Bootup Labs Blog

Well, it seems like September is going to be a busy one. It’s back to school and back to work. I’ve got a bunch of links and meetings cluttering up my bookmarks and my brain, so here’s a big post to clear the decks.

Calling Advisors

We’ve got several companies we’ve talked to at very early stages that are looking for advisors. The majority are web-based in some way, although with very different target markets (you can browse some of the public ones in our company directory).

Code Factory - coworking in Ottawa

I picked up the phone and talked to Ian Graham of Code Factory today - we talked about it when he launched back in March. Ian is adding about a member per day, has seen consistent increases in the DemoCamp Ottawa events he organizes, and in general is pretty jazzed about how things are moving in Ottawa. I spent 4 years there and am glad to see things taking off, especially around a commercial coworking space similar to Vancouver’s WorkSpace (which, according to a brief chat with the owner yesterday, is bursting at the seams and looking for more space).

LaunchParty Vancouver version 5 is up. Eventbrite is being used for registration, you need to signup here.

BarCamp Vancouver has venues locked down for the party (evening of September 26th at WorkSpace) and for the day of (September 27th, several locations around Granville Island). I’m looking forward to this first time semi-distributed version of BarCamp, wandering around Granville Island, heading to JJ Bean for coffee and maybe nipping in to the local sake brewery for a tasting.

The VEF Momentum guys don’t have their website up yet, but they’re putting together an event for September 30th.

I posted this to Twitter some time ago, but we ripped out our event listings (blanket statement: your website and the world likely don’t need yet-another-event-listings page) and changed it to be a pointer to places to look for events in Vancouver. The Techvibes Vancouver event listings are very solid, but we’ll also be pointing to Upcoming and Facebook. We’ve made a group on Upcoming and are fleshing out an event resources page plus a guide to the recurring events in Vancouver.

Entrepreneurs Everywhere

We’ve been hosting interns for the Impact Entrepreneuership Group in our office all of August. As it turns out, Impact is also the national host for Global Entrepreneurship Week for Canada, taking place in the third week of November (Bootup Labs is a partner, and we’ll be doing a startup / founder focused conference - more details to follow).

I’ve spoken with people at both SFU and UBC about various entrepreneur programs that are underway. SFU’s Surrey campus (which I have yet to go out and visit, but I will do and take some pictures) is expanding its Entrepreneurship program with a side of Innovation. The first classes don’t kick off until January, but by all accounts it looks very interesting. Continuing with SFU, I’ve also got my eye on COSTAR, who are going to be focusing on open source. I’ve long wanted more university-level involvement in open source.

I also sat down with Mark Mawhinney to talk about the expanded UBC New Ventures Program which is in the process of being defined. I really hope that this is something not restricted to the Point Grey campus — downtown is where business happens in Vancouver. In general, we should encourage more cross pollination of all the campus’ and the downtown action.

Finally, had a great lunch today with Basil Peters of Angelblog.net. We had a lively discussion about all things startup related in Vancouver, from funding to education to what needs to go in a term sheet. You definitely need to be subscribed to his blog, and we hope to see Basil sharing his knowledge at some upcoming startup / founder workshops.

I sat down last week with the folks at Hop Studios and Venn Communications to talk about their upcoming Expression Engine Roadshow training event.

First off, what is Expression Engine (or EE as it is fondly known), and why should you care?

Briefly, EE is a content management system (CMS). OK, there are lots of those. Next up, it’s a “beyond blogging” publishing platform. I use the term beyond blogging as a general system for flexible platforms that manage dynamic content beyond posts or pages – flexible data structures that can be created and updated from within such a beyond blogging platform. I spoke at length about the 3 stages of CMS at Web Directions North 08.

This type of functionality is invaluable for prototyping – or even running – many types of web applications. Drupal (with its content construction kit) is the only other widely used system that I know of which has this type of functionality. This is especially important for less technical founders: you can potentially put together the skeleton of a web app which does a lot more than a Powerpoint presentation in showing what kind of site/product/technology you’re trying to put together. EE should definitely be in your kit of potential startup tools.

Who should go to this event? Well, I have a fair amount of experience with the CMS marketplace. My view is that EE is perfect for design-centric web shops that want a supported, commercial product that can be used to build sites that go beyond content management. If you’re a web shop or aspiring designer that fits that description, you should go to this training event and get up to speed on Expression Engine. The event is on Friday, September 26th (right before BarCamp Vancouver kicks off) and tickets are $50. Register here »

Lastly, EE and I have a long history. Back when I was living in Ottawa is when I started blogging. I started with pMachine, the precursor to Expression Engine. I also started talking to Rick Ellis, CEO of Ellis Labs, the makers of Expression Engine. I doubt he remembers it, but I started trying to negotiate one click installs of pMachine for a hosting company I was working with. Small world

P.S. Yes, I’m known as a frothing-at-the-mouth open source and Drupal evangelist. And really, I firmly believe that Ellis Labs could make Expression Engine open source and not change a single piece of their business model. They sell piece of mind, not bits.

My brain is still a little melted today from participating in the New Ventures BC mentor panel yesterday. 9am to 5pm, 8 presentations, 30 minutes for lunch, and short breaks between presentations. Wow.

For starters, let me say that this highlights the activity that is going on in Vancouver. Regardless of the specifics of the particular business model or idea, I was impressed by the way all the founders presented their companies and discussed their ideas.

As well, I really enjoyed hearing the varied feedback from the entire room of mentors. Everybody came from varying backgrounds, so it was great to hear the different perspectives that people had. One issue that came up a couple of times was the slippery slope of business feedback vs. presentation feedback (the mentors started riffing on the business). At the end of the day, the New Ventures BC program is a competition, and this event was to help the founders tune their investor presentations. Explaining your product or service succinctly and in an exciting, believable way, with the dollars and cents to back it up and show investor value.

The room I was in (there were three in total) had a technology / web focus. There were quite a few familiar faces presenting, but also some that were completely new to me. I’m trying to encourage new companies that I come across to enter themselves in StartupIndex.ca (we also have a company directory which we’re trying to figure out how to tune: the current list of companies are ones that we’ve spoken to the founders at length, and have extra information in our private Extranet).

Without further ado, here are the companies that presented to us:

1. ClicVue: a home theater video aggregator — hardware plus a software based remote
2. Project Opus: a revamped spin on the album — digital artist subscriptions for fans (I’m not getting this quite right, but I don’t know how public this is…I’m excited by this concept)
3. CrowdTrust: personal identity and knowledge management
4. QCDocs: the small business ERP (Sean the founder is our accountant, and we are going to be using QCDocs for all the startups that come through Bootup)
5. AdHack: eBay for advertising, DIY advertising — disrupting the ad industry
6. CloudTel: fully hosted business VoIP
7. DreamBank: give dreams, not stuff
8. Adventure Engine: a booking engine for adventure travel operators

The complete list of 30 finalists is on the NVBC blog. Aside from the official blog, Diaries of a Suburban Startup has been posting great content related to the competition, the startups, and the founders involved.

I spent some time posting commentary to my personal Twitter account. Unfortunately, my favourite Twitter tracker Twemes was affected by Twitter API breakage, so this Twitter search will have to do as an archive. Two of my favourite quotes are James Sherrett from AdHack mentioning the phrase “return on attention“, and David Gratton from Project Opus stating that the new “[music] album is a living document rather than an artifact”.

NVBC is definitely a great event that provides real value to the local entrepreneurial community. I myself participated in it 4 years ago when I came back to Vancouver, not to launch a company, but to go to the various seminars and meet the local community. NVBC should be on every entrepreneur’s list to attend. Thanks to Bob de Wit for asking us to participate.

Finally, special thanks to Andrew Kumar for loaning me an SFU wireless login so I could research companies and their competitors as they presented.

Today we’ve got 5 students from the Shad Valley program joining us at Bootup. What valuable life skills will they be learning about startup life? Putting together their own IKEA desks, of course!

Alex Shipillo showing off his IMPACT interns

Joking aside, we’re happy to have the students join us in the office: they’re an example of the sort of working environment that we’re trying to foster. The students aren’t interning with Bootup, just borrowing some office space while they work with IMPACT, another great organization encouraging an entrepreneurial spirit in young people.

With the VEF Momentum crew starting out soon as well, there look to be a lot of opportunities for young people interested in this space over the coming months. Stay tuned, we’ve got something to coincide with Global Entrepreneurship Week (mid November) in the works.

It’s official, BarCamp Vancouver is set for September 27th. This is the third annual occurrence of this event, and we’re pushing it out a little farther than its traditional late August so we can have enough time to organize it.

For starters, it’s going to be larger. We’ve got (free) registration currently capped at 225 people: please do sign up now to let us know that you’re planning on attending. Last year’s event had 80 people on the waiting list…just sayin’.

BarCamp Vancouver will also be playing host to two “sub camps” — specifically, WordPressCamp and PhotoCamp. Please do check off the appropriate item in the registration form if you’re interested in those events, so we can help estimate numbers. We’re going to reserve space and time for dedicated sessions around those two topics.

Lastly, there are a bunch of other events happening around the same time. The Thursday before — September 25th — is National Digital Media Day. Maura is planning a Launch Party for Vancouver that evening to coincide with the day, and potentially coordinated across the country. September is going to go off with a bang…

One of the things we’re doing at Bootup is to gather together best practices that we can share with startups and founders. The goal is to get the most bang for your buck, from spending money to spending your time.

When Danny and I decided on the name for Bootup, we had basic systems up and running in something like 3 hours: domain registered at NameCheap, configured for Google Apps for Domains to get email, calendaring, and docs up, and a basic website / blog at WordPress.com.

Even if you have technical people that can setup and run some of these things, your goal is to build your technology / grow your company. For instance, talking to AdHack, I quickly put them on to Unfuddle, a hosted SVN and ticket tracking system. Below are two tools that I love, and that are on the list of sites we encourage startups here to use.

I’ve been organizing a couple of events recently – VinoCamp is coming up August 16th, and BarCamp Vancouver is going to be either September 13th or 27th (you can help decide which date here). For both, I’m using Eventbrite to do registration and sell tickets. I’m evening considering using Eventbrite’s ticket functionality to “sell” sponsorships through their PayPal integration. Gathering registrant information? check. Affiliate links? check. Tracking links? check (Miss604 and TechVibes are neck and neck in sending traffic, BTW). In all, a really great tool for doing free as well as for pay events, although there are a few little changes that I wouldn’t mind seeing.

Which brings me to my next tool: how are you gathering feedback? feature requests? beefs or bugs with your product or service? Seeing a blog post by Vince at Pennyminder reminded me about Get Satisfaction. It provides a way to implement everything from bug reporting to forum discussions about your company or even specific products. While you certainly want to keep in close contact with your early users and respond directly via email, Twitter, blog posts, etc., you can promote Get Satisfaction as a more structured way. For example, a suggestion via email might get the response “Great idea, I’ve added it as a suggestion to our Get Satisfaction page - please tell other people about it if they also think it’s a good idea”. I just added Bootup Labs - you should probably at least claim your company name and monitor it, even if you don’t plan to use it directly.

What other tools can you recommend, and how have you used them? I know there are local Vancouver startups that would fit this bill, like ScribbleWiki.

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!

Unfortunately, we’ve had to postpone the Founders and Funders event that was to be held tomorrow, June 17th. We’ll be updating this post with details on the new date once it is finalized.

I am pleased to announce the first West Coast Founders & Funders event. I attended the first iteration that took place in January in Toronto, and immediately started scheming with David Crow on how and when to expand it. I just spoke with David, and he’ll be flying out to join us for the event. The next Toronto event is June 4th, and there may be a few slots still available. I missed the Montreal event on May 14th, but I do intend to continue cross pollination with other cities and I hope that other Vancouverites will continue to come along.

After the success and excitement of the visiting VCs at VC Forum last week, I expect several visitors from the US to be in attendance, as well as an excellent selection of local founders and funders.

We are limited to 100 seats. The fee for the dinner is $100 which will include drinks and dinner. This is a private networking event and we are selecting the audience to ensure a quality group of attendees. And to provide the best chance to network together.

How do I get an Invite?

If you would like to attend the dinner, please fill out the following form and let us know who you are.

We will be contacting those invited with details on the registration and attendance details for the dinner in the next week.

In addition to Bootup Labs, we are looking for sponsors, so please contact us if you are interested.

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…