Breaking into the Valley? Use the “Canadian mafia”
There is a PayPal mafia, a Facebook mafia and a Twitter mafia, all powerful networks of entrepreneurs and investors based in the Valley. And now there is a really strong “Canadian mafia” emerging. It started to formalize with the launch of the C100 a few years ago. The organization is comprised of a select group of mostly Silicon Valley-based Canadian […]
How to hire for your start-up
I recently read a great article about Google’s recruiting machine that described in some detail how Google’s hiring success is based on 4 elements: “data, money (lots of it), sophisticated programming, and an army of young, eager recruiters.” And while Google plays in a league by itself (and can throw tons of money at the problem), every […]
Why Google became so successful – reviewing Steven Levy’s “In The Plex”
I just finished reading “In The Plex”, Steven Levy‘s book on Google, and can highly recommend it to anybody who wants to better understand Google’s success. While many things are not completely new if you have followed the company for a while, the systematic recount of Google’s history and the decisions they have taken along […]
The stream is broken
One of the key innovations in social media was Facebook’s newsfeed and it transformed the site from a social network built around profiles to a truly engaging communication platform. But as every site with a focus on social has adopted a feed, the noise seem to have reached an unproductive level. No viral marketing strategy […]
Amazon’s new Vancouver office is great news
Yesterday’s news that Amazon is opening an engineering office in Vancouver is a really good one for the city. While development offices can never replace having “real” anchor companies in a community, they can help attract and train talented developers that at some stage leave the company and start new companies. It is this typical […]