Waterloo Tech Startup Resources and Links
Waterloo is a great place for startups, although its no silicon valley we do have a thriving community here of startups, established tech companies, and great events and organizations to support entrepreneurship, as well as two incredible universities including the University of Waterloo. I try to stay in touch with whats going on in the area, and although I often feel like I know all the names of the important people, and have heard of all the startups, I still get pleasantly surprised when I discover a new one, or find a new local resource.
Here are some links to local news, events, organizations, bloggers and companies that I follow. I'd love to hear some of yours too!
(If I get any information wrong feel free to let me know, sorry!)
Organizations, News and Events
- Communitech - great local organization promoting technology and innovation in our region
- Communitech blog
- Waterloo tech tv - a great site with videos of local leaders speaking including: Ted Hastings (Moxy Media), John Baker (Desire2Learn), Dan Latendre (Igloo), Mike Worry (Nuvation, I worked there as a coop!), Ali Asaria (Well.ca), Omar Ismail (ProductWiki) and more
- Entrepreneur Week - November 16-22 this year, speakers, events, networking!
- They organize lots of peer-peer groups, tech breakfasts and more
- Membership is free for startups with fewer than 5 employees
- The Accelerator Centre - a great place for short term leases with shared facilities for startups, and hub of events and activities
- Entrepreneur's Edge
- An annual 5 day course (going on right now!), with great topics such as product management, teams and boards, sales financing, investors, pitching
- Unconferences
- Startup Camp Waterloo (google group)
- Demo Camp Guelph
- I haven't been to one of these yet, but I gather the first rule is you have to demo :)
- Other events
- Dev House Waterloo - (google group) run and hosted by Ilya Grigork (of PostRank), no business, just tech/code, hope to attend next month
- Startup Drinks Waterloo - just what the name says, organized by Dan Silivestru
- Red Canary - not just Waterloo, but regional (across Canada) tech news, jobs and more
- See their hot starts in Waterloo survey
- Kitchener-Waterloo Startup Index by techvibes
- Updated for november
- Gary Will - publishes his Tech Digest of whats going on in the area
- StartupNorth - canadian focused
- Waterloo Tech News - aggregation of local news
- Velocity - a residence incubator for student startups at the University of Waterloo
- Update: techstartup.ca is a new site that aggregates news, blogs, twitter from local people involved in tech startups
Bloggers
- Jeff Fedor - tech entrepreneur of ParkVu (previously of Primal Fusion, Covarity...)
- Jim Estill - blogs about time management and leadship (previously ran Synnex)
- Ilya Grigorik - founder of PostRank, writes great technical articles about the latest tech including Ruby and Cloud Computing
- Joseph Fung - part time entrepreneur, seems to be involved in everything around here :)
- Jesse Rodgers - involved with Velocity and StartupCampWaterloo
- Declan Wheelan - local Agile and TDD evangelist and trainer
- Ali Asaria - founder of well.ca
- Peter Sweeney (the founder of Primal Fusion) blogs on their ideas blog
- Mark Connolly - designer at Primal Fusion
- Robert Barlow-Busch - user experience at Primal Fusion, also organizes local user experience group
There are many more great bloggers out there in KW, these are just a few that I identify with as either particularly interesting or influential within the local community.
