Posts Tagged ‘Ottawa’

Amidst the plethora of news that we’ve been hearing from all industries about the economy heading towards worse times and as we hear stories of worsening conditions close to home (i.e. Nortel), I can’t help but say, let the startups begin.

There is a lot of talent in Ottawa and other cities around the world that currently work at larger corporations with comfortable, and in some cases, inflated salaries. It is exactly these conditions that make it almost impossible for them to attempt to either join a startup or begin one themselves. Times are changing and we may see more and more of this pool of talented and intelligent people move on to other things and potentially the startup scene.

We’ve seen this in the past and we have a number of local success stories coming from guys who voluntarily/involuntarily left their jobs at these large corporations and attained a level of success that they wouldn’t have achieved by staying at their previous positions. Companies like Nakina Systems, Nimcat, Fitel-Photomatrix, ObjecTime, and many many more fall under this category. Needless to say, the Economic Downturn can be looked at as an opportunity or a menace depending on how you look at it

These days web startups don’t need too many resources to get started. An internet connection, a place to work, some basic capital, and a motivated team may be the beginning. I am writing this post from the University of Ottawa where I’m sitting amongst 2 other groups who are working on their own startups.

The University of Ottawa happens to keep alumni credentials (i.e. usernames/passwords) active and this is why a lot of already-graduated students come back to where they spent 4(+) years of their lives studying. I’m sitting amongst 2 groups right now but happen to know of another 3 that work out of this University. I’m sure that the situation is similar in Carleton, Algonquin, and other colleges and Universities.

These are groups that you won’t typically meet at a BarCamp/DemoCamp. These are the groups that prefer to stay stealth for a long time. I typically argue with them that there is a lot of benefit that they can seek from the community, yet, it’s difficult to get the message to sink in.

As far as I’m concerned, Ottawa is a startup town. We have a huge student population (probably close to 70,000) and a lot of very experienced senior executives. If we could connect these disparate groups, I think we’d have amazing results.

Aydin.

This Thursday night should be lots of fun. I’ve been invited to present as part of a round-table of local CEOs, VCs, and Angel investors  about what it takes to start a company without significant outside investment. It should be quite entertaining so if you’re free this Thursday night make sure to drop by.

This is one of the better attended events in town that happens once a year and usually has ~200 professionals in the local tech scene attending… here are the details of the event:

Ottawa’s technology clusters, OCRI Global Marketing and The Ottawa Network present the 3rd annual “Buddy Keep your Million” funding focused event.  In light of the almost non-existent VC money filtering into the city, the theme of this year’s event is based around how innovative people get their companies off the ground without the traditional financing options. The panel will be made up of experienced veterans and energetic start-up entrepreneurs.

Panel Participants:

• Moderator, Bruce Lazenby, Chair Ottawa Software Cluster
• Wael Aggan, TradeMerit Corp.
• Richard Charlebois, GrowthWorks Capital
• Rob Lane, Overlay.TV
• Scott Lake, Jaded Pixel
• Aydin Mirzaee, bOK Systems Corp. and Chide.it
• Karen Letain, CMI International
• Paul Slaby, Kaben Wireless Silicon Inc
• Kareem Sultan, RaceDV

Its that time again. Ottawa DemoCamp9 is on Monday at a new location. The big news is that Ottawa’s top blogger, Alec Saunders, will be our MC. Should be lots of fun.

For those of you that don’t know, DemoCamp is an amazing event where some of Ottawa’s Up and Coming Tech Stars present the latest products that they’ve been working on. Its alway impressive to see how much goes on in Ottawa. If you’ve never been to one of these events, this is the time to start! If you’re gonna be there, message me on Twitter (@aydin) or on Facebook…

Here are the details for the event:

The following is a guest post by good friend Harley Finkelstein in response to an article from reportonbusiness.com entitled: A tech saviour’s manifesto:

Mr. Macdonald,

I recently read your manifesto article in the globe and mail.

To be honest, and as a 24 year old Law/MBA grad student and concurrently the founder of a tech venture firm, I think you may be out of touch with what’s really going on in the Canadian tech scene.

Silicon Valley wasn’t built because of companies like Cognos, it achieved its real success because of garage startups like Google and Paypal (which you mentioned in the article).

Cognos and ATI are NOT the current Canadian tech scene, the real tech scene are these amazing young startups that will eventually become the next RIMs and Skypes, and many of these guys have yet to even bring their ideas to market (which is when I prefer to invest in them).

The main reason I moved to Ottawa at 21 years old was to take advantage of the amazing grass roots entrepreneurial climate in Ottawa’s tech community.

And thus far it seems the Canadian startup tech scene is alive and well, albeit most VCs wouldn’t know it.

With a fund that is probably smaller than your daily payroll, my shop, Innoventure Capital, invests in local talent and their startups and in the last 3 years we have been inundated with amazing opportunities. Young tech wizards cringe at the idea of pitching an idea to a grey haired VC committee, and when we meet with them they seem relieved to see we are young, ambitious, and just like them. There is a real dichotomy and gap between the next great tech startup and the Canadian VC community, yet WE are getting more pitches and great ideas than we can even read.

I recently had the opportunity to meet some of the gents from Sequoia in California, and what immediately struck me was that they were the antithesis of the VCs we work with in Canada (Bay street and in Kanata).

The real problem in Canada is that conventional VC is a dinosaur, yet the Canadian shops are still cherry picking for homeruns and mandating overly restrictive covenants (which in itself is a dinosaur of a contractual concept).

Innoventure’s key to success has been investing small (5-10k) amounts of funding into strong people, and NOT strong businesses. We let the entrepreneurs focus on what they know best, and often we even pay their living expenses while they are doing so, while my partner and I focus on finding ways to make their ideas profitable. Most of the guys we invest in would never consider putting on a suit and heading into First Canadian Place (and neither did Jobs, Gates or Dell in the 80s), but once we show them that together we can make money most of these entrepreneurs always come back for their 2.0 idea.

The solution in Canada may be that the VCs need to recalibrate, and if we are so concerned with achieving success like in S.Valley than why aren’t we acting more like them.

I can show you 3 to 5 online businesses based in ottawa alone who are right now in need of financing, and whose companies have the potential to be market leaders. Innoventure prides itself not on our ability to fund even the smallest businesses, but rather on the mentorship and guidance that comes along with being our partners, and we look for these types of people.

I would love to continue this conversation if you’d like.

I mean no disrespect from my email, and in fact am somewhat in awe of you and your company’s success…I hope to one day enjoy even half of your good fortune.

Thank you in advance, and I hope you will respond.

Best regards,

Harley

I met Simon Chen at the last DemoCamp in Ottawa and he mentioned his new project called Sixent.com. I just tried out the service and created my own personal profile here: http://sixent.com/aydin/Public

Here is a screenshot:

I like Sixent since it gives me LOTS of privacy options… I get to determine who sees what and what is publicly displayed… I’d love for this profile to appear when people are searching for me… I definitely recommend everyone create one of these profiles for themselves!

Aydin.

What is DemoCamp?

Six demos by members of the Ottawa high tech community. Read more about it at AboutDemoCampOttawa. wino kredyt mieszkaniowy sprzedam mieszkanie sprzedam bilet

MC – Alec Saunders, one of Canada’s top 10 bloggers

Demos – Sign-up to demo here

• dD dot tv – beta preview
• Stockify – Investing Software
• SIMtone – Virtual PC, http://www.simtonecdu.com
• picsphere – complete workflow solution for event and studio photographers
• Ramius Corporation – Sixent.com

Scott Simpson from BitHeads really stood out as the person everyone remembered at the OCRI Awards. He gave the most entertaining and funny acceptance speech that I have ever seen when his company, BitHeads, won the award. He had the whole audience captivated and as a result, I think everyone knows about him and knows about BitHeads… Congratulations to Scott!

On another note, I happened to bump into John Roese who is CTO at Nortel (I used to work @ Nortel). He also won an award tonight (Next Generation Executive of the Year). Nortel is the 4th major company for which John has served as CTO (and he’s still under 40 – pretty impressive). You can check out his biography here. Amongst other things he has written two books and he’s also named on 16 different patents… and of course he’s an amazing public speaker… good to see him win.

Other than that, BridgeWater Systems won the Technology Company of the year award [I think that's what it was called] (Doug Somers was sitting at my table).

Well, I had a great time at the awards and can’t wait until next year

Aydin.

I’m a big Facebook fan but in the last little while I have been wondering about what Facebook will look like in the future… Just thinking about the advantages of having Facebook (especially with all the new privacy features) for government agencies seems like a godsend. I mean, if you think about it, people “without any coercion” are documenting their every move online… If anyone wanted to track you, wouldn’t the best place be Facebook /Twitter ?

Ok, so, how unreasonable is it to assume that some of the following are possible in the future?

-no passport: why would you use a passport when you can add a “Passport Facebook Application” that will do the same thing? All you’d have to do when you get to the airport is show them your “virtual passport” on your Phone/PDA or perhaps give a secret access code to anyone who wants to check it out (possibly via bluetooth)?

-Facebook pages mandatory: Already, if you don’t want to fall behind in life, you need a facebook profile…. is it unreasonable to assume that one day everyone will be required to have a facebook page? Remember, as we go forward, privacy features will only get better (or so we hope)… so, its not all that unreasonable…

-verify with birth certificate: what if you had to verify your facebook page with your original birth certificate in order to prove your identity? Could your facebook page also act as your birth certificate? what if you were given login access credentials in the hospital when you were born?

-driver’s license: why show your driver’s license when you are standing in line for a 19+ bar/club when you can show your facebook page? yeah, yeah, you can show it when you get pulled over by a cop too…

big brother: Is it also unreasonable to assume that government agencies will be freely able to browse through all of this material online? I for one think that one is not so unreasonable at all…

Anywho… a lot of this stuff sounds ridiculous, I know. But, the world changes fast… I remember when I was first telling people about Facebook in Ottawa, Canada they would say: “why would I join? so people could stalk me?” and now look at where we are… people’s ideas and beliefs are changing.

Aydin.

Posted By: Aydin Mirzaee

Just finished seeing the movie 10,000 BC @ the South Keys movie theater in Ottawa. It was absolutely amazing! Make sure to see it!

Here is the trailer:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=gBQAQ_t26lo]