room only crowd. We have space for 300+ this year.
Discovery is the annual showcase of the best of innovations in Ontario hosted by OCE. Recently named Canada’s Best Trade Show 2010, Discovery has become the premier innovation and commercialization showcase in Canada with over 2500 attendees & over 300 exhibitors.
Some of the highlights of Discovery this year:
Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and author of Sketching User Experiences is the keynote speaker on the morning of May 19
A hot panel on the direction of mobile app development in Canada, moderated by Kunal Gupta, CEO and Founder of Polar Mobile.
A full track on Stereoscopic 3D technology including S3D gaming development
Indra Laksono from Toronto’s own ViXS Systems on the future of digital technology in the home. (btw, ViXS is a very cool company, check them out.)
The return of the Elevator Pitch competition – Dejero Labs and Gridcentric were past award winners.
Moderated by David Crow (@davidcrow), with guest speaker Anand Agarwala from Bumptop (now at Google) kicks things off with a unique “Art of the Hustle” (Street Smarts for the Startup World) presentation, followed by a showcase of 5 unique selected startups to pitch in front of an audience of over 300 participants, including panel members:
Discovery is not the usual DemoCamp venue. But, we are looking to accomplish 2 goals:
Put some interesting, exciting new DemoCamp start-ups in front of an new audience; and,
Put DemoCamp in front of that new audience and inspire some of them to join future DemoCamps
Want to demo?
We are looking for up to 5 startups or entrepreneurs to demo a new technology. Selected presenters get 5 minutes to show us the best of their application and then ask the audience for feedback, coaching, and insight from a highly connected, if occasionally cynical, crowd. You get market advice, technology advice, and pitch advice and the opportunity to deal with the hecklers.
Want join the audience, offer advice, heckle and get to explore the full conference floor?
Discovery is a full conference and trade show at the MTCC with all the typical costs and overheads. We run it on a cost recovery basis with a lot of very generous help from sponsors, but costs are a lot more than your typical Democamp.
But, we want you there. You can join us at DemoCamp and visit Discovery with a one day pass May 19 for $250 if you use the promotion code DC250 when you register. (The full price for the 2 days is $895, $75 for students with ID.)
Why isn’t there a commuter train from Toronto to Waterloo? Ok, you might ask actually ask why Toronto doesn’t have a train from downtown to the airport but let’s leave that for a conversation with more educated politicians and policy wonks.
If the assumption is that UWaterloo is a top ranking university (possibly my alumni delusions that cause me to overlook UWaterloo’s non-placement on Times Higher Education rankings). And with more startups like Kik raising money with powerhouses like OpenText, RIM, MKS and Christie Digital. There are less reason for students to have to leave the reason. It makes it more attractive to rent an apartment for the year and stay in Waterloo to manage your costs on your coop program.
Maybe the argument is that the capital is better spent on more programs for entrepreneurs or road infrastructure. But it seems that one of the greatest assets to the Toronto startup community (UW Coop students and graduates) are disconnected by public transportation. I wonder what my UW alumni brethren like Farhan Thawar (@fnthawar), John Green (@johnphilipgreen), Amar Varma (@extremevp), Brydon Gillis (@brydon), Ali Asaria (@aliasaria), Razor Suleman (@iloverewards), Kunal Gupta (@kunalfrompolar) think about the need for better connections between Waterloo (assuming a stop in Guelph) and Toronto.
It’s nice. It’s concise. It’s clean. There is choice but it’s not overwhelming. It feels like there is a consolidated effort to make Montreal the hub for startups and technology in Quebec. There are other activities and groups but there seems to be a core group of influencers, activities, and events where high tech entrepreneurs can go to find others like them, potential employees, potential investors, etc.
I look at Ontario and I am concerned. We have what should be the building blocks for a great entrepreneurial soup. And we’ve seen some spectacular successes (Bumptop, Sysomos, Pushlife among others). But there is a lot of noise. Efforts divided between regions.
I’m not suggesting a “one ring to rule them all” strategy. There are grassroots efforts, there are provincial government efforts, there are local economic development efforts like:
It leads to the murky waters that are the entrepreneur community and support infrastructure in Ontario. There is no segmentation. There definitely isn’t self-selection. They use similar words to describe their activities: entrepreneurship, startups, technology, media, growth, etc. As entrepreneurs there is a paradox of choice about who to listen to, where to go for advice, support, mentorship and guidance.
We started StartupNorth as a way to document our experiences finding, using, evaluating other startups in Toronto and across Canada. It was a way to connect with others interested in startups, emerging technologies and business models, and to talk about the things in a context specific to Canada.
Waterloo = University of Waterloo + Wilfred Laurier University
Kingston = Queen’s University + Royal Military College
Guelph = University of Guelph
Halton Region = Sheridan Institute of Technology & Applied Learning
Durham Region = University of Ontario Institute of Technology
Hamilton = McMaster University
Toronto = University of Toronto + Ryerson University + OCAD
St. Catherines = Brock University
Sault St. Marie = Algoma University
North Bay = Nipissing University
Sudbury = Laurentian University
Ottawa = University of Ottawa + Carleton University
Mississauga = University of Toronto Mississauga Campus
London = University of Western Ontario
Markham = York University + University of Toronto Scarborough Campus
Windsor = University of Windsor
It’s interesting that California with an estimated population that is 3.7 times larger [1] than Ontario[2] has less innovation hubs than Ontario (12 in California to 14 in Ontario). (Sure from a per capita GDP calculation, Ontario is higher (Cdn$43,847 vs US$38,956) but it’s probably not entirely a relevant metric unless you’re a politician which I am not).
Photo by postbear eater of worlds – Some rights reserved CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
I’m wondering if rather than satisfising constituents with perceiving innovation benefits for votes, that we need to look toward innovation, education and economic growth programs that benefit citizens. I keep wondering what we are missing because of the existing programs and repackaging of programs for Ontarios entrepreneurs. Look at the job creation from a single venture firm, Union Square Ventures has portfolio companies with over 557 open jobs around the globe (128 are in NYC + Brooklyn). This is job creation. It’s focused on creating new positions, in a variety of rolls, that hopefully will attract new talent to the location.
Everyone loves to hates Toronto
Let’s all hate Toronto. It’s not uncommon for Canadians to dislike Toronto. But I don’t hear the same disdain for Montreal or Vancouver. But maybe that’s because I don’t live with their large gravity well pulling me closer. I choose to live downtown in Toronto because it’s where I want to be. I understand the lifestyle choices that others make to live elsewhere. There are days when the traffic, the people, the crazy, all get to me, but I love the collision of people, cultures, and ideas (go read Richard Florida for more thoughts on the Creative Class).
Are we missing an opportunity to raise the profile of Ontario companies because we don’t want to embrace the fact that Toronto is one of the major technology/media hubs? Are we diluting efforts by spreading the love and effort across 16 regions?
We have been committed to connecting high-tech entrepreneurs, companies and enthusiast. Two major vehicles for connecting the community are 
