Montreal Start Up

It has been a busy few months behind the scenes at MSU and we’re really pleased that we are able to make the following announcement:

Montreal Start Up, a venture investor dedicated to supporting Montreal based entrepreneurs in their quest to create and build successful companies, today announced the closing of a $2 million investment in its venture capital fund by the Solidarity Fund QFL, bringing to $5M the amount of assets under management.

This extra $2,000,000 GUARANTEES that more Montreal entrepreneurs are going to get funded ! We would really like to thank Janie Béïque, Luc Couture at the Solidarity Fund QFL, as well as Jacques Bernier, for their support in making this happen.

Nous avons été très occupés ces derniers mois et en voici une des raisons:

Démarrage Montréal, un spécialiste du capital d’amorçage, dont la mission est d’appuyer les entrepreneurs montréalais qui bâtissent les succès de demain, a aujourd’hui annoncé avoir reçu du Fonds de solidarité FTQ un investissement de 2 millions $ dans son fonds de capital de risque, ce qui porte à 5 millions $ les actifs gérés par l’entreprise.

Ces 2,000,000$ de plus, garantissent que plus d’entrepreneurs montréalais vont recevoir des fonds! Nous aimerions remercier Janie Béïque et Luc Couture du Fonds de solidarité FTQ, ainsi que Jacques Bernier, pour leur aide à réaliser cet investissement.

Last week at Startup Empire in Toronto a couple of people told me they felt that the Montreal startup community was much more collaborative than the Torontonian one. While I can’t comment on things in la ville reine, I definitely agree that people here go out of their way to help one another. Last week for instance, I asked Sylvain Carle if he’d be willing to answer a few questions from the CTOs of two of our portfolio companies. They were preparing to deploy their services on Amazon’s cloud but, as newcomers to AWS, they had some concerns. Sylvain went one better and organized a round table discussion for CTOs, developers and sysadmins. In two hours, the newcomers to the cloud were up to speed and even those who had been using EC2 since its inception learned a thing or three. Shout-out to the Praized and Karabunga crews for generously sharing their time and knowledge. 

Last night, Akoha gave a sneak preview of their product offering to a number of their friends, family and investors in Montreal (disclosure -  MSU is an investor).

The founders, Austin Hill & Alex Eberts (along with PR guru Dov) are no strangers to creating buzz and excitement about their projects and once again they made a splash - albeit the type of precision splash that you would see from a Chinese Olympic diver and not that of Shamu the whale !

A reasonable amount of money would have been spent on the event and as an investor in the company I can’t but help consider wether this was actually a good use of money. My conclusion is that it was; and that it achieved a few  things that any start-up entrepreneurs could consider as they launch their businesses.

1) When you’re sprinting the marathon - don’t forget the feeding stations.

When your legs, lungs and brain are fatigued but you realise you’ve only just started the marathon it’s great to see the 10km feeding station. A feeding station is designed to give you renewed energy, but it also marks another milestone on the race. The lungs, legs and brains of any start-up are of course its founders and employees and its essential to provide feeding stations along the way to motivate and re-invigorate the team.

The sneak peak event created an opportunity for the founders to put the whole team in the spotlight. Akoha hasn’t even launched yet but their sneak peak event felt like a celebration of success; as an investor I don’t see Akoha as a success (yet), but I can fully appreciate that as a team, coming together to deliver a product, they have successfully reached a major milestone.

I don’t think that Akoha is actually creating any real marathon runners, but last night a few probably felt like junior (tech) rock-stars.

2) Practice your pitch

I assume (obviously) Akoha intends on taking its pitch to the "world" at some point. That would probably involve presenting the company at a much larger event than the one last night. So their sneak peak event gave them a chance to practice their pitch in a realistic environment -  in-front of an audience with all the adrenaline flowing and nerves jangling (or in Alex’s case "Jango"ing).

Anyone at the event (including myself) would say that the presentation went really well, but the guys at Akoha know that to be the best you can’t be satisfied with "really well". You need to be outstanding - and as practice makes perfect, I think that a real-life test run is a valid investment of time and money. Its all about raising the bar.

3) You get out what you put in

By inviting the community to become "insiders" the sneak peak event has placed Akoha as one of the companies that everyone in Montreal will want to help. This help is invaluable to any start-up and I would encourage ALL start-up’s, early stage and venture backed companies to open up more to the Montreal community. It’s through the community that you will probably find your next employees, your next investors and perhaps even some of your most innovative ideas.

So to the Akoha team - thanks for a great night and good luck with the next 10km !

Here are some more of Y-Combinator’s Summer 2008 intake and where appropriate a mention of Montreal companies I am aware of that are competitive or complimentary.

Youlicit

Youlicit automatically generate simple, link only web sites that are supposed to be at least as relevant as those generated by human editors - time will tell if the automation as good as a real person produces but it should generate them plenty of free organic traffic that is very monetizable. Do people want this ? I’m not sure but it may well be one of the more commercially viable companies presenting.

Job Alchemist

As the name would suggest, these guys are in the online recruitment space. They have two offerings that are somewhat related . The first is a series of niche job boards and some white label software to roll out more job boards. The second is a syndicated distribution network for jobs that will try and place job adverts on blogs, forums, networks etc. They say they "want to fix on-line recruitment " - but, whilst I admit they have have done some great work in a short time, I don’t think they are going to fix anything - they are just adding to the current melting pot of offerings. (We are investors in Standout Jobs .)

Slinkset

Slinkset is another company that is providing software to enable not programmers to launch a white label version of a well know offering - in this case you can create your own version of  Reddit /Digg (social news site) and brand it as you like - with no coding necessary. I guess that they must have been caught out by Reddit going open-source.

Frogmetrics

Frogmetrics have developed software solution for doing mobile survey response that tracks responses in real time. I don’t see anything new in this business but they have taken the Apple approach of delivering a smooth, polished, end to end solution that includes both hardware and software - in this case they were demo’ing on Nokia hardware. I really see this as a systems integration play.

Anyvite

Competition for E-vite. Nothing new per se, but well done and less of a hassle to use than E-vite. Not sure how they plan to gain main stream awareness - always the problem with a ME2 product, but if it is that much better .. who knows.

Ididwork

Ididwork enbales you to share your work log with co-workers and managers. Nice implementation but I think they could look to incorporate some of the thinking from the team at Timmy on time - developed by a couple of young guys from Trois Rivieres (almost Montreal!).

Popcuts

Think pyramid marketing scheme meets indie music. The earlier you buy a song the more "revenue share" you will get when (if) the song takes off. I don’t think this is going to fly using financial incentives but it could evolve into something interesting. 

BackType

BackType was the only Canadian team presenting ( a second team are still in "stealth mode") and one of the reasons we wanted to go to Demo Day. They refer to themselves as the Google of comments. Simple idea; they provide a search service that allows you to search the Web for comments by a particular author or on a given topic. Let’s see if they end up in Montreal or the Valley ;-).

That’s it for the reviews - the next post will draw some conclusions about my trip to Demo Day.