Announcing Canada Learning Code: Supporting bottom-up innovation

As the global economy shifts from analog to digital, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I can help others thrive in this digital world and make the transition a success. There are several ways one can help build a strong tech ecosystem, be it in your city, local region, or country. First, you can […]

Why you need to innovate on three horizons

How does your startup think about innovation? Is it a new feature that gets incorporated into the next release? Is it a new market breakthrough that’s years away? I recently held a mini Tweetstorm where I opened the conversation to innovation across three horizons: short-term, mid-term, and long-term. Here’s more dissection on the topic beyond […]

On innovation in start-ups

One of the most impressive pieces on innovation I recently read was Jeff Bezos‘ answer to a shareholder question at the last annual meeting. The question was: Amazon seems to be executing well lately — is the company taking enough risks? Added the shareholder, “If it’s still Amazon’s philosophy to make bold bets, I would […]

New opportunities in e-commerce

Both Josh Kopelman and Fred Wilson have lately been pointing out that it is time for e-commerce 2.0 after we have seen a lack of innovation in this space for almost a decade. I have been thinking about concrete opportunities in the e-commerce vertical for some time now and wanted to share them – here […]

German start-up scene – copycats or innovators, enough or not enough VC money?

Fred Wilson published an interesting post today about the start-up scene in Berlin. Having founded my own start-up in Germany (JustBooks, later acquired by Victoria’s AbeBooks), being currently invested in a successfull Internet start-up based in Berlin (Tripsbytips, an online travel community) and working with one of the leading German VC’s (Munich-based Acton Capital / […]