Startup Fuel

Posted on March 13, 2008 by Thomas Purves

Rick Segal is doing a good thing. He’s organizing VC round tables around the country for start-ups offering conversation and “Sample Term sheets, documents, business plans, PowerPoints”. I caught an earlier iteration of a similar event by Rick and some others a year ago. Let me tell you this stuff is gold. If you’re a technologist, even if you are a commerce grad, they don’t teach you this stuff in school. And the opaque world of term sheets and finance structures its damn hard to learn this stuff any other way. The event is also free, I’m sure it will be poplular, it’s worth your time.

StartupCamp Toronto is also back. This isn’t just financing pitches, it’s a full-on public debugging session on your business model. Fun stuff. StartupCampToronto2 is happening at CIX on April 29, here’s how to apply to present.

UPDATEWow Rick wasn’t kidding, the VC roundtable is a serious cross Canada event. Here’s the full list of dates:
Halifax Monday, April 14, 2008 8:00 am – 10:30 am
Moncton Monday, April 14, 2008 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
St. John’s Tuesday, April 15, 2008 5:00 pm – 7:00 am
Ottawa Wednesday, April 16, 2008 10:30 am ET – 12:30 pm ET
Montreal Wednesday, April 16, 2008 4:30 pm ET – 6:30 pm ET
Toronto Thursday, April 17, 2008 at 8:30 am ET
Victoria Monday, April 21, 2008 8:00 am PT – 10:00 am PT
Vancouver Monday, April 21, 2008 4:00 pm PT – 6:00 pm PT
Edmonton Tuesday, April 22, 2008 8:00 am MT – 10:00 am MT
Calgary Tuesday, April 22, 2008 3:30 pm MT – 5:30 pm MT
Regina Wednesday, April 23, 2008 8:00 am CT – 10:00 am CT
Winnipeg Friday, April 25, 2008 12:00 pm CT – 2:00 pm CT
Guelph Monday, April 28, 2008 4:00 pm ET – 6:00 pm ET

Sign up here

Posted in Archive, events, startups | 2 Comments

Joshua & Gwendolyn at eTech this year

Posted on March 13, 2008 by Thomas Purves

I’m super excited that my friends Joshua Kauffman and Gwendolyn Floyd will be presenting presenting at ETech this year. And presenting something really cool too.

All the while, barely 1 in 1000 people have access to the Internet in a form recognizable to the average connected person. Mobile phones are nearly as absent from the technological mix. In Trinidad de Cuba, one hustler proudly showed off his mobile phone to us, though it didn’t even have a service provider…

… What will happen when a cultured, literate, hyper-social people get access to the Internet for the first time? How will their virgin experiences and experimentations impact the rest of the world? Cubans teach us to strip away layers of plastic, metal, and code to the root of what technology is, and what it has always been. From a people that have been greatly anticipating the future—any future—we’ll be left with clues for the promising technologies of our own near future by looking at recent progress and universal lessons in the Cuba of today. “

More on the official Etech pageOf Necessity and Humanity: What Cuba Can Teach Us About Ourselves and Our Own Technology.

Gwen and Joshua will also using the exposure from ETech to help

File under wonderfuly bright minds of our generation.

Posted in Archive, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

LearnHub Launches, looks great

Posted on March 5, 2008 by Thomas Purves

LearnHub shot

Congrats to John, Malgosia and their highly tallented team at Savvica on the launch of their newest product LearnHub. This is the project that brought them back from the valley to build their startup in Toronto. What they’ve just launched is version 1.0. It already looks great. But know to expect even more polish and general awesomeness in iterations to come.

LearnHub is a social learning platform, where members can create lessons, guides and all sorts of learning tools around user-generated communities like photography, cooking, software development (some serious Ruby experts resident at Savvica) and other subjects. Check it out!

Posted in Archive, awesomeness, learnhub, plugs, startups, torcamp, toronto | 3 Comments