Bootup Labs Blog

Our office got together this week and did a fun holiday lip dub video:

Thanks to Jordan for whipping us all into shape — check out the Strutta holiday page for the main post of this video.

If you haven’t seen it, First Round Capital did an excellent holiday video with all their portfolio companies.

Thanks to David Crow, Bootup Labs is now a Microsoft BizSpark Network partner. I got a whole wack of Network Partner guides to promoting BizSpark and press kits and what not, but they pretty much don’t apply to just writing a simple blog post

The long story short is that if you’re a startup interested in using Microsoft technology — from desktop software licenses to server software to some of the new cloud computing tech like Azure — come see us at Bootup Labs and we can recommend that you get accepted into the BizSpark program for cheap or free access to some of these items.

Startups are also always looking for visibility, so while you’re filling out your StartupIndex.ca or Crunchbase listing, go ahead and yourself to the BizSpark DB as well.

Several people have sent this along to us already. We’ve definitely been looking at Montreal Startup’s model as we explore the details of how to set up Bootup Labs. I caught up with John Stokes and Austin Hill at the Banff Venture Forum and got some good detail on their progress. They’ve been spending a lot of time building support at the provincial level, and of course cultivating their local ecosystem.

» Montreal Start Up raises another $2M | StartupNorth

Montreal Start Up announced today the closing of an additional $2,000,000 for its venture fund from the Solidarity Fund QFL, bringing total assets under management to $5,000,000. The Solidarity Fund QFL joins Investissement Québec, la Conférence Régional des Élus, and 20 of Montreal’s most successful entrepreneurs and investors who partnered with Montreal Start Up to address the need for more early stage capital and mentoring.

“We have met with hundreds of entrepreneurs since our launch and the quality and creativity of the ideas we are seeing is constantly improving. We were having to turn down good deals because of the limited amounts of capital available to us. The support of Solidarity Fund QFL will allow us to support more of Montreal’s best startup companies.” John Stokes, Montreal Start Up

Also revealed were Montreal Start Up’s four latest investments: Mobilize Central, KeenKong, The Book Oven, and Oneeko all of which are based in Montreal. These investments are in addition to its previously announced investments in Standout Jobs and Akoha.

www.startupnorth.ca

We don’t yet have enough data to see if this new model “works” from Montreal Startup, but similar models like Y Combinator and Techstars do have enough data to show success. I firmly believe that these relatively small, very early stage investments “prime the pump” for a cycle of entrepreneurs starting companies, learning from the experience, and doing it again.

I’ve spent a lot of time reviewing business ideas and talking to entrepreneurs that want to start a company, are already in progress in pitching, or in general are looking at what they need to do in order to go down the path of getting funded.

Having the “big idea” is something that has often been talked about, so I’m going to skip that one - Mark Peter Davis of DFJ Gotham covers some of the points today in Want VC? Then Be Ready To Go Big, with his last paragraph being a good summary — “entrepreneurs should know that getting into bed with a VC typically means setting your sights on going big - very big. If you’re looking for a small lifestyle business or a small exit, venture capital is probably not right for you.”

Other than the “big idea” that you think you can execute on, here are the 4 items that every startup needs to complete if they want to get funded.

1) A Co Founder

Doing a startup all by yourself is hard, especially your first one. Unless you’re a very well rounded individual, being able to balance technical, marketing, and business skills in one head is going to be a lot to handle. More practically, a second person whose “day job” is the startup means that they’re investing their sweat equity, meaning you can ideally get your company that much farther along.

A lot of the founders I talk to really want to have someone who fills in a technical, marketing, or business hole in their own skillset. Now, that doesn’t mean that each founder needs to narrowly fit into one role — the fact is that you will be wearing many hats and need to have some familiarity with everything.

Finding the perfect second person (or third … more than three and it starts getting messy) can be the defining moment for a startup: things gel, many hands make light work, and you’ve got the personal networks of multiple people to get things done.

2) Executive Summary

You should have this. It’s arguably more important than a business plan filled with some meaningless spreadsheets with made up numbers that you can’t prove you can execute on.

The way I like to think about an executive summary is that it’s a prose-based description of the direction you intend to take your company in. You can refer to it whenever you are reviewing new opportunity — client X is asking you to customize the system to add feature Y, or to do a white label version — what does your executive summary say? Does it fit with the direction that you are planning to grow the company?

What needs to go in an executive summary? Well, this is a written document, so it’s pretty flexible. Talk about the problem you are addressing, your particular solution, how you’re going to make money (including how you’re going to make a lot of it, which will actually warrant that funding you’re looking for), your competition, etc. Here’s an executive summary template to get you started — feel free to use it to get you started (it’s not perfect by any means — feedback welcome!).

Writing an effective executive summary and tuning the wording and messaging is more than just one blog post. Get a start on it, as it’s the first piece of documentation that will actually let you share some information about your business.

3) Pitch deck

AKA the Powerpoint presentation. Some people are going to be better at presentations than at more written documents like an executive summary, or vice versa. Regardless, at some point you are going to be at Angel Forum, VANTEC, New Ventures BC, or some other forum where you’re giving an investor presentation.

The key to the presentation is that it needs *some* information that is directly consumable without you presenting (e.g. some financial projections), but the bulk of the material is going to really sing when you stand up there and tell the story of your company. The executive summary can cover the more extensive written material that can stand on its own without you explaining / talking to it.

I’m a big fan of the story model of presentations. Tell us the story of the problem, how you came up with the solution, and then the details of your company. As soon as possible, clearly and concisely make it easy for people watching you present understand what you do and why they should care. I find the model of telling a story or real world use cases make it easiest for listeners to put themselves in the mind of an actual customer or user of your product.

Of course, an investor focused presentation is going to need to then focus on the business fundamentals of your company: at the end of the day, neat technology that doesn’t have an investment story isn’t going to work. Technically minded founders will often spend too much time on the gee whiz bits. Investors care about the technology to a degree, but really, they want to know if there is potential to make money, including how *you* can execute to make this work.

I don’t have a good template for pitches per se, but another piece of material from Mark Peter Davis is useful — his recent presentation is in our favourites in the Bootup Labs Slideshare group. Slide 7 covers what materials do you need.

4) Prototype

Recall that Bootup Labs works with technology startups that work on “digital delivery” of products or services. More narrowly, that means consumer internet, mobile, casual gaming, or enterprise internet. In this space, you *can* build an alpha/beta/prototype/whatever of your company. Even if the founding team aren’t developer types themselves, it is possible to work with a firm or contract developer to get something live. In fact, it’s a nice benchmark that proves you can execute — whether directly in terms of code, or indirectly in funding and managing a development process.

Mockups, Flash, or Powerpoint “prototypes” all have their place, especially in terms of sharing ideas or vetting markets. But, this should happen early in the life of your startup, when it really just is an idea or three in your head. Get out there and register that killer domain, throw up some code, and get going. You expect someone else to give you money when you haven’t built *anything*? And you don’t even have a blog up?! (Remind me to tell you the story of why Cover It Live doesn’t have a blog — the short version is that Keith McSpurren is right and I’m wrong )

I’ve been thinking of using this yardstick to at least open discussions with companies. There are exceptions to these 4 points (as there always are). But, if you can get these 4 pieces together, I believe you have a much higher chance of success. Most venues where you will be seeking funding or partnerships or some sort of business arrangement, will want this same set of materials. Putting time into this collateral will definitely be rewarded.

I don’t want people to think its hopeless if they haven’t done these things. But if you’re looking for concrete directions on what to do next to help build your idea into a startup, or to take your startup to the next level, I suggest you check these items off the list.

For the record, I finally decided to post this list because I sat down with the team from NetHooks today. I first saw them almost exactly a year ago at DemoCamp Vancouver, where they gave their first pitch ever. The peer feedback, if I recall, was pretty harsh. Now, a year later, Chris and Brenda have checked all 4 items off the list and are about to do a broader beta launch. I’m impressed with how far they’ve come, and am looking forward to “what’s next” from them.

Thanks to Michael Fergusson and the team at Rude Boy Games for hosting last nights meetup with the team from Wavefront. Wavefront is a non-profit “accelerated commercialization centre” for BC, focusing on wireless and mobile applications and devices.

They came to Gastown to find out more from developers and companies working in mobile here in Vancouver, to tell us more about themselves and the services they offer, and to feed us free beer and pizza.

Michael ran the evening admirably. He had everyone sit in a circle, introduce themselves, their company, their projects, and talk about challenges they were facing around mobile here in BC. We didn’t get very far before some person’s commentary on anything from embracing the web as THE path for mobile development or a discussion on funding realities right now evolved into a discussion by everyone in the room.

I talked a bit about Bootup Labs, a bit about the VCC program (info on BC’s Venture Capital Programs here) that we’re applying for, and a plea for less duplication and more working together on common issues. Things like “HR bootcamp” or a seminar on getting investor ready is not at all specific to mobile startups, and I’d hope that local industry groups work together on co-sponsoring or organizing such events.

Lastly on the funding side of things, I mentioned the JumpStart program from the BlackBerry Partners Fund — this is something to keep an eye on to get started with really early stage. For those that are currently iPhone crazy, getting some investment dollars to focus on BlackBerry might be what it takes for people to look at the platform more closely. I definitely think there are interesting demographics around it, and of course folks are much more guaranteed to have things like data plans.

Back to the discussion, the huge theme was seeing the web as the primary platform for delivery, and anything like device specific applications being a step backwards. There were a handful of Nitobi developers there that in particular esposed this point of view, hence their involvement in the open source Phone Gap project, to make native iPhone apps (and soon, Android) using just web technologies. Parveen Kaler from Smartful Studios – who comes from a game developer / console background where he has dealt with lots of “gatekeeper” companies with much stricter rules and is now building iPhone apps – was the main contrarian: he’s loving Objective C and developing natively for the platform, and his business model fits with the rules in place.

It was great to find out more about Wavefront and the programs they’re currently offering. The item of biggest interest, judging by the crowd, is probably the handset library they are going to build up. They have a couple of G1 Android phones today, and one of them already got lent to the guys from Handi Mobility. I still see a little bit of overlap with, for example, WINBC, but it would be great if Wavefront focused on the developer / technology / direct carrier interactions. I think leading these type of developer-centric gathering events would be a great direction for Wavefront, and hope to see more of them as they get ramped up.

Roger Ehrenberg just wrote a post entitled: “The Pyramid Principle: Venture Investment in a Capital-Efficient World”  I think it’s very much worth reading if you’re as passionate about making Vancouver a world class tech center as we are.

It will require a culture that pushes rapid assessment and admission of mistakes, rewards innovation and compensates heavily for successes that can be broadly applied. Most large venture firms find this activity too time-consuming and capital inefficient to warrant much attention. In the future I believe that getting the base right will be the key to success in the large-scale venture field.

Bootup Labs is the base of the Pyramid.  We live to serve the rest of the Venture Capitalists who don’t feel like changing their model or letting go of their management fees.  Help us, help you.

The PACT event that we attended just had a release from the Trade Commissioners out of the San Francisco office. It looks like some of our feedback — specifically, moving the “Boot Camp” programs of prepping companies for investment and pitches to regional locations in Canada — are going to go ahead. We’ll keep everyone up to date on how this program evolves, it looks like there are definite plans for a similar event April / May 2009.

Thanks Guillaume, Thierry, and the rest of the San Francisco and Palo Alto office teams for putting this event on. We’re looking forward to be involved in the regional Boot Camps as well. Full post of the results / press release after the jump.

Title:  SFRAN0029 - Canadian Technology Start-ups Plug and Play in Silicon Valley!

1. Summary:

The Consulate General of Canada in San Francisco /Silicon Valley, in partnership with the Canadian Chapter of the Association of University Research Parks (AURP), organized a venture financing “Boot Camp” for IT start-ups in conjunction with an Investor Forum and EXPO at a successful local incubator, Plug and Play Tech Center.  The two-day program was delivered to 21 Canadian companies and five Canadian incubators, October 20-21, 2008, in Santa Clara, California, with a view to prepare companies’ investment pitches and put what they learn immediately to practice in front of  Silicon Valley investors.  Detailed program click here.

2. Key Findings/Outcomes:
High client demand for VC access services: 25+ Canadian technology start-ups indicated strong interest after a first broadcast (Company Profiles click here) as well as 5 incubators (OCRI, MaRS, Waterloo, Victoria, and Bootup Lab/Vancouver)
High client satisfaction for this formula as indicated by spontaneous client testimonials and follow-up survey: Business Plan/Pitch Review + Exposure to about 30 Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists/ Angels (Full agenda click here)
Immediate success was recorded from a few participating start-ups in securing funding and/or partnerships (at least 3 tangible transactions)
One of the participating Canadian companies, Redwood Technologies, won the Plug and Play pitch competition (43 international participants)
Post is actively working with a number of these new clients, introducing them to additional VCs and other contacts
AURP and participating science parks would like to repeat the exercise and possibly open a Canada Pavilion at Plug and Play as an added-value service to clients - At least one company decided to move to Plug and Play in order to get access to network of investors and partners
There would be value to host regional “Boot Camps” in selected Canadian cities ahead of time of a follow-up start-up mission to the Silicon Valley.  This would also allow a better qualification of companies for this activity
In spite of financial crisis, a number of Silicon Valley VCs are still in an investment mode
3. Next Steps:
In association with IT cluster organizations and DFAIT regional offices, SFRAN will coordinate a series of “Boot Camps” in selected cities across Canada, to be facilitated by Chris Gill, the Executive Director of  the Silicon Valley Association of Start-up Entrepreneurs (SVASE).  This may take place in the early spring in preparation for a follow-up mission by qualified companies before the summer.
Most suitable technology start-ups will then participate in the second phase of the program in the Silicon Valley with a view to get maximum exposure to VCs and Angels: very early-stage start-ups would participate in the Plug and Play Tech Centre EXPO/ PACT (Date TBC in April/may 09); more mature companies would participate in “Launch Silicon Valley” (Date TBC in April/may 09)
Post will assist in the identification of resources for opening a Canadian Pavilion at the Plug and Play Tech Center to facilitate the temporary stay of Canadian start-up entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley, to allow them to quickly be “up and running”.

4. Report:

The Silicon Valley is home to more than 500 VC firms and received last year approximately 35% of all VC investment in the US (+$10B).  This is also the home of the largest concentration of entrepreneurs, including numerous Canadians who moved to the Valley to launch or grow their own business.  This market is therefore of great appeal to Canadian techno-entrepreneurs who can get access to venture financing, strategic partners, clients (including some of the largest IT  and life-science companies) and share experience with peers in a highly networked environment.

Targeting this clientele, SFRAN/PALTO arranged its first IT start-up boot camp with the support of Chris Gill, Executive Director of SVASE, a local association devoted to assist technology start-ups excel in the Silicon Valley, and some VC friends of the Consulate.  The program was developed in order to give start-ups as much exposure as possible to venture capitalists while providing them with the education/right tools to succeed in this very competitive market.  Recruitment for the project was undertaken through DFAIT regional offices, DFAIT HQ colleagues, NRC, Industry Canada, and Various Research Parks and Incubators across Canada.

The program started with a coaching session led by Chris Gill. Many topics were covered in this session from “how fundable is my business” to “what should I include in my pitch” to “what potential investors are looking for”.  Two guests from RIM and the new Blackberry Partners Fund were invited over lunch as keynote speakers.  The afternoon session was a dry run for participating start-ups in pitching their business in front of two panels of three local venture capitalists and an opportunity to receive constructive feedback following their performance. This component of the program was key in order to assist start-ups to prepare their pitches to 30+ venture capitalists the day after.  Beyond communication aspects, it turns out that the session was also useful in refining some aspects of business plans.

The second day was essentially concentrated on the pitch competition and EXPO, although Post arranged a visit to Google headquarters, in Mountain View, a global company which was not so long ago a small “garage” start-up.  More than 300 people attended the pitch competition and EXPO, and several high-level players from the Valley shared insights on where the industry goes and what are their expectations.  Canadian start-ups, with competitors from other countries such as Israel, Spain and Australia to only name a few, were given 2 minutes to pitch their business to a crowd of venture capitalists during the “extreme” pitching session. It is a total of 43 companies who pitched, whom from which 21 were from Canada. Start-ups that were the most fundable were then given an additional 10 minutes to present their ideas in more details; two Canadian companies were selected to come back for the 10-minute presentation and Redwood Technologies from Calgary actually won first place. The program concluded with a networking reception including all start-ups that were in attendance, various industry players and venture capitalists.

5. Feedback:

We administered an e-survey to capture everyone’s feedback and improve this program moving forward. Feedback received so far were very positive ranging from “I have learned more in 4 hours that in 4 months” to “Thanks for opening my eyes to Silicon Valley … we are now planning our next trip to San Francisco to meet with VCs” to “First exposure to the Valley and gained significant insight on the opportunities in the Valley and what VCs are expecting”. For complete analysis matrix, please click here.

6. All company profiles of participating start-ups can be found here.

7. Lessons learned on the format and follow-up:
Develop this program on an annual basis
Run 2-minute extreme pitching dry runs on the preparatory day
Hold “Boot Camps” in major Canadian IT clusters while ensuring a national reach
Have more lead time for adjusting presentations
Open a Canadian Pavilion at Plug and Play Tech Centre to facilitate entry of start-ups in this market
AURP will spread the gospel among their 27 national members and post articles in their monthly newsletters
8. Conclusion and Acknowledgement:

We wish to thank all participating Canadian start-ups for the hard work and professionalism they have put into fine tuning their pitches and plan. Special thanks to the Canadian Chapter of the Association of University Research Parks for partnering with DFAIT to make funding available to participating start-ups. The energy emanating from the group was stimulating and everyone in SFRAN/PALTO look forward to build on the success of this project.

Drafted /Released: Guillaume Parent, Trade Commissioner
Consulted /Approved: Thierry Weissenburger, Senior Trade Commissioner

We were all crossing our fingers and holding our breath, hoping that Yaletown would close their new fund in these tough market conditions.  That’s why I was so happy to learn that we can finally exhale!  Yaletown did a first close with $65M and plan to do a second closing to top the fund out at $100M.

Congrats to Steve, Mike, Kirk, and Hans.  But more importantly, I think this is a big win for the Vancouver tech scene in general.  Many funds around town have put themselves in maintenance mode, and angels are in a wait and see pattern, which has all but halted any new innovation in BC.  I’m hoping that Yaletown folks will be acting like kids in a candy store.

My favorite warren buffet quote: “Be fearful when people are greedy, and be greedy when people are fearful.”

Sean from QCDocs is king of the “top 10 lists” on the QCDocs blog. He just posted a wrap up of lessons learned from our PACT conference attendance last week. I still need to do a longer wrap up plus cut and paste the content from my Cover It Live live blogging session from last week, but I’ll add a few comments on Sean’s post here.

As Sean says, Chris Gill from Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs (SVASE) did a great job of running the presentation Bootcamp organized by the Federal government trade commissioners. I think there was consensus that running such a Bootcamp on a regional / provincial level would be ideal: get everyone trained in their home locations, and then do an investment roadshow to Silicon Valley similar to how TechStars, Y-Combinator, and Seed Camp do.

There were lots of connections to be made with Canadian companies from across the country, and we’re still navigating our way through introductions at both the Federal and provincial level. There definitely are resources to lean on, it’s a matter of finding the right ones. To continue those connections, please join the PACT Canada 2008 LinkedIn group so we can stay in touch.

Image by bmann via Flickr

And yes, the Mai Tais were delicious, and *I* think they helped loosen us up for presenting the next day.

To get an investor to agree to that first round of financing, usually all you need is three documents:

1. Slide Deck
2. Executive Summary
3. Financial Projections

You’ll notice that I didn’t put a business plan on that list.  Most investors don’t have the time to read a full blown business plan.  They would much rather spend face time with you because they know that a startup is very dynamic, and a business plan is very static. You’ll need more documents in the due diligence phase, like your captable, articles, employee agreements, past financials (if any), etc. I came accross Martin Bliemel’s free financial templates and think it’s great template to work with.

Danny and I are still down in San Francisco at the Plug and Play Tech Center, just wrapping things up before we head up to our Canadians in the Valley beer up in the city.

I’m taking a few minutes to catch up on my reading when I came across May Chu’s post on the Clarity Accounting blog - Don’t be afraid to be small. It’s an absolutely great write up of their approach to their business.

Less than 12 hours ago, I received an email sent through our contact form from a potential client who wanted to know more about our company. He wanted to know how long we have been in business and how big our firm is. He noted that our mailing address looked like a small business running out of some one’s apartment. He wanted to know if the business he is dealing with is a big, fail-proof company.

At first I was worried about how best to respond to this inquiry. After all, we are a small company that is run virtually. Everyone who has ever worked on this project has been contracted virtually. In the spirit of being an online accounting software, we conduct our business using as many “online tools” as possible.

Go read the whole post, and also check out the two Seth Godin posts that May references — Small is the new big, from 2005, and his recent post Too small to fail.

May and Dobes are doing a great job with Clarity Accounting, building their business one piece at a time, and I can’t help but think that they will be highly successful. I’ll leave you with another piece of information that I think highlights this:

Recently I found out that a company providing similar services as us burns 6 million dollars a year. I thought to myself, “wow, give me 6 million dollars and I would only spend a fraction of that amount”. In fact, within 1 month of our full launch, the business is already paying its own bills.

Image by akakumo via Flickr

Yeah, that title has probably been overused a lot lately. We have a joke here in the office that pretty much anyone that has a website can now say that they do “cloud computing“. But we *have* been doing a lot of thinking about how hosting and Internet infrastructure will be changing. From the beginning of thinking about Bootup Labs, we also thought that we could support the companies we were working with by helping point them at best practices around scalable web services: from hosted tools to hosting providers.

LayerBoom is Trevor’s baby: it’s tackling problems around next-gen hosting and virtualization that would be THE area that I would have been diving into if Bootup weren’t around. Now I get to have my cake and eat it too, as I peer over Trevor’s shoulder in investigating where all this stuff is going.

To that end, I completely agree with his most recent post on the future of the hosting industry: Hosting Apocalypse. Yep, that does deserve a drumroll and an explosion. I could go into all sorts of Gutenberg printing press analogies etc., but the fact of the matter is that we don’t really know what orders of magnitude changes affect: some businesses are destroyed, but like fireweed after a fire, new opportunities are created. Hmm, kind of sounds like the current economic situation, too.

Other folks covering related ideas include Mark Mayo, who writes about the changing role / skillset of sysadmins. Tim Bray’s Tough Times series covers infrastructure in part. Zero Cloud Lockin is having a good discussion on what does or does not constitute lock in with platforms.

Lastly, the ask. LayerBoom is running a survey asking what people would want from tools to run their own cloud. Trevor will be sharing the results on the blog, trying to get some data to see if the hosting apocalypse concept is real, and how far away it is.

I’ve been watching and reading CNBC, Bloomberg, New York Times, Paul Kedrosky and everything else I can get my eyes on.  And I think I’ve figured it out!!  NOBODY knows what’s going to happen with the economy.  It’s a very unsettling time.  I actually feel like I’m staying up to date with developments of the bailout, the elections and the extreme depth of the problems the world faces as a result, but they’re not providing me with any conclusions.

I do, however, have two fundamental beliefs:

1. The economy will recover at some point (1-5 years)
2. Investors make the most money when they buy low and sell high.

So am I making is this just too simple?  Is the “Buy low and sell high” doctrine just too obvious to really work?  With the dow closing at 9447 today, I think we can all agree, that we’re in a buyers market.  Take Warren Buffet and JP Morgan for example.  A New York Times article, Like J.P. Morgan, Warren E. Buffett Braves a Crisis, calls Warren a “Profitable Patriot”.  The biggest fortunes in the world’s history have been made in times like these. But investors are also human, and fear does often override this basic common sense logic.  The smartest investors are the ones who can put their fears aside, and invest long in companies now, when valuations are low.  By the time these companies are ready for a liquidation event, the markets will have returned.  I still find it very puzzling how some long term investors (like Angels and VCs investing in private startups) make investment decisions based on short term indicators.  Ron Conway is one of the more respected Angel investors, and I take the message that he’s sending out to entrepreneurs as a pragmatic warning of my very point.

“I would tell (entrepreneurs) to keep their day job until they got one year of funding, and if they couldn’t get that, then they’re not meant to start that company right now…. My advice to (start ups that don’t have a year’s worth of money in the bank) would be to raise money by reducing your own spending. If you can’t raise more money, you have to cut costs. And that’s what I’m harping on to my companies.”

Vancouver’s own Lyal Avery had some pretty insightful words to say in the comments:

“With all respect to Mr. Conway, I think it’s dangerous advice to tell people behind startups to “not quit their day job.” In my opinion, economic downturns are the perfect time to get started - the conditions are better than during a boom. Labour is cheap, distractions are minimized, and a lack of over-abundant investment means the business models produced can weather future storms. “

What do you think is going to happen?  When do you think the market will return?  Is it actually prudent for investors just wait and see?  or Are We All Doomed?!

Well, James and I head back to Vancouver tomorrow, after 2 days in Banff, and one day in Calgary.

The Banff Venture Forum was definitely a worthwhile event. I got to connect with many different people, from entrepreneurs to VCs to government representatives. I also got to review a ton of different investment pitches, taking notes for working on our own pitches.

I worked with James at AdHack to tune the presentation: we ripped it apart and put it back to together last week, with an excellent graphical upgrade from AdHack Community Manager, Corey Rollins (check out the WTF is AdHack video for another Corey production). But, at the end of the day, James went off by himself, prepped, and then stood up on stage and spent 12 minutes telling the story of AdHack, and (in my opinion) — knocked it out of the park. Congrats, James!

(Sandra captured most of the pitch on video, so I hope that we can link to a copy soon.)

After a great closing keynote by Terry Matthews, Calgary Technologies Inc put on an entrepreneur “unwind”. I invited Terry to join us, but he was a bit busy — he did have great things to say about Todd Tessier, Director of the Investment Capital Branch and BC Renaissance Capital Fund. At the unwind, I spent quite a bit of time finding out more about the non-profit CTI program and people, and how they support startups of all kinds in Calgary. I’m looking forward to connecting the west by working more with them.

Kudos to Nicola Burdeniuk, Associate Executive Director, and the entire rest of the Banff Venture Forum team. You put on a great event and I look forward to attending next year, hopefully with a larger contingent of delegates of all kinds from BC.

Strutta launched the first real customer on it’s new platform yesterday.  I’m saying “real” because we did run the Launch Party contest on it last week, but it was sort of an inside job since we also organize Launch Party.

Check it out, enter to win Free Pizza for a year, and let us know what you think.  Oh, and especially let Maura know if you want us to make something like this for you.

Win Free Pizza for a Year!

I’m here in Banff, at the Banff Venture Forum 2008. I’m here with James from AdHack, who is presenting at 2:45pm on Thursday. We’ve got the AdHack booth set up at #14, and already had a great discussion with Kevin Dahl from Calgary Technologies, Inc.- a non profit that helps grow the Calgary technology ecosystem. Sounds like a great partner for Bootup (and I’m going to hit the Vancouver municipality over the head with your example) - we’ll be trying to make some cross pollination happen.

Update: a few one liners around some of the companies and presentations I saw during the forum. Look at Rob’s great coverage on Techvibes for a more in depth write up of each company.

In any case, for the next 2 days, we’ll be hearing 12 minute pitches from the following companies in the IT Stream:

• StandOut Jobs
  - social media upgrade your careers page. I’m going to talk to Ben to see if we can maybe use Standout Jobs to connect around startup jobs and co-founder searches somewhere on Bootup. Regardless, a good solution that’s getting even more interesting
• Shopster.com
  - good solution for super charging
• Myotis Wireless (placeholder page, no website yet?) - funny comment was “we have no one under 40″; has real tech around very low power radios, and cuts through interference
• Semanti Corp. - toolbar powered semantic search upgrade on top of Google results
• Business Infusions Inc.
  - practice management software for veterinarians
• Reflex Photonics Inc.
• VoIPshield Systems Inc. - security solutions around VoIP systems
• WideSail Technologies Inc. - sells digital chip designs that increase range and/or throughput using new error correction techniques - excellent quote is “when I make a sale, I send an email”
• Flixel Technologies Inc.
• Psyko Audio Labs Inc. - positional audio, initially for gamers
• Mingleverse Laboratories Inc. - stealth! out of Vancouver, interesting plan with audio, also related to positioning. More general usage with web-delivered audio conferencing and virtual rooms. Pretty much have to demo for it to make sense until they come out of stealth
• Akoha - Austin Hill’s new startup, labeled as “casual gaming”, but has lots of real world interaction through physical cards and missions. I went for dinner with Austin and have a bunch of Akoha mission decks that I’ll schedule a meetup around.
• MoboVivo Inc.
• Tribal Nova - kids gaming, lots of licensed content like Curious George, etc.
• Ph03nix New Media Inc. - casual gaming, deal with Big Fish Games, and new virtual world concept with education plus gaming on a hip hop theme.

I’ll be coming back to this post to flesh out some one-liners about what each company does, and link to any longer posts or comments from my myself and others.

Well, James and I arrived in Banff. We left early this morning from Vancouver and drove out. It was a long day, but was actually a great opportunity to talk strategy and different ideas around AdHack without interruptions.

We checked into our hotel, and then managed to connect with Sandra MacDonald for dinner at the Rose & Crown. Sandra and Mic are working with the Sun Startup Essentials Canada program and are talking to startups across the country. They’ve got a temporary blog up, I’m hoping to see it integrated directly into the SSE Canada landing page  — where’s the RSS feed icon on that page! (that’s a hint in the direction of Sun folks…)

I was probably a little rant-y at dinner with Sandra over what I would LOVE to see Sun do: they feel like my old company Nortel - great engineers, really bad marketing, really bad at explaining / showing their value to the people that want to love them. Write me up some real world solutions / architectures around dtrace, OpenSolaris, ZFS, containers, etc. etc. - if you’re long on engineers, let’s see bi-weekly “solution” blog posts - either cool tech you want to talk about, or responses to questions on how to solve problems real startups are having. From my blog ranting we digressed into talking about how startups don’t really buy servers - they buy hosting. Hmmm, those Amazon Web Services credits sound more interesting, now…

Anyway, as I said before, it’s great that Sun has connected with such great people, I’m interested to see the stories they discover.

I’m going to be Twittering a few reactions to other companies in the IT Stream (Life Sciences and Cleantech are also presenting here in Banff). I’ll be using the #bvf08 tag, looks like a few other people using Twitter as well. More on the other companies in another post.

The day after tomorrow, James from AdHack and I will be heading up to the Banff Venture Forum. We’re both foodies, so our trip planning amounts to departure time wrangling so we can make it to Trufflepigs in Field, BC for lunch

AdHack is presenting in the IT Stream, plus will be present on the floor with a booth. I’ll be lending a hand at the booth and getting to know the other companies. I also hope to catch up with Brad Feld of Foundry Group aka Brad of TechStars that my last post was about: he’s the keynote speaker for the IT Stream.

Sandra MacDonald and Michal Berman will also be in town, representing the Sun Startup Essentials Canada program — which launched at the beginning of the year at Launch Party. I think we’ll do an ad hoc dinner in Banff at some point, watch Twitter* and/or blog postings here for updates.

After Banff, James and I will be spending the weekend in Calgary and have a couple of meetings booked already. I have an email out to the STIRR Canada folks to maybe help get the word out about a Calgary Tech Entrepreneur Meetup on Saturday night. For now, here’s a placeholder Upcoming event. Please sign up and let us know you’re interested, as well as suggesting a venue for Saturday, October 5th in Calgary.

*I’m using #bfv08 as my tag for the event. Watch Twemes to just monitor those postings.

TechStars is the incubator that we feel philosophically most aligned with. Their successes don’t hurt, either Danny is down in the Valley right now, and attended their Demo Day. Here’s Vator.TV interviewing Brad Feld about the TechStars model.

Danny actually spoke with David Cohen of TechStars a couple of weeks ago. One of the really interesting pieces of information was that 50% of founders / companies decide to stay in Boulder after the program is over. 50% of companies staying and running companies in a city?! Sounds like pretty fantastic numbers.

In other news, we’re putting together the details around a Canadians in the Valley event — if you’re interested, sign up for that Upcoming link and we’ll update the details as we figure it out. Dana Oshiro and Rebecca Reeve are Canadian ex-pats that were going to take Danny and I for beer when we went down for the Plug & Play event, and of course we decided to turn that into something a little bigger. Thanks Dana and Rebecca for playing along so far.