East meets West BBQ at Redwerks

Sunir from Fresh Books emailed me a couple of weeks ago to let me know that he was coming out West in order to help break the continental divide. How? With a traditional Canadian summer time BBQ!

Sunir, Colleen, and Redwerks are hosting a roof top BBQ this evening starting at 5:30pm, and they’re going to kick everyone out at 10:30pm to find another watering hole. Let them know you’re coming via the Upcoming entry.

It’s great when we have more people traveling physically between different high tech centers in Canada. I already feel bad enough that I don’t make it to Victoria or Calgary often enough, and that the most often connection between the Canadian Internet Mafia tends to happen at conferences…in the US So thanks to Sunir for taking the initiative and to Colleen and Redwerks for hosting.

And yes, a thousand apologies for the extremely last minute notice – I had originally planned to be down in San Francisco at the Structure 08 conference, along with Trevor O and Layerboom (his virtualization / cloud computing startup that we’re working with here at Bootup). C’est la vie! Now I get to enjoy charred meat in Canada, instead!

VC Forum #5 in Vancouver is a wrap

We just wrapped an invite only VC Forum event (Danny talked about it a month ago). I ended up Twittering a few comments during the day.

I think the general consensus from both pitching companies and attending funding sources (a mix of mainly VCs, banks, and some government options like the NRC) was that it was a good event. We’re continuing to show that interesting things are happening here in VC, and there are lots of good potential early stage or Series A companies making things happen.

As always, I would love more transparency, but some of that will only happen over time. I think it was rough on pitching companies that they didn’t know much about who they were pitching to, but this is something you have to get used to. Be ready with your story, believe in it, and be willing to say you don’t know, or it’s something you haven’t encountered yet. One thread that was common was companies stating clearly either how much they were looking for today, or outright saying they *weren’t* looking for funding until some time in the future. Definitely appreciated, and a good way to set the stage for keeping in touch with potential investors.

Thanks to Blakes for hosting the event at their firm, and to Gordon Smythe from Propel and other participants for pulling this together.

Lastly, aside from pitch events, it sounds like lots of companies are interested in weekly working lunches, such as the one that Igor from Handi Mobility suggested for tomorrow. Interested in weekly meetups with your startup peers? Leave a comment and we’ll see about setting this up on a regular basis.

P.S. Yes, Launch Party 4 last night was excellent. This is a super busy week (check out the vidfest buzz on Twitter!) so we’ll be doing wrap up posts as time permits. It’s almost time to ready up for both DemoCamp and Founders & Funders… 

Launch Party Vancouver 4 – May 21st

As some of you may know, I co-host Launch Party Vancouver with Maura Rodgers and Dimitri Sirota. Well, the truth is, that Maura does most of the work, all while holding down a day job at Strutta and being the best mother I know. We don’t do it to make money; We do it because we love to bring the Vancouver tech community closer together to exchange ideas and build great stuff. I have no doubt that Vancouver can be a hotbed for tech startups, and Launch Party is just one of the ways that will help get us there.

I’ve asked Gordon to get as many VCs from the VC Road Trip to attend the event as he can, and a few have already confirmed.

For startups who are looking for people, or people who are interested in joining a startup, drop by the Career Fair.

Date: May 21st, 2008
Career Fair: 3pm
VC Preview: 4:15pm
Demos: 5:30-9pm
Party on: 9pm-late
Location: The Republic, 958 Granville Street Vancouver, BC

RSVP on Facebook or on the Launch Party blog

for fun: Previous Launch Party pics on Flickr

See you there!

Auctomatic acquired by Live Current Media

I’m happy to report that the Auctomatic team has been acquired by Live Current Media (TechCrunch entry here). You might also know Live Current Media by their former name, Communicate.com.

I helped with this in a very small way by introducing Jonathan Ehrlich to the Auctomatic guys. Jonathan was hired by Communicate as President, and moved out to Vancouver from Toronto. We met back then through an introduction by Toronto-based mischief maker David Crow. Jonathan and Communicate have been excellent Vancouver tech community participants, supporting DemoCampVancouver and other local tech events.

I knew of the Auctomatic guys because they were a Y Combinator funded startup, and were hanging out with Avi and the team at DabbleDB. It was great to talk with this international team (England, Ireland, and elsewhere) and find them hiding in our backyard.

I call this success for Vancouver, and I’m looking forward to cool things from this team. Congrats to everyone evolved, I look forward to continue working with you. I expect great things!

Giant Ant Media create cool AdHack videos

I’m a big fan of video. I’m a big fan of the intersection of “new” media and old film / broadcast models – we’re not even close to having them figured out yet, but both new kinds of producers, talent, and distributors are going to play. And here in Vancouver, we just happen to have an intersection of old and new, in everything from film production to the hotbed of social media that this city is becoming (and check out Bridging Media**, which is targeted right at this intersection).

In any case, Giant Ant Media are producers and talent, and they do pretty good at kicking out the AdHack*-style videos, too. They’ve just put out their shingle looking for more work, and sent me a little note to say their site is up. Check out the demo reel on the front page of their site – it’s great stuff. There’s more in the work section of the site, around which I only have two complaints: please don’t make the home page video auto-play, and also, please prominently display an RSS feed I can subscribe to (video podcast or mainly text blog posts … I suspect you’ll want one of each).

Their Chocolate Love video is probably the best example of an AdHack: I can see any number of chocolate or aphrodisiac vendors wanting to use this as an ad.

So, looking for a place to create innovative video for your idea, startup, or event? Call Jay and Leah @ Giant Ant Media…

* AdHack is a Friend of Bootup, and we’ve been working with James Sherrett, the founder, for some time. We think AdHack is a pretty good name for cool social media ads, and that it’s a pretty good idea for a company, too. So the next time you see a social media ad for a product, call it an AdHack

** Bridging Media aims to connect film/broadcast with digital media Internet types, hopefully that both can learn from the other. March 29th, you should attend.

P.S. Got a Vancouver-area startup, service provider, or other company you want to get the word out around? Leave a comment…

Rick Segal is coming to Vancouver, Victoria for a VC Roundtable

Rick Segal is a partner in the team at JLA Ventures, a Canadian VC firm with offices in Toronto and Montreal. He’s doing a VC Roundtable to give entrepreneurs across the country a chance to meet with him. Rick does a lot of “no harm, no foul” meetings that are much less like traditional “pitch” meetings, and in general has been doing a great job in supporting the growth of Canadian entrepreneurship.

As part of the VC Roundtable, Rick will be visiting Vancouver (signup) and Victoria (signup) (both in one day, Rick? Come on, stay a little longer….) on April 21st. What is this VC Roundtable all about?

Something’s missing in Canada’s tech community – the chance to informally interact with VCs, learn about what it is exactly that they do and how the funding process works.

The VC Roundtable series aims to fill this gap, by hosting small (free!) get togethers across Canada’s major cities where Rick Segal, JLA Ventures Partner and VC blogger (http://ricksegal.typepad.com) will walk through what getting involved with VCs is all about.

There is a bit of a longer write up on what this is and isn’t on each of the signup pages — see the Vancouver one for an example.

Rick, we can give you space at Bootup Labs if you need it in Vancouver. If you’re a startup in one of those areas, or one of the many other locations across the country that Rick is visiting, I encourage you to sign up and sit down with Rick.

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.

Booting up

Hi, welcome to Bootup Labs!

Who: Boris Mann and Danny Robinson

What: an incubator, a company that helps startups get started (for now, in the Vancouver area). We could say kind of like Y-Combinator or sort of like the Founders Fund, just to start getting your head into the right space. We’re not a fund, but we do want to help you quit your day job. The web, mobile, and casual gaming are three of the main areas we’ll be focusing on.

Where: 350 – 375 Water Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada – right down in Gastown

When: now. This is it. We’re booting up. What’s amazing to us again was that picking the name was the hardest part. Lucky for us “bootup labs” was actually a Google Whack – that kind of sealed the deal. A few hours later, we’ve got Google Apps running everything from email to calendars, and this blog up and running in moments with WordPress.com. Now all we need is a place where we can crowd source a logo.

It feels like we’re getting started at exactly the right time. In just the last couple of weeks, we’ve noticed lots of relevant blog posts come bubbling up that are in line with our thinking. As the last year closed, Mark Evans figures we needs a Peter Thiel in Canada. David Crow batted that back, asking if money was really all we are lacking here in Canada.

David’s been doing lots of relevant blogging, like this one on seed stage financing in Canada – but that should come as no surprise: he and I often seem to share a brain, we just haven’t figured out which one is the evil twin yet. Oh yes, and you should definitely plan to go to the Founders and Funders dinner that David is organizing January 21st in Toronto.

We’ll be talking more about what we see as our value proposition to, well, founders and funders, in upcoming posts. We’re aiming to set up an environment where many more startup companies can flourish in Vancouver.

Welcome to Bootup Labs. Stop by our offices the next time you’re in town – we’d love to talk to you if you’re a founder, a funder, or want to get involved in some other way.