Even when investors, mentors and experts dedicate their full time and life to spotting the next big thing, it can come walking straight through their door and they miss it.

We love the honesty of Bessemer Venture Partners Anti-Portfolio page. It is a badge of honor among VCs to have the courage to share stories about the ones that got away but all would rather have had the insight available that would have supported a different decision and gave them the billion dollar ride of their life.

At the same time, there are Founders working away in hacker houses, Estonia or where ever, who feel they can not possibly boil their life’s work down to a demo day or pitch competition. We love why Mark Suster doesn’t do demo days.

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First we want to thank the top players from across the startup ecosystem who confidentially referred all of the startups who have been considered for this opportunity.

As you can imagine, the most important elements of our report to Nikhil evolved out of our Cdling Scores for players, although there are also some startups who have used Cdling to get themselves through the door.

We would have released this earlier, but we were working with a few startups to confirm that they could attend.  So while it may not be a surprise to those who have been selected for these meetings, I apologize to anyone who was working towards this opportunity and is only getting this news released now.

We are working hard to try to create meaningful opportunities for both the startups and the investors that we serve. If you were not selected, remember that this can be a reflection of your stage or Nikhil’s interests and not a judgement on what you are doing.

Nikhil’s final selections for OFFICE HOURs tomorrow at Gowlings and the schedule:

4 pm - Shelflife

ShelfLife is the future of collecting with next-generation e-commerce and collection management tools. Whether you collect action figures, H&M designer sales, skateboards, Japanese kaiju, video games, or books, ShelfLife will provide everything you need to make your collecting experience faster, cheaper and more fun.

4:10 pm - Uken Games

Uken is one of the truly cross platform gaming companies around. We build fun social and mobile games that make people stare, smile, jump, and feel awesome inside.

4:20 pm - UNATA

Unata supplies technology that allows retailers to connect their loyalty program to digital platforms such as mobile & web, automatically personalizing content for every user so as to enhance the at-home and in-store shopping experience and thereby increase customer loyalty. The platform includes a real-time analytics & marketing platform that delivers all the benefits of online marketing to bricks & mortar operations, allowing retailers to monetize new data and become more efficient marketers.

Break

4:40 - BUNCH

Bunch is a mobile platform to share and discuss your passions with like-minded people. The Bunch iPhone app is live in private beta and has had 1.1 million pre-signups via a Facebook marketing app. Bunch will test launch Sept 2012 in Canada, with a US launch to follow.

4:50 - Shiny Ads

Allows (small) advertisers to build their ad banner, set up their campaign and pay for it all in an automated fashion without the need of a direct sales force. The advertising is automatically placed in the web publisher’s ad server and all payment and optionally refunds are handled automatically.

Startups - you can pitch, ask for advice or an introduction or just forge that relationship for future consideration.

Thanks to Nikhil and everyone who participated in this Cdling Alpha experiment. We have learned a ton!

We have dug a little further into the story of how Bunch reached out to some of the most credible investors, experts and Founders in the country to use Cdling and get in front of Paul Singh at 500Startups.

“Once I figured out what to do, I kept it short and straight forward,” says Bunch CEO and co-Founder, Andrew Sider.  Bunch currently has 20 different opinions shared on their Cdling profile, from 13 different players.  Andrew says he sent the note below to 13 people and within a day or two he had received the results he needed.

Here is the sample email:

TO: xxx
FROM: Andrew Sider
Subject: reference on cdling please?

I need 10 positive references on Cdling to secure a meeting with 500 Startups on Monday.

Can you please do the following today?  

• Sign up for Cdling using LinkedIn: http://cdling.com/desktop/
• 5-10 mins later you’ll get an email welcoming you to the alpha group
• Go to Bunch’s profile: http://www.cdling.com/desktop/companies/365
• “share an opinion” when Bunch will raise $10m

Thanks for helping!

Andrew

Thanks Andrew for sharing this with us.

While Andrew’s email focuses on securing the meeting with 500 Startups, the opinions he gathered continue to qualify Bunch for other potential investors. 

Have you built your startup’s reputation on Cdling?

You can start here: www.cdling.com

I would like to start this post off with the word “validation” but from a purely business perspective, this is still just a feel good story. 

Back at the beginning of August Dave McClure wrote a post entitled VC Evolution: Physician Scale Thyself. I had been working on a post with similar themes, “Do Investors Need to Compete?”. At the time I complimented Dave on Twitter for his use of Vitruvian Man as an illustration. He “Favorited” the tweet. That’s not the cathartic story.

In my old talks on Social Capital Value Add, I have a slide that uses the same illustration to make the same broad point that Dave applied in his post to the VC biz. Cdling is SCVA applied.

You can dig into all of the ideas in the links above: Distance matters less. Experienced, credible investors will use Cdling to connect through their real world reputations with other reputable investors, faster. Startups anywhere can benefit.

It seems fitting that this story comes together with the visit to Toronto of Paul Singh, Dave’s Partner at 500Startups.

Paul is a VC that lives in Washington, D.C., his fund & the incubator it operates is based in Silicon Valley. They have done 20 deals in Canada and have investments in more than 20 countries. On September 10th we were sitting in Toronto and the startup that was the top selection for a meeting with Paul was Bunch, who’s co-Founder came in from Montreal.

Bunch landed the meeting by pushing through Cdling’s shortcomings and making our value proposition work for them.  They enabled us to deliver to Paul a very granular, easy to understand report by collecting more than 10 opinions from credible investors, subject matter experts and experienced Founders.

Check out Bunch’s profile. They collected opinions from some of the top VCs, influencers & tech Founders in the country.

I talked to Andrew Sider, the Co-Founder & CEO behind Bunch afterwards.  We had exchanged a few emails leading up to Paul’s visit as he tried to figure out how to make this opportunity work for his startup. They already had great referrals to Paul. Great backers. Connections to other reputable Founders. But in this era of low cost, globally funded startups - even this great team was having trouble cutting through the noise.  Once he decided to go for it, Andrew said he sent a short note to the people who matter most, with a simple statement: he had decided to use Cdling, will they help him?

We are grateful to everyone who participated. Thanks to Jolt & MaRS Commons for working with us to make it happen.  It would be nice if this story ended in a really valuable way for everyone.

FYI - On October 25 Cdling will support SoftBank Capital and on October 30 Cdling will support Wasabi Ventures. Startups, mentors and investors in NYC, Baltimore, Toronto … or anywhere … are invited participate.

Working with MaRS Commons and the MaRS Mentor Network, we submitted a list of startups who have been referred through the Cdling platform and other channels and Paul made the final selections below. 

We should point out to the rest of the community that Jolt withdrew the startups in their current crop from this selection process since Paul will be meeting exclusively with these Founding teams on September 11th.  Thank you again to the team at Jolt and MaRS Commons for working with us to make this open time available to any startup! 

There are still some spots available to join us for Paul’s pizza lunch “fire side chat”.  You can get your tickets here.

I also have a couple of spots for the closed investors only event with Paul that will be taking place on Monday afternoon at 3 pm.  If you are interested in one of those, please @cdlingHQ or email me at michael at cdling dot com.

If you are connected to any of the Founders from these startups, please send them a link to this post!  We are trying to contact them now to make sure that they are ready for Monday morning!

Thanks also to all of the startups who expressed interest in the opportunity to meet with Paul.  If you were not selected, don’t take it badly there were many inputs and not making this list is not necessarily a reflection on what you are doing.

Congrats to the companies that were selected!  

Paul will be getting started at 9:30 am Monday, September 10 in the MaRS Commons on the second floor at 101 College Street.

The format is 10 mins. Make a bond. Ask a question. Pitch. But you have 10 mins.

Here is the schedule and names of companies selected:

9:30 am
Penyo Pal
Penyo Pal builds fun, engaging experiences for kids and kids at heart to learn Mandarin. Users adopt and customize their own Penyo Pal and explore Penyo World playing mini-games and interacting with their Penyo Pal. Learning a new language opens doors, your eyes, and your mind… and with Penyo Pal you’ll be saying in no time!

9:40 am
NoteSolution
Notesolution is an educational network that delivers the best course resources to university students worldwide by crowdsourcing content.

9:50 am
Hovr
HOVR makes images on social networks clickable for product search. Through a 1-click update of your browser, the magic of HOVR is unlocked on any website. Easily go from the image of what you want, to window shopping comparables, to the best place to buy all within the HOVR Sidebar.

10:00 am - break

10:10 am
Kickvox
Kickvox is a search engine built uniquely for mobile. We do this by introducing a visual search process and deep integration with popular mobile apps giving users a truly mobile friendly experience.

10:20 am
Bunch
Bunch is a mobile platform to share and discuss your passions with like-minded people. The Bunch iPhone app is live in private beta and has had 1.1 million pre-signups via a Facebook marketing app. Bunch will test launch Sept 2012 in Canada, with a US launch to follow.

Special thanks to the nearly 100 new members who have joined Cdling recently. Our community now has 622 members and if you take a look at the cross section of experience, geography and talent sets, we could not be happier with the diversity of players that are coming together.