Calgary now has an Accelerator to call their own

The first 6 months in a startup are hard. You can’t explain to your friends and family why you’ve quit your job and work long hours for no money. You spend a bunch of your very limited time trying to figure out the lay of the land, connect with other startups, learn what events are high value, what a pitch is (and is not), the difference between seed funding, angel funding and a VC round. It’s overwhelming, it can be frustrating and it’s frequently isolating.

Then you find your feet connect with other entrepreneurs you quickly discover that there’s a whole community of people that think, dream, act and feel the same way you do. You share ideas and tips. You trade stories and learnings. Thoughts collide and combine and bounce off of each other to create new and exciting ideas at a pace that only happens when you have a group of entrepreneurs in the same space together.

Those are the words of Calgary’s Christian MacLean and this is precisely why AcceleratorYYC was conceived. Today it is born.

Christian and Victoria MacLean of Cardinal Media Technologies and Pieter Boekhoff of Fenture Solutions wanted to create a place for startups to work together and ultimately grow the Calgary Startup community.

If you’re an early stage startup in Calgary and you want to surround yourself with other startups and entrepreneurs, you’ll want to rent a desk at AcceleratorYYC.

They’ve got 26 desks, 2 smartboards, a breakout room, a boardroom, mail delivery, high-speed internet, printers and copiers, beverages (free for a tweet), a kitchen, and cheap parking. All accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

In addition to hosting local tech events in the space, AcceleratorYYC plans to bring in mentors and potential investors during “office hours” to help tenants grow their businesses.

Christian believes that AcceleratorYYC will feed Canada’s larger funded accelerators like Vancouver’s GrowLab and Montreal’s FounderFuel. Maybe they should have called it DealFlowYYC.