Bootup Labs Blog

Great article in Business Week today: ‘Super Angels’ Shake Up Venture Capital except we may not “shaking” venture capital up, we’re just reacting to the changing conditions of how investors are making money today.  Traditional VCs with $1B funds are just caught in the tough position of trying to find deals that are looking for many millions of dollars in funding.  The new generation of seed funds are nimble and fast and can do things the old boys can’t.

IPO exits are dead, but acquisitions are still happening:

I watch the Crunchbase Acquisitions page and see there are still a lot of companies being sold.

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.

Kicking off the New Year, there are lots of great entrepreneurial, techie, and capital raising events coming up – Techvibes has a good roundup in their Venture Capital Outlook 2009, and we’ve updated our events listing at Upcoming — 13 events in January and counting!

But this post is about highlighting First Round Capital holding “Office Hours” in Vancouver. First Round is a top tier Silicon Valley venture firm, so it’s great to hear that they’re coming for a visit. James from AdHack and Danny and I met with them when they did this event across the street from their Palo Alto offices at the University Coffee Cafe. They teamed up with Boris Wertz’s W Media Ventures to put this on, and I think it’s a great format — practice your 1 – 2 minute pitches now.

Who should come? First Round says:

just like the original Palo Alto edition, we’d love to meet with entrepreneurs, people thinking about becoming entrepreneurs or folks who would like join a start-up. We’ll be available for a bunch of informal ~15 minute chats. Again, there’s no agenda. We’ll provide the napkins to write on and the coffee to keep you warm while you wait.

They’re also asking that you fill out this form if you know you’re going to come ahead of time, although it’s not required.

We just showed up last minute in Palo Alto, so spent plenty of time out on the sidewalk chatting with the other entrepreneurs. I think it wouldn’t be a bad thing if our extended local ecosystem filled that form to capacity… (yes, I’m looking at you Whistler, Okanagan, Victoria, Bellingham, and Seattle). Maybe Pete from HearWhere wants to take the guys skiing at Whistler?

See you January 15th at the Agro Cafe from 4 to 6pm. Happy New Year, and good luck with all your ventures.

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Our office got together this week and did a fun holiday lip dub video:

Thanks to Jordan for whipping us all into shape — check out the Strutta holiday page for the main post of this video.

If you haven’t seen it, First Round Capital did an excellent holiday video with all their portfolio companies.