A group of 10 emerging and established tech startup founders and funders were invited to the dinner, hosted by STIRR Canada’s Patrick Lor and Claudia Moore. Among the companies represented were Acceleware, Calgary Scientific, VoodooPC (HP), Userful, and Evoco, as well as the evening’s sponsor Macleod Dixon.

Discussions covered a range of other topics including: best practices in working with international partners and resellers, startup culture, the ins and outs of tax credits and government funding, when to outsource, and more … talk continued on past dessert.

Some of the attendee feedback included:

• “It’s nice to have exposure to raw entrepreneurial spirit/DNA …”
• “I lost track of the time owing to the terrific conversation.”
• “I appreciated the small format discussion - and the ability to ask questions and share experiences.”
• “It was interesting hearing about the common issues all our companies suffer …”

More Founders’ Tables are planned for this summer, with a larger Tech Mixer planned for the fall. Stay tuned for dates, locations and times.

Following the success of our kick-off May 2008 STIRR Canada event (which hosted 50 Alberta-based guests) this July 2008 invitation-only dinner will return to the classic STIRR single-table gathering comprised of 10-12 founders of tech-driven companies.

FOR MORE DETAILS, please email: Info{at}stirr{dot}ca

If you’re not already a member of STIRR Canada, please complete the APPLICATION FORM.

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A range of Calgary-based events are planned for the coming year:

• A Founder’s Table will be held each month.
• Pitch Labs are planned for August, October, December, January, and February.
• Popular Tech Mixer main events will be held in September and February.
• STIRR Canada will also hold on-campus events for Calgary students this fall, as well as participating in various BarCamp and DemoCamp activities.

BarCamp Calgary breaks for lunch (left) and Nexopia Founder Timo Ewalds (right) chats with BarCamp attendees.

If you haven’t joined us before, STIRR’s ‘Hack’ talks are typically short 3-5 minute vignette’s about hard lessons turned into success from entrepreneurs who have felt the pain. Each time with give the Hack format to a new speaker it morphs a little to fit the topic. This time the VC’s turned it into more of a “do’s and don’ts” talk based on pitches they have received in the past. We encouraged stories of previous failures/deals they regret passing on, and there’s a hidden gem in Jeff Clavier’s talk right at the end: see if you can catch what deal he missed before he really groked the power of social networks a few years ago (hint: the company was sold to Yahoo).

Adeo Ressi (The Funded) and I spoke offline before the event and the stories he has to share are arresting and should be shared. He didn’t get into any detail in his talk, but we’ll invite him back to speak privately in the future so he can get deeper into the topic. For DealHacks, instead of a hack, Adeo riffed on the two VC talks before him.

Beyond the talks the crowd was great. There was a mix of pre-launch (Involver, Lipzoo, etc.), early stage (Mint, Satisfaction, Watercooler, Mixbook), post acquisition entrepreneurs (Mybloglog, etc). A huge round of thanks to everyone who made it special. If you have photos from the event, please tag them “stirr” and “dealhacks”.

Words of thanks to:

• First Round Capital for buying the first round of drinks (thanks Rob!)
• Sun Microsystems our Gold Sponsor for the evening. If you run a startup, check out their Startup Essentials program.
• Jeff Clavier, Rob Hayes and Adeo Ressi for great insights and keeping the crowd smiling.

Shout outs:

• JobScore has launched (run by STIRR co-founder Dan Arkind). It’s free and takes a bunch of pain out of the candidate sourcing process. Dan and the team have done a killer job, check it out.

Videos:

Jeff Clavier, SoftTechVC

Rob Hayes, FirstRound Capital

Adeo Ressi, The Funded

Photos from the event:

Participating companies included: Active Conversion, Broadramp, Calgary Scientific, Cambrian House, Cognera, CoolIT, Coril Holdings, Cornerstone Technologies, Datagardens, DirectVoxx, Dynastream, eSchedule, GamesCafe, iNovia Capital, Intervera, Loa Corporation, Mobovivo, Octane Venture Partners, Ph03nix New Media, Preo Software, Psyko Audio Labs … … Renoworks, Shopster, SpatialQ, StockVantage, StumbleUpon, Techvibes, Tynt, and Xtreme Technologies.

Calgary native, and StumbleUpon (acquired by Ebay) co-founder, Garrett Camp, talked about the ups and downs of his friends-and-family funded early startup days and how he ultimately moved to Silicon Valley to be closer to his advisors. He also revealed that his first investor was a StumbleUpon user from the Valley who simply contacted him by email.

Read the rest of the article and see more photos at STIRR Canada

DealHacks is SOLD OUT. Please join us next time. Add STIRR to your RSS reader or subscribe by email using the links to the right.

Adeo Ressi, Founder of The Funded, joins the lineup for STIRR’s DealHacks on Wed, May 14th.

Check out the Finalists here: http://women2.org

Limited tickets due to venue constraints. Tickets ARE going fast.

Get 30% off the entrepreneur ticket with coupon code “w2stirr” http://beyondthespark.eventbrite.com

Can’t make it for the entire conference but want to come in the afternoon to check out the pitches? Yes we have a ticket priced just for that too! Get your ticket now for Pitch 2008!


Have yourself an interactive lunch on Saturday.
Arrive a little earlier to the conference this Saturday and reserve your seat with one of our Lunch Leads. Meet Silicon Valley movers and shakers over an intimate lunch on Saturday during the conference!

Hear first-hand stories, have the chance to ask questions, and really dive deep into what you really want to know from these leading ladies (and a few good men).

Who’s coming for lunch?
- Chris Shipley (Founder, DEMO)
- Christine Herron (First Round Capital)
- Katherine Barr (Partner, MDV)
- Sundeep Ahuja (Co-Founder, richrelevance)
- Susas Lucas-Conwell (Executive Director, SD Forum)
- Surya Yalamanchili (Director, Marketing, LinkedIn)
- Will Bunker (Co-Founder and Principal, WhiteSpace Ventures)
- Alka Gupta (Managing Director, Ojas Group)
.…and many, many more

Check out the list of lunch leads http://women2SWIB.wikispaces.com

STIRR Canada launches its first event featuring Garrett Camp one of Calgary’s native sons and co-founder of StumbleUpon (recently acquired by Ebay). More details about the STIRR Canada dinner here.

STIRR Brings Back the Startup Mixer for 2008 with a Twist.

Join other founding teams for STIRR’s first Startup Mixer of 2008.

STIRR Celebrates It’s 3rd year with a twist on the FounderHacks series. This time we bring you two of the best early stage investors and a terrific founder for contrast in ‘Deal Hacks’. Each speaker will be sharing personal stories from the the investment side of the fence.

If you haven’t joined us before, STIRR brings together founding teams of startups to connect and forge relationships. (This isn’t a pitch session and please don’t attend if your only goal is to find funding.) We feature great short-talks from notable founders, investors, and key thought leaders around the globe. This isn’t a sit-down event.

On Stage:

Adeo Ressi, The Funded

Adeo is a serial entrepreneur. His most recent project The Funded still creates quite a stir on Sand Hill Road. Before The Funded, Adeo founded and sold casual gaming site Game Trust to RealNetworks. Adeo also serves on the board of the X Prize Foundation. More about The Funded and the 9 months of mystery after it’s launch in this article from Wired.

Jeff Clavier, SoftTechVC (Jeff is on the Right) - Photo courtesy of Brian Solis

Jeff Clavier is one of the most prolofic investors in Web 2.0, with over 40 deals executed in the last 4 years. After investing as a business angel for over 3 years, Jeff launched his $12M seed fund at the
TechCrunch40 conference in Sept 2007. He has since invested in 18 startups in social media, communities, search and discovering, gaming and advertising. A (too) frequent speaker at industry conferences, Jeff works and lives in Palo Alto with his wife and 2 children, and can be followed on twitter at twitter.com/JeffClavier.

Rob Hayes, FirstRoundCapital (Rob is on the left) - Photo courtesy of Duncan Davidson

Rob joined First Round Capital in 2006. Since joining he has led investments in companies including Mint.com, Xobni, and Get Satisfaction. Rob came to First Round Capital from Omidyar Network where he was their first venture investor. He led most of Omidyar Network’s initial venture capital deals and later built and ran the technology investing group.

This event kicks off STIRR’s 3rd year. We’re celebrating by returning to the site that reignited the Bay Area demo+mixer scene back in early 2006: Bistro 412 (formerly F&A’s). The venue has a beautiful back patio and we’ve reserved the whole space just for STIRR and we’ll be feeding everyone as usual.

Tickets:

http://dealhacks.eventbrite.com

Who should attend?

* Founding Teams of high-growth Internet, Mobile, Enterprise, Software related BioTech and Cleantech
* VCs
* Qualified Angels
* Top level engineering talent
* Press (must qualify for pass: press@stirr.net)

Some of the ticket, venue and food cost have been graciously underwritten by:

Sun Microsystems
http://www.sun.com/startup

Tickets for the event:

http://dealhacks.eventbrite.com

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