Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

You know what to do… [link]

Tuesday, July 4th

see you there.

The Toronto Venture Group (TVG) held a breakfast session on thursaday to shocase two of the prize winners of the TVG venture forum a few weeks back. Specifically Rob Imrie, CEO of Demand Cast (a data provider of local event info) and Kevin Leflar, CEO of Official Community Corporation (turning top-tier musician/band websites from cost centres to significant cashcows) were on hand to talk about their companies and answer questions about their experiences getting started and their efforts to seek capital.

The good news: It was refreshing to see some segment of the Toronto finance community actually there to hear about two startup firms in the sofware/internet space. And both Rob and Kevin didn’t dissapoint, they came across with convincing and impressive presentations. (you should check these companies out).

For a sobering perspective on the Canadian VC industry though read Robert Oullette’s take (and more thourough coverage) on the breakfast over on gagglescape ( here). Snip:

“These two companies passed the selection committee at the Canadian Venture Forum. They then jumped through the presentation hoops there and were selected as the most worthy companies for venture investment by a community of financial specialists. They have been vetted, turned inside out, inspected, and almost due-dilligenced to death. For what? They are looking for about a million dollars each. Neither has a term sheet yet.”

Catching up on other events of this week, the first edition of CaseCamp was a success with a packed crowd in attendence in Toronto on wednesday. It was great to see the openness of the Barcamp ethos making a successful transition to the world of business and marketing. The format will likely be tweaked a little for the next event but by and large it seemed to work well. Requiring participants to demo real cases rather than theory or products was a good decision. Case in point, most interesting were those presenters who provided examples of what they learned by screwing up in the course of a campaign as well as what worked most successfully (or unexpectedly) as well as those able to share the actual results of the campaign.

Thanks Eli Singer for organizing casecamp, and see you there next month.