Thanks to Stephen King, a TechVibes blogger, many of us have discovered the TechVibes Startup Index, an informal index to tech startups across Canada (and also Portland, WA for some reason). Using a mixture of Alexa and Compete rankings, along with criteria to make sure the company is a startup, this index lists a number of well known companies, along with some not so well known.
Taking a look at the Alberta Index, One thing they all have in common are uncommon names. Shoptoit, Loa PowerTools, Evoco, Tynt, SideFinder, Cambrian House are some startups I know, and as you can see have some interesting names. It’s definitely worth a look, so you can check out the tech startup action in Calgary and Edmonton. Click on the names to get to the various websites to see whats up.
Our company (listed in the top ten for Alberta!), ActiveConversion is proudly on this index now to wave the flag. If you have a startup, make sure you get yourself listed!
And now that TechVibes Calgary has a dedicated blogger in Stephen King, providing the local tech startup news almost every day to you. His blog today is outstanding, as he lets us in on the latest from the Alberta government as to their plans to help encourage technology investment in Alberta to help diversify the province’s economy. The premier, Ed Stelmach looks like he is going to act on task force recommendations led by David Martin of SMART Technologies. This looks like exciting news so click here to read more about it and other tech startup news on Stephen’s blog.
Well, the event came and went, and as usual it went off without a hitch with the Claudia Moore and her team from Material Insight making sure everything went off as planned by Ivan Sierralta and TechRev. It was a long night that went very fast from 5 to almost 9pm for me, because of the ongoing networking before and after the event. I had to decline hanging out with Jessica and the TechRev organizers after such a long day.
Jessica Livingston proved to be as charming and well-spoken as she is thoughtful in her book, Founders@Work. Far from just regurgitating the contents of her book, she added some startup examples not covered in her book. She also added some Calgary-centric points to her talk, by imploring Calgary investors to ‘make bets’ with smart, tech startups, even if they didn’t fully understand the technology. She brought up example startups like Calgary’s StumbleUpon that were under the radar for 3.5 years before being discovered by A-list angel investors in Silicon Valley and subsequently sold to eBay for $75 million. Imagine being a seed investor in that, and staying in until that acquisition!
Jessica then proceeded to do a Founders@Work interview with local serial entrepreneurs, Geoff Lyons from CoolIT and Michael Sikorsky of Cambrian House. Using the same questions she would pose in her interviews with the technology rockstars in her book, we were educated (and entertained) by their responses to what to do and maybe not do in a startup situation.
I think I’m able to summarize Jessica’s findings with two points. Be persistent and build something that customers really, really want. Nothing new but in a startup, where everyday is a challenge, those two points are much easier said than done.
Kudos to Claudia, Pat Lor, Ivan, Darren Massey, Derek Ball, and the other TechRev instigators for bringing this and the Guy Kawasaki event to town. With these events and DemoCamp/BarCamp, I’ve never seen Calgary’s Tech community in better shape and with this kind of promotion and exciting profile.