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.

Today we’re announcing our first conference targeted at founders and “idea stage” startups. One of the missions we feel we need to complete is to “raise the entreprenial IQ” here in Vancouver. Down in Silicon Valley, your downstairs neighbour probably has a drawer full of term sheets, we simply need more exposure to some of these concepts. We want to give a wide range of people some clear “next steps” they can do to keep working on their startup or startup concepts.

The workshop style conference is called Starting Something, and we’ve scheduled it for a full day on November 20th, 2008 (event on Upcoming). There will be a Launch Party that evening that you’ll also be invited to. All this to coincide with Global Entrepreneurship Week. Our August office mates, Impact, are the national Canadian host for this event – find out more at Eweek Canada.

We have 10 session slots across 2 tracks throughout the day (find a cofounder, one of you can be in each track). We have some ideas on session leaders and topics, but we’d like to hear from you! We’re kicking things off by asking you to fill out this survey to help us design the sessions and topics that you want to learn about. Thanks to Basil Peters, James from AdHack, and Trevor from Layerboom for early feedback on the session ideas.

We’re working with Kerry and Na’im from VEF Momentum to organize the conference. We will be putting a call out for speakers and sponsors in the next couple of weeks — if you’re interested in being either already, please contact us. We’re nailing down the venue as we speak and we expect tickets to be in the $50 – $75 range including breakfast, lunch, caffeine, and various “take home” templates and worksheets.

Ideally, you and your startup will be well positioned for the 2009 year to enter the New Ventures BC competition and present at Vantec, Angel Forum, Canadian Financing Forum, etc. etc. etc. What are you waiting for? Let’s get Starting Something!

Any other comments or ideas, please visit our Get Satisfaction section for Starting Something or use the widget below to give us feedback.

Active customer service discussions in Bootup Labs about Starting Something Conference

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Get Satisfaction support network

My brain is still a little melted today from participating in the New Ventures BC mentor panel yesterday. 9am to 5pm, 8 presentations, 30 minutes for lunch, and short breaks between presentations. Wow.

For starters, let me say that this highlights the activity that is going on in Vancouver. Regardless of the specifics of the particular business model or idea, I was impressed by the way all the founders presented their companies and discussed their ideas.

As well, I really enjoyed hearing the varied feedback from the entire room of mentors. Everybody came from varying backgrounds, so it was great to hear the different perspectives that people had. One issue that came up a couple of times was the slippery slope of business feedback vs. presentation feedback (the mentors started riffing on the business). At the end of the day, the New Ventures BC program is a competition, and this event was to help the founders tune their investor presentations. Explaining your product or service succinctly and in an exciting, believable way, with the dollars and cents to back it up and show investor value.

The room I was in (there were three in total) had a technology / web focus. There were quite a few familiar faces presenting, but also some that were completely new to me. I’m trying to encourage new companies that I come across to enter themselves in StartupIndex.ca (we also have a company directory which we’re trying to figure out how to tune: the current list of companies are ones that we’ve spoken to the founders at length, and have extra information in our private Extranet).

Without further ado, here are the companies that presented to us:

1. ClicVue: a home theater video aggregator — hardware plus a software based remote
2. Project Opus: a revamped spin on the album — digital artist subscriptions for fans (I’m not getting this quite right, but I don’t know how public this is…I’m excited by this concept)
3. CrowdTrust: personal identity and knowledge management
4. QCDocs: the small business ERP (Sean the founder is our accountant, and we are going to be using QCDocs for all the startups that come through Bootup)
5. AdHack: eBay for advertising, DIY advertising — disrupting the ad industry
6. CloudTel: fully hosted business VoIP
7. DreamBank: give dreams, not stuff
8. Adventure Engine: a booking engine for adventure travel operators

The complete list of 30 finalists is on the NVBC blog. Aside from the official blog, Diaries of a Suburban Startup has been posting great content related to the competition, the startups, and the founders involved.

I spent some time posting commentary to my personal Twitter account. Unfortunately, my favourite Twitter tracker Twemes was affected by Twitter API breakage, so this Twitter search will have to do as an archive. Two of my favourite quotes are James Sherrett from AdHack mentioning the phrase “return on attention“, and David Gratton from Project Opus stating that the new “[music] album is a living document rather than an artifact”.

NVBC is definitely a great event that provides real value to the local entrepreneurial community. I myself participated in it 4 years ago when I came back to Vancouver, not to launch a company, but to go to the various seminars and meet the local community. NVBC should be on every entrepreneur’s list to attend. Thanks to Bob de Wit for asking us to participate.

Finally, special thanks to Andrew Kumar for loaning me an SFU wireless login so I could research companies and their competitors as they presented.