Canadians unite in Silicon Valley
C100 is getting the love from Atlantic Canada. As you’ll see from the story, most of the excitement is around providing Canadian companies access to the VC community in Silicon Valley.
“Because of the C100 I got access to several Venture Capital Firms at the partner level,” he says.
“That’s invaluable.”
For an innovative New Brunswick-based startup, Martell says the network of Canadians could help him set an entrepreneur from his home province up with prominent people in San Francisco for mutually beneficial interactions.
“For a New Brunswick company to know they can land in Silicon Valley and talk with the top VCs I think it’s pretty awesome,” he says.
Without connections like this he says a company from Atlantic Canada wouldn’t be able to get much attention in the bay area.
“If you’re not here and you’re cold emailing people there’s no way (you will get attention). It’s just going to go dead,” he says. “There’s so much noise here they need to use peer recommendations as a signal.”
I agree that is probably the sexiest part of what C100 does, but it is a pretty small part.
I think a much more interesting part of what we do is provide real business-relevant mentoring to Canadian IT companies. (Although I’ll admit, I’m a little biased here!)
😉
The C100 Mentoring lets start-ups pose problems and ask questions to execs who have been battle hardened in the by the tough competition (but very agreeable weather!) of Silicon Valley.
We’ll be holding our next mentoring session in Sunnyvale in a couple of weeks with some great Canadian companies in online video, healthcare IT, alternative energy and more.
I’ll post a recap of the session once its wrapped up.
A Musing 
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