Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

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.

Dropped in yesterday for show and tell day at the Beal Centre. Having long been a fan of Alex and having had a number of friends participate at the centre, I was glad to finally be able to pay them a visit.

Interestingly, Tuesday’s traditional show and tell became something else. A propective client was in the room and amazingly no one minded at all that I sat in a while they pitched the client. After all, it was show and tell day. While nothing especially proprietary was being discussed, I had the pleasure to hear Alex give his pitch on what the Beal Centre is all about, the meaning of life (something they discovered just incidentally a few months ago) and several other of their recent insights. Some gem’s I thought I would pass on to you. These are as I remember them and therfore somewhat paraphrased and with my further comments in [ ]

• Now is not THE information age, we’ve always lived in the information age. DNA is information. [DNA is the ultimate meme]
• The meaning of life is the propagation of organization, whether it be organisms or organizations [and at the most fundamental, this is your primary purpose and the primary purpose of your company].
• One of the first questions people ask of a new technology is, how can I have sex with it? [think of one of the first applications of the electric motor and, er, the internet]
• A ball at rest is just a ball but it has the latent potential to bounce and roll. [objects/products/things/theworld have a static nature (what most focus groups would reveal for you), but what’s more interesting is the latent potential]
• Technology does not change behavior, it reveals behavior [for me this idea resonates significantly with web2.0 and social media, it’s not important that your site has tags, has social networking has feeds and blog integration etc. what’s important is the latent social behavior these tools enable. Understanding this is why flickr or upcoming.org works so well, not understanding is why so many other web2.0 bandwagon apps with their me-too tag clouds and such just look silly.]
• When forecasting the future, you can’t just imagine what would the world be like in 5 years with this new product with all else held constant. You have to have a model of the future where every thing else evolves synchronously as well.
• The world is not connected by the Internet, the world is connected by the ideas that we share on the Internet

There’s more, if you have an interest either professional or academic in this kind of thinking, I encourage you to get in touch with the folks at the Beal Centre yourself. Smart, creative people and so welcoming it’s spooky. Thanks for an enlightening and thought-provoking morning everyone. I’ll be back.