One week from today is our 24th rendering of DemoCampGuelph. It’s cool that this event is old enough to drink but we’re creeping up on 30 now. I’m not sure how I feel about that. If you haven’t been, here are a few key points about the event…. Free to Attend It’s free and you do […]
Failure. It seems we talk about it more than success in the startup world. Mark Evans suggested that in “Canada, unfortunately, failure is a four-letter word”. Our fear of failing here prevents us from reaching, from leaping, from succeeding. Some other guy suggests that safety nets are for failing. The idea that allowing yourself the […]
Public tickets sales are now available for this year’s Ontario Startup Train! You can purchase your ticket here, if you don’t already have one. For the third year in a row, we’re chartering our own private VIA Rails cars to pack them with Ontario entrepreneurs, investors and other startup junkies. We’re travelling to Montreal to […]
Personally I’ve had a long standing policy to not respond to unsolicited Requests For Proposals, known as RFP’s. In the early days, I couldn’t give you a sound reason for my avoidance. I’m sure my main reason was that I didn’t feel confident I could craft a worthy response to your 64 page fancy-pants RFP […]
Do you sign Non Disclosure Agreements(NDAs)? In general, I’m told most funding folks do not. I have signed many but I do so cautiously. There are many opinions on signing and not signing. I tend to view it as a red flag when early stage projects request that I sign an NDA before we’ve met, […]
Our upcoming Python On Rails is having a bit of an identity crisis. Is it a peer-based, on-train, mini conference for software developers, that happens to arrive in Montreal at the start of PyCon? Or is it a means of travel exclusively for PyCon attendees? Our previous StartupTrains have proven that our on-train events have their own value, […]
While it can be fun the first few trips, travelling for business and conferences generally sucks. It’s a necessary evil in order to get yourself to an awesome conference like PyCon. We’re hoping to fix that for a small group of people heading to PyCon in Montreal this year. We’ve chartered our own VIA Rail […]
So founders suck at grammar, or at least I do. We host a weekly event in our space that we named Founder’s Club. It’s a peer based group of individuals who are starting something, or about to. Actually a lot of members are in between startups as well. Ultimately our event is group therapy for […]
Have you ever created and maintained a Product Roadmap? It’s an excellent tool that allows a team, or the execs, to plot the precise path a software development team is heading. You then simply share the roadmap with the team and they start following the directions that will take them on their way to a […]
PyCon is the “largest annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language”. The Montreal community convinced the PyCon conference to step outside of the US for the first time in it’s history. PyCon is being hosted in Montreal Canada in 2014 and 2015. With an unique opportunity like that, we jumped at the chance to extend […]