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.

The PACT event that we attended just had a release from the Trade Commissioners out of the San Francisco office. It looks like some of our feedback — specifically, moving the “Boot Camp” programs of prepping companies for investment and pitches to regional locations in Canada — are going to go ahead. We’ll keep everyone up to date on how this program evolves, it looks like there are definite plans for a similar event April / May 2009.

Thanks Guillaume, Thierry, and the rest of the San Francisco and Palo Alto office teams for putting this event on. We’re looking forward to be involved in the regional Boot Camps as well. Full post of the results / press release after the jump.

Read more »

Danny and I are still down in San Francisco at the Plug and Play Tech Center, just wrapping things up before we head up to our Canadians in the Valley beer up in the city.

I’m taking a few minutes to catch up on my reading when I came across May Chu’s post on the Clarity Accounting blog – Don’t be afraid to be small. It’s an absolutely great write up of their approach to their business.

Less than 12 hours ago, I received an email sent through our contact form from a potential client who wanted to know more about our company. He wanted to know how long we have been in business and how big our firm is. He noted that our mailing address looked like a small business running out of some one’s apartment. He wanted to know if the business he is dealing with is a big, fail-proof company.

At first I was worried about how best to respond to this inquiry. After all, we are a small company that is run virtually. Everyone who has ever worked on this project has been contracted virtually. In the spirit of being an online accounting software, we conduct our business using as many “online tools” as possible.

Go read the whole post, and also check out the two Seth Godin posts that May references — Small is the new big, from 2005, and his recent post Too small to fail.

May and Dobes are doing a great job with Clarity Accounting, building their business one piece at a time, and I can’t help but think that they will be highly successful. I’ll leave you with another piece of information that I think highlights this:

Recently I found out that a company providing similar services as us burns 6 million dollars a year. I thought to myself, “wow, give me 6 million dollars and I would only spend a fraction of that amount”. In fact, within 1 month of our full launch, the business is already paying its own bills.

TechStars is the incubator that we feel philosophically most aligned with. Their successes don’t hurt, either Danny is down in the Valley right now, and attended their Demo Day. Here’s Vator.TV interviewing Brad Feld about the TechStars model.

Danny actually spoke with David Cohen of TechStars a couple of weeks ago. One of the really interesting pieces of information was that 50% of founders / companies decide to stay in Boulder after the program is over. 50% of companies staying and running companies in a city?! Sounds like pretty fantastic numbers.

In other news, we’re putting together the details around a Canadians in the Valley event — if you’re interested, sign up for that Upcoming link and we’ll update the details as we figure it out. Dana Oshiro and Rebecca Reeve are Canadian ex-pats that were going to take Danny and I for beer when we went down for the Plug & Play event, and of course we decided to turn that into something a little bigger. Thanks Dana and Rebecca for playing along so far.

So, I was mentioning last week some of the international incubators that are out there, in reference to meeting with Zac Boon from Thymos Capital in Singapore. Today Stefan Korn from Webfund in New Zealand stopped by our office, Vancouver being the first hop on the way to a conference in Montreal (of the Denturist Association of Canada — as we find out in the video, Canada apparently has the most denturists in the world).

As another aside, Singapore, New Zealand, and the province of BC all have approximately the same population: close to 4.5M people.

Here are the companies that Webfund is currently incubating:

• Base Diary, the practice management software for denturists
• Book Habit, sell your ebooks, early buyers pay the least, as you the author get more popular, sale prices go up
• DIY Father, positive parenting community for new and young fathers, to go alongside the legion of resources for moms
• Global Registries (not launched), productizing the current New Zealand software for doing business registration online to other governments around the world

We’re working through a couple of ideas on how to cross pollinate. With various connections to governments in different countries floating around, look for something maybe the middle of next year. In the more short term, there is Canadian government involvement in an event at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale. I added it to the Bootup Upcoming group, and we’re trying to track down more information from the government end of things.

I’ve been experimenting with the YouTube annotation method. We actually like Viddler for “produced” videos (it has great functionality to layer on a logo plus link automatically), but having the computer right there next to the kitchen makes it easy to do these “no editing” videos. Let me know if this is useful or distracting, either here or on Get Satisfaction.