Bootup Labs Blog

We’re in the prepping stages for the next Launch Party on May 28th and a few other upcoming events and educational workshops. Anecdotal feedback has been really positive about our events, but as we’re gearing up to plan some more through out the year, we’d like to get some direct responses on what you like, what you don’t like, and anything else you’d like to tell us.

We’ve put together a survey to get your responses – the survey is embedded after the jump, or go fill it out directly.

Save the date for our next event, Beers and Boulder with Brad Feld, which will take place April 22nd. We’ll be opening tickets in the next day or so.

Read more »

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.

Well, it seems like September is going to be a busy one. It’s back to school and back to work. I’ve got a bunch of links and meetings cluttering up my bookmarks and my brain, so here’s a big post to clear the decks.

Calling Advisors

We’ve got several companies we’ve talked to at very early stages that are looking for advisors. The majority are web-based in some way, although with very different target markets (you can browse some of the public ones in our company directory).

Code Factory – coworking in Ottawa

I picked up the phone and talked to Ian Graham of Code Factory today – we talked about it when he launched back in March. Ian is adding about a member per day, has seen consistent increases in the DemoCamp Ottawa events he organizes, and in general is pretty jazzed about how things are moving in Ottawa. I spent 4 years there and am glad to see things taking off, especially around a commercial coworking space similar to Vancouver’s WorkSpace (which, according to a brief chat with the owner yesterday, is bursting at the seams and looking for more space).

LaunchParty Vancouver version 5 is up. Eventbrite is being used for registration, you need to signup here.

BarCamp Vancouver has venues locked down for the party (evening of September 26th at WorkSpace) and for the day of (September 27th, several locations around Granville Island). I’m looking forward to this first time semi-distributed version of BarCamp, wandering around Granville Island, heading to JJ Bean for coffee and maybe nipping in to the local sake brewery for a tasting.

The VEF Momentum guys don’t have their website up yet, but they’re putting together an event for September 30th.

I posted this to Twitter some time ago, but we ripped out our event listings (blanket statement: your website and the world likely don’t need yet-another-event-listings page) and changed it to be a pointer to places to look for events in Vancouver. The Techvibes Vancouver event listings are very solid, but we’ll also be pointing to Upcoming and Facebook. We’ve made a group on Upcoming and are fleshing out an event resources page plus a guide to the recurring events in Vancouver.

Entrepreneurs Everywhere

We’ve been hosting interns for the Impact Entrepreneuership Group in our office all of August. As it turns out, Impact is also the national host for Global Entrepreneurship Week for Canada, taking place in the third week of November (Bootup Labs is a partner, and we’ll be doing a startup / founder focused conference – more details to follow).

I’ve spoken with people at both SFU and UBC about various entrepreneur programs that are underway. SFU’s Surrey campus (which I have yet to go out and visit, but I will do and take some pictures) is expanding its Entrepreneurship program with a side of Innovation. The first classes don’t kick off until January, but by all accounts it looks very interesting. Continuing with SFU, I’ve also got my eye on COSTAR, who are going to be focusing on open source. I’ve long wanted more university-level involvement in open source.

I also sat down with Mark Mawhinney to talk about the expanded UBC New Ventures Program which is in the process of being defined. I really hope that this is something not restricted to the Point Grey campus — downtown is where business happens in Vancouver. In general, we should encourage more cross pollination of all the campus’ and the downtown action.

Finally, had a great lunch today with Basil Peters of Angelblog.net. We had a lively discussion about all things startup related in Vancouver, from funding to education to what needs to go in a term sheet. You definitely need to be subscribed to his blog, and we hope to see Basil sharing his knowledge at some upcoming startup / founder workshops.

It’s official, BarCamp Vancouver is set for September 27th. This is the third annual occurrence of this event, and we’re pushing it out a little farther than its traditional late August so we can have enough time to organize it.

For starters, it’s going to be larger. We’ve got (free) registration currently capped at 225 people: please do sign up now to let us know that you’re planning on attending. Last year’s event had 80 people on the waiting list…just sayin’.

BarCamp Vancouver will also be playing host to two “sub camps” — specifically, WordPressCamp and PhotoCamp. Please do check off the appropriate item in the registration form if you’re interested in those events, so we can help estimate numbers. We’re going to reserve space and time for dedicated sessions around those two topics.

Lastly, there are a bunch of other events happening around the same time. The Thursday before — September 25th — is National Digital Media Day. Maura is planning a Launch Party for Vancouver that evening to coincide with the day, and potentially coordinated across the country. September is going to go off with a bang…

We’ve had some complaints that we party too hard at Launch Party.  So much so, that investors and entrepreneurs can’t hear each other talking.  Even when we turn down the music all the way, people can’t hear very well over all the mingling.  So, we have a solution.  If you’re an Angel, VC or Blogger, please let me know and I’ll put you on the list for the sneak peak portion of the event, which simply starts an hour earlier.

Quick post to remind everyone to check out Vidfest and The Vancouver International Game Summit.   Looks like it’s going to be a great event this year.  I’ll be there on Saturday to pitch Strutta at the Pitch ‘n’ Play part of the event.

A note to the organizers: We accidentally scheduled Launch Party on the same night as the Opening Reception.  I apologized to Adam, and explained that the reason we chose May 21st to host Launch Party was because of the VCs that would be in town for the VC Road Trip. Maura, Dimitri and I promised to pay more attention in the future….. Hey maybe we should have a unified calendar… err techvibes does I guess, but VIDFEST is not on there.  Besides, I told Boris Wertz that I wont use it until they break up with their 1999 web design?  That said, their blog is a great resource for the city and should be read daily if you want to know anything about the tech scene in Vancouver.

As some of you may know, I co-host Launch Party Vancouver with Maura Rodgers and Dimitri Sirota. Well, the truth is, that Maura does most of the work, all while holding down a day job at Strutta and being the best mother I know. We don’t do it to make money; We do it because we love to bring the Vancouver tech community closer together to exchange ideas and build great stuff. I have no doubt that Vancouver can be a hotbed for tech startups, and Launch Party is just one of the ways that will help get us there.

I’ve asked Gordon to get as many VCs from the VC Road Trip to attend the event as he can, and a few have already confirmed.

For startups who are looking for people, or people who are interested in joining a startup, drop by the Career Fair.

Date: May 21st, 2008
Career Fair: 3pm
VC Preview: 4:15pm
Demos: 5:30-9pm
Party on: 9pm-late
Location: The Republic, 958 Granville Street Vancouver, BC

RSVP on Facebook or on the Launch Party blog

for fun: Previous Launch Party pics on Flickr

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.517802&w=425&h=350&fv=]
See you there!

We’re already down one month of the 2008 year and it seems like the pace of activities are speeding up.

In upcoming order, here are the events in Vancouver relevant to startups that I know about:

• Fusion Forum (February 20 – 21): a financing event put on by New Media BC. What is Fustion?
  

  Fusion is designed to showcase the hottest digital media firms, provide valuable insights into key issues in the industry, provide a premium networking opportunity and a chance to learn from world-class investment professionals involved in the sector.

  Sorry I didn’t mention it earlier, but this past Thursday was actually an Entrepreneur Bootcamp. I believe there is still room if you want to pitch your company to investors. Bootup Labs was invited, but Danny is actually presenting Strutta and we’ve got too many other items still on the “to do” list between now and then to do it justice. Thanks for the offer, Adam!

• Northern Voice 2008: of course there’s a conflict of interest! I’ve helped organize this personal blogging / social media conference for the past 3 years (this is the 4th annual), and it’s always a mind expanding experience. We have people attending from across the country and around the world, with lots of travel from our US neighbours in particular. Anyone wanting to plugin to what is happening online from a personal / social perspective should attend, or at the very least plan some dinners or meetups with the many folks that are arriving from out of town. Almost sold out, so buy a ticket now if you intend to come.
• Launch Party (late March / early April): the last one at the Lamplighter headlined by Sun and their Startup Essentials launch in Canada was filled to the brim: networking and new product launches plus an intro to who’s doing what in Vancouver are the reason to attend every time. Sounds like late March or early April according to Maura.
• DemoCampVancouver06 – Gaming Edition (late March / early April): we just wrapped the DCV05, where I announced that we’d be doing something a little different for DCV06 — a themed version that will focus on gaming. There are lots of big gaming companies that have spun off some smaller studios, some of which only got re-absorbed (Baby EAs, in Rob Lewis’ parlance on TechVibes) — are there more gaming startups, or gaming related ideas out there? I’m going to reach out to the local gaming tribe and see about getting some of them out. Including, hopefully, a guest speaker from Project Darkstar.

P.S. OK, OK, I *didn’t* forget about CaseCamp Vancouver 3 on February 20th, I just would expect any startup worth its salt to know these lessons already.