Thoughts from the road: building startups and collective ambition outside Silicon Valley
Just a few years ago, if you wanted to do something big, you needed to go to Silicon Valley. It meant frequent flights or moving your company to San Francisco to raise money from Bay Area VCs. Times are changing, and these geographical barriers are beginning to break down. Waterloo has another unicorn with Kik. […]
How did Jeff Bezos scale Amazon without destroying its entrepreneurial culture?
Running a start-up is profoundly different than running a big company. When you’re small, founders are close to the action and can make sure all the important things happen. But as a start-up scales, founders can’t have their hands in everything: many companies lose focus on the customer; decisions get bogged down; and there are […]
Our Guide to Marketplaces, now summarized in a deck
Six months ago, we published A Guide to Marketplaces. Marketplace companies comprise an important part of our portfolio and investment thesis and we recognized the shortage of content out there specifically geared toward marketplace startups. We compiled a lot of the insights we learned from working with great marketplace companies and wrote a handbook. It […]
Learning from Jeff Bezos: Big winners pay for so many experiments
Amazon’s Annual Letter to Shareholders has become a must-read for entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders – and the recent 2015 letter provides great insights into how Jeff Bezos thinks and how one of the most successful companies on Earth operates (this year, Amazon became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales). […]
Understand learning profiles before hiring
The average 25-year-old has already worked 6.3 jobs, and will have 12-15 jobs before their working career is finished. The portrait of the job-hopping millennial is a stark difference to Gen X and Boomer workers who may have stayed with the same job and employer for decades. Another study found that millennials have almost twice as […]