Recapping the Data-Driven Marketplace Meetup

A few weeks ago, we hosted our second marketplace meetup in San Francisco. The night centered around data-driven marketplaces and we connected with and learned from many smart members of the marketplace community. We had a diverse group of people attending, from founders and product and growth leaders, to data scientists, data engineers, and investors. […]

Entrepreneurial ecosystems: Reflections on Toronto and Silicon Valley

On May 26th, I attended the C2 conference in Montreal, joining my good friend Harley Finkelstein (Shopify), along with Magaly Charbonneau (Password Box), Wesley Chan (Felicis) and Eric Boyko (Stingray) on a panel. The theme was: “Entrepreneurial ecosystem: it takes a village to build a startup”. Harley asked about my experiences growing up in Toronto and […]

How to combat negative investor sentiment? Use your customer references

Sometimes there’s a disconnect between investor sentiment and the product’s value. The same thing happens in the market: good companies can have a lower stock price due to public sentiment and market factors outside of their control. Not every start-up can play in a vertical that’s an investor darling. For example, you may be in […]

Can a sinking start-up reaccelerate growth?

Conventional wisdom, at least in VC land, is that no start-up sees a reacceleration of growth. Once the growth curve starts heading down, it only sees a downward slope. This is partly due to the law of big numbers: a bigger denominator makes it harder and harder to keep up year-over-year growth rates. Things get […]