When working on a startup, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day details and lose track of the things that are most important in life. Late in 2011 I had the opportunity to realize this – one could say that life completely blind-sided me and forced me to stop and smell the roses. [...] Read More »
A recent Huffington Post article on AngelList reminded me I need to finish this post – my apologies to those that expected me to post it months ago. There are some fantastic posts about how to get started on AngelList (one of my favourites is Brendan Baker‘s post How to Hustle with AngelList), but I haven’t seen as many [...] Read More »
I’m of the opinion that the startup journey is really just the process of repeated work between “a-ha” moments of key insights. The faster we get to new insights, the better we are at ongoing improvement. I’m writing this post to describe an a-ha moment that happened early on (although earlier would have been better) [...] Read More »
If you haven’t seen Ali Asaria‘s video on CBC yet, it’s worth watching. You can watch it here, but the best segment from it happens at 3:42 when Ali says: “There’s no better time to be running a tech company & there’s no better place to be running it than from Waterloo” I couldn’t agree [...] Read More »
Unfortunately, Google Wave is officially in the DeadPool. What’s truly unfortunate about this, though, is that it highlights an issue: organizations that put significant money and effort behind an unproven technology, particularly when that technology is backed by a “reliable” player like Google. Read More »
This year’s Entrepreneur Week in Waterloo was a blast (kudos to Communitech for running a great program), and coming out of it, a number of things struck me: Too many of the events sold out Many people missed the round-table sessions like the “chapter” events in the past StartupCamp was absolutely packed Read More »
It’s been a long and tumultuous road, but a few days ago Jesse Rodgers and I opened the curtains on a project that we’ve been working on with Thom Ryan at Communitech: http://Waterloo.TechStartup.ca It’s a simple idea – we’re trying to answer the questions “What’s going on?” and “Who’s doing it?” The site is intended [...] Read More »
Fred Wilson made a post yesterday describing how Web Entrepreneurs are the New Urban Architects. Although he’s correct in many in his observations, I don’t think he has gone far enough. I believe today’s Web Entrepreneurs are the New Citizens. What unifies the examples Fred gave (Twitter, Foursquare, Outside.in, CitySourced, etc) and other Web Entrepreneurs [...] Read More »
I’ve noticed an interesting trend in speaking with employers of late: everyone is paying attention to the problems and issues posed by employing “Gen Y” workers. They recognize that there are cultural value differences between the generations, and they work to accomodate those changes. I am, however, very concerned. While managers focus their energy on [...] Read More »
Today I attended a presentation at MaRS on Social Entrepreneurship and Social Finance, and theme of the day was pretty plain: as a country we are falling woefully behind. However, stats only show one side… To bring everyone to the same page, when I describe “Social Entrepreneurs” and “Social Enterprise”, I’m talking about individuals and [...] Read More »
