STIRR Is Coming To Canada!

Earlier this year, I attended a STIRR event in the Valley - and was thoroughly impressed. In my view, three factors made the event great:

1. The Entrepreneur-to-Service Provider Ratio: The event was free for founding teams, engineers, angels, VCs, accredited investors, and press. Service providers had to pay $40. The result: lots of ideas shared between smart & energetic people.



2. Short pitches from new companies and sponsors. How short? 60 seconds! If you can't get your point across in 60 seconds, it's probably not worth listening to anyways. All companies and sponsors did a great job, and had no problem making their products & services sound interesting and compelling.



3. Pleasant atmosphere. The event was held in a casual atmosphere, where attendees could order drinks, munch on some tasty appetizers, and mingle as they please.

I was so impressed, that I asked STIRR co-founder Sanford Barr if he was interested in bringing to STIRR to Canada. Today, I'm very pleased to announce that STIRR Canada will be launching in Calgary in 2008! A consortium consisting of CTI, UTI and SAIT has stepped up as our first partner with $30,000 in funding (press release here). Special thanks to Darren Massey and the rest of the consortium for putting their trust in us.

To complete the picture, we're looking for two additional partners to help us match the $30,000 in funding. We'll also be recruiting some of the industry's best advisors, mavens, and connectors onto our operations team. So far, interest on both fronts has been very strong, and that's no mystery - Calgary simply has a voracious appetite for world-class tech gatherings - as indicated by the flood of registrations for the Guy Kawasaki event on December 14th, and a fantastic event held by Cambrian House and Material Insight earlier this year.