December 31, 2011 marked the end of my reign as the Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EiR) at UW VeloCity. The VeloCity residence announced a new leadership team before Christmas Holiday. I’m still affiliated, I’m still an alumni and I’m still an avid supporter.

I was lucky enough to spend 6 months with the students and their companies in Waterloo. I made the trek down the 401 to Waterloo almost every Tuesday night for dinner. The dinners were modelled after the YCombinator dinners. We brought in our friends and acquaintances from the world of high tech entrepreneurship to talk to the students. To share their experiences starting companies, raising funding, working with cofounders, etc. The goal was to provide a social, educational experience for the students and hopefully teach them something about the industry and software culture.

I was an undergraduate back in the early 90s. I wrote Objective-C on NeXTSTEP boxes. But no one at Waterloo really promoted starting a software company as a career path, maybe I’m just an idiot, but I never thought that I could start a company and sell the software I was writing. There were a few startups (MKS, RIM, Maplesoft) but this wasn’t a career path that was promoted. You could argue may this was because I was in the Kinesiology department. But spent a significant portion of my time in CS and SYSDE (SYSDE142, 342, 542 and others). The closest was a class about database management in the department of Management Sciences but it definitely wasn’t about entrepreneurship (how much do I still hate Access).

It wasn’t that hadn’t been exposed to entrepreneurship. I grew up in an entrepreneurial household, my Dad had left Clarkson Gordon to start his own small business accounting and consulting firm in the early 1980s. And my first real job was with a small usability consulitng firm, but I thought that I would get a job at CIBC or IBM or maybe Delrina. I was never provided the skills, the experience or even the awareness that entrepreneurship (software entrepreneurship) was a career path. I went to CMU for graduate work, and I was exposed to founders from MIT, CMU, Stanford and other places. My first job after grad school, I did research at UIUC and was exposed to things like early Netscape. But it wasn’t until I started working at Trilogy Software with a bunch of Stanford graduates did it become clear that I could start a software company. I always wished that someone had shown me entrepreneurship (beyond consulting) as a career path.

My view about VeloCity comes back to my own experiences at UWaterloo. And the role that VeloCity needs to play in exposing and educating UW students about high-tech entrepreneurship. It will be great to see the evolution with Mike Kirkup (LinkedIn, @mikekirkup) and Brett Shellhammer (LinkedIn, @bashome). VeloCity represents something that wasn’t available to me when I was a UW student. For me, VeloCity represents the next stage of evolution for the University of Waterloo cooperative education program:

“ the solution was not just classroom instruction but “the co-operative program,” which offered students alternating terms of paid work in industry to get practical experience.”

Velocity feels like a starting ground for the next set of education at Waterloo. With the launch of MITx in addition to Open Courseware, MIT is attempting to change the face of higher education. There is inspiration and direction from TED, TEDx, and SingularityU. There is also the rise of self-learning platforms like Codeacademy, Khan Academy and others. It is time that UWaterloo explored evolving the cooperative education program beyond the constraints of the existing program. For me VeloCity represents the start of a new academic experience.

I can’t wait to be a part of what is next.

It’s been 9 years since Joe Strummer passed away from an undiagnosed congenial heart defect. Joe Strummer and The Clash were my biggest musical influence. I eagerly awaited the release of The Future is Unwritten (and I’m now the proud owner of a Region 2 DVD from Amazon.co.uk). My friends Scott Berkun, Roger Chabra, Saul Colt and others have reminded me about how important Joe was both musically and politically.

Photo in my living room thanks to Lee Dale, Kristin Heeney and Simon White for the best friends and a special gift

“And so now I’d like to say – people can change anything they want to. And that means everything in the world. People are running about following their little tracks – I am one of them. But we’ve all got to stop just following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything – this is something that I’m beginning to learn. People are out there doing bad things to each other. That’s because they’ve been dehumanised. It’s time to take the humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time. Greed, it ain’t going anywhere. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. Without people you’re nothing. That’s my spiel.” — Joe Strummer

It was Billy Bragg’s post this morning that connected connected Joe’s view on worker and humanitarian rights explicitly for me to the Occupy movements.

Thanks Joe!

Toronto for Comparison

• Coporate Income Tax Rate - Small Business 15.5%
• Canada – 11%
• Ontario – 4.5%
• Salaries for Employees
• Software Engineer – $75,000
• Executive Assistant – $35,000
• Graphic Designer – $50,000
• Project Manager – $75,000
• Web Developer – $55,000
• Personal Income Tax – 31.15% (assumes range from $40k-$81k)
• Federal – 22%
• Ontario – 9.15%
• Cost of Office Space – $1.67/square foot/month ($2o/square foot/year) (using general listing for A grade space from OfficeZilla)
• Cost of Utilities/Taxes/etc – $12/square foot/year ($1/square foot/month)

• Twitter has 105,779,710 users. 300K new users per day. 600 million search queries per day. 175 employees.
• Salesforce thinks that their Youtube channel has the ROI equivalent of 35 super efficient sales reps
• Facebook says sites that have added Like button have seen triple growth of fans
• Stumbleupon 2010: 10 Million users, 115,000 Facebook fans, 600 Million stumbles/month, 1 Billion ratings, 45 Million URLs, 50,000 discovers/day
• Top 5 countries after the US for Facebook usage/traffic: UK, Indonesia, Canada, France, Turkey
• 70% of Facebook traffic comes from outside the US, 10% increase in the last year alone
• 37% of tweets originate from mobile devices
• Most of YouTube’s views are from videos older than 6 months old, invest in a content strategy.

I am hoping that Michael McDerment might apply to tell the FreshBooks metric story at the SMASH Summit. He first gave this talk at DemoCamp back in 2007 but he continues to evolve it based on the FreshBooks business. It’s one of my favs. And given the updated focus on both acquisition and retention it makes it a perfect opportunity for FreshBooks.

SMASH Summit will feature presentations and case studies on strategies, tactics, and “hack-tics” used in successful internet campaigns across multiple platforms—from search to social to mobile. Led by both tech geeks and savvy marketers, you will walk way with new tips and tricks for pumping up your customer acquisition and retention. In 2010, SMASH Summit debuted to a sold-out audience including speakers and attendees from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Apple, Google, Virgin America, National Geographic, Mint, Twilio, Sony, Slideshare, and many others.

I am hoping to attend because I want to see some of the approaches used to acquire customers for $0 dollars. Why? I spent part of Monday, in my role as EiR at VeloCity, asking students and entrepreneurs how they could get to 10,000 (or 100,000 or 1,000,000) users in 30 days with a $0 budget. I’m curious to see both the tactics and the tools that other high traction startups are using to attract and retain customers. Apparently I’ve been spending time understanding marketing and sales automation (again).

Great list of speakers including the infamous Dave McClure (@davemclure), Charlie O’Donnell (@CEONYC), Victoria Ransom (@wildfireapp) and others.

• Count me in on Plancast
• Register Now »

• 85% of B2B marketers invested in event marketing in 2010
• 28% of this group plan to increase their event marketing investments in 2011
• 69% of B2B marketers intend to try new digital marketing approaches in 2011

Don’t go in to the light! A couple of days ago it was the 5th anniversary of my heart attack at DemoCamp. I am really luck to have friends like Jay, Joey, Sutha, Leila and Greg who understood the symptoms and were caring enough to protect me from myself. I’m very lucky we were at MaRS, because for the heckling I do, the first rule of real estate was my friend. Location, location, location. And I’m really thankful for the spectacular care I received at Toronto General Hospital.

I missed what was one of the most important early DemoCamps, it takes almost these 5 years to play out, but look at the schedule.

1. Skydasher/Feedcache: Skydasher is Tucows latest super-secret attempt at bringing great services to Webhosters and ISPs and their customers. Feedcache is a big, queryable cache of syndication feeds that application developers can play with. Presented by Ross Rader and Joey deVilla, developer relations dudes at Tucows.
2. BlogScope: Online analysis and visualization tool for blogosphere. By Nilesh Bansal, grad student from database group, University of Toronto.
3. BumpTop: Next-generation desktop organization software powered by a physics engine. Presented by Anand Agarawala. Video also available.
4. Joshua Wehner – Rails based web application
5. semanticPAL – learnable natural language user interface from nSM Semantic Modules Presented by sasha uritsky

On the schedule were BumpTop and Blogoscope which eventually became Sysomos. Both of which were acquired approximately 3.5 years after their inital DemoCamp presentations.

I often get asked why I continue to do this: DemoCamp, StartupNorth, Founders & Funders. I’ve tried to write about my motivations about this community of crazy, under-appreciated technologists, designers, entrepreneurs. I think that this is a special place. I’ve met a lot of good friends. I’ve learned a lot about great people. I hope that I’ve been able to make Toronto a better place. And I wonder what my role should be going forward. This is my hobby. This is my passion. This is my distraction. I do it because it makes me feel better.  It’s just too bad that this isn’t a real gig. I tried at Microsoft. Mark Relph and John Oxley really understood the power of a strong Canadian emerging technology and startup community. It was time to move on. Others think they can manipulate, own and harness the power of loosely connected pieces where the only benefit is in providing a space for the collisions to happen. I like to think of my role as conductor. How do I get the right people to collide so sparks happen.

I’m left thinking I’m very proud of all of the entrepreneurs that I’ve met in the past 5 years. I’m thankful for how much each of you has helped me. And if you feel like I’ve been dishonest or untruthful, please let me try to rectify that. If I’ve ignored you, it’s because your message wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Help me hear you. And to everyone who has become a friend. My table, my bourbon bottle and my office is always open. Please keep on making Canada a place that I am proud to be a citizen.

All rights reserved by geoperdis

That’s right Mesh Conference is a DIY event. It’s the Do-It -Yourself endeavour of small dedicated group of individuals. And you can see each of their personalities and interests in the schedule and speakers. Rob Hyndman (@rhh), Stuart MacDonald(@stuartma), Mark Evans(@markevans), Mathew Ingram(@mathewi), and Mike McDerment (@mikemcderment) have been working very hard since 2006 to build a world-class that has attracted renown speakers, mayors, and attendees. The secret is that Mesh is an event that all of them want to attend. The reason they invest time and effort into this event is because it is really for them.

All rights reserved by photojunkie

Why is Mesh Toronto’s most important DIY event?

There are great events ranging from my DemoCamp to EcommerceCamp, from MakerFaireTO to Open Toronto, TechTalksTO to HackTO.  There are a great number of local events that have emerged. The thing about Mesh is that it started in 2006. Over 5 years ago, shortly after the first BarCampToronto. And since the very first Mesh, it has always had an air of professionalism that others should strive to obtain. Mesh from the very first event was an event that was world class. It was Canadian in size (about 1/10th the size of a US event). But it has always been DIY, it has never felt DIY.

Rob, Stuart, Mark, Mathew, Mike and Sheri deserve true accolades for building an event that defines the emerging technology, emerging culture, emerging policy in Canada. Thank you!

I hope to see everyone at the Allstream Centre this week.