Bootup Labs Blog

Kudos to Mark Lise for organizing a succesful first DemoCampVictoria. Lots of excited post coverage of the evening: Mark, Yule, Tris, TechVibes – I think this was a great spring board for future meetups. My favourite quote from the evening was from Gels Saby, who said at the beginning of her talk “I wasn’t going to present, but I got excited about my project, so I wanted to share it with you”. Great stuff, this is exactly the kind of reaction that DemoCamps are meant to engender.

I haven’t been back over to Victoria in quite some time, so I was amazed by all the activity. Sure, the University of Victoria is my alma mater, and I know that it spreads co-op students everywhere – much like Waterloo – but after leaving, I certainly wasn’t in touch with the technology industry there. It turns out that tech is the #1 / #2 industry in Victoria, along with tourism.

The Juliet Presentation Center, where the event was hosted, definitely also deserves mention. This is for a new “Vancouver style” condo development in downtown Victoria. In general, there seemed to be consensus that holding the event downtown was a critical factor. Hmmm…a link between property developers and technology workers? Definitely something to explore.

I felt like it was a really successful trip for me: I got to meet a bunch of people doing cool things in Victoria, and then ended up in a couple of longer discussions – one with the crew from Flock (thoughts on the social graph for every website on my personal site) and Yule on Placeblogger-like functionality for Victoria.

Photos of the event can be seen in Tris Hussey’s photostream, and I did a live interview using Utterz.

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on the scene in Victoria, and encouraging cross pollination in both directions with Vancouver. For that matter, Seattle is pretty close as well…

P.S. The next event in Vancouver is this Thursday, April 10th – DemoCampVancouver06: Gaming Edition.

Rick Segal is a partner in the team at JLA Ventures, a Canadian VC firm with offices in Toronto and Montreal. He’s doing a VC Roundtable to give entrepreneurs across the country a chance to meet with him. Rick does a lot of “no harm, no foul” meetings that are much less like traditional “pitch” meetings, and in general has been doing a great job in supporting the growth of Canadian entrepreneurship.

As part of the VC Roundtable, Rick will be visiting Vancouver (signup) and Victoria (signup) (both in one day, Rick? Come on, stay a little longer….) on April 21st. What is this VC Roundtable all about?

Something’s missing in Canada’s tech community - the chance to informally interact with VCs, learn about what it is exactly that they do and how the funding process works.

The VC Roundtable series aims to fill this gap, by hosting small (free!) get togethers across Canada’s major cities where Rick Segal, JLA Ventures Partner and VC blogger (http://ricksegal.typepad.com) will walk through what getting involved with VCs is all about.

There is a bit of a longer write up on what this is and isn’t on each of the signup pages — see the Vancouver one for an example.

Rick, we can give you space at Bootup Labs if you need it in Vancouver. If you’re a startup in one of those areas, or one of the many other locations across the country that Rick is visiting, I encourage you to sign up and sit down with Rick.