Bootup Labs Blog

I’m really excited to be on a panel at the Future of Funding event in San Mateo on Feb 18th.  I’ll be joined by Adeo Ressi, CEO of the Founder Institute (and TheFunded.com), David Cohen, CEO, Techstars and Reshma Sohoni, CEO, Seedcamp, and It’ll be moderated by, Matt Marshall, CEO and Editor, VentureBeat.

Incubators and Accelerators

Time: February 18, 2010, 2:30-3:30pm

Description: There is an increasing number of incubators and accelerators appearing around the country. What has been their effect? What models are working? How are they succeeding, and what challenges are they facing? This panel will examine the growing role of incubators.

If have any intrest in learning more about how the funding world is changing, and how fast, I encourage you to attend.  Here’s a 50% off link.

We’re coming down to Seattle tomorrow, and we’d like to see you!

In particular, we’ll be at the Spitfire Grill from around 12noon to 2pm, having some lunch after the drive down from Vancouver. We’d love it if startups and entrepreneurs from Seattle dropped by and said “hi”. Did we mention that the application for our January 2010 program is open and you can apply here?

We’re actually coming down to hang out with our friends from TechStars, who are having demo days and a mini reunion. I’m also hoping to connect with the Founder’s Co-op team.

There’s an event on Upcoming if you like that sort of thing, and you can reach Boris on his Google Voice number at (916) 341-9528 if you want to get in touch. Come meet us at the Spitfire, tell us about what you’re doing, let us tell you more about Bootup, and let’s connect in the Pac Northwest, as the kids might say.

Thanks to Bryan Zug of Lilipip and Lee Lefever of Common Craft for venue suggestions, and Boo! to Chris Pirillo for having fun in Hawaii so we don’t get to see him.

Yes, we know things have been quiet here at Bootup HQ (besides Danny’s great posts and our always active Twitter account). This year has been a busy one, working with our portfolio companies that are part of our beta fund.

Now we’re ready to go into full operation. And that means we want YOU! (insert picture of Uncle Sam pointing at entrepreneurs in the audience).

Our January 2010 cohort application is now open »

What are we looking for? Well, our four “big bucket” categories are consumer Internet, mobile, gaming, and enterprise Internet. We want to work with digital media startup teams that want to hunker down and spend 8 months growing their business, either getting ready for further investment or growing their “cash engine” to a profitable state.

Yes, this is similar to Y Combinator or TechStars. The TechStars model is the one we’re most inspired by, although we’ve put our own unique twist on it. We believe, like they do, in a mentor model, and that being in the same physical space is important.

Oh, and in case I’m not being clear, you absolutely should apply to any other accelerator programs you can get your hands on. I actually think that for first time entrepreneurs, the question is no longer whether or not to take part in a startup accelerator, but rather, which one to join.

We’ve already gotten a handful of applications from across Canada and around the world. In the US, it’s a little bit harder to get into the country as an entrepreneur (see Startup Visa for what some people are trying to do to fix that), but we’d love to hear from teams wherever you’re based.

Head on over to the application page to get started. The relevant dates for the January intake are as follows:

• Application deadline: November 6
• Interviews with select applicants: November 9 through November 20
• Offers made to selected companies: November 30 to December 4th
• Program begins: mid-January, 2010
• Program ends: end of September 2010

Our about page has the extended remix version of our program details, we’ll keep updating the FAQ based on questions we get, and our contact page is open if you need anything else.

I know it’s only the first half of August, but the wall of events in September is already staring me in the face.

The week of September 14th is what is making me call it “Pitch-tember” – a ton of opportunities to pitch your company.

• Monday, Sept. 14th: California Market Access Bootcamp Vancouver – (apply to pitch)
• Tuesday, Sept. 15th: Vancouver Enterprise Forum featuring Kevin Ham – (buy a ticket)
• Wednesday, Sept. 16th: Launch Party Vancouver 8 – (apply to launch)
• Friday, Sept. 18th: IRAP Lion’s Den (talk to your IRAP rep)

Thursday looks empty, but I’ve heard that Ventures West is having their annual (private) mixer that evening – so the whole week is full!

To prep for all this pitching, we’ve asked Patrick Lor to fly in from Calgary, to spend some time giving feedback. We’ll be giving preference to the companies accepted to the Sept. 14th Bootcamp – sign up for the event on Upcoming for more information.

September is busy elsewhere as well – TechCrunch 50 is on the 14th and 15th in San Francisco, and the week after is DEMO in San Diego. I know of at least a couple of Canadian companies going down for TechCrunch.

So, even though it’s “only” halfway through August, I already feel the pressure building to work with companies to tune and prep their story. Especially after seeing the Techstars Demo Day, where the teams spend a gruelling 3 weeks straight getting ready for their pitch.

Danny and I are down in Boulder, CO, attending the investor demo days that TechStars is having for their 2009 cohort of companies. Danny went to the presentations in SF last year, and we figured it was time to head to Boulder directly to check out the organization, talk to the companies, and compare notes.

Bootup Labs is highly inspired by the structure and feel of the TechStars program, and it is *the* early stage accelerator program that we feel most “spiritually” aligned with. Everything we’ve heard on this trip — from founders taking part in the program, to investors, to the staff and mentors — convinces us that it’s a great starting point for the right model. As Brad Feld and others have said many times, rebuilding a Silicon Valley should not be the goal for any region or local community. Each place has its own strengths and weaknesses and will find its own path for “what works”.

The vibe here is definitely about building businesses. As we suspected, teams that come to Boulder aren’t just at the “idea” stage – the founders have come some distance on their own (in many cases a considerable distance with a medium sized team of 4 – 6 people+) ; they are taking part in the TechStars program because they are fully committed to building fundable *businesses*.

I took the time to meet with many of the teams after the presentations and dig for a little more info on how and why they came here, and what they think of other programs around the company. Some of them we have further connections for, and some might even swing through Vancouver at some point – the reaction to Vancouver was of general interest or saying that it’s on the list of places they’d like to visit. The tech community in Vancouver isn’t readily known here, and things like Flickr’s early genesis here are forgotten or not known. And that’s something we all need to work on, to carry the flag abroad that we’ve got great stuff going on. This is something that the Bootup Entrepreneurial Society is actively working on with other local organizations – a PR campaign to get Vancouver on people’s mental map when the subject of tech hubs comes up.

In any case, below are some short “Tweet-length” observations about the companies that presented today, that got eaten by the SMS gateway.

I also have a rough 4 axis point scale that I used to try and rate my feelings about each company, but I actually don’t think I’ll publish that since it’s very contextual and subjective based on my own experience and feelings. There were companies that were great and there were companies whose *presentations* weren’t perfect, but they all presented well and generated lots of discussions and follow ups.

• First @techstars pitch is ReTel – video monitoring for retail & chain restaurants to do reporting on employees – feels a bit like @odesk screen caps
• Everlater next up @techstars – I’m seeing lots of travel related apps lately – v. high energy presenters
• TimZon is run by a Frenchman from Huntsville, Alabama – visual communications – mainly support / helpdesk focused to deliver email responses as screencast + recorded video messages
• TakeComics is making me want to buy comics again w iTunes-style interface for reading/browsing/buying comics – even ‘DVD-style’ extra features
• Next Big Sound is analytics for music industry – very slick presentation incl. live numbers of new bands being found/added in real time; *many* industries could use better analytics
• Vanilla is open source forums – moving to offer hosted version and commercialize – hey @apeatling, BuddyPress should ditch bbPress and use this
• SendGrid is up – email delivery for “transactional” emails (e.g. notifications, registration confirmation, etc.) — not like MailChimp, which is promotional emails
• Spry integrates on top of dev tools to do reporting – interesting to hear they are talking about bundling out of the box with existing web services, which is an interesting angle; feels like an enterprise need, but I don’t see enterprise targeting
• Mailana visualizes strong relationships in networks (FB, Twitter, email, etc.) – a bit like Zoe (old school IMAP email scanning Java app that I can’t find a link for other than my own post from 2004) and a bit like Gist
• Rezora is the final presentation – email marketing specifically for real estate, currently targeting brokerages, lots of domain-specific tools and analytics

Congrats to all the companies for getting to presentation day, and thanks to the TechStars team for welcoming us and putting on a great event. We’ve got lots of ideas to take back to Vancouver – look us up when you’re in town.

Another Bootup Labs like model that we’re watching closely is Betaworks out of New York.   Bit.ly’s $2M on $7M financing continues to prove that Bootup Labs, YCombinator, TechStars, and LaunchBox, have now become the new standard for accelerating web startups.t

We’ve always struggled to find a name for what we do.  What we do know is that “incubator” is not the right term. “Accelerator” — maybe.  Lance suggested “Startup Factory.” I kinda like that one.  I’ll try it out for a while and see how it takes.  What do you guys think?

As we have said many times, Bootup Labs is most similar to TechStars in the way it operates.  We can’t say enough how much respect we have for what they’ve accomplished.

Today, Brad blogged about more TechStars portfolio company action with the merger of Limbo into BrightKite and a $9M financing.  And, of course, here is the obligatory TechCrunch article.

This marks the third exit from TechStars’s Class of 2007—the other two being SocialThing to AOL and IntenseDebate to Automattic.

Congrats to the Brightkite crew!

Brad Feld jumped the gun on us and got his blog post up first, when he saw our placeholder event. We’re super pleased that he’s making the time to come up to Vancouver and tell us about Boulder, the TechStars program, and his experience with startups and venture funding in general.

TechStars was the closest model for us in setting up the structure of Bootup Labs, so we’re very interested in hearing some of Brad’s “lessons learned”. Brad is going to make the event highly Q&A based – please bring your questions. Feel free to kick off the questions by posting comments to this entry so Brad can get a flavour for what people want to know.

The event takes place April 22nd in the private room at SteamWorks. We’ll open the doors at 6pm, and Brad will start his talk just after 6:30pm. We’ll be providing some drinks and refreshments. You don’t need to bring anything else other than a stack of business cards and your great ideas and questions – another good opportunity to maybe find a cofounder and network.

The first 50 tickets are free and open for registration now – we’ll be releasing some additional tickets at a nominal cost once these sell out. The full registration form is after the jump, or you can go directly to the registration page at Eventbrite.

Read more »

Launch Party Vancouver 6 is on the runway, with 6 great companies on deck. Techvibes did a post adding all the startup profiles to their directory, so you can learn a bit more about them. Freebie tickets are gone, but you can still sign up to attend. LPV6 will be right below the Bootup Labs offices in the atrium of The Landing and the private room of Steamworks. I’m looking forward to the first Launch Party of the year and some of the new new stuff we’re going to try out, and we’ve even gone so far as reserved a date for the next one in May.

James from AdHack sent me a link to a post at Startup Lessons Learned – The free software hiring advantage. It’s no secret that I’m a fan of open source, and this is a good read through of what it means to build on and hire from an open source community. AdHack itself is built on top of Drupal.

We often have people drop by the office that are new to town and/or wanting to have an overview of the local tech and startup scene. Greg Wynans just moved back to Vancouver from The Netherlands, starting out here originally at PMC-Sierra. Greg is interested in connecting with startups that need to add business and marketing skills to their team, or maybe doing a startup of his own.

The next two upcoming events that I recommended that Greg attend to connect with more people are the Feb. 17th VEF and the Feb. 26th Launch Party. Say “hi” when you meet him, and ask him about the cake shop he built in the Netherlands…

By the way, we’re helping to run the Lightning Pitches at the VEF event again. There are a handful of slots still open to present, so please email lightning@vef.org to apply. Tell us about your company, organization, or service provider and why your 100 second pitch would be of interest to the Vancouver business community.

The Iceberg Problem

I’ve talked through this concept in person a number of times with entrepreneurs, and on Monday Mark Peter Davis posted on how you should ‘Tell the bigger story’ – we call this the “iceberg problem”. You’ve got a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (aka BHAG, pronounced bee-hag) that you want to tackle, but no one can realistically believe that you can make it all the way there. It involves massive rollout, changes in technology and/or people’s behaviours over time. But, if you only talk about the “tip of the iceberg” — how you can make money and grow your business today — you both undersell your bigger ideas and make the entire business seem less interesting / less compelling.

Striking a balance between explaining or walking people through the entire size of your iceberg is a fine line. Done right, it can cause growing excitement in an audience, until they get the ah ha! moment of understanding how you’re going to tackle the entire audience. It tends to play well with investors, too

Incubator Application Season

TechStars application is open now, and the deadline is March 21st. Y Combinator’s application for Summer 2009 is also open, with a deadline of March 18th. To put you all on notice, Bootup Labs is fine tuning our application form and will be opening it next week. Our form is very similar to the other two: we’ll ask you tell us about your team and your company, with much of the material being very similar to what’s in a good executive summary (check our templates page for an example).

Riz’s Links

• Digital Media interns from the Centre for Digital Media are going to becoming available – here’s an example of a previously completed project for Telefonica. I presented at a lunch and learn at the Centre last week about Bootup and startups, and connected with some great students. Contact Dennis Chenard if you’re interested in interns or hiring a product team.
• Riz recommends that you find some time in your busy entrepreneur schedule and read The Innovator’s Toolkit (recent review at the Globe & Mail)
• From Vator.TV, Ten Top Action Items to best prepare you for success in achieving a funding event with Angels – how many of them do you already have done?

Most content or links are fair game for Wednesday posts. Feel free to contact us with anything you’d like to see highlighted here. Until next week, stay classy, YVR…

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.