Hitchhiker's Guide to the Vancouver Tech Community

A great guide to the Vancouver Tech community for angel investors and entrepreneurs who want to get more connected or who are new to the Vancouver startup community. It was created by one of our active angel investors, Peter Meisl @pmeisl

The Vancouver high tech industry is growing quickly and it can be a confusing place especially for a newcomer (entrepreneur or angel investor).   When you're getting started, just figuring out who the players are and what resources are available can  take some time.     Luckily, there is a good sense of  community and there are many people around that are willing to help.   In fact a sense of community like this is considered to be a  key contributor to successful innovation economies (check out Brad Feld's book "Startup Communities" for one perspective on this).

In the past few years I've made the transition from working in a large high-tech company to making angel investments and becoming involved in tech start-ups.   During this time, I became an investor and an active participant within E-fund.  Joining the E-fund community connected me with experienced local entrepreneurs and investors.  By participating in the deal sourcing, due diligence, and follow-up process I got a lot of hands-on experience working with start-up CEOs.   

As I've been learning about the Vancouver tech industry, I collected quite a bit of general information on the organizations and players in the community.   I wanted to share this with other people that wanted to discover the tech industry, so I packaged up the info into a kind of "Hitchhiker's guide to Vancouver Tech" and put it up at www.vantechguide.com   I was inspired by some similar on-line guides in other cities. I found some existing collections covering Vancouver, but they either weren't up to date or were in an awkward format.

In this Hitchhiker's Guide, I have tried to include only things that are at least in some way specific to the Vancouver tech community. I didn’t include general tech, start-up, or entrepreneur resources since there are lots of other good lists already.   The overall intent is to offer a broad-brush view of the key players in the Vancouver Tech industry  with the specific focus on resources for tech start-ups. I come from a electronics and software background, so that is the area I’m most familiar with.

The areas currently covered by the guide include:

• Key Organizations and Companies - these are industry associations and sampling of local tech companies (just a few examples to give total newcomers an idea of what's actually local in  Vancouver)
• News, Newsletters, Blogs, Feeds - sources of news on the local community
• Meetings, Events and Competitions - pointers out to calendars of events and a listing of the major annual conferences
• Help for Startups - a listing of accelerators, co-working spaces, events, competitions and a pointer out to the relevant government agencies
• Education - a list of the major local educational institutions
• Talent and Jobs - pointers to local job boards
• Funding and Investing - a listing of angel groups, events, online platforms, VCs and other funding organizations

I hope this Guide to Vancouver Tech is useful to you and I encourage you to engage in some way within the tech community.

Peter Meisl

Angel investor, E-fund investor   LinkedIn   Twitter