Several people have sent this along to us already. We’ve definitely been looking at Montreal Startup’s model as we explore the details of how to set up Bootup Labs. I caught up with John Stokes and Austin Hill at the Banff Venture Forum and got some good detail on their progress. They’ve been spending a lot of time building support at the provincial level, and of course cultivating their local ecosystem.

» Montreal Start Up raises another $2M | StartupNorth

Montreal Start Up announced today the closing of an additional $2,000,000 for its venture fund from the Solidarity Fund QFL, bringing total assets under management to $5,000,000. The Solidarity Fund QFL joins Investissement Québec, la Conférence Régional des Élus, and 20 of Montreal’s most successful entrepreneurs and investors who partnered with Montreal Start Up to address the need for more early stage capital and mentoring.

“We have met with hundreds of entrepreneurs since our launch and the quality and creativity of the ideas we are seeing is constantly improving. We were having to turn down good deals because of the limited amounts of capital available to us. The support of Solidarity Fund QFL will allow us to support more of Montreal’s best startup companies.” John Stokes, Montreal Start Up

Also revealed were Montreal Start Up’s four latest investments: Mobilize Central, KeenKong, The Book Oven, and Oneeko all of which are based in Montreal. These investments are in addition to its previously announced investments in Standout Jobs and Akoha.

www.startupnorth.ca

We don’t yet have enough data to see if this new model “works” from Montreal Startup, but similar models like Y Combinator and Techstars do have enough data to show success. I firmly believe that these relatively small, very early stage investments “prime the pump” for a cycle of entrepreneurs starting companies, learning from the experience, and doing it again.

Sean from QCDocs is king of the “top 10 lists” on the QCDocs blog. He just posted a wrap up of lessons learned from our PACT conference attendance last week. I still need to do a longer wrap up plus cut and paste the content from my Cover It Live live blogging session from last week, but I’ll add a few comments on Sean’s post here.

As Sean says, Chris Gill from Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs (SVASE) did a great job of running the presentation Bootcamp organized by the Federal government trade commissioners. I think there was consensus that running such a Bootcamp on a regional / provincial level would be ideal: get everyone trained in their home locations, and then do an investment roadshow to Silicon Valley similar to how TechStars, Y-Combinator, and Seed Camp do.

There were lots of connections to be made with Canadian companies from across the country, and we’re still navigating our way through introductions at both the Federal and provincial level. There definitely are resources to lean on, it’s a matter of finding the right ones. To continue those connections, please join the PACT Canada 2008 LinkedIn group so we can stay in touch.

Image by bmann via Flickr

And yes, the Mai Tais were delicious, and *I* think they helped loosen us up for presenting the next day.

The day after tomorrow, James from AdHack and I will be heading up to the Banff Venture Forum. We’re both foodies, so our trip planning amounts to departure time wrangling so we can make it to Trufflepigs in Field, BC for lunch

AdHack is presenting in the IT Stream, plus will be present on the floor with a booth. I’ll be lending a hand at the booth and getting to know the other companies. I also hope to catch up with Brad Feld of Foundry Group aka Brad of TechStars that my last post was about: he’s the keynote speaker for the IT Stream.

Sandra MacDonald and Michal Berman will also be in town, representing the Sun Startup Essentials Canada program — which launched at the beginning of the year at Launch Party. I think we’ll do an ad hoc dinner in Banff at some point, watch Twitter* and/or blog postings here for updates.

After Banff, James and I will be spending the weekend in Calgary and have a couple of meetings booked already. I have an email out to the STIRR Canada folks to maybe help get the word out about a Calgary Tech Entrepreneur Meetup on Saturday night. For now, here’s a placeholder Upcoming event. Please sign up and let us know you’re interested, as well as suggesting a venue for Saturday, October 5th in Calgary.

*I’m using #bfv08 as my tag for the event. Watch Twemes to just monitor those postings.

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.

There are incubator-style companies and funds springing up all over the world. Y Combinator in Cambridge and the Bay Area, and TechStars in Boulder are the ones that we at Bootup identify with most strongly. And yes, we don’t like to use the term incubator since previous versions had very different models than today’s crop.

This past Thursday, Zac Boon came by to visit us. He’s with McLean Watson Capital, out of Toronto, Ottawa, and Singapore, and also runs Thymos Capital, based in Singapore. Their “who we are” sounds pretty familiar — it’s great to find similar concepts springing up:

a private business incubator which focuses on mentoring, seeding and creating successful Interactive Digital Media startups in Singapore with unique competitive advantages – sustainable businesses that are fundamentally sound and financially viable when they leave our incubation process.

Zac was on his way to the Bay Area with one of his mentored founders, and stopped off in Vancouver to see what’s happening here. We talked a bit about the challenges of smaller environments — Singapore is of course a city state, with about 4.5M people, and all of BC is about 4.4M people. This is definitely an area where we’ll keep talking — would it make sense to work with our governments to sponsor some cross pollination between BC and Singapore? I think so, so it’s time for me to go bug some of my contacts in the Ministry of Economic Development…

On the other side of the world, we’ve been watching SeedCamp in London, England. Chris Comella from BuzzPal did a great “blink” reaction on his top SeedCamp picks, and will also be heading to London to hang out with the SeedCampers even though he didn’t get picked. That’s initiative!

While I’m talking about Europe, a pointer to ClipperZ is in order — the team is another “friend of Bootup” that I’ve kept a connection with for years. They have tools for building “zero knowledge” web applications that apply to security and identity online. Their updated intro to zero knowledge web apps and ClipperZ is on SlideShare.