The afternoon sessions on day 2 were great. I focused on probably the smallest room and it allow for more intimate discussions:

How to Pitch VCs with Rick Segal and Susan Dingwall Williams

I read both Rick and Susan’s blogs regularly and I was excited to see both of them. Rick did a great job of providing an quick overview of how to pitch VCs and the keys to get VC interest. I didn’t there was really anything new in his presentation was but it was great to see everything outline. Some key highlights for me were the time lines for
funding, 6 months to raise, 18 months to provide and the rinse and repeat until exit. And ALL VCs are looking for an exit plan. Rick also spoke briefly about Angels in Canada, and believed their issued approximately $21M last year in capital. Many of the Angel funded projects were not practical for VCs.

Build a Team, Build a Culter with Mark Dowds

I was seriously impressed with the setup and process that Mark went through in this session to start the discussion. The audience was divided into groups of 4-5 people and each group member was given a hidden agenda. In many cases these agenda conflicted and the group was asked to develop different aspects of their companies strategy of
vision. In my group was some members were focused on having fun and others were focused on results, and punishing for bad results, it ended up being a funny corporate vision of ‘Have fun performing, or else…” The process was great and it was interesting to see how each group tried to solve these differences.

Building a community with Kate Trgovac

Kate had the unlucky position of closing off the conference but she did a great job of creating a discussion around building an online community. She used several current examples, like flickr, or facebook and was able to help define what is an online community and what is a platform. It helped that there was also many people in audience that
were actively in the process of trying to build a community.