Montreal Start Up

I was fortunate enough to be invited down to Cambridge, MA to attend yesterday’s demo day for Y-Combinator’s latest batch of companies.

Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston acted as both the gracious hosts for the event and the concerned parents for the Founders as they exposed their ideas to an external audience for the first time (for the most part).

(Sorry about the photo quality - but I had just shaken Paul’s hand ;-))

We decided to send someone down there for a few reasons;

Firstly, there were a couple of companies founded by Canadians that we had been talking to and wanted to catch up with and let them know that their was an alternative to heading to the Valley - Montreal ! Speaking to the guys from BackType,(one of the better company’s there ;-)) it seems that long term Visa issues are always going to be a problem for Canadian founders of start-up founders in US.

Secondly, we wanted to get a sense for the overall quality of the ideas and entrepreneurs. We have met with many Montreal based start-up’s over the past few months and have a good sense of the calibre of ideas and entrepreneurs on offer. We wanted to be able to compare what we see with what was on show at (if you believe the hype) the Mecca of web-startup’s.

Thirdly, we wanted to understand the size and quality of the VC eco-system that exists for follow-on (Seed or A-Round) investment in companies as they move from Beta 2 Business.

And finally, as we push ahead with developing our own FounderFuel investment program, we wanted to get a better insight into some of the practicalities of running the Y-Combinator program.

So they were the goals - I’ll let you know how I got on in the next post …………