[cperciva]

Is Tarsnap good? (please say yes...)

In all seriousness, though, Tarsnap doesn't really come out of Vancouver. It happens to be located here, but that's just because I'm here; I certainly can't point to anything and say "if Tarsnap wasn't in Vancouver, I wouldn't have had access to X and it wouldn't have succeeded".

I hope we can develop more of a startup community here, but so far all I've seen is hordes of MBAs and a distinct lack of technical people.

[imack]

The 'distinct lack of technical people' is what worries me the most. But I like to think a lot are just tied up in the video game industry. There are a lot of post-secondary institutions around with solid CS programs and it isn't hard to convince someone to move here. (worked on me)

As for the hoards of MBA's, I've seen a couple startups run by muggles who just contract out the initial coding (Bootup labs sponsored included) then look for a tech lead much later, if at all. There are also odd things like local democamps where the "no powerpoint" rule is cast aside and few of the speakers actually have software to demo. To their credit, a thinking ape was at the last democamp with a demo, unlike the act that went up after them: guys pitching a TV show about iPhone apps.

[dannyrobinson]

Completely agree that Vancouver could use more technical founders, but we do have plenty of "technical people", and you're right, lots are in the gaming industry. (the compass engine and dimerocker founders came from there)

It's hard to find "technical people" who are in a position to take the financial risk of starting a company. We're working hard (and I mean hard) to fix that by making more money available to them. Bootup's minimum criteria is, and has been for some time, that at least one co-founder has to be highly technical, but preferably both. But ideally, balanced in that the other would be heavy on design and user experience, HTML5/CSS.