Montreal Tech Watch

Montreal is the best startup city in the world

By Heri Aug 1st 2010 in entrepreneurship

So it’s August 1st, middle of the summer and most of you are probably on a terrace, back or going to holidays, plus maybe a few hardcore techies still sleeping from a hard night coding (raise your hands hahaha)

Today we have a light and quite modest post I entitled “Montreal is the best startup city in the world”, since a few people on Hacker News were wondering what’s the best city to relocate if they can’t get a visa in the US. Here is what I wrote as a reply:

  • Strong, diverse and friendly startup scene. From 2 to 5 startup events every week. see calendar (View @mtlnewtech for more). Many local developer groups (ruby, python, php, .NET, javascript, uxmtl, etc.
  • Strong existing angel investors + new VC funds being created. You mention Toronto but actually there is more money flowing in Quebec
  • Montreal is half european and half north american, half-french, half-english. Lots of diversity, lots of creatives. Literature : “Nearly a fifth of the Montreal region’s workforce forms a super-creative core: techies & cultural & entertainment types … Montreal also benefits from its dense, compact geography. Most experts agree that innovation and productivity are driven by density, and Montreal ranks third among all North American cities in average population density” (thanks @sebpaquet for the find)
  • Montreal is 2nd happiest city in the world
  • 4 universities, plus engineering and business schools, such as McGill University, Hec Montréal, @SUPINFOMontreal or ETS
  • cost of living is cheap. Not as cheap as Bangalore of course, but cheaper than Toronto, Boston and of course cheaper than San Francisco or London, U.K.
  • lots of initiatives, one startup incubator (@bolidea), another one coming in September, blogs and publications dedicated to the community (MTW or also upcoming @nextmontreal), student/entrepreneur groups (@Startupifier), startup weekends (one coming in early October), conferences drawing hundreds of attendees (wordcamp, rocococamps, startupcamp, podcamp etc), big startup space soon (@notmanhouse)
  • plus of course many technology projects launched every month, in average 1 or 2 new products launching every week. OstrichApp launched 10 days ago featured on apple.com, BeyondTheRack funding, statusnet, vanilla forums, Tungle etc.

Note: You are welcomed to add more points, since I intend to bookmark this page and provide the link next time there’s a young entrepreneuring mind on Hacker News or a blog like TC.

  • Intellitix provides rfid access to Coachella

    #coachella

  • twtspire.com| idea for the next startup = One Tweet Away? twtspire.com| idea for the next startup = One Tweet Away?

    twtspire.com| idea for the next startup = One Tweet Away?

    Startups solve problems. So if you find a problem there’s probably a startup idea lying somewhere nearby. A Montreal developer Kenji Williams developed an app called twtspire.com that scours twitter and automatically detects tweets from people that wonder why a solution doesn’t exist for a specific problem they’re having. Here are example of tweets from [...]

  • AccelerateMTL : more than just a conference

    AccelerateMTL is coming up on the afternoon on May 23rd, right after the FounderFuel demo day. It’s announced as a conference full of good keynotes, from successful entrepreneurs like BeyondTheRack founder, renowned Internet marketers, and other Internet execs. View more on the eventbrite page. As the name suggests, the presentations were curated to accelerate startups. [...]

Comments

You must be logged in to post a comment.

blog comments powered by Disqus