http://www.vef.org/momentum

VEF Momentum was founded under the Vancouver Enterprise Forum with a mandate to connect and educate a new generation of young entrepreneurs in Vancouver.

The program was founded with four important principles since conception:

• The content offered at all events had to be relevant to young, first-time entrepreneurs. For example, attendees should leave with a better idea of how to secure early-stage financing, how to tackle a persistent day-to-day problem, or have found inspiration from a speaker who has shared many of the same challenges as a young entrepreneur.

• Events should be as open and accessible as possible. Whether you are a student with an idea for a new business, an aspiring entrepreneur with a day-job or you’re bootstrapping your start-up, we want you to come to our events. We want to remove any barrier that could potentially prevent someone who could add value to our events from attending.

• The atmosphere of every event should be both comfortable and conducive to networking and peer-mentorship. We like to avoid formalities or rules that make connecting with other people a chore instead of a valuable experience.

• Our web-site can be more than a communication tool – it can be a community tool. We can connect young entrepreneurs between events with an active, community-centric web-site with updates from our events, information on external events, educational blog-posts from reputable contributors and social networking integration.

Vancouver Enterprise Forum www.vef.org

British Columbia Innovation Council

Naim Merchant

As one of the founders of VEF Momentum, Na'im spends much of his time setting out the marketing and external relations functions of the program. He is a recent graduate of the Sauder School of Business at UBC with a concentration in Marketing and Accounting. He has a keen interest in start-ups and technology and has recently served as Chairperson of BDC Enterprize 2007, one of the world’s largest student entrepreneurship events, and as a Junior Analyst at a local venture capital firm. He will be starting as an Associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers in September 2008.

 

  Kerry Liu

As one of the founders of VEF Momentum, Kerry focuses on the operations, content, and community development areas of the program. Kerry is currently an associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers pursuing his CA designation. Prior to joining PwC, Kerry spent a summer working at BDC Venture Capital in their information technology group. Kerry is also a past chair of Enterprize Entrepreneurship Conference and Business Plan Competition and holds a Bachelors of Commerce from UBC.

 

  Arnold Leung

Arnold is currently the CEO of Appnovation Technologies, a downtown based web development company. Prior to founding Appnovation, Arnold was involved with various entrepreneurship organizations, including organizing the UBC Enterprize Conference in 2006. Arnold has also competed in various business plan competitions in the past including New Ventures BC. He has a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of British Columbia. During his leisurely times, Arnold enjoys hiking and swimming.

 

  Jon Bixby

Jonathan is a founder and the CEO of Strangeloop Networks (www.strangeloopnetworks.com). Jonathan has a wealth of experience in starting, leading and mentoring technology start-ups. As co-founder and Chairman of the Board of IronPoint Technology, the market leader in public-sector content and collaboration, Jonathan led the company from start-up to successful acquisition by The Active Network in thirty months. Jonathan sits on the board of the Vancouver Enterprise Forum and the final jury for the New Ventures BC competition. He is a Business in Vancouver Top 40 Under 40 award recipient.

 

  Dick Hardt

Dick A pioneer in the Internet sector and open source software community, Dick has been active in software development for over two decades.

Prior to founding Sxip Identity, Dick founded ActiveState in 1997. Under his leadership as CEO, ActiveState became a leader in open source programming languages and anti-spam software and was acquired by UK-based software company, Sophos in 2003. As a successful entrepreneur and technology expert, Dick is very involved in the technology community giving keynotes at numerous conferences across the globe. Dick is an active participant in the OpenID community. He co-authored the OpenID 2.0 specification and OpenID Attribute Exchange, is a founding board member of the OpenID Foundation. Dick is also very active in the Vancouver community and is on the board of the Vancouver Enterprise Forum. He previously was on the board of the BC Technology Industry Association and Ludicorp, creators of Flickr. He is a Business in Vancouver Top 40 Under 40 award recipient.