July Update: Building in the summer heat
The summer has been busy in the community! Builders building, talking tech, sharing ideas, and at least one BBQ.
Builders Club for people who are building stuff
A new place for ambitious people building stuff has opened up - The Builders Club - and it is designed to be a place for devs, marketing, and product folks to have a place to connect with others. You don’t have to work on a startup… but want to work on a side project or have one.
If you want to check the place out, join the next Technical Wednesday at lunch.
DevHouse!
July’s DevHouse had six demos (5 shared their info and it’s below) and offered the first real test of the community space inside the Clubhouse. Everyone fit.
The demos:
Shriji - https://ronin.co/ - shrijike@gmail.com
Marcelle - X: @charisma_css - marcelrusu0@gmail.com
Lucas - end-to-end tests in swift - lucas@me.com
Tyler - using L Systems to generate fractals and model plant growth - tylersafaric99@gmail.com
David - http://tabletopicker.com/ - david@davidasix.com
Be sure to follow the events page so you don’t miss the next one.
Socratica
The students behind Socratica celebrated the people behind the projects with their end-of-term event called Assembly. They filled the fantastic Cafeteria space at Communitech with a lot of builder energy where a wide range of projects took the stage. Once again showing off the creativity and talent of students in the region.
They also switched up venues for their coworking sessions and started hosting them out Den 1880! As one of the nicest spots in town to work on stuff, you can check out their Instagram for a sense of how those sessions went.
Finally, Socratica also hosted a ‘camp’ in July. Reminding lots of us old timers how much this community does offer people!
Podcasts
Focusing on early founder stories, three new podcasts have been posted on the Monday Club. All three are early-stage founders who have found customers and a little revenue. Each of them has a unique story but they all share some similarities — mainly that they built a tool that they wanted to use.
The short podcast series is still a bit of an experiment and is meant to capture those early ideas and energy to inspire others to get to work building something.
BBQ’s, new CEO at the AC, Catalyst expanding, and more!
Some quick-fire updates:
Accelerator Centre has a new CEO (officially), report, and program - huge congrats Ruth!
Accelerator Centre and UW partner on a new global impact program
Accelerator Centre released its impact report. It’s a lot of impact.
Startups and Beer at Catalyst (above pic)
Navigating community
The interest in community events is as high as I remember in Waterloo. There are a lot of people showing up every time. The challenge most people face is finding the events… partly because there are not as many as there used to be.
At the risk of creating a little controversy, I am going to try and provide a bit of a guide in the future. Your best bet for tech is to subscribe to the long-running Watcamp calendar. Other places to look:
Meetup (not many in here right now that are tech)
Accelerator Centre - they normally announce events on LinkedIn and other places
Den1880 - if you join, you get access to their internal events
Catalyst - some tech events do happen there, look to the bottom of the page to find out
Communitech - watch their events page for more stuff as they tend to host the most
With all of the above, finding events is still pretty hard. If you are hosting an event or would like to, let me know. I will try to help get the word out.
Also, Waterloo is not Toronto-Waterloo. It’s Waterloo.
Big thanks to Communitech for their support of things like Monday Club and this newsletter.