Startup Open House — Ottawa Edition
Fewer, Larger Companies Made For a Different Experience
Unlike other Canadian cities, startup open house took place in Ottawa on November 29 this year, and with only a handful of organizations participating in 2 separate zones:
KANATA:
1. Martello
2. The Better Software Company
3. ProntoForms
4. You.i TV
5. L-Spark (Incubator)
DOWNTOWN OTTAWA:
6. Klipfolio
7. PageCloud
8. Shopify
9. SurveyMonkey
The Kanata portion was held in the afternoon and the downtown portion was held at night making it easy to attend all different venues. Busses were also provided.
The first thing that hits you when you go to any of these companies is that many of them are pretty well established compared to what you might expect at Startup Open House. ProntoForms for example was established more than 15 years ago under the name TrueContext, SurveyMonkey has offices all over the world, and Shopify is publicly traded. Not exactly looking for seed money.
On the other hand, The Better Software Company, Klipfolio and certainly PageCloud are smaller, younger and do have more of a startup feel to them both in the layout of their offices and the work culture within them. However they are all up and running, and have both funding and revenue. Impressive!
Of this group, PageCloud is the smallest with just 22 employees, however they are experiencing hockey stick growth and they hosted their portion of the event in their new offices in the Byward Market, which they have not even moved into yet! Very cool new space that will eventually hold up to 65 staff, triple what they have today.
I spoke with Klipfolio CEO Allan Wille at length while visiting their downtown office and he gave me the lowdown on the Ottawa startup scene. As you might expect, there is a lot of collaboration and sharing of knowledge among the companies in this space and among the leaders of these companies as well. Secondly, the competition for talent is scary, saying “We made an offer recently to a developer right out of school, and he had competing offers from IBM, Adobe, Shopify and other companies in the US. Just nuts!”
And speaking of nuts… my first stop was in Kanata at the Better Software Company. These guys are really disrupting the market for software used by small and medium sized businesses. I spoke with their CMO Chris Neil, and no he did not challenge me to a hockey fight. Instead he spoke about all the things they are doing to build automation and marketing campaigns in the US, where they do 95% of their business. What part of that is nuts you may ask? Well, while we were chatting, we were actually interrupted by a baby kangaroo!
Of course, a day of networking among startups wouldn’t be complete without a well deserved drink at the local pub… I stopped in at the Lowertown Brewery that evening only to find it overrun with VCs! I wasn’t expecting that!
It turns out the pub had 2 private events going on that night. The people from Startup Open House were invited to come for 8:00PM. I arrived about 8:10, only to find there was almost no room left inside the bar. The other event, an opening cocktail reception for SaaS North had already filled the entire room! Let the networking begin!
Overall, it was certainly a different experience from Montreal’s event back in September. However the spirit of collaboration and innovation is clearly also present in Ottawa’s tech community. They are growing and in many cases growing very fast. Perhaps a little friendly competition between the 2 cities would be a good thing!
