Friday April 23rd noon-9pm at the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo we’re hosting the community for live streaming event coverage of the conference happening in San Francisco.

Check out the speaker schedule and Register for free now!

Startup Lessons Learned is the first event designed to unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup. The goal for this event is to give practitioners and students of the lean startup methodology the opportunity to hear insights from leaders in embracing and deploying the core principles of the lean startup methodology. The day-long event will feature a mix of panels and talks focused on the key challenges and issues that technical and market-facing people at startups need to understand in order to succeed in building successful lean startups.

Join the startup community at the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo to share the ideas explored at the conference via the live stream.

This is an incredibly positive step since it frees capital to flow to early stage Canadian startups from US venture capitalists and individual investors.  That’s the win.  Previously, for US VCs all the lawyering and paperwork made doing a deal in Canada burdensome if not downright impossible since the filing requirements extended to the original investors into the VC fund and can number in the hundreds or thousands. Not to mention anything about funds of funds where the complexity compounds. This made the deal count low and pushed the deal size up, way up to a point where most US VCs only considered investing in a much later stage, lower risk and higher placement expansion round. This of course ads insult to injury since most Canadian “early stage” VCs have the risk profile of a pensioner.

Early stage investments in Canadian startups have been coming from from government grants and from individual angels and a growing number or organized angel networks. These groups have been carrying the load for what would be/could be an institutional investment industry here.  I recently watched companies pitch an angel network for million dollar rounds and was left wondering where the VCs were?

The audio for the webinar is available as well.

I have to admit that the victory is somewhat bittersweet.  Sweet because it is progress, bitter because it took so long to fix and there is so much more to be done.  I hope with this one step at least more young companies find the funding they need which will inevitably grow the ecosystem. Canada needs many more startups, more learning and evolution.  The best way I can imagine to learn it is to do it. Hopefully this will help.

I’m talking to some VC friends in Boston this week and I’ll hopefully get their take.  I’ll update when I have.

You often hear people focusing on the internal parts of agile.  Often these are the things the scrum master is supposed to facilitate during a sprint like daily stand-up etiquette, burn down charts, planning poker, retrospective games etc.  These are all useful tools but ignore the elephant in the room if you happen to be a startup: how to you build the backlog?

Even more, how do you build a backlog that will define and evolve a sustaining product in a profitable market before you run out of cash?!  That, my friends is the primary challenge of a startup and so many of the rituals of agile development alone wont hep you with.   I don’t intend to diminish the value of something I’ve spent the last decade learning and practicing, but in the last few years I’ve learned where it belongs relative to other important factors that can’t be ignored. If you’ve ever been the Product Owner I’m sure you’ll agree that it take a hell of a lot of effort to build and maintain a backlog including the efforts of many people.

There has been little in the way of process to address this fundamental challenge in a way that was as compatible with the style of agile development – at least until lately.  This is why LeanStartups and Customer Development resonated so strongly for me.

Is your dev team immortalized on streetview?  I think not!

Here are a few points that stood out for me:

• “Our economy is shifting away from jobs based largely on physical skills or repetitive tasks to ones that require analytical skills and judgment.”

• “…there is considerable pressure on governments to protect the past and to undertake bailouts – to preserve what we have during this time of uncertainty. But this protective approach can only forestall the inevitable. There is a better way”

• “This must be more than a government effort. … Businesses should make these choices for their own benefit, not in response to government directives.”

• “The evidence shows we rank well behind a set of peer regions in North America and  behind the best global peers in economic output per person – perhaps the single best measure of our overall economic prosperity. And in recent decades, we have seen our advantage erode from near parity with these global leaders”

• “Ontario is relatively prosperous; but our assessment is that we have settled for a level of prosperity that sells our province short. While it is not comforting to admit, we have in fact lost ground against the very best economies over the past twenty years…our citizens’ creative skills are less developed than those of the world’s leading jurisdictions”

Lots of this report is motherhood and apple pie, and sounds very unsurprising coming from Richard Florida who’s creative class evangelism is not new – Revenge of the Squelchers.  The sections “Raise the Creativity Content of Occupations” and “Capturing Ontario’s Diversity Advantage” highlight some critical insights: Ontario needs to more closely align its values with creative values.  There are no programs, incentives, tax reform or anything else that will overcome overly conservative and stodgy social attitudes.

“A place like Pittsburgh or Rochester can have substantial  technology, but will fail to grow if talent leaves, and it lacks the openness and tolerance to attract new people.”

Ontario needs to be a magnet for attracting talent not a place young talented creatives see in their rear view mirror on their way to more attractive places.  Address the brain drain problem!

Read about it on Michaels blog.