Montreal Tech Watch

This is the third and final post presenting the results of the tech entrepreneurship survey. The first one was about the current strengths of the Montréal technology community, the second exposed the challenges and problems met by technology entrepreneurs, while this post will present potential opportunities, for actors of the community and also anyone having an interesting in making Montreal a better place for technology.

The results are presented here. Like the previous 2, the items on top are the top answers, ranked by average from the 108 respondents. A few surprises, which after a little bit of thinking aren’t surprising at all after all:

Opportunity #1: A mentorship program to connect new and experienced entrepreneurs. This was the most surprising, imho, and it reveals how many entrepreneurs or tech developers are already on the verge of committing to their projects and startups, but lack guidance amongst all the diversity of paths offered to them.

The good news is that Gabriel is leading a mentorship event today at Café des Éclusiers (ha! ahead of the results), with @sebprovencher as a mentor. I’m excited for this event, and look forward to see how we can make it work.

Opportunity #2: More angel investors, seed funds and VCs. This is tied to the challenges presented earlier (see #5). Since it appears on both results, this appears to be a true limiting factor. Hopefully, there is the upcoming FounderFuel, but there is definitively more space for alternative means of funding

Opportunity #3: Global events & conferences promoting local startups Could we organize an event à la South By South West? or a conference similar to TC50? The answer today is no. It takes significant time and resources to organize events at that scale. The need is there though, so event organizers should see now how they can partner with other groups and key associations, and hopefully, we’ll see one in the near future.

Opportunity #4: Startup school program à la techstars This is doable although like #3, it would require most actors in Montréal to work together to make it happen

Opportunity #5: Initiatives bridging Montréal and global tech centers This is definitively doable. We had many startup instigators coming from other provinces, the States or Europe. We have also many Montréalers going regularly to other global conferences. They could be dubbed as “Montréal tech ambassadors”. In a similar way, there’s also something to do with MTW

Opportunity #6: More initiatives growing the community; bridge local groups There is a division currently amongst all the different developer groups (the Javascript people, the ruby, python or php folks), also amongst the marketing/entrepreneur groups. There’s a lot to do to make those groups talk to each other, through common events for instance. MTW played a role in the past of uniting those groups, and this is going be one of the focus in the future

See more results in the report

Again, thanks to everyone who helped promote the survey and took the time to answer it.