THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT! But one Founder can still earn a seat.

Nikhil Kalghatgi is surpassing my ideal as an NY venture capitalist.Softbank Capital’s portfolio includes Media (Huffington Post), Entertainment (Zynga), Commerce (Gilt Groupe) and advertising (Buddy Media). This Fireside Chat should attract a different slice of the Toronto startup set, less upstart and more offshoots - i.e. Founders who bring with them experiences from these established sectors in TO.

Get your tickets here.

Nikhil’s style is Gangnam.  Our first exchange on Twitter was about his Twitter bio, now updated from: “I’m a VC. And this is crazy. But here’s my term sheet. Call me maybe?” which was so last summer to: VC. Gangnam Style.

You can read his official bio here. This is going to be fun.

OFFICE HOURS @ GOWLINGS

Nikhil is also giving us an hour for one on one meetings with promising prospects that fit his investment profile, in an “Office Hours” format just like First Round Capital’s Howard Morgan and 500 Startups’ Paul Singh. Cdling Capital Services Inc. will work with MaRS Commons and the MaRS Mentor Network to incorporate traditional referrals from across the local ecosystem and the Cdling platform to deliver a report to Nikhil on October 21 and we will announce his selections on October 22. @cdlingHQ or email me at michael at cdling dot com with any questions or for more details.

We are grateful to our friends at Gowlings who are graciously hosting us for both OFFICE HOURS and the chat.

At the last Startup Grind Toronto event we hosted, we had an unpaid intern get his MacBook ripped off of the registration table while he was volunteering.

We bought him a new one. 

That is a fairly major set back for an unfunded, pre-revenue startup.

We would be grateful if you kicked in.

A few factoids to help you along:

There are now 450 in the Startup Grind Toronto Meetup Group.

450 x $4.44 = $2,000

200 x $10 = $2,000

1 x $2,000 = $2,000 or in other terms, a lot of product dev.

The optimal solution is in here some place.

Any help on this is greatly appreciated and will be personally recognized.

Kind Regards,

Michael

With a startup you are pushing out an idea.  You will typically go through several iterations, pushing out a new design, or a different marketing approach … each time pushing through a new cycle of activity. Then at a certain point, you will start to see signs of “the PULL”.

That is when your users start to pull things out of you.  They want you to fix something that doesn’t work or implement a new feature.  Ideally you are iterating every week or day or even more often to solve problems. Soon you are getting feedback faster than you can react.

That’s real traction.  It doesn’t have to be about huge user numbers (though that is always nice), but when users are starting to care enough about what you are doing to help you improve it, that is probably the time that you should consider going out to raise some outside capital to help you keep pace with the opportunity and figure out how to scale a real business.

Above, I am paraphrasing Paul Singh, Partner at 500Startups who joined us for a fireside chat in Toronto on September 10th. That is the kernel of wisdom that stuck with me as a unique insight from someone who needs to have his finger on the pulse of this kind of moment in a startup’s cycle in order to do his job with a fund that is probably the highest velocity seed stage investor in the world.

You can hear the full hour of audio at this link. There are a lot more nuggets to glean, it is worth the listen.

You can check out ITBusiness.ca’s full coverage here or if you are short for time, take four and half mins for their video recap above. Check out the photos here (including a great panorama of PlayThink’s live sketch).  Or click here for a short voice over of the amazing live sketching that Patricia Kambitsch at PlayThink did to capture the major themes and ideas.