Where’s Waldo?

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I’ve written about CIX Top 20 Follow @CIXCommunity in 2008200920102011 and 2012. To follow my pattern here is my post for 2013. Full disclosure: I sit on the Advisory Board for CIX. 

There are 3 core events in the Canadian startup calendar:

There are other happenings and gatherings ranging from NxNE to HPX Digital to Mesh to the C100 events. If you need a reminder about the state of the Toronto startup ecosystem, make sure you check out my now 14 month old but still relevant post, Don’t Panic.

Each of the above events is optimized for different audience needs. CIX brings the  viewpoint of Canadian investors (if you care). The advisory board is primarily venture capitalists (a few lawyers, a couple of CEOs and  one evangelist):

  • Roger Chabra, Rho Ventures
  • Boris Wertz, Version One Ventures
  • Mark MacLeod, Freshbooks (recovering VC)
  • Barry Gekiere, IAF
  • Joe Catalfamo, Summerhill VP
  • Justin LaFayette, Georgian Partners

The advisory board is 44 people big. And approximately 30 are doing some form of investment. It’s almost 70% are actively making investments in technology companies. There is very strong Canadian VC and investor representation in the group that advise and plan the conference content.

And it shows in the content, of the 67 scheduled speakers (as of Nov 14), 19 of the speakers are from the advisory board – that’s 28% of the content. (It’s even higher if you include partners and others from firms of advisory board members). If you want to know what Canadian VCs and investors are thinking, this is the best way to see what is important. They define this conference. They provide the content and the voices at the conference.

So why go?

CIX gives you insight in to the types of companies, IP and traction that Canadian investors are currently looking for. It is the barometer of the “high potential growth technology companies” in Canada. It will be interesting to see what everyone thinks are the hot companies and trends. The panels and policy discussions are the things that Canadian investors are grasping and struggling with. It will be interesting to hear the conversations.

You might argue that as an entrepreneur you don’t care about these conversations. They don’t help you grow your business, build your product, or acquire customers. But they do provide you insight into the mind set of the people you are trying to raise money from. That might be the thing that gives you an unfair advantage in understanding their decision making process this year.

I love that 2 of my personal investments Upverter and OpenCare made the Top 20. Full disclosure: My employer, OMERS Ventures, is an investor in 360 incentives. I’m also excited to check in on Breather, Bionym, AxonifyHubba and others. The CIX Top 20 has turned out some of the best companies in the past 5 years.

It is possible to make your luck at CIX (just remember the preferred method of connecting).

Photo Credits

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Make your own luck at CIX

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Next week is the Canadian Innovation Exchange. I sit on the Advisory Board and StartupNorth is an Association Partner. We are big fans of the event  and have watched over the past few years as CIX has gone through changes and growth. It continues to evolve both the CIX Top 20 as well as the event. The focus in 2012 is about providing meaningful content and experiences for entrepreneurs. This is a change from the past  where you might argue that the focus was on the investors attending. There is a strong focus on building an amazing event will attract amazing entrepreneurs, which in turn will attract amazing investors. And it the 2012 event looks to be very entrepreneur focused.

Entrepreneur Pricing

One of the bitches about this event used to be the pricing. There is a $199 entrepreneur ticket. Seriously, if you can’t justify the cost versus the opportunity to either see an amazing program or for the chance for random collisions with some of the best investors in the game actively deploying capital in the Canadian ecosystem.

This is your chance to hustle (see my comments about hustling at CVCA). Make your own luck. There will be people that buy products and the people that invest in companies at this event. Make something happen.

I love seeing Switch Video, an audience of VCs and companies that need video to grow their business. Bingo. Good hustle.

Buy a $199 ticket and figure out how to make serendity happen!

Entrepreneur Content

Where to start? Entrepreneur One-on-One with Jevon MacDonald . Sure he sold his company to Salesforce, but you know he started a blog, this blog. Jevon is a great guy. He has helped me with my thinking about startups in Canada, the role of venture capital, and with corporate development. GoInstant was around for a little less than 24 months, but I know that Jevon will be talking about the >5 years of hustle at Firestoker and Dachis Group before GoInstant. It should be a great conversation for founders looking for an understanding of how an amazing overnight deal.

The trade off is that if you go see Jevon, you’ll have to skip How Emerging Companies Can Think, Appear and Act Like they are Bigger then They Are which features Daniel Debow , Michael Hyatt , Yona Shtern and Razor Suleman . This is about how to strategically build a reality distortion field. Should be fun to learn the secrets of these 4 crazy entrepreneurs.

We spend a lot of time focusing on Lean and pre-product/market fit companies. But there are equally difficult questions about culture and growth at scale. There is a panel hosted by Howard Gwin and Derek Smyth with Dan Shimmerman of Varicent and Michael Harris of BlueCat Networks. This should be a good mix for companies that are in the scaling cycle. Given that apparently everything that Howard and Derek touch turns to gold: Varicent, Dayforce, Rypple and they have their hands in others Desire2Learn, Hootsuite, Vision Critical and others.

And there are US VCs. There is Mike Katz from Battery Ventures and Devdutt Yellurkar of Charles River Ventures (who invested in Influitive and Wave Accounting locally) and Alexander Kolicich of Mithril Capital Managment (and I don’t know the intricacies but Mithril is associated with Peter Thiel is associated with  Valar Ventures who invested in ShopLocket).

If you can’t find content that can help you, you’re doing it wrong.

It’s not about the content

Seriously, it’s not about about content. It’s about the hallway conversations. The random collisions. But you need to be there and you need to participate to have the chance for those things to happen. There will be a lot fo interesting folks in Toronto early next week, you should figure out how to have a collision. And make your own luck!

Register to attend CIX 2012

 

The Royal Agricultural Winter Fair

How many innovative Canadian startups are there?

Earlier tonight the good folks at CIX announced a group of 20 who will be presenting at the eponymous conference on November 27. Congratulations: Frank and Oak, Scribble Live, Shopcaster, SiteScout, UrtheCast, Yactraq, Celtx, PenyoPal, Wajam, Sweet IQ, Livelenz, Payfirma, VidYard, Influitive, PrintChomp, 360pi, Viafoura, Nulogy, EmployTouch, and Jibestream.

This list is a nice start, no doubt, but what the announcement immediately got me thinking is the following… there are easily another 200 startups (probably many more than that) worth recognizing, joining, financing, and cheering on.

So this post goes out to all the hustlers and hackers across Canada who are burning the midnight oil. The founders who take it upon themselves to get out of the basement and face the hecklers at DemoCamp and other events. The funders who take their nth coffee meeting of the day with a bright eyed but green CEO to iterate on the deck together. And the early employees that take a chance on someone’s dream over the cushy corporate gig.

We’ve lined up a discount to the conference just for you: CIXSTARTUP