Now that the first SproutUp of 2012 has come and gone, and we’ve had some time to recover, it’s time to share some of the highlights of this fantastic experience.

First off, a huge thank-you to everyone who helped us kick off the first of many SproutUps in 2012. We sold 500 tickets for this event, and Erin captured this fantastic shot of the crowd after her introduction:

Startup Demos

Shopcastr were the first to take the stage and made their debut at SproutUp January. Shopcastr makes it simple for retailers to show off their best products and gives consumers the ability to window shop their favourite stores. Lots of questions from the crowd, and some fantastic Twitter attention gave Shopcastr a very warm welcome.

Next to take the stage was Allen from WattPad. Wattpad lets you interact and share stories across text, video, images, and through conversations with other readers and writers. Want to learn more? Check out their demo video:

Our final startup demo for the night was by QuickTapSurvey. Created by TabbleDabble, QuickTapSurvey wants to replace clipboards forever, and their demo was very well received. QuickTapSurvey is an iPad app, available through iTunes.

Guest Speaker: Charlie O’Donnell

After the startup demonstrations were finished, we moved on to the main event. Charlie O’Donnell was taking the stage to talk about his new venture capital firm Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. Charlie wasted no time setting the mood, starting off his talk by saying “Welcome to sh*t VC’s say.”

Having seen the VC table from all angles – as a startup founder, a partner at First Round Capital, and now leading his own VC firm – Charlie provided some great insight on pitching startups, and how to make sure investors remember you. Charlie is a master of one-line advice, so the Twitter stream for #SproutUp is a great recap of his talk:

What he looks for in Potential Investments

• Nothing wrong with starting up a business that is already out there – you just ned to show you can do it better.
• Make sure I could not recruit a more appropriate team than what you have.
• When pitching, give me 50 users that you have to pry it from their cold, dead hands. I’m not asking for a big number.
• I funded two companies from a Hackathon. Which is two ahead of other investors.

(thanks to @yourfabva, @erinbury, and @hindrees)

For Startups Looking for a VC

• Pay attention to the pattern of investments from your VC. You need an investor who is a good fit.
• Check marks for investment: 1. Team. 2. Product (with 50+ hard-core users). 3. Market (show existing or traction)
• Google and Facebook can’t and won’t buy every business.
• Companies are hesitant to say ‘I’m the x for y’, which is actually a great elevator pitch. 1-2 sentences max.
• Don’t start your pitch with ‘First you sign up for our site’ Tell me why I should sign up for your site.
• TechCrunch should not be the inspiration for your startups. Talk to real people and solve a real problem.
• Don’t introduce yourself with ‘You probably don’t remember me’ that is the weakest intro ever.
• Sometimes why you’re not getting capital is because you’re not taking over the world.

(Thanks @hidrees, @lordeagle, @erinbury, @alexxbain)

All in all, Wednesday night was a great start to the 2012 SproutUp events, and we’re very excited to see everyone again in February. Our guest speaker is Daniel Burka, co-founder of Milk (along with Digg founder Kevin Rose) and Pownce, and the former creative director at Digg. We’re also excited to host startup demos from Shoplocket, and Washly! Check out the details, and get your tickets before they sell out!

Sprout Up is a monthly event for forward-thinking entrepreneurs to gather and mind-meld. A great chance for startups around the to get friendly, discuss current trends, and network in a casual, open, and focused setting. Sprout Up events have been held in cities around the world including Toronto, Montreal, NYC and London, and regularly have over 300 attendees. Our last event saw over 450 attendees joining us, so we’re selling a few less tickets this time to make sure there is more room for networking!

Our next SproutUp will be  taking place Wednesday, February 22nd at The Courthouse. We’re very excited to be hosting guest speaker Daniel Burka, a web designer and serial entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of Milk (along with Digg founder Kevin Rose) and Pownce, and the former creative director at Digg. Daniel is Canadian, but is based in San Francisco.

He’s also one of Sprouter’s startup experts - check out his past Q&A.

We’ll also be featuring demos from startups Shoplocket and Washly. As always, there will be plenty of time for networking after the interactive demos and Daniel’s talk!

Tickets for the January SproutUp event sold out completely, so be sure to get your ticket for February’s event before they’re all gone!

David Cohen is the founder of TechStars, one of the largest and most successful startup accelerators in the world. Though he’s now seen as the go-to guy for mentorship, it wasn’t always that way. Before his TechStars days, Cohen started a company called iContact, which he calls a “graceful failure.” He says it was that experience with iContact that taught him the importance of mentorship. He didn’t have any mentors around then, and he later met people who could have helped his company from going under. “Mentorship is the missing component for a lot of early stage companies.”

Cohen decided to become entrepreneur after getting his first job after college. “A lot of entrepreneurs go through that, they work for somebody and then they realize that they never want to do that,” he says. “I got that one job, worked there for about a year then started a company and have always been in startups since then.” He started and sold companies including Pinpoint Technologies and earFeeder.com, and built iContact in between. It was through building and subsequently folding iContact that Cohen learned valuable lessons about failure and entrepreneurship. ”Every startup that you do teaches you a lot, the ones that fail teach you the most. I learned a lot of specific lessons relating to the internet including the importance of distribution, and just how critical that is to the success of just about any internet startup,” he says. “At that time there were no app stores or open systems and really the phone carriers controlled distribution. The gatekeepers who control a market are difficult to work with.”

It was 2003 when iContact shut down, and Cohen reflected on it with a post-mortem in 2006. He says in nine years the approach to failure hasn’t changed much in the U.S. “In general, we’re really fortunate in this country that people accept failure,” he says. “I travel all over the world and talk about entrepreneurship and in many places its not tolerant.” He believes every company that fails should write a post-mortem because writing it down forces you to think about the lessons that you learned from that company, and it also could help someone else going forward. “It’s really powerful to do but not a lot of people do it.”

Cohen launched TechStars with Brad Feld, David Brown, and Jared Polis in 2006. The mentorship-driven seed stage investment program runs three-month long programs in cities like Boston, Seattle, Boulder and NYC, taking technology businesses from idea to viability through mentorship, access to investors, and funding. Each of the ten companies selected for a class receive $18,000 in funding and are offered a $100,000 convertible debt note, and graduates of the program raise an average of $1 million in outside capital. TechStars has launched now-acquired companies including BrightKite and DailyBurn, with 104 companies in the alumni network.

The program also features a network of mentors including prominent investor Fred Wilson, and Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley. Their approach to mentorship is what Cohen calls the “Socrates approach.” “The mentor does not know all, the mentor is simply there to share their own experiences and to be supportive of the company however they can be,” he says. “Big red flags go off for us when we have mentors that say this is absolutely how it is and I’m right. Instead they can say I’ve been in four experiences, it’s always turned out this way and hopefully you can learn from that and talk to other people.” He says the best mentors are happy to be told no.

TechStars made headlines recently when it was revealed that it’s harder to get into the program than to get into Harvard. They receive hundreds of applications for each spot, and founders are constantly trying to figure out what they can do to stand out. Cohen says the five things they look at for Techstars in order are, team, team, team, markets and ideas. “Team is the first three, so when we say how can a founder stand out, really how can a set of founders put together a team that has some unfair advantage or unique insight into the market they’re attacking,” he says. “Why is this team the team that can do this thing? That’s the number one thing you have to convince us of.” Beyond that he says they’re looking for teams who really understand their market.

Nine of the TechStars graduates have already had their company acquired, and many more will sell in the years to come. So what’s Cohen’s advice for navigating an acquisition? He says it’s important to have people who have been through that process on your side. He tells the story of his first company, which he sold. “We bootstrapped the company and there were just a few founders and we did really, really well with it. But I got to know the CEO of the company that acquired it over the next few years and he told us very directly, ‘You left half the money on the table.’ Otherwise, you sucked at negotiating that deal.” He said that because it was his first exit, he didn’t go find a mentor that understood those dynamics. “We did great, but we left half the money on the table.” The lesson for startups is to get someone experienced to help you navigate an acquisition. “I’ve seen Brad Feld double outcomes on phone calls for our companies at exit,” he says. “He has the ability to just understand what’s happening and how to negotiate. He’s had a wide range of experiences.” He says at Techstars they take six per cent equity, but it will probably double a company’s exit value. “Not only because of the experience and negotiating, but of the number of people the acquirer gets on their team. Mentors, mentors, mentors is the answer.”

We’re excited to be hosting a live session with Dharmesh Shah, Co-founder of HubSpot and founder of OnStartups, this Wednesday, February 1st at 2pm EST.

Dharmesh is the founder and CTO of Cambridge, MA based HubSpot. Founded in 2006, HubSpot helps companies manage and analyze all of their internet marketing in one place. Dharmesh also blogs for OnStartups, which provides advice and insight for entrepreneurs.

Ask him about inbound marketing, startup life, and raising capital. You can ask a question now at sprouter.com/dharmesh

For entrepreneurs who don’t have access to investors, bank loans or friends and family money, bootstrapping can be the only way to get an idea off the ground. Back in 1989 Bruce Poon Tip was one of those founders who had to rely on his own resources to start his company. With only an idea and his personal credit cards, Poon Tip bootstrapped his adventure travel venture G Adventures, which over 20 years later offers tours to over 100 countries. “It was difficult for us for many years at the start,” he says. “I would even go so far as to say our first ten years were hard because we had to fund such a huge growth curve and never had as much as a loan. I was very aggressive in building the business. Fortunately, I have a very high tolerance for risk, but that doesn’t work so well for the bankers.” Poon Tip knew entrepreneurship was in his blood from a young age. Most entrepreneurs say they don’t work well in traditional work settings, but not many can say they’ve been fired from McDonald’s. “I had three businesses before I turned 16,” he says. “When I tried a regular job at McDonald’s, I was fired.”

In 1989 Poon Tip went traveling and eschewed the traditional options, which were taking a coach tour, bus tour or cruise, in favor of backpacking. “When I wanted to travel back in 1989, there weren’t any travel companies like ours,” he says. “While I was travelling, I met many others who were looking for a more culturally-focused and responsible way to travel. That became the inspiration behind G Adventures.” He originally called the company Gap Adventures, because he said it was about “bridging the gap” between mainstream travel and backpacking.

Today eco-friendly and sustainable tourism is all the rage, but back when he launched the company in 1990 it was a novel concept. “We didn’t have a name for it at the time, but we knew we wanted to do the right thing,” he says. “The world later caught up to what we were doing.” Originally, the goal was to create a low-impact form of travel that appreciated the world and showed it in an authentic way. He says the coach companies and destructive tour packages represented everything his team was against. “We developed a new way for people to see and experience the world. For us, it’s always been about innovation.”

The travel industry is extremely competitive, even more so since the recession in 2008 and the European debt crisis. In addition to competition from the traditional coach, bus and cruise tour companies, he now faces competition from online build-your-own vacation sites like Expedia, and a new crop of eco-friendly and sustainable tourism companies. Poon Tip says his approach to competition is all about staying focused. “Watching what other companies do would really drag us down and take us away from driving our own innovation,” he says. “We can’t expend a lot of energy being concerned about what others are doing. We are very visible now, and your perspective is different when you’re the market leader.”

He says the company outpaces competitors in terms of customer service and satisfaction, something that has become a part of the G Adventures culture. Similar to how Tony Hsieh has started a happiness revolution in the workplace with his company Zappos, which was acquired by Amazon in 2009, Poon Tip has made culture a central part of his company. He laughs off the title of the Canadian Tony Hsieh, but admits the two share the same outlook on workplace culture. “We do share a lot of the same values towards business,” he says. “The G Adventures business model is driven by happiness, freedom and creating community. It’s a bit more complex as we operate in over 100 countries and change people’s lives every day. Our culture is our brand. I would say that we share the same philosophy on understanding the human side of business. Driving the best customer service on the planet remains our goal.”

Poon Tip says maintaining that level of customer service when running a global workforce can prove to be a challenge. “It’s about creating freedom and happiness,” he says. “Ultimately, happy and free people are motivated to deliver the best customer service.” One constant that always tied his employees together was the Gap Adventures brand. But in 2011 a lawsuit was brought forward by The Gap clothing retailer, and a court ruled that Gap Adventures had to change its name and logo when doing business in the United States. Poon Tip decided to rebrand to G Adventures in September 2011 instead of fighting the case, and the new name came into effect on October 1, 2011. He says the transition has been easier than he thought it would be. “We had everyone on board with the idea and we executed a flawless plan. Admittedly, it wasn’t a huge change, but it was significant enough for us to make the statement – to prove – that our culture is our brand; that our customers own our brand, not us,” he says. “We surveyed our travellers, team members, partners and future travellers extensively. It was exciting and the approach was innovative.”

When asked about his biggest piece of advice for entrepreneurs, Poon Tip again points to happiness and culture as keys to success, echoing the old adage of ‘do something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.’ He also says founders must understand their motivation and define themselves in terms of the type of entrepreneur they are. “Not everyone creates for a living,” he says. “There are many entrepreneurial people who own franchises, run corner stores or even work with a more out-of-the-box type of thinking for established companies. It takes a level of focus, hard work and determination to take the ideas inside your head and present it to the world. It is a very personal process that many people don’t think about.”

His company has been around for over 20 years, and Poon Tip says he wants to continue to grow as a leader. “I’ve resolved to become more focused, since I know we cannot grow collectively unless I improve personally,” he says. “We’ve got a few tricks up our sleeves though. We might be the original and the biggest, but this old dog has a few more tricks.”

Sprout Up is a monthly event for forward-thinking entrepreneurs to gather and mind-meld. A great chance for startups to get friendly, discuss current trends, and network in a casual, open, and focused setting. Sprout Up events have been held in cities around the world including Toronto, Montreal, NYC and London, and regularly have over 300 attendees.

For the first SproutUp of 2012, we’ll be joined by guest speaker Charlie O’Donnell from Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. He has been an active member of the NYC venture capital and startup community for ten years in roles ranging from institutional fund investor to venture capitalist to entrepreneur. He has venture experience at two of the top venture capital firms in the country, Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital, and sourced First Round’s Investment in GroupMe, which sold to Skype in 2011. The investments he sourced at First Round Capital also include Refinery29, chloe + isabel, Backupify, SinglePlatform, Salescrunch and Docracy.

We’ll also be joined by startups Shopcastr, Wattpad, and QuickTapSurvey. and there will be plenty of time for networking after the innovation demo and the guest speaker!

There are only a few spots left to join us at the January SproutUp TO event, so get your tickets now!

Over the next two weeks, we have a great lineup of live Q&A sessions scheduled to help you get the advice you need for your startup. You can submit a question anytime at sprouter.com/answers, or you can ask specific experts during the following live sessions:

Monday, January 23rd at 2:30pm EST

Kevin O’Conner, CEO and founder of FindTheBest.com, Former CEO and founder of DoubleClick sprouter.com/kevinoconnor

Kevin is the founder of FindTheBest.com, launched in 2009, with the goal of filtering excessive junk and presenting information in a simple, comparable way. He has over 30 years of entrepreneurship experience, and has been on both sides of the finance and venture capital table.  To read more about Kevin’s journey as an entrepreneur, check out our profile of Kevin here.

Ask him about raising capital, scaling your organization, and for tips on taking your idea and turning it into reality.

Thursday, February 2nd at 2pm EST

Dharmesh Shah, Co-founder of HubSpot, founder of OnStartups – sprouter.com/dharmesh

Dharmesh is the founder and CTO of Cambridge, MA based HubSpot. Founded in 2006, HubSpot helps companies manage and analyze all of their internet marketing in one place. Dharmesh also blogs for OnStartups, which provides advice and insight for entrepreneurs.

Ask him about inbound marketing, startup life, and raising capital.

Take advantage of your Sprouter memebership & join the conversation – submit your question now, or during one of these live sessions.

With the first Sprout Up of 2012 fast approaching on January 31st, I wanted to share a story from Stavros Rougas on how a chance meeting at the November 2010 Sprout Up in Toronto led him to the co-founder of his startup mediaspot.me. For anyone who doesn’t know, Sprout Up is a monthly event for local entrepreneurs that features networking, startup demos, and all-star guest speakers (past speakers have included Gary Vaynerchuck and Hootsuite’s Ryan Holmes).

When I attended the November 2010 SproutUp I was a TV producer with idea and unexpectedly left with what became a technical co-founder and a new friend. I was continuing to explore my fascination with how the internet continues to redefine how we connect (think Clay Shirky) and at the same time solve something that was pissing me off at work – looking for people who wanted to be found by journalists, yet lacking tools to connect that harness the power of social networks and the cloud.

As per the SproutUp quid pro quo I was chatting with someone and he suggested I speak with a friend of his stranding a few metres away as he felt we had common interests. I briefly mentioned my idea and we quickly shared our backgrounds. Then we ended up in a one hour conversation about history, politics and whatever else came to our minds. Little to no discussion about programming, my idea or the web.

Ebrahim lives in Waterloo (yes he is a programmer, enter your stereotype here) so a month later he came back to Toronto to chat more about my idea and to see if we might have some common ground. It was the push I needed to put my ideas onto paper.

That meeting led to another, this time in Waterloo, and in quick order we decided to do a small trial around a prototype to test both the validity of the idea and whether we were able to work together. Turned out we respected each other and so we kept working together and eventually formed a partnership.

Fast forward to January 2012, we are the co-founders of mediaspot.me and both of us have left our jobs to go full time. We have rolled with our Waterloo-Toronto working relationship doing our best to take advantage of both worlds and being creative to deal with the challenges. We run a textbook lean startup and we will be launching a private beta in February, all of which would not have happened without Sprouter. (Ok a truck load of cash would have got things to an initial point, but not sure if that would have led to the pillars of a sustainable business).

To learn more about mediaspot.me, check out this post from the Canadian Digital Media Association.

Sprout Ups are great opportunities to learn from experts, see demos of amazing local startups, and network with fellow entrepreneurs, so join us on January 31st! You never know – you may meet the co-founder you’ve been looking for!

If there is one type of web app that is overdone, tasks lists might be it. New startup Sandglaz is taking a different approach to the task management app, giving users a better way to get things done.

The web app syncs with your Google account and allows you to share a to-do list in the same way you can share a document on Google Docs. You can also share tasks with someone else by @ tagging their name. Productivity apps should make you more productive and make sure you’re not spending time in the app, but on the actual tasks. It really helps that you can navigate almost the entire app with your keyboard. The shortcuts come naturally, but the tutorial really helps you get into the groove.

One of the other cool features is the infinity grid. The infinity grids can be shared with select people and can scroll forever left to right, moving by tasks for the specific day.

Sandglaz is a top-rated app in the fast growing Chrome Web Store Productivity and Utilities categories. There is no native iPhone or Android app yet, but the HTML5 mobile app does the job.

I recently read a study which gave some data about how long people can keep their resolutions. For a two week resolution, the study showed only 30 percent of men and 37 percent of women were successful implementing a two week resolution. If only a third of people keep up a two week resolution, imagine what the stats for New Year’s resolutions are.

The company came out of beta in early January, and while I can’t figure out what the name means, I think it can definitely help anyone achieve their New Year goals (if you haven’t given them up already). The basic web app uses a freemium model by offering solutions with additional features for power users or a team space plan. If you sign up for one of the plans before the end of January you can get 50% off the plan for life.

Kevin O’Connor became an entrepreneur because of two people: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The investor and co-founder of DoubleClick and several other companies says he always had an inventive nature, but his dream was to get his PhD and then work for Bell Labs. “I thought the only road to innovation was via a PhD,” he says. “But around this same time a couple of college drop-outs named Steve and Bill were out there changing the world with the personal computer. I knew then that a PhD wasn’t necessary – and Bell Labs ultimately went bust.” He was accepted into the PhD program, but declined to work on his own company, a software company he started in 1983.

It was while brainstorming ideas in his basement with co-founder Dwight Merriman in the mid-90′s that O’Connor stumbled upon his big Internet idea. “After narrowing in a few ideas we explored their potential.  Is there a problem and does technology solve that problem most efficiently? That’s as simple as business gets,” he says. He started reading books about advertising theory, and realized that technology could dynamically serve ads to the right user at the right time; it was no longer just a theory. “Things advertisers were dreaming of doing could be possible on the Internet.” The pair launched DoubleClick in 1995, and it became a billion-dollar company over the course of a decade. Along with CEO Kevin Ryan, now the founder of Gilt Groupe and Business Insider, O’Connor and Merriman grew the company until a private equity firm acquired the company for $1.1 billion in 2005. The company was later acquired by Google for $3.1 billion in 2007.

After being an entrepreneur for 25 years, O’Connor decided to start O’Connor Ventures so he could be on the other side of the investment table. “I love the challenge of taking on a big problem and identifying the best solution,” he says. “After 25 years of trial and error, I think I have figured out a way to create something out of nothing, creating new ideas and turning them into successful products in the market.  I wanted to help other entrepreneurs by sharing some of my processes and insights.” He says likes founders who are really passionate about what they’re doing and believe they can change the world.  He also says he prefers to invest in companies with at least one founding engineer since tech is so fundamental for the success of the company. “And finally, can the founder afford to take the risk,” he says.

O’Connor Ventures is no longer seeking investments due to O’Connor’s return to entrepreneurship. “A couple years ago, I became increasingly frustrated and disappointed with the Internet,” he says. “I could find endless amounts of information on any subject but when I had a complicated decision to make, I found myself wasting hours, or even days, compiling information I could compare.” Or he found sites offering top 10 recommendations, but discovered they were secretly getting kickbacks from the sites they were recommending. So in 2009 he launched FindtheBest.com with the goal of filtering excessive junk and presenting information in a simple, comparable way.

FindtheBest is an unbiased data-driven comparison engine with funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. ”While the Web is great at making seemingly infinite amounts of information accessible, the Internet can be a little overwhelming in that it doesn’t allow for straight up apples-to-apples comparisons, nor is it transparent enough to allow you to spot those hidden marketing schemes influencing the data you receive,” he says. He says he uses FindTheBest to plan family ski trips, while his eldest son is using FindTheBest to compare colleges. Scaling across many verticals has been challenging though. “I’ve been asked ‘are you trying to boil the ocean?’ but the more I looked at the challenge I realized it’s the same process whether you are making a decision about the best college for your kid or the best dog for the family.”

O’Connor has built companies in the ’80′s, ’90′s, and ’00′s. He says the main difference between building a company in 1995 and 2012 is the fact that the Internet is essential. “In 1998 we were just laying the foundations, building roads, laying the plumbing, many didn’t know what it was or how to use it.  Today I can go online while flying across the country and Obama has a blackberry.” He says back then it was hard to focus on your core competency as a startup because you also needed to build your own infrastructure. “Most companies were doing it all themselves, from creating the software to deliver their website to developing an ad serving system. Some of our biggest competitors at the start were publishers that had already built an ad serving system.” Today he says startup costs are lower and there are infinitely more resources. “When starting DoubleClick we couldn’t scale fast enough, at FindTheBest.com we can scale in a day.”

O’Connor says entrepreneurship is all about standing behind your convictions. “If you chose an innovative, entrepreneurial path, you must believe in your convictions so strongly that you would stand behind your opinions no matter who tries to discourage you,” he says. “A new way of thinking often attracts a lot of nay-sayers, you can’t let that discourage you.  Of course, there’s always a chance you’re delusional – sometimes tough to tell the difference.” He says the mark of a great entrepreneur is how many profitable products they invent – they’re inventing and innovating constantly. “Ideas that take off are often a numbers game where you need to come up with a lot of bad ideas before you come up with the great idea. You must be persistent; don’t give up.” He also says successful innovators get things done quickly because they know time isn’t on their side. “You might have a multi-million dollar idea, but if you don’t get it out there before someone else does, that idea will no longer be profitable to you.”

Despite his ability to capitalize on big trends – the personal computer, online advertising, the consumer Internet – O’Connor is hesitant to look to what’s next. “I never focus on what’s next because you never really know,” he says. “I’m incredibly focused on building the best tool for making decisions online and excited about building a truly great company.”

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Kevin O’Connor is taking your startup questions LIVE Monday, January 23rd at 2:30pm EST. Submit a question now, or view his full Q&A at sprouter.com/kevinoconnor.