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Ottawa Founders & Funders Wrap-Up

The inaugural Founders & Funders Ottawa was a great example of entrepreneurial power networking. I personally don’t like “fashion show” events where founders pitch a panel of funders. I have a feeling that not many startups get funded that way and it just gets in the way of person-to-person networking, which is what F&F Ottawa excelled at.

Allan Isfan (founder of FaveQuest) did a great job organizing the event and encouraging/forcing people to talk to each other. Speaking of which, here is a brief rundown of some of the folks there:

• Ian Graham from the CodeFactory, an Ottawa co-working space that I am a member of
• Mike Ball from LoyaltyMatch, a cool service to trade rewards points
• Ian Barker from Symtext, an e-content platform for distance educators
• Adrian Salamunovic from dna11 which uses DNA to create ultra-cool artwork
• Jason Kealey from LavaBlast, a software platform for mid-sized franchises
• Andrew Seely from Therapeutic Monitoring Systems
• Trevor Stewart from Hummingbird Music, a platform for booking live shows
• Aydin Mirzaee from Chide.it
• Nick Quain from CellWand
• Luc Levesque from TravelPod who created the life-destroyingly addictive TravellerIQ on Facebook

It was nice to see a variety of funding sources including a Boston VC (Sigma Partners), government funding, Angels and debt funding sources. I also think it’s encouraging that founders and funders travelled to Ottawa from Toronto, Montreal and Boston. I don’t think any Canadian city can sustain its own technology ecosystem so people need to start enlarging their networks.