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 »

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.

So, I was mentioning last week some of the international incubators that are out there, in reference to meeting with Zac Boon from Thymos Capital in Singapore. Today Stefan Korn from Webfund in New Zealand stopped by our office, Vancouver being the first hop on the way to a conference in Montreal (of the Denturist Association of Canada — as we find out in the video, Canada apparently has the most denturists in the world).

As another aside, Singapore, New Zealand, and the province of BC all have approximately the same population: close to 4.5M people.

Here are the companies that Webfund is currently incubating:

• Base Diary, the practice management software for denturists
• Book Habit, sell your ebooks, early buyers pay the least, as you the author get more popular, sale prices go up
• DIY Father, positive parenting community for new and young fathers, to go alongside the legion of resources for moms
• Global Registries (not launched), productizing the current New Zealand software for doing business registration online to other governments around the world

We’re working through a couple of ideas on how to cross pollinate. With various connections to governments in different countries floating around, look for something maybe the middle of next year. In the more short term, there is Canadian government involvement in an event at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale. I added it to the Bootup Upcoming group, and we’re trying to track down more information from the government end of things.

I’ve been experimenting with the YouTube annotation method. We actually like Viddler for “produced” videos (it has great functionality to layer on a logo plus link automatically), but having the computer right there next to the kitchen makes it easy to do these “no editing” videos. Let me know if this is useful or distracting, either here or on Get Satisfaction.