Bootup Labs Blog

Bootup Labs will inevitably choose companies from outside the country to invest in.  These companies would work for a minimum of 8 months with us in Canada.  In the case of our January cohort, potentially 3 of the 6 founding teams are moving here from outside the country, and all 3 companies have proactively indicated that they have no intention of leaving Vancouver after they have completed their time at Bootup Labs.

Bootup Labs has neither the time nor resources to work through the immigration red-tape every time.  I have to believe that reversing the brain-drain has to be a priority for the government.  So, I am asking for your help.  Let’s make Vancouver (and Canada) an easy place for entrepreneurs to set up shop!

The startup community in the US is rallying behind a way to streamline the immigration of foreign startup founders.  I say, let’s take advantage of Canada’s nimbleness (relatively speaking of course) and beat the Americans to their Startup Visa concept. This is how is could work for us:

1. VC Firms and Investors apply to become “Sponsors”
2. Founders apply to Immigration Canada along with an accepted Term Sheet from the pre-approved VC Firm
3. A temporary work visa is approved for the founders with certain conditions:
   1. They incorporate a canadian company within X days of Landing in Canada and become employees of that company.
   2. They close on the financing.
   3. They cannot work for another company.
   4. They can apply for a more permanent status after a “probationary period” of some amount of time.

<<  –  SIGN THE PETITION —  >>

more links:

• Start-up Visas Can Jump-Start the Economy – Wall St. Journal
• The Founders Visa Movement – Brad Feld
• The Founders Visa – Paul Graham
• The Startup Visa And Why The Xenophobes Need To Go Back Into Their Caves – Techcrunch

Yesterday I spoke with Amar Varma from Extreme Venture Partners.  They have create a Bootup Labs/Techstars like startup program in Toronto called Extreme University!  From all of us at Bootup Labs, we welcome them to the scene.  Well, the reality is that they’re not that new.  They’ve been working on a number of projects under the Extreme brand, including a venture fund, and a elite web services company called Xtreme Labs.  AND, they’ve already had one exit: J2Play was recently acquired by EA.

We’re very excited to see this new era of Internet venture investing mature to the new permanent way of getting start ups going efficiently.  Sure, entrepreneurs can still start their companies on their own, but not as quickly, and with more dilution.  It’s quickly no longer becoming a question of if to start at Bootup Labs/Techstars/Extreme, rather than which one to start with.

See more of my thoughts in the comments of Boris Wertz’s blog post: The Sudio-ization of the application business

What are your thoughts?  What will happen to traditional VC?  How fast will this transformation take?

It’s not clear who Canada Heritage will choose to administer the $134.7 million Canada Media Fund, but I’ll bet that Telefilm Canada will get the honors.

See this article in the Toronto Star for more information.

Riz spoke at VEF Momentum last night, March 11st, 2009. Which, I sadly missed. Thankfully the Government of Canada has increased their support of the IRAP Program

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.

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.

Read more »

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.”

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. “

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!

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.