Montreal Tech Watch

Rick Segal, partner at JLA Ventures, a fund investing in emerging tech companies, is touring Canadian cities in a series of “VC Roundtables” to meet entrepreneurs and local startup community. The goal is to present and explain what really is a technology investor; and also present documents and information about the investment process.

The planned date for Montréal is Aril 16th, from 4.30 to 6.40pm.

This was the proposed format for the Roundtable:

The format will be something like this – and I’m open to suggestions:

• Evening, about 3 hours in length
• Informal/Free (super important!)
• Small Groups (super important!)
• Information on VC/Angels and the process.
• Sample Term sheets, documents, business plans, PowerPoints
• Example Pitch or Pitches to show what’s interesting/good/bad
• Open questions for a good chunk of time.

What it will not be:

• Demo/Startup/FooBar/Camp/Conference/MESH/MASH
• Me trashing your ideas
• You trashing somebody else’s ideas
• Three hours of me showing you PowerPoint slides

The hope is that at the end of the get together you will have:

• An understanding of my world
• A good set of reference documents/examples/materials
• Some of your top of mind questions answered
• A better feel for my industry and if raising third party capital is right for you.
• A good place to start

Here are some reasons why you might want to attend:
- it’s free and informal
- Rick Segal is one of the rare VCs who participate actively in the startup scene in Canada, he is an active blogger, sponsors and goes regularly to demoCamps, and is committed to support Canadia-based startups,
- you are planning to launch a startup, and looking to raise third-party capital,
- you might be an engineer/a tech guy, and clueless about term sheets and due diligence processes,
- you want to know how to approach angels and VCs and what kind of relationship to have with them,
- you want to know the business criterias (and other) that investors are looking for when investing

Registration is here. It is limited to 25 seats for each session.

There are also sessions in Ottawa on April 16th, and in Toronto the following day, if you can’t make it.