Well, James and I head back to Vancouver tomorrow, after 2 days in Banff, and one day in Calgary.

The Banff Venture Forum was definitely a worthwhile event. I got to connect with many different people, from entrepreneurs to VCs to government representatives. I also got to review a ton of different investment pitches, taking notes for working on our own pitches.

I worked with James at AdHack to tune the presentation: we ripped it apart and put it back to together last week, with an excellent graphical upgrade from AdHack Community Manager, Corey Rollins (check out the WTF is AdHack video for another Corey production). But, at the end of the day, James went off by himself, prepped, and then stood up on stage and spent 12 minutes telling the story of AdHack, and (in my opinion) — knocked it out of the park. Congrats, James!

(Sandra captured most of the pitch on video, so I hope that we can link to a copy soon.)

After a great closing keynote by Terry Matthews, Calgary Technologies Inc put on an entrepreneur “unwind”. I invited Terry to join us, but he was a bit busy — he did have great things to say about Todd Tessier, Director of the Investment Capital Branch and BC Renaissance Capital Fund. At the unwind, I spent quite a bit of time finding out more about the non-profit CTI program and people, and how they support startups of all kinds in Calgary. I’m looking forward to connecting the west by working more with them.

Kudos to Nicola Burdeniuk, Associate Executive Director, and the entire rest of the Banff Venture Forum team. You put on a great event and I look forward to attending next year, hopefully with a larger contingent of delegates of all kinds from BC.

In a strategy to spark more early stage innovation in the province, the BC government has set up a fund called the BC Renaissance Capital Fund (BCRCF). This fund is being managed by 6 venture capital funds. Some in the US and some in Canada

• Kearny Venture Partners
• Ventures West
• VantagePoint Venture Partners
• Celtic House Venture Partners
• ARCH Venture Partners
• Walden Venture Capital

I personally think this is a very smart strategic move for the government to do and I think many in the tech startup industry would agree. According to a response from my twitter post this morning by Brent Holliday “Finally, a non-tax driven strategy to attract capital… The US has been doing it this way for 30 years. Hopefully this is a big shot in the arm for BC technology companies.”

Despite Todd Tessier’s secretive selection process, I have to sincerely thank him for all the hard work I know it must have been to drive this to closure. Thanks Todd! And thanks Sam for getting me invited to the announcement this morning. I’m not sure why it was so exclusive; I couldn’t even get Boris or Parveen in past the tight security. What was it again?… something to do with the fire marshal? Anyway, this is all good news and I’m planning on a good portion of this money being funneled into Bootup Labs companies in the future