Shopify raises $7 Million Series A

But you know what, I bet they got an amazing deal because of their leverage. how can you not take the money?

I don't think anything in the so-called "lean startup" philosophy runs counter to the idea of taking Series A financing when appropriate. Hell, even 37Signals took money from Jeff Bezos...

I guess we are not technically bootstrapped by some incredibly demanding definition of the term.

To me all those things - Bootstrapping, Angel money, Grants, VCs, etc - are just tangential tools in a pretty large toolbox that we as entrepreneurs can draw upon. There is no secret bootstrap society that you get to join if you do that just like there is no secret hammer society that you get to join if you only use hammers for all your carpentry jobs.

In any case, use the right tool for the job. We started a risky business in a crowded space so we bootstrapped. We ran out of cash so we got Angel money. We became profitable so we increased our own spend. We got really good at this and wanted to accelerate so we take VC money to get to our goals faster. It's not rocket surgery.

http://www.startupnorth.ca/2010/10/28/what-do-canadas-vcs-re...

Being insulted by a VC is almost a rite of passage up here.

http://www.aspectgraphics.com/ACCTO/A_TO_invite.html

Basically, it was a room full of startup folks, a couple of people with money talking and a few lawyers. It was more informative than it sounds.

In short, the question being asked was "what's wrong with Canadian Startup Capital?"

After the lectures and a lot of conversation about the topic with other Toronto based startup folks in addition to a few VC people, I boiled the problem down to these points:

1) We don't value our own work. To hit a product out of the park, we sort of assume (like the rest of North America) that we need to be in the valley. I don't think that this is unique of Canada though - I've talked to a lot of U.S. based startups outside of California that feel the same way.

2) Canadian investors have different investments. We like resources, land, oil, that sort of stuff. Investing in tech somehow seems un-natural to a lot of the folks with the Brewsters Millions type of money.

3) A lot of Canadian tech startups are founded in revenue. Shopify is a good example - they're making money. They need some money so they took funding, but they didn't start the company needing funding to survive.

Talking to a large number of Canadian startups over the last few years, I think that the previous point is the biggest problem with the Canadian VC industry. We simply don't ask for the money early and often enough to constantly remind people outside of the tech industry how much money it usually costs to get to revenue. A lot of the products grown in Canada are not erroneous in the least - the strong majority of them have customers and revenue in proportion to the costs they incur.

4) Last, many Canadian tech companies aren't solving big enough problems. Similar to the point above, we're focused on revenue. VC is a game best played when the players are ALL swinging for the fences. A lot of the problems that our current products solve are focused on those that have a limited number of customers so that we can quickly build and sell them a solution. VC's want to fund solutions that will impact very large groups of people, if not all 6.8 billion of us.

In the end, it's only a matter of time really. We'll have a few more Shopifies under our belt and then Film Industry won't be the only folks coming up North for a good deal :)

I have tons of respect for the company and the team, but the documentation isn't given first-class status in my experience.

For a basic general cart, it's great. But especially for an e-commerce system that you rely on your store for 100% of your income, the second you want to try anything nifty, such as combo packs, flat rate box shipping (mostly calculations involving if a cart can fit in the flat rate box), coupon codes for only specific products, and random general issues (such as 100 variants per product max, which is annoying when trying to hand-create combo packs with 200-300 variants), I'd suggest something else.