Who You Calling A Jesse?

Over the past week we tried something different at VeloCity – we opened up the term not with speakers but instead engaged the students in a serious of brainstorming evenings followed by a weekend focused on starting their startup. Amongst the group discussions, team formation, development, and business planning have been a number of local entrepreneurs that have wandered around the residence talking to students and offering some insights—at least one mentor really enjoyed the experience.

The goal for the week evolved a bit but what I wanted to do is give all 65 students at the residence an opportunity to participate early on by challenging them to have a pitch and a demo by Sunday night. Keeping in mind that most (if not all) of the students here have never had an opportunity to work towards building a business with their peers.

The result? About 50 of the 65 students at VeloCity participated this weekend in fleshing out some ideas and most of the teams actually built a usable application. One of them, the room booking application, will be used at VeloCity starting this week!

At the moment I am a bit tired from the 80+ hour work week to write a big post but I can confidently say that we have exceeded out goals for this week and moved VeloCity clearly away from simply a space for innovation to a community that is actually doing something.

Over on the VeloCity blog is a request for support from students at U of Waterloo for what we are calling a Centre for Student Innovation. The idea is to provide an office somewhere on campus that is more accessible to students that we could offer things like co-working, office hours for off campus entrepreneur resource/mentors, and find out more about the amazing entrepreneurial community here in Waterloo. Sorta like a VeloCity club office of sorts.

What we need are email from U of Waterloo students(to velocity at uwaterloo.ca) in support of this idea. It seems a bit crazy to think we need that but we really do as there are a lot of good groups on campus competing for very limited office space. I think VeloCity has the best idea but I am biased. It would be great (and easier) if a few really successful entrepreneurial UW Alumni wanted to maybe donate some resources to expand or build something for VeloCity, any out there reading my blog?? ;)

Until those investors arrive, we do need those emails to make that happen. Please spread the word, retweet, make a facebook group in support!

In our team meeting on Friday we were throwing around some initial feedback we heard on a number of things and the following analogy was discussed:

Deciding to live in VeloCity is like joining a varsity team. You have to commit to being an entrepreneur; balance the demands of academics with developing your skills and learn to place entrepreneurship on the same level as academics.

This makes a lot of sense to me. If you are on a varsity sports teams there are set practice times, expectations on training, and expectations on how you perform in your academics. Sometimes the team needs will conflict with academic or personal needs but all members of the team figure out a way to balance it all.

As a student and an entrepreneur it doesn’t seem to be a whole lot different from being on a team. If you don’t put in the time in practice and developing your skills you aren’t going to perform. So what would the core skills be? At VeloCity I see the opportunity to work on the following three skills:

• networking and communicating your ideas (and/or pitching)
• taking risks and managing risks
• ability to prioritize tasks and doing what it takes to complete them (Waterloo students are exceptionally good at this, generally speaking)

Working on these skills is not something you can do just when you have time. You must to have the passion and the drive to create opportunities and take advantage of the opportunities that are created at VeloCity for you.

No surprise the analogy came from Sean Van Koughnett (the guy who made VeloCity happen) who spent many years committed to varsity Basketball at Waterloo… and from what I hear he was pretty good ;)

The fall term at VeloCity kicks off with a one day conference that aims to set the tone for the term and introduce the students here to some of the community’s greatest assets—the people. Speakers for the day include:

• Ali Asaria, Well.ca
• David Crow, Microsoft BizSpark
• Ilya Grigorik, PostRank.com
• Jacqui Murphy, TechCapital
• Steve Lightstone, Corner Office Leads

Along with some folks from PriceWaterHouseCoopers the day should be filled with some great conversations. We start off at 9:30am with a breakfast and close out the day by 3:30pm and the event is taking place in RCH. We do have tickets available to non-VeloCity residents with different rates for VeloCity Alumni, students, and community folks. The spots are limited so please only register if you are sure you can come.

Since I have something to do with the organization of the one day conference I am trying to make this as unconferencey as possible but we do have an agenda (will post the PDF soon). There is also a new VeloCity site coming next week—which is where stuff like this will be posted as well.

Starting in September is the first full term that Virginia and I will be able to guide how things work at VeloCity. I am really excited to change things up a little and offer some events that I think are more inline with what the outside-the-uni startup community is use to seeing.

Some things we are keeping:

• Startup conference on the first Saturday of the term. We are calling it VeloCity 101.
• Bringing in speakers when they are available to offer some insights on experiences.
• Working with community partners to help enhance the overall experience and resources available to students at VeloCity.

Some things that are sort of new:

• More things that involve whiteboards and building ideas into products.
  
  • A regular schedule: Alternating Monday nights with Tuesday mornings and offering a brainstorming/social/discussion on the Monday night and a breakfast networking/talk event on Tuesday.
  • The first Saturday conference will try and reduce the lectures and engage in conversation.
• Invite the larger community to participate and getting the students in VeloCity to participate in the community events.
  
  • This means demos, talks, etc.

…and so far that is all we have. We will need to react to the needs of the group but my goal this term is to have 100% of the students in the residence actively engaged in the discussion and over 66% building something… even if it is simply a lemonade stand in the SLC.

I had some fun with the Spring term even though we were still trying to find our bearings jumping into a program that is moving so quickly but I am really looking forward to the fall term.

The Canada 3.0 conference wrapped up the second day with speeches from the CEO of RIM, the Chair of the CRTC, and others all with a strong patriotic message as well as a surprising amount of useful vision and position stuff specifically from the the Chair of the CRTC. Day 2 did, sadly enough, start off with some rather dry and boring stuff that made for a fun game of buzz word bingo.

Between the speeches I attended the talk that included Waterloo’s own Jacqui Murphy from TechCapital. She took full advantage of having a mic and an audience to make it clear that startups shouldn’t be about seeking funding or exits with big companies buying you. You should dream big and focus on revenue generation. Some great messages to bring back to VeloCity I think.

The round table discussions in the afternoon felt like they lacked energy and urgency. The big rooms and groups just didn’t work well for that but I did meet some really interesting folks around my table. If nothing else, that was a huge bonus.

Overall, the strength of the Canada 3.0 conference was in the diversity of the folks that attended. There were some very obvious complaints about the lack of students attending but we really need to stop idealizing students, if they are interested they will come—if they aren’t there they really don’t care…. yet. There were enough student volunteers to suggest to me that the ones that are interested knew about it and made the effort to attend.

What I think was really missing was the younger entrepreneurs and leaders on the panels. Not the under-25s that the over 50’s marvel at, but the 25-40 yr old professional crowd that have the skills, experience, and know how to really push Canada’s ‘digital economy.’ I would have also liked to see more of an unconference stream. Being a Barcamp/Startup organizer I am already a fan of the format but we needed more conversation over round table sticky notes. I will even volunteer to organize that for next time ;)

I should also point out the technology situation. Stratford doesn’t have 3G, the wireless was overwhelmed by all the mobile devices and laptops begging for data (but we got the tweets out!), innovative things weren’t set up like streaming panels to the media room at the very least. Sure Igloo put together a good site but that was impressive a couple years ago, if this is ‘3.0’ then it should push the boundaries.

Honestly, it was an amazing conference. This should be the start of something… keep the buzz going, follow up with the business cards you collected, and start thinking big!

The Canada 3.0 started today in Stratford Ontario (45km west into farm fields from Waterloo) and surpassed a lot of people’s expectations I think. The morning had the typical political talk you would expect when government folks are given a microphone along with the University of Waterloo making it clear it is committed to the Stratford campus and all the potential developing such a campus may hold. What followed was a day of great conversation about communities, what to do to foster entrepreneurial talent, mobile technology, and more.

It was high level discussion mostly but it was honest discussion focused not on how great Canada is but where Canada needs work. Have a look at the twitter stream under the #can30 hash tag for some great bits of information. Day 2 promises to be more interactive with work groups tackling some of the issues presented today.

I spent a lot of they at the VeloCity booth talking to people that are interested in the idea and colleagues at other schools that are a bit envious that Waterloo has such a residence. I will be around for day 2, stop by the booth and say hi!

After a few weeks of going back and forth with all the internal workings it is now official, I am one of two new Associate Directors at U of Waterloo’s incubator 2.0 residence, VeloCity. I join Virginia McLellan (the other Associate Director) and Sean (Director) as the new team to really push things into something really great (and fun).

The residence has come a long way in last 8 months since it started taking on students. With more investment in people to help push the direction we plan on building more of a community around VeloCity, trying out new things, and seeing where we can go. It is very exciting to be involved in such an innovative and fast moving project.

Can’t wait to get started.