Three leadership lessons from Slack’s Stewart Butterfield
Last week, I had the pleasure of sitting down for an intimate fireside chat with Slack’s Stewart Butterfield as he was honoured with C100’s Icon of Canadian Entrepreneurship (ICE) award. This award is presented yearly to a Canadian who has played a historic role in technology and innovation, as well as demonstrated a commitment to giving […]
A few take-aways from the Augur prediction market
I’ve always thought that the concept of a decentralized prediction market like Augur or Gnosis is one of the most interesting and crypto-native ideas. Just imagine creating millions of small markets around any potential outcome in the world…from sports to elections, weather and stock prices. So it was great to see Augur go live a […]
Changing the narrative on distributed teams in Silicon Valley
The predominant narrative among Silicon Valley start-ups has been: don’t open a second office until you have reached 100+ employees. Yes, there are tremendous advantages when everybody works out of one headquarters. However, the pressure of sky-high housing costs, salaries and competition for suitable candidates is causing start-ups and investors to rethink their approach to […]
How to balance judgment and process when you start to scale
In the early days of a start-up, almost all decisions in the company are driven by the judgment calls of the founding team. During this stage, there’s a limited set of experiences to draw from and no playbook. Most of the situations and questions are occurring for the first time, and founders need to quickly […]
VCs rarely make exceptions to their investment scope
Part of the job of a VC is to deliver on the promises they made to investors when raising the fund. Every VC defines their investment scope by a combination of thesis (e.g. invest in network-effect driven business), thematic interest (e.g. invest in AR / VR companies), stage (single stage versus lifecycle investment), ownership targets, […]