My enduring memory of the two days I spent last week with the Sydney startup community will be the sight of two developers setting up a chat room for the community as one event was breaking up.
On Friday, we held an Entrevestor Luncheon sponsored by BDO Canada at the Verschuren Centre at Cape Breton University. It was followed by brief presentations from seven of the winners of the first two Spark Cape Breton startup competitions. (See accompanying story.)
I’ve written recently about the number of companies being launched in Cape Breton, but spending time in the area showed me the people and business dynamic behind the numbers. What I found was a core of new companies that are preparing to launch their product or raise money. Some are even attracting talent to the Sydney area. And I found a remarkably energetic group of tech entrepreneurs.
Consider the Entrevestor Luncheon itself. The goal of our lunches is to get people in the community together to discuss issues that could improve the ecosystem. There’s no keynote speaker – just a group discussion. We’d hosted four of these events before, one in each provincial capital in the region, and we’d had 40 to 50 people at each one.
About 100 people turned out to the Sydney luncheon, and a large proportion of them participated in the conversation. The common challenges of finding talent and capital featured prominently in the discussion and there were a couple of novel suggestions about finding talent.
Lokol.me – one of the winners of the recent Spark Cape Breton competition – has launched goCapeBreton.com, a local site that includes content provided by the community. The site includes a page where employers or jobseekers can post their details, which could help solve the problems in finding the right employees.
One speaker, A.J. Fraser also suggested members of the Cape Breton startup community set up a slack channel, a sort of chat room, to post jobs and work together to solve common challenges. By the time the meeting broke up, he and fellow techie D. Darren MacDonald had got out their laptops and set up the channel. It was done by the time the Spark demo day started.
The Spark demo day highlighted one interesting feature of the Cape Breton startup community. It’s beginning – just beginning – to attract people to the area. Sona Nanotech, which is producing non-toxic gold nano-rods for the medical industry, has moved three PhDs to the company headquarters.
And Shout CEO Daniel Faria, a native of Portugal, became the seventh immigrant approved under the federal government’s Startup Visa program when he moved his company from Boston to Sydney. Shout is a social network in which people within a specific geographic distance of each other can link up.
The startup ecosystem is continuing to develop. University of Cape Breton is now accepting applications for the second year of its UIT program – a course in technology and entrepreneurship. Spark Cape Breton has opened applications for its third year. And Sydney will soon be home to its own tech incubator.
My own opinion is that the next step for Cape Breton is to become more involved in the larger startup movement in Atlantic Canada. The Sydney metro area has a population of more than 100,000 and there are tremendous coders, business development people and mentors in the city. The Atlantic startup community overall will be richer when there’s a greater exchange of talent and support.
