Bolidea – Giving Rise to Stellar Companies

Challenge Your World at Montreal NewTech

by Olivier Cabanes

Today, entrepreneurs – whether they have a business or technology background – who want to start a business have access to a lot of help and resources, such as events that promote sharing project ideas, interests and skills with peers. However, it seems like most of these gatherings are made for groups with similar backgrounds. As an example, Montreal NewTech mostly attracts business-oriented entrepreneurs or investors, while developers prefer to hang out in events such as Free Hackers. Bolidea decided to participate in the latter and is also willing to do the same for other crowd-specific events as we believe they bring tremendous value for entrepreneurs and their start-ups. It is through events like these that entrepreneurs can get specialized feedback, insight, support, and maybe funding! While we entirely encourage crowd-specific events, we think that there aren’t enough “hybrid” events – events that create synergies between different crowds.

Of course some “hybrid” events do exist, such as Co-Founders Monday, which we will be hosting for the first time next week, but for these types of events, it seems to be quite difficult to get the different crowds to show up with an equal amount of interest. Often, there will be more people from one crowd and the other crowd will end up feeling overwhelmed and out of place. That is the problem Bolidea would like to tackle in order to help our startup community thrive even more. We want to be able to successfully unite business-focused personalities with developers and investors in a way that will spark new ideas and relationships which we can then hopefully help grow into independent, successful companies.

We don’t have the winning solution yet, but we’re working on it. One thing we are doing is getting feedback from individuals that attended our events and also gathering suggestions from people in the startup scene for eventual events. We want to identify why crowds don’t necessarily want to mix and what would make them want to. Everyone involved in the tech community is welcome to let us know what they think the winning “hybrid” event would be; if you’re a business brain, a tech guru, a startup fan, a money man, what you’ve got to say is important to us. What do you think is the key to making a “hybrid” event successful – what type of “hybrid” event would YOU want to attend?

And of course, if you share our vision and you want to organize an event, give us a shout – maybe we can help!