I had the pleasure of being on a panel last night at the awards dinner for the Markham Space Race. While the panel was great (more on that later), the real treat was the concept of the event itelf.

Basically, Colliers (business real estate leasing) decided to run a contest where the best seed startup idea would win free office space for a year in Markham (30 minutes north of Toronto, though still part of the Greater Toronto Area).

Then other businesses jumped in, multiple prizes were created and apparently more than 100 companies from all over the GTA entered. Third place prize included more than 15K in stuff from free legal advice to servers to research to insurance. Second prize was similar, but worth about 25K. First prize included all of that, office space for a year at a premium location worth about 60K/year, free office furniture, computers, installation, phone system, etc.

Essentially, one young company would win a totally kitted out professional office to help them ramp up really quickly.

The panel was done before the final awards, and consisted of 3 folk. A local real estate software guy, a Chinese gentleman who moved here in the 70s and has done rather well for himself (Harvard grad) and me. The real estate guy actually prepped his answers to the questions (we got them ahead of time), and the Harvard guy was fantastic.

I was “the blogger”. Which was fun because I decided early on to freeform it, try and get some discussion happening, to grab a few laughs and to try and share a bit of what I’ve learned in running a few companies. Not that I’ve “arrived”, but b5 is a few steps ahead of the companies at the dinner – so if I could help them at all, it made sense to do so.

The panel got a fantastic reception, and the mix of personalities was about the best I’ve ever seen. Really, really great.

The 3 finalists were Valtx (secure chips for embedded devices), Flatline (smart meter reading and data aggregation using P2P-style data collection) and Rescue7 (medical technology and services firm).

Our table picked Flatline to win, based on innovation of product, ability to hit the market and growth potential for the market (4.3M to 100M smart meters in 5 years). And Flatline won, very deservedly.

Congrats to the whole Flatline team! And thanks to all involved for inviting me. It was fun, inspirational and educational :)