And that’s a wrap! Another great 48hrs in the Valley is complete, and we’ve mentored, celebrated and heard all the fantastic pitches of this June’s cohort.  Let’s take a look at what the two days were like:

Day 1 started with Anar Simpson (Founder of Parallel Earth and C100 organizing committee member) as our MC for the morning at Rocket Space, first introducing us to the CEO and founder of Rocket Space, Duncan Logan.  After hearing about what San Francisco has to offer the tech world (in comparison to Silicon Valley down the peninsula), we chatted with Charter Member Jonathan Ehrlich (Founder of Copious) about prevailing wisdom that isn’t. As the Montreal tech community got to hear Jonathan speak about this subject back in May, he now taught the whole 48hrs crew that tenacity is what really takes us places. Working incredibly hard and not giving up, that’s what makes a great entrepreneur.

Another one of our Charter Members and part of the 48hrs organizing committee, Arif Janmohamed gave us insight into the mind of a Valley VC.  Our friend Catherine Courage (VP of Product Design at Citrix) then showed us that design is the ultimate startup weapon.

There was a kick ass founder-to-founder panel with Alex Mehr (Founder of Zoosk.com), Rahim Fazal (Founder of Involver), Dan Martell (Founder of Clarity), and Ranjith Kumaran (Founder of YouSendIt).  Afterwards while eating lunch, we broke into smaller sessions with each founder to hear more about their individual journeys.

And, of course, the best part of 48hrs are the one on one mentoring sessions with about 25 of our favorite Charter Members.  Each company was carefully matched with 2 Charter Members for 2 sessions of one hour mentoring. We keep hearing that both the companies were quite amazing and the Charter Members’ advice was invaluable. So, we want to give a big thank you to all the Charter Members who participated—you all rock!

To end day 1, we went all out to celebrate Canadian entrepreneurship by throwing the 48hrs in the Valley reception at Achievers in SF. Razor Suleman (Founder and CEO of Achievers), Lars Leckie (co-chair of the C100 and Partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners), and Cassie Doyle (Consul General, Consulate General of Canada, Silicon Valley/SF) congratulated the 20 companies on their success and thanked the C100 community for joining in on another awesome 48hrs in the Valley. 

Day 2 brought us down to Quadrus in the beautiful Menlo Park, for a morning filled with a corporate development panel with Anil Patel (Principal of Corporate Development at Google), Ryan Aytay (VP of Corporate Development at Salesforce), and Colm Callan (Sr. Director of Corporate Development, Ebay) and was moderated by Charter Member Michael Buhr. Then we broke out again into groups, to chat with the panelists in a smaller setting. Finally, to end the lineup of speakers and mentors, we heard from Charter Member Jeff Mallet on celebrating failure. 

Lastly, all 20 companies got to strut their stuff during the C100 Showcase. This is when each company had the opportunity to pitch to investors and C100 Charter Members. And boy, did we hear some great feedback: these are some really impressive companies! In the end, both Openera and Frank & Oak were voted 48hrs favorites and each company won one ticket to the Grow conference in August. Congrats guys!

Thank you to everyone who made this a memorable 48hrs in the Valley--we'll see you all at the next one!

To view all the photos taken during this June's 48hrs in the Valley, check out our flickr page.