Today I’m extremely proud to publicly announce my new job as Community Manager at VenCorps. Be sure to head on over there to sign up for a beta invite 
About VenCorps
VenCorps is an online platform for discovering, funding, and growing startup companies. Our community is made up of entrepreneurs, investors and other members of the startup ecosystem. We’re going to change the way startups get found, funded and grow. We’re counting on the wisdom of our community to find and pick the startups we will give seed funding to. Then, we’ll tap the participation of our community to help those startups grow.
VenCorps is the brainchild of Sean Wise, one of Canada’s experts in raising venture capital. He’s trained over 3500 entrepreneurs, who collectively raised more $2.1B. He’s also the author of The Globe and Mail’s Wise Words column & book by the same name, and an industry advisor to CBC’s Dragon’s Den startup pitch show. Sean has been a great boss and mentor already, I’m looking forward to learning even more from him over the long term.
A Spencer Trask Company
VenCorps is owned by Spencer Trask, an investment company with a mandate to change the world. Let me just say: wow, it’s amazing to work with such a firm. Mr. Spencer Trask himself funded Thomas Edison’s lightbulb, The New York Times, General Electric, and the first credit rating service Moody’s. Since then we’ve funded the first human genome company, the first stem cell company, the first optical integrated circuit company, and the first AIDS vaccine research, and crowdsourcing innovators like Innocentive.
The fund for startups that the VenCorps community chooses is managed by the Spencer Trask Collaborative Venture Partners. We have an amazing team and investors. Expect to hear more about STCVP later.
The Cambrian House Transition
Very soon we will begin a special alpha preview where we start to rolling out invites to the 65,000 members of the Cambrian House crowdsourcing community. Cambrian House is a world leader in crowdsourcing ideas, so crowdsourcing companies was a natural evolution. The Cambrian House team will now be focused on building out the companies they crowdsourced like Gwabs and Mob4Hire.
I’ve spent a lot of time working with the Cambrian House team over the last few months, and I’m humbled at the trust they have placed in me to manage the community they worked so hard to grow.
What’s Next
In the short term, we will be rolling out alpha invites to the Cambrian House community. Next up will be invites to people that signed up for the private beta (hint, hint). Once we feel like things are going smoothly we will open the site up to everyone for a public beta.
We will also be headed to conferences like Mesh and Under the Radar to make announcements, demo the site, spread the word and tape elevator pitches for startups.
I will be blogging more about startups, entrepreneurship and venture capital here and later on a forthcoming public VenCorps blog.
And finally, thanks to my colleagues that knew what I’ve been up to for the last few months and were kind enough not to blow my cover. I like to be transparent, but I dislike talking about things too long before I have something to show.
If you have any questions or comments, let me know.
