Bootup Labs Blog

I’ve got various bits and pieces of real-estate related news today, hence the Real Estate edition.

It looks like some of the feedback we gave on the PACT event we attended in San Francisco are moving ahead — the Canadian Trade Commissioners are putting on a Canadian Regional Boot Camp for Technology Start Ups. They’re starting with some back east locations, and when I asked, Guillaume Parent let me know about a time frame for Western events:

As far as the boot camps are concerned, yes, we are planning a Round II for the West with stops in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Saskatoon and/or Winnipeg. We are targeting early summer (May/June) for this. As FYI, and as you may have read on our website, we are in the process of opening the Canadian incubator at Plug and Play so CDN tech start-ups can use this as a landing ground, at no costs for up to 3 months, while focusing on securing partnerships in the Valley.

We’ll keep you posted on timing for the boot camps. The latter half of that news — that you can potentially work out of an office at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Silicon Valley — I’ll call the first bit of real estate related news.

The second real estate news is that Jamie Cheng of Klei Entertainment called to tell me that he’s looking for someone to sublet part of his cool new space in Yaletown:

We are moving into a new space of 3800sqft at the end of the month.
That’s about 1000-1200 sqft extra than what we need, and it’s got built out offices, kitchen, etc. I’m wondering if you know anyone who may be  looking to sublease some space.

The rent is cheap — $17/sqft + operating costs in Yaletown.

Get in touch with Jamie at sublease@kleientertainment.com if you’re interested.

Real estate news #3 comes from Rilli, Vancouver’s own geo-web startup. They finally took a break from tracking and locating their users, and located *themselves* in a new office in Gastown. Situated on 116 Pender St (above Wild Rice, across
from Tinseltown), the “up and coming” neighborhood has already proven
itself entertaining. Any and all are encouraged to stop by to get a tour, a product demo, and a sticker. Colin Brumelle, who I got the news from, is now the only team member who hasn’t moved back to Vancouver. He told me a fun story about how their rent is so cheap that they actually calculated that working out of coffee shops would be *more* expensive. Colin, that calculation would make a fun blog post…

A little bit out of left field is a request from old Drupal buddy Zack Rosen. Aside from Drupal services firm Chapter Three, Zack also started Mission Bicycles -

Mission Bicycle is a bicycle store for the Internet age. Customers give us their measurements, pick colors and components, and their dream bike arrives in the mail in 2 weeks. We’re like the CafePress of bicycles. You can check us out at missionbicycle.com, see our photo stream of bikes, or read coverage of us on CurrentTV and Thrillist.

The U.S. bicycle industry is a $6.2B business that is over 100 years old. We’re disrupting this market by selling directly to the rapidly growing market of 20-30 year-old bicycle commuters in cities. We can make cycling in cities as desirable driving a car. We’ve sold 225+ bikes around the world in the past 9 months (average sales price of $1000) and we have twice the margin of our competitors.

Why post about them here? For one, these are very cool bikes that bicycle mad Vancouver is sure to be interested in. And secondly, Zack’s looking for a round of angel / friends and family financing to take Mission Bicycles to the next level. If you’re interested in investing in this type of direct to consumer, Internet ecommerce business, email info@missionbicycle.com.

We here at Bootup are working on prepping our first official application process which will open the middle of this month. In the meantime, the TechStars application is already open for their summer program. This interview with David Cohen of TechStars is an excellent listen.

Closer to home, the New Ventures BC 2009 seminar series is in sneak peak mode: they’ve posted an outline of the 9 week seminar series that goes from April to June. The 2009 competition will get rolling in March. I can definitely recommend it – it’s a good way to tune your ideas if you’re just getting started, and it’s also a great place for networking. I went through a part of the program when I came back to Vancouver 5 years ago, and made lots of connections.

Final decisions on accepted companies for the next Launch Party (put it on your calendar for Feb. 26th) are going to be made this Friday. Want your company to present? Send a short blurb about your company and what you’ll be launching to Maura.

Riz’s Links

• The SFU TIME Center has some incubator office space available, with prices ranging from $720 to $830 per month.
• When the Dragon’s Away: “Live” Social Enterprise business case competition on Feb. 26th (calendar link) – put on by JDQ and Vancity, with a first prize of $15,000

Links, stories, promotions etc. being accepted now for next weeks edition. Leave a comment or send an email and we’ll get the word out.

I don’t often do these kind of little link posts, but I had a lot of tidbits of news that I wanted to let people know about. Will it become a weekly thing? Tune in next time to find out!

Northern Voice 2009 is now open for registration. 2 days of mainlining all that’s fresh and new in personal blogging and related tech. The party on the Thursday night is going to be fantastic. A good excuse from visitors elsewhere to come visit. Oh yes…and it sells out every year, so do buy your tickets soon.

Alexandra Skey and her Victoria-based wommp team are now blogging. Does your startup up have a blog? You should…I didn’t include it as a must have in our four things startups need in order to get funded, but time again I’ve found it worth my time both for promotion and for making connections.

I could probably link to every blog post that Keith McSpurren of CoveritLive writes (and his blog is still brand spanking new). He writes what we all know: entrepreneurs are crazy people.

I met with Kyle Housman this week, telling him a bit more about Bootup Labs for a study on Incubators 2.0 that he’s doing. He’s currently doing an entrepreneurial MBA at Boston-based Babson College. Based on how he excited he is about the program, and that our already entrepreneurial friend Bill MacEwen, founder of WorkSpace, is also attending, it sounds like a great program. Looks like we’ll be hunting for good startup ideas from Babson graduates.

I know I *just* posted about the First Round Capital Office Hours yesterday, but wanted to let you know two things: lots of people are coming, including from Calgary (thanks for spreading the word, CTI), and I really want their form to be filled to overflowing.

OK, actually, three things: Ed Levinson and I are going to run a quick “pitch tuning” session the day before in the Bootup Labs offices for up to 10 companies. Get in touch using the contact form and select ‘Pitch Tuning’ if you’re interested. We’ll do some one on one and peer review of you pitching your startup or startup idea.

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.

The day after tomorrow, James from AdHack and I will be heading up to the Banff Venture Forum. We’re both foodies, so our trip planning amounts to departure time wrangling so we can make it to Trufflepigs in Field, BC for lunch

AdHack is presenting in the IT Stream, plus will be present on the floor with a booth. I’ll be lending a hand at the booth and getting to know the other companies. I also hope to catch up with Brad Feld of Foundry Group aka Brad of TechStars that my last post was about: he’s the keynote speaker for the IT Stream.

Sandra MacDonald and Michal Berman will also be in town, representing the Sun Startup Essentials Canada program — which launched at the beginning of the year at Launch Party. I think we’ll do an ad hoc dinner in Banff at some point, watch Twitter* and/or blog postings here for updates.

After Banff, James and I will be spending the weekend in Calgary and have a couple of meetings booked already. I have an email out to the STIRR Canada folks to maybe help get the word out about a Calgary Tech Entrepreneur Meetup on Saturday night. For now, here’s a placeholder Upcoming event. Please sign up and let us know you’re interested, as well as suggesting a venue for Saturday, October 5th in Calgary.

*I’m using #bfv08 as my tag for the event. Watch Twemes to just monitor those postings.