Summer travel is over and I’m back on the airwaves with Amber.

Today I’m extremely proud to publicly announce my new job as Community Manager at VenCorps. Be sure to head on over there to sign up for a beta invite

About VenCorps

VenCorps is an online platform for discovering, funding, and growing startup companies. Our community is made up of entrepreneurs, investors and other members of the startup ecosystem. We’re going to change the way startups get found, funded and grow. We’re counting on the wisdom of our community to find and pick the startups we will give seed funding to. Then, we’ll tap the participation of our community to help those startups grow.

VenCorps is the brainchild of Sean Wise, one of Canada’s experts in raising venture capital. He’s trained over 3500 entrepreneurs, who collectively raised more $2.1B. He’s also the author of The Globe and Mail’s Wise Words column & book by the same name, and an industry advisor to CBC’s Dragon’s Den startup pitch show. Sean has been a great boss and mentor already, I’m looking forward to learning even more from him over the long term.

A Spencer Trask Company

VenCorps is owned by Spencer Trask, an investment company with a mandate to change the world. Let me just say: wow, it’s amazing to work with such a firm. Mr. Spencer Trask himself funded Thomas Edison’s lightbulb, The New York Times, General Electric, and the first credit rating service Moody’s. Since then we’ve funded the first human genome company, the first stem cell company, the first optical integrated circuit company, and the first AIDS vaccine research, and crowdsourcing innovators like Innocentive.

The fund for startups that the VenCorps community chooses is managed by the Spencer Trask Collaborative Venture Partners. We have an amazing team and investors. Expect to hear more about STCVP later.

The Cambrian House Transition

Very soon we will begin a special alpha preview where we start to rolling out invites to the 65,000 members of the Cambrian House crowdsourcing community. Cambrian House is a world leader in crowdsourcing ideas, so crowdsourcing companies was a natural evolution. The Cambrian House team will now be focused on building out the companies they crowdsourced like Gwabs and Mob4Hire.

I’ve spent a lot of time working with the Cambrian House team over the last few months, and I’m humbled at the trust they have placed in me to manage the community they worked so hard to grow.

What’s Next

In the short term, we will be rolling out alpha invites to the Cambrian House community. Next up will be invites to people that signed up for the private beta (hint, hint). Once we feel like things are going smoothly we will open the site up to everyone for a public beta.

We will also be headed to conferences like Mesh and Under the Radar to make announcements, demo the site, spread the word and tape elevator pitches for startups.

I will be blogging more about startups, entrepreneurship and venture capital here and later on a forthcoming public VenCorps blog.

And finally, thanks to my colleagues that knew what I’ve been up to for the last few months and were kind enough not to blow my cover. I like to be transparent, but I dislike talking about things too long before I have something to show.

If you have any questions or comments, let me know.

I’ll be presenting a case study at Case Camp Toronto 6 next Tuesday, November 20th. My topic will be “Building compelling identity in social media spaces” where I will present my online identity as a case study for how to build audience and brand awareness.

This is a bit different than the average Case Camp presentation because I’ll be talking about how my personal brand mixes with my personal life online. The trick will be to make it relevant for the business audience, and I’ve got a few ideas. I’ll also post my slides up here after the presentation. If anyone in attendance will be taping, please let me know and I’d love to post it here also.

I’m happy to tell you that I’m joining the ConceptShare team as Community Evangelist. We’ve wanted to work together for almost a year now, and finally the stars have aligned. You can read Scott’s update about the ConceptShare team growing too.

This is probably going to be the easiest gig I’ve ever had. Evangelizing and building a community around a web application that people go ga-ga over is a dream for someone like me. People rave about ConceptShare, and they have good reason to. We have a great product that solves a real world problem, and a team of three guys made it happen. Scott Brooks has done an amazing job evangelizing up to today and will continue to do so along with me, but he’s also got a company to keep building!

This is going to be seriously fun. I’m going to get to work with designers of all sorts, creatives, artists, scientists, architects, engineers, worldwide advertising agencies and major league sports – to start. I could tell you how excited I am about this, but it’s hard to understand just how much without the backstory.

Four years ago, in my hometown of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island I was inspired by my super talented friends at silverorange to start my first web services shop. I looked up to them, and wanted to be like them. While I knew that they had the right idea by staying local and doing top notch global projects, I knew I would have to beat the pavement to make it happen for myself. When I moved to Vancouver and co-founded Raincity Studios their model of work and comradery was forefront in my mind. When I moved on from Raincity to join Flock, and from Flock to contract work for the last year, I learned what I wanted from my work was to be part of a small close knit team of people working on something amazing.

I visited ConceptShare HQ last week in Sudbury, and that’s exactly what I found. I’ve decided to move to Sudbury to join the team full time. There are also some other opportunites available to me with online video there, stay tuned for exciting news on that. And don’t worry – I plan to travel to Toronto regularly for commandN! I’ll be posting company news on the ConceptShare blog Thought Balloons too, so keep an eye out there for exciting announcements.

Tags: willpate, conceptshare, design, sudbury

“Obviously, we all want to sell, at least some of the equity. But Mark owns the whole thing and he’s a crazy kid. He doesn’t let us in on his ideas, and all he cares about are the users.”

Valleywag – ‘A crazy kid’

If you’re looking for reasons why Facebook is so successful right now, everything else is secondary. Mark is passionate about his users, to the point of having other people call him crazy. You need to fight for your community. He tells his partners to back off, and let him focus on his community. Mark, if you’re out there: you’re my kind of crazy.

Tags: facebook, markzuckerberg