Archive for category Tech Stars

Seedcamp Mentoring

Posted by john in Seedcamp, Tech Stars, Y Combinator, startup on April 28th, 2009

I spent some time last week in London (UK) where I had the opportunity to spend a day at Seedcamp and get involved in mentoring some of Europe’s up and coming web and wireless businesses.

There were 20 companies and about 80 mentors !

Mentors were split into groups of eight and each group spent about 30 mins each with 8 of the 20 companies. The feedback on the event from the mentors and the entrepreneurs was really positive and I personally can’t wait to do it again.

Seedcamp runs a number of mini-Seedcamps in 6 European cities and then hosts "the full monty" once a year (to date this has been held in London).This is structually different to the other "feed capital" programs and may work well in Canada.

Interestingly the type of mentors invited were very broad. Of course there were investors and experienced entrepreneurs, but there were also a number of people from industry and some recent grads from the Seedcamp program. I think that this only adds support to the feedback that comes from all the feed capital programs, showing that knowledge transfer between smart founders plays as much a role as knowledge gained from mentors / advisors.

I’ve now been to a Seedcamp event, a Y-Combinator event and Alan MacIntosh (one of MSU’s other Partners) has also been involved in Launch Box Digital. I can honestly say that the raw quality of entrepreneurs and ideas that we see in Montreal (and this also applies to the limited number of entrepreneurs I’ve met in other parts of Canada) are as good as anywhere else; but our entrepreneurs must continually compete and co-operate in order to push themselves harder (ie smarter).

Whenever possible MSU tries to get the Founders of its portfolio companies to get together and engage in some co-opetition. We will continue to do more of this and we are now also looking to find ways in which we can get other funded and "to-be-funded" entrepreneurs in Canada involved in these sessions.

Look out for some upcoming MSU out-reach events!

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Start-Up Hubs

Posted by john in Finance Dept, Founder Fuel, Seedcamp, Tech Stars, Y Combinator, startup on October 19th, 2007

Y-Combinator’s Paul Graham has raised the hackles of a Brit or two recently by suggesting that startups would do better if they moved to Silicon Valley!

In as much as Silicon Valley has a greater density of all the aspects of a start-up hub – great human networks, a willingness to support innovation, a community appreciation of the lessons gained from failure, an acceptance of startups inherent risk/reward ratios and large amounts of seed capital – he is of course right….

…. but Mr.Graham is really talking philosophically, as the biggest problem in moving to Silicon Valley is US immigration !

The point he really means to drive home is that “the more of a startup hub a place is, the better startups will do there” and that the biggest startup hub in the world is Silicon Valley – thus – “go west young (wo)man”.

Whilst he makes a valid point conceptually, I believe that his extrapolation of this point to the nth degree fails to consider one major issue – access. Whilst a willingness to support innovation, a community appreciation of the lessons gained from failure, an acceptance of startups inherent risk/reward ratios and large amounts of seed capital are essential to a start-up hub, they are only of benefit to an entrepreneur after he/she has access to human networks.

What “founder fuel” programs like Y-Combinator, Tech Stars and Seedcamp offer are a bit of “feed capital”, but more importantly they provide a clear and simple path for entrepreneurs to access a great human network. Provided that a city genuinely has all the aspects of a good startup hub mentioned before then the benefit gained from going to a bigger startup hub will almost definitely be outweighed by the difficulties of (and importantly the time spent) trying to gain access to the network.

Given the immigration difficulties of moving to Canada as a young entrepreneur, I would like to tailor the following recommendations to Canadians.

If you are in a Canadian city that has, in volume, all the aspects of a start-up hub, and you have good access to a strong human network – then you don’t need to move to Silicon Valley to startup – go there (with the help of your network) to expand or when you want to sell !

(For a self-professed geek, Mr. Graham does a great job at creating PR – but more on that in another post.)

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