UPDATE AUG. 26, 2020 - We are working to come out of stasis with a new offering to help Founders, Investors and experts during these Covid times. (see About page).

If you are a Founder who is ready to test your startup with feedback from Investors and Experts please email info@cdling.com.

To all Founders, Investors and Experts: We have not sent out an update for a long time, but if you want to join the more than 4,000 people who have received our updates in the past please sign up here.

Original post:

Hey - how are you? My name is Michael Cayley and I am the Founder of Cdling (pronounced “seedling”). I was the Director of Startup Grind in Toronto and KW and for the last couple of years I have been living in Ottawa with my family.

Cdling has worked with hundreds of startups from Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, New York City, Silicon Valley and Montreal over the last few years. In fact we have orchestrated more than 50 one-on-one meetings between promising startups from more than 6 countries and seed/early stage investors like 500Startups, First Round Capital, Softbank Capital, Sequoia (more than 40 investors from all over the world).

We are always looking for great startups to feature in our LABs. Please feel free to @michaelcayley to start a conversation if you are interested.

For more background on Cdling, you are welcome to visit our About page. Or check out our FAQs.

Depending on the pitch materials that your startup already has, setting up your Cdling profile should take less than 15 mins.

During the one week LAB period, Founders will want to begin by recruiting credible experts to share opinions about their startup and then engage with the feedback that they are receiving on an ad hoc basis as the conversation evolves.

Here is a good example of how a startup was able to break through the noise with Cdling. 

Any startup’s objective for a LAB is to qualify for a Cdling Rated Referral but it is never too early to begin identifying the right people to connect with and determine if you are on the right track. 

Startups save time and money with cdling

from

Michael Cayley

Need two hundred more reasons to test yourself against your peers in innovation?

Tootyr is creating a marketplace for on demand tutoring. Their first verticals include music and tech support (replacing Apple’s One to One service.) and they are using a Cdling LAB to collect insight on their progress.

Today Tootyr announced that they have posted a $200 cash prize that will go to the expert who has the top rank in the Tootyr Cdling LAB when the LAB closes on January 30.

To volunteer to join the LAB, click the join button on the LAB page.

Click here to learn more about how to win a Cdling LAB 

“We want to reward experts for their feedback,” says David Blackmore, Founder and CEO of Tooytr.

“We are grateful to have Tooytr as a customer,” says Michael Cayley, Founder of Cdling. “I think David’s addition of the prize to the LAB recognizes that our experts’ time is valuable, but more importantly it says something about David’s ability to innovate!”

Update: If you are looking for details on the $200 cash prize that Tooytr has posted for their Cdling LAB click here.

The “coffee meeting”. It is perhaps the most undervalued activity in innovation. Whether you are rubbing shoulders at a conference, huddled in a meeting room or exchanging first impressions at Starbucks - I am sure you have asked yourself many times, “How do I make this meeting matter?”

Next time you are in a coffee meeting, enjoy the coffee and use a Cdling LAB to account for the investment you are making in collaboration.

There are benefits every time that you participate in a Cdling LAB.

1. You get rewarded when you apply and sharpen your judgement.

2. You earn your reputation and distinguish yourself among your peers and future business prospects.

3. You discover other experts who have interests, experiences and talents similar to yours, where ever they may be.

4. You earn the respect and gratitude of the startups you provide feedback to.

The objective of a LAB is provide the best feedback to the startup that is featured in the LAB.

This is how you can win a LAB:

Actions lead to increasing your score. The highest score gets First Rank in the LAB.The second highest score gets second rank and so on.The First Rank wins a lot of CD$. The 2nd rank wins about half and so on.

Being the first to participate in a lab or to write a comment gives you a big head start. Then the engagement that you get to support your input helps improve your ranking. 

Share your comments on twitter and receive tips from other players who support your point of view - these are the activities that help you improving your ranking. 

If your input gets the top rank, you win the LAB!

Every time there is an engagement in the LAB everyone who is participating will get a notification. You won’t miss out on a chance to defend your positions against the other players.

Scroll down in the LAB to get hints on what to do next and to see who is winning.

Watch the clock! A lab is a timed event!

These trends and the challenges that they present motivate Cdling.

“The intellectually easy thing to do is to look at an existing process and say, How can I have a machine do part of that job? It does take a certain amount of creativity and a little bit of work to do that, and it does create value. However, it takes a lot more creativity to say, How can I have this machine and this human work together to do something never done before and create something that will be more valuable in the marketplace?

What kind of economic environment would make the best use of the new digital technologies?

McAfee: One that’s conducive to innovation, new business formation, and economic growth.”

Read “The Great Decoupling” in Harvard Business Review.

Just a quick follow up to express our gratitude to Matt Miller from Sequoia and Derek Andersen, my friend and the Founder and CEO of Startup Grind globally.

These two guys have a long standing relationship, and it is because they invited me into that, that I had an opportunity to work with Matt at the Startup Grind annual conference last February and then follow up with the invitation to visit Toronto.

The chat was great and you can see for yourself that it is smart Partners like Matt that put Sequoia at the top of the VC heap.

We were also fortunate to be able to arrange OFFICE HOURS, one on one meetings with Matt for almost a dozen local startups and venture capitalists, while he was in town.

In total, Cdling was able to include over 50 ranked referrals to startups for this push and give Sequoia a great overview.

Today we have released the beta version of Cdling Scores based upon our analysis of Crunchbase.

Cdling Scores are a measure of real world experience and influence across the global startup funding ecosystem.  We completed a social network and financial analysis of over 349,000 individuals and 275,000 companies in Crunchbase. What is the total investment represented in this analysis?  $737,821,977,673.

You can think of the method as a kind of Page Rank for experts, investors and founding teams that is rooted in their startup co-investments not their social media presence.

Follow this url pattern and you will get the Cdling Score for anyone in Crunchbase:

http://www.cdling.com/desktop/users/jason-calacanis

What does Jason’s Cdling Score of 479 mean? 

Cdling Scores are expressed in terms of the highest ranked individual who has already joined the Cdling platform. The top ranked person on Cdling has a Cdling Score of 100. Jason has not joined yet, but we know from this score that he is 4.79 times more connected and influential than the top player already on Cdling. 

Keep in mind that Cdling Scores generally conform to a long tail distribution. 

Based on the scores, we allocate our reputational currency called CD$ (that is a twitter friendly spelling of “seeds”).  This enables investors, experts and founders to bring their real world experience and influence into the Cdling platform. A CD$ is a CD$, but when Jason provides feedback on a startup on Cdling, his CD$ carry more intrinsic value than mine.

Jason can use his CD$ (i.e. a measure of his real world social currency) in limitless ways outside of Cdling too. He can go to his settings page and get the code for a TIP button that he can embed anywhere he publishes content on the web, so that anyone who appreciates his contribution can TIP him with their own CD$. Or he can reward anyone by sending them some of his CD$ with a TIP send via email, Twitter or Cdling’s messaging system.

It seems appropriate that Jason is our poster child today.

When we did a test release of a chart with the ranking and Cdling Scores of the 25 judges for Jason’s Launch Conference, Forbes’ Pulitzer-prize winning journalist George Anders asked us to use Cdling Scores to compare the startup funding influence of the established “PayPal Mafia” and the emerging Facebook Friends.

“Dig deeper, though, and Cdling brings intriguing visibility to the rest of the Silicon Valley ecosystem.” George Anders, Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist,Startups’ Best Patrons, Forbes, Mar. 8, 2012.

We realize that CrunchBase does not have all of the information on all startups. We have also used Thomson Reuters data in the past and moving forward we will take a far more comprehensive approach. 

When we do not have enough data on someone to rank them or rank them accurately we call it a transparency gap.  As soon as we can get the data, we can add more CD$ to the individual’s rating if appropriate.

Cdling Scores will enable potential collaborators to quickly understand players’ real world experiences.  Enabling the establishment of trust faster, and just like a FICO report, enable smoother, faster commerce.

This week we have added over 20,000 investors and 200K experts based on our analysis of CrunchBase to our matching engine at Cdling.com. We can help you discover the network of people that are most important to your success whether you are an investor, startup or expert.

Hit the LABS tab to check out the first startup that has shared their profile(roughly the same kind of info many startups share on AngelList).

CLICK HERE TO JOIN

You can see a sneak peek image of our matching engine here:

Right now we are preparing a list of promising startups that we will share with Sequoia Partner, Matt Miller and Startup Grind HQ. HQ is recommending a short list for upcoming batches at Y Combinator, 500 Startups and TechStars.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to me. We want to make it easy for startups to connect with great investors and great investors to discover their peers in regional markets so that everyone can spend less time on expensive, time wasting events and have more time to focus on building great businesses.

Kind Regards,
Michael
@cdlingHQ
Founder, Cdling Capital Services Inc
Director, Startup Grind Toronto

We have now introduced LABs which give startups complete control over how to present their startup. Here are the features of LABs:

• Any startup can be recommended just introduce the via twitter @cdlingHQ and we will take it from there.
  
  
• Startups decide if they want to move forward with their free LAB, indicate the stage of their progress, have complete control over how much or how little information to include and have our matching engine to help them discover the investors and experts that are critical to their success.
  
  
• Startups collect MUSEs (a simple 4 question feedback format) from people they know or discover via Cdling’s matching engine.
  
  
• Experts who provide feedback to the startup discover other global experts just like them and they are instantly recognized and rewarded for their time and insight.

Get more than 10 MUSEs and your startup is qualified for a Cdling Rated Referral.

We hope you had a great summer!

This fall we are excited to be presenting OFFICE HOURS with SoftBank’s Jordan Levy,Maven Ventures’ Jim Scheinman and Ariel Poler.

If you would like to recommend a startup for a meeting with one of these investors please email me at michael@cdling.com.

We are grateful for the opportunity to partner with Startup Grind Toronto and a long list of collaborators for this ambitious program. Click here for all of the details.

In January of last year we worked with Nir Eyal and Startup Grind Toronto on a workshop, introducing Nir’s HOOKED model of building habit forming products. This coming November, we are delighted to be part of Nir’s Canada book launch, teaming up with 500px and Penguin Canada to bring designers, developers and marketers a special lunch, learn and book signing offer. Register now!

Cdling is proud to present …

THE DIGITAL CURRENCY CHALLENGE:

HOW BITCOIN CAN UNLEASH A POWERFUL NEW STARTUP WAVE

GET YOUR TICKET HERE

UPDATE, Oct. 15: Marc Andreessen: Bitcoin is like the early Internet.

 "As late as 1994, many of the same things said about digital currency today were being said about the Internet: it can’t scale, the Fortune 500 will never let this happen, etc.

Bitcoin has grown to $1.5 billion from $10,000 in three years.  But the opportunity is much bigger than currency speculation: in order for digital currency to succeed, there has to be an infrastructure of companies to move them efficiently through the system.  What could you use the Internet for before Amazon, eBay, Google, PayPal and Yahoo?  Digital currency needs its own superstar companies to support its potential trillion-dollar marketplace.  Coinbase has already grown to 260,000 users and 200,000 transactions per month in less than a year.  Who will become the Amazons and eBays, Walmarts and Microsofts of digital currency?“

Michael Terpin, Co-Founder, BitAngels

BitAngels co-founder Michael Terpin, who also founded Marketwire and SocialRadius, will discuss the opportunities and risks in the coming digital currency boom.

Since May of this year when Michael co-founded BitAngels, the first multi-city angel network and incubator dedicated exclusively to digital currency startups, it has attracted over 120 investors and US$18-million in capital.

Special Guest: NACO Chair Michelle Scarborough will provide closing comments.

Food & Beverages will be served after Michael’s presentation.

LOOKING FOR THIS EVENT IN Kitchener-Waterloo?