404 link on the ITA contacts this page. Also could you please send me the link to your most excellent presentation from the HTML 5 session last week.

Thanks Ken

http://previaroadtrip.blogspot.com/
http://wihifiradio.blogspot.com/
http://ckgi.ca/

I’ve seen many mentors, advisors and even investors (who are explicitly interested only in companies with Billion-Dollar potential) who are encouraging/forcing great entrepreneurs to go for modest exits and not to be “unrealistic” about their company potential!! But, it gets worse. Those few investors/mentors who are not afraid of backing startups in creating billion-dollar empires, seem to be facing with entrepreneurs who are not confident enough to carry out such task (due to the influence from that culture). So, kinda like chicken and egg.

We should be willing to shoot for the stars (and probably fail 99 times out of 100) because we can and we have the necessary goods. Flickr was a great company but I’d take one Google instead of 2000 Flickrs any day of the week. Yes, we should learn from mistakes and experiences of others as much as we could but, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make our own mistakes and try new things(and even break things). We should learn to honor mistakes and celebrate courageous failures as much as we honor/celebrate successes. With such culture , we can come back from failures stronger and smarter and build a richer and greater ecosystem. Until we do that, we are not going to see Googles, Facebooks and Apples coming out of Vancouver.

There are some great people (not many) who are trying to do just that. Also, organizations like C100 and BCIC are pushing the ecosystems in the right direction. However, it’s on EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US to think and act like that, both individually and collectively as a community. After all, Silicone Valley is a state of mind and that culture/mindset is the first step in turning Vancouver into the best tech startup city.

It just takes a little bit of crazy to be smart. Or as Steve Jobs put it:
“Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”.

You can see that these sorts of things make growth very difficult in BC. The tech industry is virtually ignored now in BC in favour of resources like mining and logging. Its no wonder so many people are moving to Alberta and businesses selling their companies to the valley.

There is another problem. Canada seems to lack the culture to make stars. Both in business and actual stars (entertainers). Most successful businesses and even entertainers wind up going to the US. It seems that for people to be recognized here they must first obtain success in the US. This country won’t recognize them until they do. It seems that a change in culture is necessary to help people succeed.

Yes – connect and create, and stay local, I look forward to seeing what’s out there.

P.S. Did I mention Vancity is giving away $90K to entrepreneurs that are current students or recent grads? And yes, we realize that not all great entrepreneurs come from universities and colleges, but we wanted to extend the runway for those with student and startup debt.

http://www.vancity.com/VentureChallenge

I had not really thought about the coexistence of gov’t and private investment. Your point about the two of them being in competition makes a lot of sense. Hopefully an ebb in future gov’t funding will result in a flow of private investment. I guess time will tell.

I think your point about Larry and Sergey is moot. They would not have come to UBC in the first place.

I love you thought at the end about how a loss in gov’t funding could potentially be the galvanizing force this community needs. Nice silver lining.

@Tayber –> Great point, there is an active gaming community in Vancouver. How we can get more interaction between the gaming and web folks?

East Side Games, A Thinking Ape, Dimerocker, Silicon Sisters, EBG, Ayogo and more… huge space in social, mobile and casual game making things happen!

Stanford, Berkeley and other universities in the bay area have an advantage not just in their proximity but in their willingness to work with the industry. Its a different mindset then you typically find at other institutions. There is no magic formula though, successful business leaders in this industry come from a variety of backgrounds, drop outs likely still outnumber academics.

Had Larry and Sergey landed at UBC and not Stanford would have seen a home grown version of Google evolve? Unfortunately I suspect not, the reason being you cannot discount the importance of visionary investors in the community (most of whom are/were entrepreneurs themselves). Even though Sergey and Larry realized they had something for a period of time they would have happily let Google go for a price under a million, abandoned the garage and simply gone back to academia. What did they have access to down there that made the difference? Investors willing to put 6 figure checks on the table with very favorable terms for a company that didn’t even exist. We have plenty of bootstrappers in BC working out of their homes, many of successful – what we lack is that infusion of capital necessary to take an idea to the next level. Often when it comes time to take that next step out of the garage the only viable choice is to leave.

Plenty of BC’ers have had success and would make ideal early stage investors. The problem is not lack of capital but rather the interference of capital in what should be a free market. When you have gov’t interests attempting to drive the ship picking winners and losers using public funds it forces healthy capital out of the environment. The two can’t mutually co-exist.

Unfortunately we have once again got things very wrong in BC and I fear we’ve run out of road to set things right. I started in this space before the 2000 tech bubble, I’ve seen this play out before more than once and I suspect I know how its going to end except its going to be worse than previous iterations. We are seeing the end of a very large gov’t spending cycle. Everyone in the industry needs to realize BC faces a serious fiscal deficit and its going to get worse. There is something very California-esque (circa 2006) about whats occurred in Vancouver real estate. All indicators point to a very dire picture for provincial finances for the foreseeable future, the tech community needs to start planning accordingly. Last time this happened the entire industry was thrown into serious disarray, the migration that occurred could only be described as a mass exodus.

Remaining in BC during the the next few years likely means going back to bootstrapping. Even if you have the dollars recruiting talent is difficult if independents get scared and feel they are better off leaving for greener, more stable pastures. If you aren’t a technical founder the environment can be very harsh & unforgiving.

Shared work spaces offer tantalizing advantages but I’m not sure the counterparty risk can be adequately mitigated if things go sideways. If you risk lawsuit from landlord because fellow tenants sharing a space are no longer able to commit its better to have the stability of a home office type of environment. Any space requiring gov’t funding cannot be trusted, at some point it will fold when funding commitments are withdrawn.

The writing is on the wall, Falcon has promised the province a balanced budget by 2013 – this means deep cuts in a left leaning province with powerful public unions, we should have no illusions what the result will be when push comes to shove. Various communities need to quickly learn how to rely on each other in the absence of gov’t funding (not as easy as it sounds if you look carefully at just how pervasive various schemes have become).

@Eric –> You are on to something there. How do we take existing tech companies and tweak them around a product that can really scale their businesses? Ryan (Hootsuite) mentioned that in a talk, that one of the reasons they had early success is that they had spent 10,000 hours working together. What about 20% time on products in a services shop? Good tip, will look up David to do a talk for the Co-Founders group.

@Tim –> I had BCIT/Emily Carr, Capilano and Langara mentioned in an earlier edit of the post. You are entirely right, we need to engage all the schools not just the biggest.