Recently I announced that we’ve launched a Startup Travel Program in Nova Scotia, with the immense help of Volta Labs and ERDT. This will give early stage entrepreneurs the chance to spend 2+ weeks in Silicon Valley/San Francisco (or elsewhere), soaking up the startup culture and bringing it back. I’m excited to see the results […]
Building Startup Ecosystems Outside of Silicon Valley
I’ve been involved in building startup communities for awhile. In Montreal I started an entrepreneurship breakfast event, launched NextMontreal, spent time advising startups/founders, spoke at events, and more. It was a lot of fun and a shit ton of work. Now that I’m in Halifax, I’m still doing stuff, but taking a different approach. These […]
Are You Really As Far Along As You Think?
In Lean Analytics, Alistair and I identified five stages that a startup goes through from the original idea to big-time success. Those stages include: Empathy: This is where you work to identify a problem worth solving, mostly by engaging in customer interviews and collecting qualitative feedback. Stickiness: Now you build an initial MVP and test […]
Governments Should Fund Startup Travel Programs
Occasionally I meet a government official and he asks me, “What should the government do to help startups?” I always say the same four things: Provide funds Get out of the way Make startup visas a reality (but this is a conversation for another day) And launch a startup travel program Most governments already provide […]
There is No Risk
When I started Year One Labs (with Ray, Alistair and Ian), we spent a lot of time looking for founders. It took us six months to make five investments. During that time we spoke with, interviewed, and hung out with lots of people, looking for teams, but also looking for individuals that we thought had […]
Imagination and Practicality
Watching my two kids play, it’s striking how different they are. My younger son (4) turns everything into a make-believe game. Give him two sticks and suddenly they’re space ships. Give him a handmade car (which we built recently at the Halifax Art Gallery; it’s meant to be Jeff Gorvette from Cars 2) and he’s […]
Sleeping Under Your Desk
I’ve slept under my desk before. A few times in fact. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was more comfortable than sleeping on my chair or on top of my desk (I’ve tried both.) Somehow the existence of the desk made it feel a bit safer… At one point (at one of my startups many years […]
Startup Founders Need to Constantly and Instantly Jump from Vision to Detail (and back again)
Some people spend all of their time in the clouds, thinking big thoughts, dreaming big dreams. They’ve got a vision for something and they can (often eloquently) speak to that vision and why it should be a reality. They’re “big thinkers.” Some people are completely the opposite – so detailed-oriented that they have to inspect […]
Startups Need to Make Leaps of Faith, But Not Blindly
In startup land, we all make leaps of faith. I think it’s part of being an entrepreneur – you need to have just enough confidence, startup swagger and insanity to jump … and figure it out before you crash. And I don’t think leaps of faith ever completely go away, even if you follow a […]
Kill the Goddamn Buzzwords and Give Me a Use Case
Recently I’ve been reviewing a bunch of startup pitches (over 150) for a couple of different things, and it’s frustrating to see potentially good ideas and quality entrepreneurs get ignored too quickly because their pitches suck. It’s like resumes with typos – there have to be some basic filtering mechanisms for written pitches, otherwise reviewers […]
Founding Partner at 