Bill Gates talks on NPR about the Vancouver development center

A friend (who currently works for Microsoft here in Vancouver, albeit remotely from the Richmond office) sent me a link to an NPR audio interview with Bill Gates, done after he testified to Congress about the need to liberalize H1-B visa rules. I have little interest in the US H1-B issues, but I am excited that he talked about the Vancouver development center (I first blogged about this on my personal site). The accompanying NPR story here:

Microsoft recently opened an office in Vancouver, Canada — where it can station high-skilled workers who can’t legally work in the U.S.

There, Gates tells Robert Siegel, the government welcomes “not only those people for these high-paying jobs, but the four or five jobs we create around each of those engineers.”

I haven’t heard much about the Microsoft Vancouver development center locally, and folks certainly haven’t been showing up at DemoCampVancouver or anything. I’ve heard some rumours that people only stay for a year, until they can do an intra-company transfer to the US (Redmond, likely), but I have no confirmation or knowledge about this directly.

Founders and Funders was great, let’s do one in Western Canada

It’s been weeks since I got back from attending the Founders and Funders event in Toronto, and things have finally slowed down from lightspeed enough to put a quick post up here.

David’s wrap up post reiterates the goal:

The goal of Founders & Funders is to create a social environment where the people who fund companies and the people who start companies can begin conversations outside of the pitch.

I decided to go at the last minute, and to leave some time the next day for any meetings that might come up. It was great to see fellow Vancouver-ites David Gratton, Ian Bell, and new-to-me Tom Williams representing there as well. I’ve been maintaining that cross-pollination in Canada is important, and so that was one of the reasons I decided to make the trip.

As it turns out, I made lots of great connections and the trip was certainly well worth it. One of them is an in progress effort to highlight information relevant to Canadian startups, which certainly fits nicely with the goals of Bootup Labs. More on this when it’s real

I have to applaud Microsoft for their support of this initiative. In working with DemoCampVancouver and LaunchParty, we’ve found that what is “small dollars” for firms like Microsoft or Sun can have big effects at the local level. Of course David Crow’s role within the organization makes it easy to directly point to the benefits, but I think we are seeing a bit of a shift in general.

What’s next? Well, I would certainly recommend any future F&F event to funders AND founders. I feel that these events are, like investments themselves, some what local in nature, and as such can and should be held in different areas across the country. I’ve heard rumours of an event in Montreal, and I certainly intend to help put together such an event somewhere west of Winnipeg (likely Calgary or Vancouver). I don’t even have a concrete date in mind yet, but please do leave a comment if you would be interested in such an event.

Finally, kudos to David and Jevon for putting this together in record time. Hope to see you out west sometime soon (hint, hint).