Demo Day and the Future of Atlantic Canada
MONCTON—NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair was in Moncton yesterday, talking about changes to employment insurance, as though New Brunswick were the only logical place to make that campaign announcement.
But let’s not pick on Mulcair. Justin Trudeau came to New Brunswick to announce his EI policy while Stephen Harper, in one of his hermetically sealed campaign events in the region, talked about fisheries.
EI and fish.
In 2015.
It’s not that those issues aren’t important or relevant to Atlantic Canada. They are. But too often it seems that the region falls into a “policy ghetto” that tends to exclude the big drivers of jobs and wealth creation from the conversation.
The leaders of our national political parties would have been well served by spending some time at the Capitol Theatre in Moncton Tuesday night. It was Demo Day for Propel ICT, Atlantic Canada’s startup accelerator. A dozen entrepreneurs pitched their ideas and themselves to a room filled with potential investors.
There was a lot of pressure, and the tension was high. Yet there was still a sense of community more than competition. Sure investment dollars are scarce, but it’s not hard to see that the East Coast startup scene is markedly less mercenary than that found in Silicon Valley.
If Mr. Mulcair and the rest had spent some time with this group, they might have gotten a better sense about where Atlantic Canada is going, instead of focusing their policies on where it has been.
At Demo Day, no one talked about pogey. Or fish.
Instead, with only three minutes to make their pitch, these entrepreneurs spoke confidently about big ideas and big ambitions. Sure, let’s live here in Atlantic Canada, but let’s set our sites on a global market.
These dozen companies help repudiate the idea that you can’t create a successful startup on the East Coast. Though, for anyone paying attention, the billion dollars spent by Salesforce and IBM to acquire New Brunswick startups Radian6 and Q1 Labs a few years ago should have put that to rest.
“This has become the premier startup event for the region. Look around this room and you see companies from all over Atlantic Canada,” said Patrick Keefe, a partner with Halifax-based venture capital firm Build Ventures. “This is the first year the event is pan-Atlantic, it’s a good example of what’s going on in the startup ecosystem in general.”
New Brunswick sent five companies to the Demo Day stage: Fredericton’s Liv9, offering cloud-based patient engagement for retail pharmacies, and SimpTek which helps electrical utilities better understand their customers. Moncton’s Ongozah helps organizations plan and organize projects. And Saint John’s *ELLA is a mobile platform that helps women sell unused fashion items, while the Port City’s SITEFLO makes performance improvement software for the packaging industry.
The other companies from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland were tackling everything from social media management solutions to managing contracts. Lisa Gillam, a music teacher and founder of St. John’s-based MusicEdZone.com even sang her pitch, in what may have been a world first.
New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant attended Demo Day. Innovation is crucial to the province’s economic future, he notes.
“It’s incredible to see the people from the different provinces working together and making sure we are creating jobs and having best environment for innovation to happen,” said Gallant, who tasked himself with the province’s innovation file.
The entrepreneurs at Demo Day mark another step in the slow turn of East Coast culture, of people saying no to the “safe” job (with a pension!) with the government or the power company. Rather these are people who would rather strike out on their own and create something new, something better.
Will they all succeed? Some will, and some may not. And that’s ok.
At the Billion Dollar Lunch hosted earlier in the day by Propel ICT and 3Plus, startup gurus Sean Wise and Brad Feld, an early investor in Fitbit, Makerbot, and Zynga, underscored one of the central tenets of startup culture: fail faster.
Businesses are built differently today than even a decade ago. As Wise and Feld noted, customers help define the product. It is a collaborative process. Now with the “lean startup” approach, a company can build and launch a product in a matter of weeks for less than $50,000. They will take what they learn from that early product and refine it based on real-life customer feedback.
For Dave Grebenc, CEO of Saint John-based Innovatia and the Chair of Propel ICT, there is still room to expand as the organization seeks to help launch 419 companies in the region over the next few years.
“There are a lot of ideas in parts of Atlantic Canada we haven’t been to yet, so we need to continue to grow it.”
East Coast startup godfather Gerry Pond was one of the original founders of Propel ICT, which started in Saint John 11 years ago. “Now we are truly Atlantic wide,” said Pond. He predicts that Atlantic Canada will soon produce its first “unicorn” – a startup that reaches a valuation of over one billion dollars. “It’s going to be a tough grind, but there are some very good companies out there.”
Pond says that unicorn will happen by 2019. Why that date? “There’s a special reason for that timing. I turn 75 that year, and hope to retire.”