Billions With Zero Knowledge

Come out an celebrate 2008 at CelebrateCamp2008 with the Montreal Technology Community.

As a community we have many things to celebrate. A successful year of Barcamps, StartupCamps, Democamps, Podcamps and a host of other community events flourished in 2008. We’ve seen more startups launched, more investing activity and a number of our local community have had great personal & professional success created in 2008.

In Montreal we are use to surviving tough winters. With many fretting about a cold & long winter (metaphorically the word Nuclear Winter has been heard by some) we invite the grateful and thankful to join the community in celebrating a good year and to wish our community well for 2009.

Come to CelebrateCamp where we will drink, dance, play and be merry with those in our community who have something to be grateful & thankful about this year.

Location will be finalized depending on final ticket numbers. It will be on the Plateau (St. Laurent) area and be a cozy, casual bar with affordable drinks and invaluable company of friends.

On Thursday December 18th at 8:00pm everyone is welcome to join us at CelebrateCamp (was HolidayCamp). This shared holiday party will allow us all to come join in the holiday festivities, drink, be merry, dance and celebrate 2008 together.

Tickets will be $25 per person which includes 3 drink tickets, cost of the event with the all event profits to be donated to the Montreal Childrens Hospital.

You can purchase tickets for teams, friends & couples through Eventbrite.

Please purchase early so we can confirm final headcount and announce the location.

We also need help in spreading the word. Please link to CelebrateCamp and help us bring out the community.

On Thu 4 Dec 2008. 1 Comment

Thank you to everyone who submitted entries to the StartupEmpire giveaway. The quality of the writing and thinking was excellent and it was inspirational hearing so many people wanting to further their entrepreneurial careers. Our hats off to all of you.

While our selection criteria was by no means perfect, we did consider things like the quality of the writing, the uniqueness of the product, whether the person was applying based on need or because they forgot to buy tickets in advance and whether they met the submission deadline.

We only had 10 tickets to giveaway unfortunately so Raymond Luk and I had to make some tough choices. The good news for anyone who wasn’t selected is that there have never been more entrepreneurial events happening across Canada. We hope to meet all of the companies at one of these events at some point in the future.

So here is the list of winners (in alphabetical order):

• Chris Advansun (DramaVida)
• Bryan Bogensberger (Reasonably Smart)
• Leonardo Borda
• Felipe Coimbra (YOWTrip)
• Dan MacGrady (IntegrateSales)
• Paolo Mazza (Alexandria High)
• Chris Pyper (MyWebVine)
• Christine Renaud (E180)
• Raul Rupsingh (Softshell Computers)
• Reynold Xin

Congratulations everyone. We’ll see you all at the conference in a few days.

I would like to thank Raymond Luk & Flow Ventures for helping me organize and sponsor this contest.  Flow Ventures is active in the Canadian Startup scene and participating in the Canadian angel investing community.  Both my companies Akoha and Standout Jobs do work with Raymond and his firm.  They are great partners for startups.

We also want to thank Angelsoft for the contribution of a number of OpenDeal coupons to allow companies to submit their fundraising needs to their network of angel investors.   We will be announcing the winners of the AngelSoft packages at the conference.   I’m now using Angelsoft at three of the venture funds/angel networks I’m a member of.  They have over 400 angel & VC funds using the software with almost 14,000 investors.  This is a great resource for entrepreneurs looking to raise funding and we are thankfull for their support of this contest.

On Tue 11 Nov 2008. 1 Comment

Every year at Web 2.0 Summit, Mark Meeker presents the Morgan Stanley state of the Tech Industry research.   Given the incredible changes we are seeing the general economy with a recession having started, uncertain growth prospects and overall stock & economic fallout I think it is important for most companies to to understand how some of these global trends affect their industries.

Specifically if you look at what occurred in the last the technology recession to ad revenue on the Internet (Slide 16) you can get a good feel for both the opportunities and risks to some sectors of the technology industry.

The source presentation is at the Morgan Stanley website, but I’ve uploaded and embedded a copy on Slideshare.net.

On Wed 5 Nov 2008. No Comments

I’m really pleased to be speaking at Startup Empire on November 13th in Toronto.   I’m going to be running a hands on workshop for entrepreneurs entitled “Slow down &  Speed Up - Managing A Startup in Turbulent Times”.

In my workshop I’ll be sharing some strategies & tools for the following aspects of your business,

• Avoiding the wall - Raising Cash and Extending Runways in a Economic Downturn .
• Risk Reduction Roadmap Planning, linking financing, scenario planning & risk reduction. 
• Performing Honest Assessments of your Market, Team & Capabilities to Win.
• Who is investing now in Canada?

Jevon McDonald & David Crow have put together a great line up of speakers and sponsors.

The organizers have recently dropped the price to a very affordable price of $69 for the entire day conference.

At the same time I know many entrepreneurs who watching budgets & may not feel they can afford to attend (travel & conference fees) so we are announcing a quick contest for entrepreneurs interested in joining us at the conference.

FlowVentures, AngelSoft and Brudder Ventures StartupEmpire Contest

In the spirit of creating great opportunities for entrepreneurs I have partnered with my friend Raymond Luk from FlowVentures and the team from AngelSoft to sponsor 10 entrepreneurs to get the following packages.

• A free pass to StartupEmpire.
• A copy of Guy Kawasaki’s brand new book Reality Check which I recently read and is a great collection of essays & practical advice on many of the aspects of running a startup.
• A copy of Randy Komisar’s “The Monk and the Riddle” one of my favourite startup books which is a quick read about startups & finding meaning as an entrepreneur written during the last tech collapse.
• A $100 credit towards any travel costs you incur to attend (To help out of town attendees get to Toronto.  If you win & are in Toronto we’ll ask you to donate your travel subsidy to one of the other winners who are travelling farther)
• Angelsoft has donated a number of discounted and free applications to their OpenDeals program where you can submit your company to be viewed by over 10,000 angel groups.  These will be given to startups that apply and qualify as companies looking for funding ($100-$250 in value).

The contest is open to any entrepreneur, startup or aspiring entrepreneur who working building a technology startup.  

To enter the contest all you need to do is send an email to startupempire [@] brudderventures.com answering the following 3 questions.   Submissions must include your contact information, URL & Company contact details (if applicable) and should not exceed 1 page per answer.

1. If you are a startup tell us about your company, size, market, product and what stage you are at in your growth. (If you are not part of a formed startup but) If you are an entrepreneur, programmer or aspiring entrepreneur tell us about your background, your plans as an entrepreneur.  Tell us what you’ve done to advance your entrepreneurial aspirations.
2. Why do you want to attend Startup Empire - what do you want to accomplish there?
3. What are the 3 questions that you would want answered by any of the speakers @ StartupEmpire?

All entries should be received by this Saturday November 8th.

On Wed 5 Nov 2008. 1 Comment

Ottawa based entrepreneur, Allan Isfan who is founder of FaveQuest (who was also formerly EIR with Skypoint Capital) contacted David Crow and I a few months ago about wanting to bring Founders & Funders to the nation’s capital.  

Ottawa has been a long time hot bed of technology activity in Canada, but recently has undergone a lot of difficulties and changes.

He has done a great job of organizing the first Founders & Founders in Ottawa which is occurring next Wednesday, October 29.  The event is invite only (in the tradition of other Founder & Funder events).  There are few tickets left - you can email Allan at allan.isfan [@] favequest.com letting him know why you think you should get an invite if you would like to join the event.

Allan asked me to do a small speech to help kick off the inaugural event in Ottawa.   I’ll be speaking about why now is a great time to do a startup, and some of the opportunities I’m seeing in the angel, entrepreneur and Canadian startup scene.

On a personal note, I’m very excited at the success that Founders & Funders has achieved.  Since Patrick Lauzon and I started the concept, there have been Founders & Funders events in Calgary, Waterloo, Toronto, Montreal and now Ottawa.   I know that there is a pending event in Vancouver to be hosted & organized by Boris Mann at BootupLabs.

David Crow & Jevon MacDonald have been instrumental in helping spread these events.

With the changes in the global economy and dark clouds of startup funding forming over Silicon Valley and the tech world I think these events are going to be an important part of ensuring our early stage innovators continue to have opportunities for funding, learning and peer support.

On Thu 23 Oct 2008. No Comments

Roberto Rocha wrote a nice article about Akoha’s launch at TechCrunch50 last week for the newspaper which appeared on Wednesday.

He followed up the article with a great post about starting to play Akoha, the faith economy and our Montreal private launch on the Gazette technology blog.

He cites the rule of reciprocation as the key driver.  Reciprocal altruism is a central part of what we working on at Akoha.

Unfortunately someone at the Gazette decided to run a photo of me in the newspaper edition that I think makes me look fat.  What do you think?

You can see more recent pictures of what I look like here on Flickr.   I would have preferred that the Gazette use any of these.  Even this gem I found on Flickr while searching for the tag “Austin Hill” would have been fun

On Fri 26 Sep 2008. [4] Comments

and all I got was a funny video

Seriously I’m just winding down from all the excitement of Akoha’s launch at TechCrunch 50 this week. Spent the day with our team responding to our growing community of players and planning some next steps to respond to the opportunities that came from our launch. You can watch our presentation on the Akoha community blog. (Subscribe to the Akoha RSS feed if you are a reader here. I’ll be posting in both areas)

Before posting about the experience of TechCrunch 50, updating my readers here about the Akoha launch and responding to some questions I’ve been getting about the choice of Yammer as the winner (which I completely understand) I’ve decided to go out and relax for a night. Those posts will come.

But enjoy this in the meantime - it made me smile.

On Fri 12 Sep 2008. No Comments

This blog has been relatively dormant the last 6 months as we’ve been preparing Akoha to be unveiled publicly.

Yesterday Akoha was able to announce that Akoha has been selected as one of the 50 (actually 52) finalists at the TechCrunch50 conference.

I still can’t announce the details of what we have been working on, but you can watch our TechCrunch50 presentation live on Wednesday (tomorrow Sept. 10th) during the Games session at 10:30PST at the TechCrunch 50 website.

You can read periodic updates on the details of Akoha on the Akoha blog.

On a personal note I want to congratulate all the TechCrunch50 finalist companies. I know how much hard work by our team has gone into premiering Akoha at this conference (dubbed the Superbowl of Startups) and want to congratulate all the companies who were also selected. We are having tons of fun watching your own companies launch and can’t wait to step onto stage and join you as presenters.

We will have more to post soon. For now you can hold on - Akoha is coming.

On Tue 9 Sep 2008. [3] Comments

It’s been overdue, but since I’m going to be using this blog more frequently with Akoha’s impending launch I wanted to update a number of disclosures about my affiliations, relationships and investments.

I’ve posted a new About Me page that now lists some of the angel investments I’ve made, some of the other business relationships I have in the technology industry and some updated info on my personal & business life.

Some of these details were previously mentioned throughout some posts that I made in the last year, but I had never updated on my bio.

There is some new information about companies I’ve invested in (Standout Jobs, Bumptop, BrainparK) and partnerships I have with some VCs hat I will announce properly in the coming weeks, but I’ve updated the About Me pending proper posts that will be coming soon.

On Tue 9 Sep 2008. [2] Comments

My brother Hamnett and I were on the cover of Report on Business Small Business Magazine last week.  The article does interviews with a number of Canadian serial entrepreneurs.

It was fun to do the photo shoot, which involved my brother and I jumping on a trampoline on the roof of the Radialpoint building overlooking Montreal.   It was a first for me, posing for the photographer & trying not to fly off the trampoline or the building

I’ve embedded a scan of the article below.

On Sat 6 Sep 2008. [5] Comments