Where is Canada’s PandoDaily?

Sarah Lacy wanted to start a new blog to “be the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle” so did was any aspiring entrepreneur would do in Silicon Valley: raised $2.5-million in financing from a group of investors that include Marc Andreessen (Netscape), Peter Thiel (PayPal) and Tony Hsieh (Zappos).

Kudos to Lacy, who worked for TechCrunch but left after the mega-tech blog was bought by AOL. Her ability to raise VC for PandoDaily has attracted detractors (Gawker) and fan-boys (Robert Scoble),

But what I want to know is where is Canada’s PandoDaily? How come Canada doesn’t have a well-financed blog focused on covering the vibrant startup ecosystem north of the border?

With all due respect for blogs that do a great job of covering the startup scene (StartupNorth, Techvibes, et al), there isn’t a Canadian startup blog armed with enough capital to become a serious business. If Sarah Lacy can raise a cool $2.5-million for a startup in an ultra-competitive marketplace, how come someone north of the border can’t raise a measly $1-million to do something similar.

Yes, I hear the refrains Canada is a smaller market that apparently has less advertising and sponsorship ammunition to support a content-driven Website.

You know what I think: that’s a crock of s*%t. It’s a lame excuse because it dismisses the idea that a high-quality Website that covers the startups landscape can’t attract advertising interest from VCs, government, suppliers, etc. to make a go of it.

Call me an optimistic but my sense is there’s a big opportunity for a savvy investor and aggressive entrepreneurs to make something like PandoDaily happen in Canada.

Does this argument have any validity or a pipedream?

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http://www.twitter.com/juepucta juepucta

While i get your point, you are still talking abouta market a tenth of the US’. And it i sprobably the same, if not worse, for the money involved.

-G.
http://www.canuckseo.com Jim Rudnick

Okay, so even at our 10% figure – that’d be a $250k raise, which would buy some pretty good infrastructure, editors/writers…attract advertisers…and yeah, it’d work I’d think.

I’ll start the donations with $100 CDN to the startup….you in?

Jim

PS I still consider this blog, David’s StartUpNorth and StartupCFO to be the definitive Canuck voices, eh!
http://www.itworldcanada.com Shane Schick

Youv’e been out of the media for a bit too long, I think. It’s an incredible struggle to get revenue, partifulaly for something about startups who may or may not spend much money on the kind of products and services offered by advertisers. I don’t really think VC funding is a sustainable option, but I could be wrong. That said, our ITBusiness.ca site does a lot of coverage on Canadian startups — not only basic profiles like the ones seen on TechCrunch and probably PandoDaily but stories about the actual projects they do with customers, if anyone’s interested.
http://startupnorth.ca Jevon

You should come and do it on Startupnorth.

http://www.markevanstech.com Mark Evans

David has been cross-posting some of my posts so that’s a start. Maybe I should talk with David about other avenues.

http://about.me/RohanSJ Rohan Jayasekera

PandoDaily isn’t a US-only site for which a Canadian parallel might be suitable. It aims to cover the “startup root system … located in Silicon Valley, but increasingly it’s stretching around the world”. I expect its coverage to include startups located in Canadian cities, along with startups located in U.S. cities outside SV. As is already the case at other blogs like TechCrunch.

I haven’t seen much evidence of a Canadian startup ecosystem — nor a U.S. one for that matter. The main organizing unit is the city (or metropolitan area). There are local ecosystems in the Valley, Boston, NYC, Toronto, Waterloo, Vancouver, etc. A Canada-centric blog can be useful when a single city doesn’t have enough going on to warrant its own blog — but Toronto could equally be covered by a Northeast blog (NYC, Boston, Toronto, etc.) and Vancouver by a Pacific Northwest blog.

I think the next level up beyond cities is not country but language. If it were country, I’d see coverage in English-language Canadian blogs about those startups whose product/service operates (at least initially) in French only.