7 ms·

Vancouver Startup Hackathon Oct 8-10: cperciva & A Thinking Ape (YC W08)

40 points by arasakik 16y ago

jamesshamenski 16y ago
on a side note, is there anything good coming out of vancouver right now? I haven't heard of anything since the bootup labs debacle.
- imack 16y ago
  Hootsuite is becoming a bit of a success story. Bootup Labs will have another intake in the new year, so we'll see what happens with that. "Plug and Play Tech Center" is opening an incubator here, and the Grow Conference happened over the summer at the new conference centre which housed the media during the Olympics. Still plenty of dopey heavily-government-subsidized green tech, but I have hope for the future.
  - dshan 16y ago
    I'm very obviously biased, as a founder of one of Bootup's startups, but I hear what everyone is saying here...Van has it's challenges when it comes to fueling rapid startup growth and success. I do think there are great people here striving to really change the world and a decent community around that scene trying to empower that activity. I think a lot of the complaints I see here are fixable, and I think it would do a lot more good to focus on the value these types of events can bring to the culture in Van, rather than pointing out what's wrong all the time. It seems like a subset of the community is really downtrodden and negative, and they seem to be the most vocal, especially online. I think money people like Boris Wertz and Jason Bailey are putting forth enormous efforts to jump start the scene right now. GROW was successful, and increasing we founders are talking with the influencers in the Valley and around the US. Hootsuite is one of a few potential success stories and I think that will be followed with a handful more from the younger companies. Again yeah, I'm biased, but we're working as hard as anyone up here in Vancouver, and I see tons of potential.
- novon 16y ago
  A bit biased :) But we just launched out of Vancouver: http://opencal.com/ http://opencal.com/
- fleitz 16y ago
  I'm working on a Vancouver based startup. I think it's awesome and my mom says it's cool! :) On a more serious note, I think the event is an awesome idea and would like to see event more startups in Vancouver. I think we've got the right culture and city to do it in. Also, VHS (Vancouver Hackspace)does a hack night on Tuesdays if anyone is interested. http://vancouver.hackspace.ca/wp/ http://vancouver.hackspace.ca/wp/
- fiveo 16y ago
  There are a few startups in Vancouver: HootSuite, Kashoo, AdHack, Indicee, EnergyPulse. There are also a few acquired startups in the past 2-3 years. LayerBoom (Joyent), Smallthought (Twitter). Some solid companies such as: ElasticPath, VisionCritical, etc. Despite the list of startups and "solid" companies. I wouldn't bet on their balance sheet. I've been here since 2001 and while there are several key buyouts in the networking/hardware/embedded industry (in the range of hundreds of millions dollars) back then, things have been relatively slow and possibly in declining state. There has been a few lay-off within 2 years. EA closed their downtown office and laid off 300. McKesson laid off 80 people. Nokia is full of management engineers, bottom-lines are either outsource of contractors. One game studio that shows big potential closed their door early 2009. A few mid-size companies that used to grow 4-5 years ago are in hiring freeze. A few small companies died quietly. Most of my friends are leaving Vancouver to go to Ontario, Silicon Valley (or US in general), or to Asia where mobile and IT are booming like mad (if you know the channel). Here's a few problems with Vancouver: 1) Laid back culture Vancouverites are well-known for enjoying their life; rain or shine. They have the "let's do it tomorrow" or "it's almost 5 PM on Friday" attitude. This caused a hit on software quality. Almost anywhere you go in Vancouver, you'll meet huge pile of technical debts with no plan to pay them. There is even a health software company build their product around MS Access even until today. 2) SR&ED SR&ED is a grant given by the government to hi-tech companies. The point of having this is to attract people to build hi-tech industry in Vancouver. So far it looks like it has been back-firing us: companies neither-living-nor-dead. Some of them rely heavily on this grant since their business model isn't strong or their sales are not hitting the target or a combination of both. Their balance sheet with SR&ED will look positive but we all know that they're lying to themselves. They should be toasted. SR&ED also attracts the wrong kind of investors. Because of this, workers aren't getting paid enough. I think in general, hi-tech workers in Vancouver might get paid 30% below the average (by skill, by age, by experience) compare to US or Ontario with no chance of increase or bonus at all. 3) Competition is getting tougher and the culture of technology for technology sake It's hard to find a job in Vancouver without 4-5 years of .NET experience with WCF, WPF, HTML, AJAX, CSS, SQL-Server 2005. Or 7-10 years of Java experience with Oracle, XML, XQuery, XPath, XSLT, XSL, Spring, Struts2, Hibernate, JSF, Seam, JBoss, WebSphere. There's one more choice though: LAMP + HTML, CSS, jQuery but working for marketing companies. They too, usually are looking for someone who has 3-5 years of experience. To some people this might be a good sign: barrier to enter is high. But with code quality is so low, I can't and won't understand this particular situation. Shouldn't you get better software from senior/more experienced people? Apparently not. 4) The rise of Business Analyst Instead of educating software developers/engineers in here, Vancouver rewards Business Analyst more than the implementors. Schools have been offering continuing studies toward BA diploma degree so they can be employable in some enterprise/corporate with better pay, less work, more politics, and quite possibly more vacations. This lure many people to join the wave. 5) Weather While it's milder here but imagine 10 months of gloomy, raining, and cloudy. It can affect your mood (according to scientific research). It's a vicious cycle in here and it looks like it'll be worse. Kudos for people who can be successful building and maintaining a solid company here.
- cperciva 16y ago
  Is Tarsnap good? (please say yes...) In all seriousness, though, Tarsnap doesn't really come out of Vancouver. It happens to be located here, but that's just because I'm here; I certainly can't point to anything and say "if Tarsnap wasn't in Vancouver, I wouldn't have had access to X and it wouldn't have succeeded". I hope we can develop more of a startup community here, but so far all I've seen is hordes of MBAs and a distinct lack of technical people.
  - imack 16y ago
    The 'distinct lack of technical people' is what worries me the most. But I like to think a lot are just tied up in the video game industry. There are a lot of post-secondary institutions around with solid CS programs and it isn't hard to convince someone to move here. (worked on me) As for the hoards of MBA's, I've seen a couple startups run by muggles who just contract out the initial coding (Bootup labs sponsored included) then look for a tech lead much later, if at all. There are also odd things like local democamps where the "no powerpoint" rule is cast aside and few of the speakers actually have software to demo. To their credit, a thinking ape was at the last democamp with a demo, unlike the act that went up after them: guys pitching a TV show about iPhone apps.
  - dannyrobinson 16y ago
    Completely agree that Vancouver could use more technical founders, but we do have plenty of "technical people", and you're right, lots are in the gaming industry. (the compass engine and dimerocker founders came from there) It's hard to find "technical people" who are in a position to take the financial risk of starting a company. We're working hard (and I mean hard) to fix that by making more money available to them. Bootup's minimum criteria is, and has been for some time, that at least one co-founder has to be highly technical, but preferably both. But ideally, balanced in that the other would be heavy on design and user experience, HTML5/CSS.
- dannyrobinson 16y ago
  Some stuff happening. (by no means is this everything) Mozzilla Thunderbird is developed in Vancouver Stewart Butterfield's TinySpeck is half here and half in SFO. Facebook has a bunch of employees here Apple has a bunch employees here. Microsoft Entertainment SuperRewards, sold to AdKnowledge LayerBoom, sold to Joyent DabbleDB/Trendly - now Twitter NowPublic, sold to Clarity Digital Matt from Flippa, 99designs PlentyOfFish Elastic Path Vision Critical Indicee Club Penguin (not Vancouver, but still notable) Metro lyrics Hootsuite CouterPath - makers of the famous X-Lite Voip client. Strutta Unbounce Mobify Deqq Mingleverse Jostle Fundrazr Rouxbe theKiwiCollection Sitemasher Bookriff CityMax Grooster Fotki Nitobi Sosido Networks GeoToko IQ Metrics Thinking Ape Carrotlines Contractually (Bootup) AdHack (Bootup) DimeRocker (Bootup) Summify (Bootup) Compass engine (Bootup) FoodTree (Bootup)
  - fiveo 16y ago
    Mozilla is relatively new here. I remember a few years ago there were news around the internet about Mozilla booting Thunderbird. Not sure why or what is that all about. Microsoft has a game studio in here, not sure how long before they absorb and move everyone down south of the border. So it's not the whole MS Entertainment division is here. Some of the companies that got bought by bigger companies are either move to USA (Flickr, DabbleDB) or ended up in here with a possible more pressure to do more sales from the HQ; basically they have to prove that they worth and the goals being set by their big mothership is usually far more ambitious than their initial startup goals. By the way, gone is all the goodies that they offer to their employees; HQ wants some cost-cutting in-place pronto (I'm not making this up, go ask any companies that got bought, including those who got bought by Intel, Ericsson, Nokia, EA, BO/SAP, etc). 99Designs is based in Australia. Flippa, not sure. Yes, Matt is local in Vancouver, but what about the rest of his crews? Matt is also in the web design business, which, coincidentally, what Vancouver is more known of: lots of web-designers. It's hard to convince engineers to mingle with web-designers when the designers are leading the company. Jostle: http://www.jostleme.com/?p=788 http://www.jostleme.com/?p=788 (after 6 years now they're out of Stealth mode?) Sitemasher: http://www.techvibes.com/blog/sitemasher-sold-and-winding-down-but-to-whom http://www.techvibes.com/blog/sitemasher-sold-and-winding-do... (this was back in June 2010, no more info after that, website is down). I'm not sure how they fit with Salesforce.com if the rumors are true. BookRiff is based in Quebec. Grooster is in the same space with Groupon. Fotki is somewhere out there on the edge of the map (Maple Ridge). Ditto with Club Penguin, like 4 hours outside Vancouver. CounterPath has been around since 2002, current stock price: $1.35. We have lots of companies like this around Vancouver: been around for a while, stock price flat between tenth of cents to less than 2 dollars. NowPublic, a drupal based website, lay-off 8 out of 11 after being sold: http://www.techvibes.com/blog/nowpublic-lays-off-staff-and-likely-to-close http://www.techvibes.com/blog/nowpublic-lays-off-staff-and-l... Nitobi is in the JavaScript widget business (and consulting as well) CarrotLines: go check their website and judge them yourself. Apple in Vancouver: unsure what they do (mixed of iTunes Store, a bit of Apple iWork) , plus it's a very small branch, Apple can close it down very quickly and ask the engineers to move to Cupertino DabbleDB really got lucky. I don't know if they're even profitable back then. They seem to just slowly eating the investor money with no clear business vision. PlentyOfFish is Marcus baby with lots of ASP.NET hacked together quickly. He keeps all the money (like 10 millions of them?) and hire a Senior Software Engineer after a couple of profitable years (probably to fix the mess). I'm not suggesting that's a bad move, but by no means that make Vancouver a good thriving place for hiring talents when the owners are like that. I don't mean to sound negative or trying to air the dirty laundry at Vancouver. This is the culture we have right now and it's driving the engineering talents out to the east or south of the border. I've seen a lot of "social media" companies that were startups 2 years ago and died not too long ago. I've seen shady companies with no clear goal/business models. I've seen consulting companies betting their business in Drupal and Wordpress!. RainCity is going down hard. I've seen plenty people jumping to the iPhone bandwaggon and suddenly they're a startup with good business models? in Silicon Valley they might, but not in Vancouver. You can't pull that thing up here.
imack 16y ago
I really want to attend this but why does it have to happen on the thanksgiving long weekend? Or is that intentional since there will be a buffer day between this and the normal work week?
- mikeyur 16y ago
  The primary reason is so we can have a lot of the space. Most tenants of the space will clear out Friday and be back Tuesday (which also gives us time to clean up after the event). We wanted to do it the week before but the schedules didn't work out for the people helping, the space, etc. Shoot me an email (m@mikeyur.com) if you just want to drop in on one of the days.
lucisferre 16y ago
This looks great, though it's hard not to notice this is the same weekend as Startup Weekend which is at Bootup. Just a coincidence?
- dannyrobinson 16y ago
  Startup Weekend Vancouver is coordinated by Shauna, Melody, Lyndi from Seattle. They contacted us looking for space, and we said no problem. They're volunteering to make something cool happen, and how could that not be great. Actually, we're seeing more of that kind of thing happening in Vancouver, including the Hackathon. I wont be able to make it due to family commitments for Thanksgiving, but there will be a bunch of people there and I hear they're making a turkey! If you're in the same boat as me, let us know, and maybe we'll coordinate another weekend where more of us can be available. - I've been hackin Ruby on Heroku, and would like to show it off, so I'm in for sure. Of course, there are advantages to working together, but it's not necessary. The more of these events that happen the better and stronger our community is.
  - lucisferre 16y ago
    I completely agree
mattped 16y ago
I'm Matthew Win Tibbals, pedophile
anonyaccount 16y ago
I'm Matt Tibbals, thief
projectileboy 16y ago
I've always loved cperciva's comments on this site. If he's involved, I can't believe it won't be a valuable session. I'd go if I was in Vancouver.
startupwiz 16y ago
startupwiz 16y ago
Startup Weekend Vancouver is the same weekend and I'm going. You should combine. Hootsuite is sponsoring a big dinner. And the Startup Weekend network is pretty sweet... access to a group that runs startup events across the world. It's a pretty cool grassroots event. You can go to Startup Weekend for around $50 total (Startup Digest discount) which includes food + everything. Just curious, why did you plan an event the same time as they did--just to save $50 so you can buy your own food? Why not work together?
scronin 16y ago
Vancouver suffers from many problems but one really big one kills startups. Primarily, risk adversity is a common trait in investors and founders here. The Lean/MVP model does not lend itself to building BIG companies because its a bit (not totally) absurd to think that a company that needs 10-30 MIT gold standard engineers to conceive can be bootstrapped. Talking about the "startup scene" is a waste of time until real efforts are put together to make real companies that solve hard enterprise class problems or uncover 2-5 year forward looking, undeveloped markets. In America, as pointed out time and again by the upper echelon in the Vancouver startup circles, people actually take these forward looking risks because the payoff is just too sweet if it comes through. Bootup is notable for pushing the boulder up the hill, Danny R and Co. are a scrappy fighters thats for sure. For instance, even a SR&ED/IRAP intensive startup with a potential BIG idea (which is a stunning program @fiveo from the standpoint of the unemotional-observational economist) meets the common phrases that investors in Vancouver rely on to skate away. "its too early" "i need to see a working prototype making profit with tons of traction" "its not scalable". And kudos to them, they worked damn hard to build a life(style) here and don't want to burn their precious money into cinders. As a proven and skilled technician, I can say that I have met many talented PhD's and engineers in Vancouver, now in Palo Alto. Someone with 2-5 years success in technology is worth about 90k a year, and that wage is nigh unachievable in B.C. Too often we leave for the states, myself included, because their are too many tagalongs who don't actually understand the minutiae involved in how specific technologies create value across international markets. Too many evangelists and mentors, not enough mature engineers who work with tenacity, intensity ,focus and audacity. Perhaps this type of discussion can be better studied by a thought experiment. How would you start a company like the awesome Palantir Inc in Vancouver? Give us a thoughtful, unbiased analysis that spells out to investors the reduction of risk and the chance to make a 10X exit in a tough hostile and messy business environment. This is a good case study for MBA types.

40 points by arasakik 16y ago

on a side note, is there anything good coming out of vancouver right now? I haven't heard of anything since the bootup labs debacle.

imack 16y ago
Hootsuite is becoming a bit of a success story. Bootup Labs will have another intake in the new year, so we'll see what happens with that. "Plug and Play Tech Center" is opening an incubator here, and the Grow Conference happened over the summer at the new conference centre which housed the media during the Olympics. Still plenty of dopey heavily-government-subsidized green tech, but I have hope for the future.
- dshan 16y ago
  I'm very obviously biased, as a founder of one of Bootup's startups, but I hear what everyone is saying here...Van has it's challenges when it comes to fueling rapid startup growth and success. I do think there are great people here striving to really change the world and a decent community around that scene trying to empower that activity. I think a lot of the complaints I see here are fixable, and I think it would do a lot more good to focus on the value these types of events can bring to the culture in Van, rather than pointing out what's wrong all the time. It seems like a subset of the community is really downtrodden and negative, and they seem to be the most vocal, especially online. I think money people like Boris Wertz and Jason Bailey are putting forth enormous efforts to jump start the scene right now. GROW was successful, and increasing we founders are talking with the influencers in the Valley and around the US. Hootsuite is one of a few potential success stories and I think that will be followed with a handful more from the younger companies. Again yeah, I'm biased, but we're working as hard as anyone up here in Vancouver, and I see tons of potential.
novon 16y ago
A bit biased :) But we just launched out of Vancouver: http://opencal.com/ http://opencal.com/
fleitz 16y ago
I'm working on a Vancouver based startup. I think it's awesome and my mom says it's cool! :) On a more serious note, I think the event is an awesome idea and would like to see event more startups in Vancouver. I think we've got the right culture and city to do it in. Also, VHS (Vancouver Hackspace)does a hack night on Tuesdays if anyone is interested. http://vancouver.hackspace.ca/wp/ http://vancouver.hackspace.ca/wp/
fiveo 16y ago
There are a few startups in Vancouver: HootSuite, Kashoo, AdHack, Indicee, EnergyPulse. There are also a few acquired startups in the past 2-3 years. LayerBoom (Joyent), Smallthought (Twitter). Some solid companies such as: ElasticPath, VisionCritical, etc. Despite the list of startups and "solid" companies. I wouldn't bet on their balance sheet. I've been here since 2001 and while there are several key buyouts in the networking/hardware/embedded industry (in the range of hundreds of millions dollars) back then, things have been relatively slow and possibly in declining state. There has been a few lay-off within 2 years. EA closed their downtown office and laid off 300. McKesson laid off 80 people. Nokia is full of management engineers, bottom-lines are either outsource of contractors. One game studio that shows big potential closed their door early 2009. A few mid-size companies that used to grow 4-5 years ago are in hiring freeze. A few small companies died quietly. Most of my friends are leaving Vancouver to go to Ontario, Silicon Valley (or US in general), or to Asia where mobile and IT are booming like mad (if you know the channel). Here's a few problems with Vancouver: 1) Laid back culture Vancouverites are well-known for enjoying their life; rain or shine. They have the "let's do it tomorrow" or "it's almost 5 PM on Friday" attitude. This caused a hit on software quality. Almost anywhere you go in Vancouver, you'll meet huge pile of technical debts with no plan to pay them. There is even a health software company build their product around MS Access even until today. 2) SR&ED SR&ED is a grant given by the government to hi-tech companies. The point of having this is to attract people to build hi-tech industry in Vancouver. So far it looks like it has been back-firing us: companies neither-living-nor-dead. Some of them rely heavily on this grant since their business model isn't strong or their sales are not hitting the target or a combination of both. Their balance sheet with SR&ED will look positive but we all know that they're lying to themselves. They should be toasted. SR&ED also attracts the wrong kind of investors. Because of this, workers aren't getting paid enough. I think in general, hi-tech workers in Vancouver might get paid 30% below the average (by skill, by age, by experience) compare to US or Ontario with no chance of increase or bonus at all. 3) Competition is getting tougher and the culture of technology for technology sake It's hard to find a job in Vancouver without 4-5 years of .NET experience with WCF, WPF, HTML, AJAX, CSS, SQL-Server 2005. Or 7-10 years of Java experience with Oracle, XML, XQuery, XPath, XSLT, XSL, Spring, Struts2, Hibernate, JSF, Seam, JBoss, WebSphere. There's one more choice though: LAMP + HTML, CSS, jQuery but working for marketing companies. They too, usually are looking for someone who has 3-5 years of experience. To some people this might be a good sign: barrier to enter is high. But with code quality is so low, I can't and won't understand this particular situation. Shouldn't you get better software from senior/more experienced people? Apparently not. 4) The rise of Business Analyst Instead of educating software developers/engineers in here, Vancouver rewards Business Analyst more than the implementors. Schools have been offering continuing studies toward BA diploma degree so they can be employable in some enterprise/corporate with better pay, less work, more politics, and quite possibly more vacations. This lure many people to join the wave. 5) Weather While it's milder here but imagine 10 months of gloomy, raining, and cloudy. It can affect your mood (according to scientific research). It's a vicious cycle in here and it looks like it'll be worse. Kudos for people who can be successful building and maintaining a solid company here.
cperciva 16y ago
Is Tarsnap good? (please say yes...) In all seriousness, though, Tarsnap doesn't really come out of Vancouver. It happens to be located here, but that's just because I'm here; I certainly can't point to anything and say "if Tarsnap wasn't in Vancouver, I wouldn't have had access to X and it wouldn't have succeeded". I hope we can develop more of a startup community here, but so far all I've seen is hordes of MBAs and a distinct lack of technical people.
- imack 16y ago
  The 'distinct lack of technical people' is what worries me the most. But I like to think a lot are just tied up in the video game industry. There are a lot of post-secondary institutions around with solid CS programs and it isn't hard to convince someone to move here. (worked on me) As for the hoards of MBA's, I've seen a couple startups run by muggles who just contract out the initial coding (Bootup labs sponsored included) then look for a tech lead much later, if at all. There are also odd things like local democamps where the "no powerpoint" rule is cast aside and few of the speakers actually have software to demo. To their credit, a thinking ape was at the last democamp with a demo, unlike the act that went up after them: guys pitching a TV show about iPhone apps.
- dannyrobinson 16y ago
  Completely agree that Vancouver could use more technical founders, but we do have plenty of "technical people", and you're right, lots are in the gaming industry. (the compass engine and dimerocker founders came from there) It's hard to find "technical people" who are in a position to take the financial risk of starting a company. We're working hard (and I mean hard) to fix that by making more money available to them. Bootup's minimum criteria is, and has been for some time, that at least one co-founder has to be highly technical, but preferably both. But ideally, balanced in that the other would be heavy on design and user experience, HTML5/CSS.
dannyrobinson 16y ago
Some stuff happening. (by no means is this everything) Mozzilla Thunderbird is developed in Vancouver Stewart Butterfield's TinySpeck is half here and half in SFO. Facebook has a bunch of employees here Apple has a bunch employees here. Microsoft Entertainment SuperRewards, sold to AdKnowledge LayerBoom, sold to Joyent DabbleDB/Trendly - now Twitter NowPublic, sold to Clarity Digital Matt from Flippa, 99designs PlentyOfFish Elastic Path Vision Critical Indicee Club Penguin (not Vancouver, but still notable) Metro lyrics Hootsuite CouterPath - makers of the famous X-Lite Voip client. Strutta Unbounce Mobify Deqq Mingleverse Jostle Fundrazr Rouxbe theKiwiCollection Sitemasher Bookriff CityMax Grooster Fotki Nitobi Sosido Networks GeoToko IQ Metrics Thinking Ape Carrotlines Contractually (Bootup) AdHack (Bootup) DimeRocker (Bootup) Summify (Bootup) Compass engine (Bootup) FoodTree (Bootup)
- fiveo 16y ago
  Mozilla is relatively new here. I remember a few years ago there were news around the internet about Mozilla booting Thunderbird. Not sure why or what is that all about. Microsoft has a game studio in here, not sure how long before they absorb and move everyone down south of the border. So it's not the whole MS Entertainment division is here. Some of the companies that got bought by bigger companies are either move to USA (Flickr, DabbleDB) or ended up in here with a possible more pressure to do more sales from the HQ; basically they have to prove that they worth and the goals being set by their big mothership is usually far more ambitious than their initial startup goals. By the way, gone is all the goodies that they offer to their employees; HQ wants some cost-cutting in-place pronto (I'm not making this up, go ask any companies that got bought, including those who got bought by Intel, Ericsson, Nokia, EA, BO/SAP, etc). 99Designs is based in Australia. Flippa, not sure. Yes, Matt is local in Vancouver, but what about the rest of his crews? Matt is also in the web design business, which, coincidentally, what Vancouver is more known of: lots of web-designers. It's hard to convince engineers to mingle with web-designers when the designers are leading the company. Jostle: http://www.jostleme.com/?p=788 http://www.jostleme.com/?p=788 (after 6 years now they're out of Stealth mode?) Sitemasher: http://www.techvibes.com/blog/sitemasher-sold-and-winding-down-but-to-whom http://www.techvibes.com/blog/sitemasher-sold-and-winding-do... (this was back in June 2010, no more info after that, website is down). I'm not sure how they fit with Salesforce.com if the rumors are true. BookRiff is based in Quebec. Grooster is in the same space with Groupon. Fotki is somewhere out there on the edge of the map (Maple Ridge). Ditto with Club Penguin, like 4 hours outside Vancouver. CounterPath has been around since 2002, current stock price: $1.35. We have lots of companies like this around Vancouver: been around for a while, stock price flat between tenth of cents to less than 2 dollars. NowPublic, a drupal based website, lay-off 8 out of 11 after being sold: http://www.techvibes.com/blog/nowpublic-lays-off-staff-and-likely-to-close http://www.techvibes.com/blog/nowpublic-lays-off-staff-and-l... Nitobi is in the JavaScript widget business (and consulting as well) CarrotLines: go check their website and judge them yourself. Apple in Vancouver: unsure what they do (mixed of iTunes Store, a bit of Apple iWork) , plus it's a very small branch, Apple can close it down very quickly and ask the engineers to move to Cupertino DabbleDB really got lucky. I don't know if they're even profitable back then. They seem to just slowly eating the investor money with no clear business vision. PlentyOfFish is Marcus baby with lots of ASP.NET hacked together quickly. He keeps all the money (like 10 millions of them?) and hire a Senior Software Engineer after a couple of profitable years (probably to fix the mess). I'm not suggesting that's a bad move, but by no means that make Vancouver a good thriving place for hiring talents when the owners are like that. I don't mean to sound negative or trying to air the dirty laundry at Vancouver. This is the culture we have right now and it's driving the engineering talents out to the east or south of the border. I've seen a lot of "social media" companies that were startups 2 years ago and died not too long ago. I've seen shady companies with no clear goal/business models. I've seen consulting companies betting their business in Drupal and Wordpress!. RainCity is going down hard. I've seen plenty people jumping to the iPhone bandwaggon and suddenly they're a startup with good business models? in Silicon Valley they might, but not in Vancouver. You can't pull that thing up here.

imack 16y ago

I really want to attend this but why does it have to happen on the thanksgiving long weekend? Or is that intentional since there will be a buffer day between this and the normal work week?

mikeyur 16y ago
The primary reason is so we can have a lot of the space. Most tenants of the space will clear out Friday and be back Tuesday (which also gives us time to clean up after the event). We wanted to do it the week before but the schedules didn't work out for the people helping, the space, etc. Shoot me an email (m@mikeyur.com) if you just want to drop in on one of the days.

lucisferre 16y ago

This looks great, though it's hard not to notice this is the same weekend as Startup Weekend which is at Bootup. Just a coincidence?

dannyrobinson 16y ago
Startup Weekend Vancouver is coordinated by Shauna, Melody, Lyndi from Seattle. They contacted us looking for space, and we said no problem. They're volunteering to make something cool happen, and how could that not be great. Actually, we're seeing more of that kind of thing happening in Vancouver, including the Hackathon. I wont be able to make it due to family commitments for Thanksgiving, but there will be a bunch of people there and I hear they're making a turkey! If you're in the same boat as me, let us know, and maybe we'll coordinate another weekend where more of us can be available. - I've been hackin Ruby on Heroku, and would like to show it off, so I'm in for sure. Of course, there are advantages to working together, but it's not necessary. The more of these events that happen the better and stronger our community is.
- lucisferre 16y ago
  I completely agree

mattped 16y ago

I'm Matthew Win Tibbals, pedophile

anonyaccount 16y ago

I'm Matt Tibbals, thief

projectileboy 16y ago

I've always loved cperciva's comments on this site. If he's involved, I can't believe it won't be a valuable session. I'd go if I was in Vancouver.

startupwiz 16y ago

Startup Weekend Vancouver is the same weekend and I'm going. You should combine. Hootsuite is sponsoring a big dinner. And the Startup Weekend network is pretty sweet... access to a group that runs startup events across the world. It's a pretty cool grassroots event. You can go to Startup Weekend for around $50 total (Startup Digest discount) which includes food + everything. Just curious, why did you plan an event the same time as they did--just to save $50 so you can buy your own food? Why not work together?

scronin 16y ago

Vancouver suffers from many problems but one really big one kills startups. Primarily, risk adversity is a common trait in investors and founders here. The Lean/MVP model does not lend itself to building BIG companies because its a bit (not totally) absurd to think that a company that needs 10-30 MIT gold standard engineers to conceive can be bootstrapped. Talking about the "startup scene" is a waste of time until real efforts are put together to make real companies that solve hard enterprise class problems or uncover 2-5 year forward looking, undeveloped markets. In America, as pointed out time and again by the upper echelon in the Vancouver startup circles, people actually take these forward looking risks because the payoff is just too sweet if it comes through. Bootup is notable for pushing the boulder up the hill, Danny R and Co. are a scrappy fighters thats for sure. For instance, even a SR&ED/IRAP intensive startup with a potential BIG idea (which is a stunning program @fiveo from the standpoint of the unemotional-observational economist) meets the common phrases that investors in Vancouver rely on to skate away. "its too early" "i need to see a working prototype making profit with tons of traction" "its not scalable". And kudos to them, they worked damn hard to build a life(style) here and don't want to burn their precious money into cinders. As a proven and skilled technician, I can say that I have met many talented PhD's and engineers in Vancouver, now in Palo Alto. Someone with 2-5 years success in technology is worth about 90k a year, and that wage is nigh unachievable in B.C. Too often we leave for the states, myself included, because their are too many tagalongs who don't actually understand the minutiae involved in how specific technologies create value across international markets. Too many evangelists and mentors, not enough mature engineers who work with tenacity, intensity ,focus and audacity. Perhaps this type of discussion can be better studied by a thought experiment. How would you start a company like the awesome Palantir Inc in Vancouver? Give us a thoughtful, unbiased analysis that spells out to investors the reduction of risk and the chance to make a 10X exit in a tough hostile and messy business environment. This is a good case study for MBA types.