About Lean Startup Machine

Lean Startup Machine is a three-day workshop where attendees use Customer Development and Lean Startup principles to validate an idea for a new product or service.

Bring your team, or come alone and new teams will form on Friday night.

Registration deadline April 26

Speakers & Mentors

  • Todd Charron
    Todd Charron
    Planning For Failure
    Todd Charron is an Agile Coach and Consultant in Toronto helping companies build collaborative work places that deliver real business value.
  • Tamar-Melissa Huggins
    Tamar-Melissa Huggins
    Driven Accelerator Group
    Tamar-Melissa is the founder of Toronto's first female and minority focused start-up accelerator, DRIVEN. She brings years of digital strategy and marketing communications to her groundbreaking social enterprise.
  • Jacqueline Nuwame
    Jacqueline Nuwame
    CFC Media Lab
    Digital and interactive media production, study and discourse @ CFC Media Lab. http://about.me/edit/jacqnu
  • A. Traviss Corry
    A. Traviss Corry
    INcubes
    [IN]ternet Biz Developer, Director @incubes INcubator, Entrepreneur, Serial Co-Founder, Mentor, Marathoner, Data Architect http://thePlantEncyclopedia.org
  • Ramli John
    Ramli John
    FamilyTales
    Startup founder, hacker, digital strategist and marketer with a University of Waterloo Math/CS and Ivey MBA background. Startup enthusiast who loves helping other entrepreneurs change the world.
  • Carolyn Van
    Carolyn Van
    thirdocean
    Carolyn is a Founder and Partner of thirdocean where her role consists of leading business strategy and operations, client service management, project and execution management and internal development. Carolyn is known by her colleagues for her straight forward and direct communication style, high-level strategic thinking and planning, her love for clean organizational processes, getting down to the root cause/challenges and wiggling her way towards hard objectives.
  • Theresa Laurico
    Theresa Laurico
    SociaLIGHT
    FOUNDER/ CVO - Chief Visionary Officer
  • Mustefa Jo'shen
    Mustefa Jo'shen
    Shopcaster / tailoredUX
    Agile & Lean UX Designer, hacker & startup-er. Currently @tucows, previously @sdelements.
  • Tim Ryan
    Tim Ryan
    Vestiigo.com
    Founder @ CEO Vestiigo.com
  • Bill Schaller
    Bill Schaller
    Architech
    Inspired by Agile & Lean, I coach teams and organizations to become the best they can be.
  • Amit Saxena
    Amit Saxena
    slamit.ca
    Part engineer, part developer, part startup scientist, Amit is solution-focused, utilizing the right technology for the problem rather than simply trying to solve problems with technology.
  • Marta Nowinska
    Marta Nowinska
    Swapsity
    Marta Nowinska is a social entrepreneur and the President and Founder of Swapsity, Canada’s leading swapping community. She traded in her Bay Street finance job to live her passion, driving the swapping movement in Canada. Visit http://www.martanowinska.com to learn more about Marta.
  • Ivan Tsarynny
    Ivan Tsarynny
    PostBeyond
    van bring 15 years of tech, business & team building experience and currently growing his 3rd company
  • Rob Kenedi
    Rob Kenedi
    Spoke Technologies
    Rob has many years of experience building web and mobile startups, and is currently Chief Product Officer at Spoke Technologies and a mentor at the CFC Media Lab's ideaBOOST program.
  • Sue McGill
    Sue McGill
    JOLT / MaRS
    Sue McGill is a startup mentor and advocate for innovation. A builder of technology companies and brands, Sue has advised and been actively involved in over 200 startups in the emerging technology space, with hands-on experience at DWL (acquired by IBM), MySpace and JUICE Mobile. Throughout her career, Sue has lived in Silicon Valley and Toronto, and has worked as an executive in major public companies, including CanWest, Yahoo! and RIM. For the past two years, she has been driving MaRS’ efforts in the consumer mobile, social and web space. She sits on the advisory boards of several leading Canadian startups and runs JOLT as Executive Director.
  • Simon Goldstein
    Simon Goldstein
    BOON Rewards Inc.
    BOON Rewards is a coalition loyalty rewards and promotions platform that helps local hospitality, retail and service businesses retain, acquire, grow and get to know valuable customers. BOON is about being part of a cool hip local lifestyle community founded on the buy local movement. BOON's Coalition loyalty rewards program delivers significantly more value by driving customer acquisition and delivering more meaningful consumer intelligence than paper and electronic stamp-card reward programs. BOON's promotions platform is targeted at and attractive to high spending valuable loyal customers which drives real value to our merchants.
  • Peter LePiane
    Peter LePiane
    Unison
    Peter, through Unison: Startup Consulting, applies a Lean and Agile approach to the startup process backed by Decision Support Statistics to ensure startups scale at the right time and no sooner: after Product-Market Fit
  • Lyndon Johnson
    Lyndon Johnson
    THINK DIFFERENT[LY] Public Relations
    A broadcaster turned PR that wants to make public relations and marketing relevant and affordable to startups.
  • Eli Aleyner
    Eli Aleyner
    Xtreme Labs
    Eli is a director of Strategic Alliances at XtremeLabs. Previously, he managed product and held engineering roles for startups and fortune 500 companies, including Reuters, Microsoft and Amazon.com. In his free time (a rarity), he enjoys running, traveling, sailing and skiing
  • Gerard Buckley
    Gerard Buckley
    Jaguar Capital Inc.
    Gerard provides advisory services to early and growth stage companies including start-ups through Jaguar Capital where he is Founder and CEO. He has been engaged to advise and mentor CEO's of such companies. With a core competency in financial management, financial structuring, foreign exchange, financial risk management, governance, and business process; Gerard has been successful in structuring companies to access financing as well as sit on advisory boards and boards of directors of such companies. Gerard is now serving as Chairperson, Maple Leaf Angels Corporation and is a member of The Small and Medium Enterprise Committee of The Ontario Securities Commission reviewing regulations on Capital Formation for SMEs.
  • Greg Vermeulen
    Greg Vermeulen
    Leaders For Non Profits (L4NP)
    Entrepreneur & Investor; Energy economist who builds socially responsible & financially sustainable enterprises in public, private, and non profit sectors.
  • Scott Howard
    Scott Howard
    Coral CEA
    Work with & fund data driven applications in enterprise verticals.
  • Saul Colt
    Saul Colt
    Kinetic Cafe
    Smartest Man in the World
  • kerry morrison
    kerry morrison
    Endloop Mobile
    Kerry has spent nearly 20yrs in the technology and marketing space, working for some of the biggest brands in the world.
  • Dave Wright
    Dave Wright
    David Wright and Associates, Inc.
    Dave has over 30 years of high tech sales and marketing experience and works with Toronto based startups as a mentor.
  • Andrew Schmied
    Andrew Schmied
    Jaguar Capital Inc
    Andrew brings 10 years of venture commercialization and transformation experience to Jaguar Capital.
  • Jason Cheong-Kee-You
    Jason Cheong-Kee-You
    Might Jupiter
  • Fabricio Nogueira Buzeto
    Fabricio Nogueira Buzeto
    Qual Canal
    CTO of qualcanal.tv , Researcher at http://UnBiquitous.org and Founder of http://Intacto.com.br
  • Owen Mullings
    Owen Mullings
    Rewards Culture
    Owen's passion for human potential and technologies role in raising the human capacity lead him to earn degrees in engineering, and spend time as an elite athlete. He then worked 4 years for one of the fastest growing Canadian technology companies in product management and design. Now he's a founder at Rewards Culture, a company dedicated to helping employees and members of organizations enrich their lives through amazing discounted products and services.

The Organizers

  • Joy Williams
    Joy Williams
    Lean Startup Machine
    Calmly working with a sense of urgency. In a #LeanStartup World. #WorkingHard #WorkingSmart. I tweet for @gospelfit.
  • Fran Rawlings
    Fran Rawlings
    MUJER
    My reflexes have an 85% success rate of saving me from calamities. Im an avid cyclist. I'm currently managing a small non-profit and I'm working towards building social enterprise models.
  • Bhami Ilyas
    Bhami Ilyas
    RWDI
    Bhami has over 5 years of consulting experience in engineering and technology with one of Canada's Best 50 managed companies. His consulting projects includes world's tallest building- Burj Khalifa in Dubai, Masdar City (Carbon neutral- zero waste) - Abu Dhabi and One Word Trade Center in NY. Social projects with high impact metrics is his love and interest. And in between he takes out to Cycling and Hiking.
  • Eric Floresca
    Eric Floresca
    Taking what comes and finding my fearlessness on the road to becoming the best me while finding my writer's voice and appreciating the joy of each passing day
  • Jonathan Buccella
    Jonathan Buccella
    Strategy & Implementation @JumpwireMedia, Co-Founder of @BizIncLondon & @Lean Workshop Coordinator & Enthusiast.

What Our Alumni Say

Our Awesome Partners

  • CFC Media Lab provides a unique training, research and production think-tank environment for emerging new media content developers, practitioners and companies. An internationally-acclaimed and award-winning facility, graduates of CFC Media Lab emerge as leaders in the world of interactive media, produce innovative projects and start up 21st Century companies.
  • ideaBOOST is a business accelerator with a difference -- a bootcamp for businesses that want to succeed within an entertainment ecosystem that has been radically disrupted by new technologies and demanding audience expectations.
  • thirdocean develops and implements social media marketing and content strategies. By building your communities with relevant members, conducting meaningful conversations, identifying opportunities, collecting valuable insights and maintaining your relationships on your behalf - we help you to achieve your business goals. We help you navigate and be seen in the social web and remain relevant to your end customers. You don't have to do it alone.
  • Venus Ventures is a project dedicated to providing support for Female-led private technology ventures who want to make a serious mark in this world. Through our community efforts, workshops and content we aim to identify and build awareness of the challenges and barriers that exist and to close the gap between startup and innovation resources and venture founders. Our goal is not to merely increase the amount of female CEOs - but to more importantly to have a heavy hand in helping to build better and relevant products, services and businesses by encouraging diverse insights, leadership and collaboration where it matters.
  • The SociaLIGHT Conference is the ultimate entrepreneurship and leadership event in Toronto bringing together over 1,000 young professionals and leaders for a day of empowerment and inspiration from internationally acclaimed speakers, entrepreneurs and innovators from across Canada and beyond.
  • We are a mentorship driven start-up accelerator designed to provide training, support and resources to under-represented minorities in digital technology.
  • A casual, social group for all technologists to meet, mingle, maybe find a partner in crime or two
  • #DevTO, a place for all, regardless of age, experience or sex to gather and collaborate on the problems we face while developing applications. You may not be a developer, but even if you have written a bit of HTML you should come out.
  • Our vision is to foster Canada's next generation of innovative CEOs, Founders and Leaders in the business and technology space.

Learn to build what customers want.