As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked serial entrepreneur Jason Flick to share some of his insights on getting technology to market. This is the second of his commentaries and we welcome your feedback.
By Jason Flick
As I mentioned in my last post, startups don’t have a common culture. This is a myth that’s been created, perhaps intentionally, by the 95 percent of people who’ve never worked for a startup.
Who would want to search out and work for a company that can’t pay much, if anything, in salaries, expects you to work 12-hour days and in the end, has a 50 percent chance of failure? Over the past 21 years I have created four startups, been employed by five others, and mentored and worked with nearly 100. None of them has fit this mould, or any other.
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This is the 14th article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
“If Canadians were as good at innovating as we are at explaining why we’re bad at it, Canada wouldn’t rank 14th among industrialized nations in the Conference Board of Canada’s report card on innovation. And because innovation is the key to improving productivity, we wouldn’t be earning $7,000 less a person each year than Americans.”
That blunt comment came courtesy of none other than Conference Board president and CEO Anne Golden in an editorial published last August in the Globe and Mail titled “Canada’s innovation malaise: The cure’s in our culture.”
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By Alexandra Reid
The Canadian startup community rang in another win this week as RIM, the maker of BlackBerry phones and the new PlayBook tablet, acquired calendar and scheduling application Tungle.me.
RIM’s move to incorporate this new tool, as a continuation of its “development by acquisition” strategy, was essential because of the criticism RIM received for releasing its PlayBook prematurely, without native email, calendar and contact applications. While there is no official word that RIM will integrate Tungle into its tablet, industry experts expect it as a necessary move to compete with Apple.
I used the tool for the first time yesterday to schedule this interview with its CEO and founder Marc Gingras. Having never met Marc before, and having never used the tool before, my first impression was that it was a rather impersonal move, so I tried him first through Twitter as a (in my view) more personable engagement before also trying him on Tungle.
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This is the 13th article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
In our various interviews for this series, one of the most elusive topics of discussion has been culture of risk. Elusive in that it strays into the realm of stereotype and generalization.
Can it be defined by borders, or is that a naive misconception? Is it somehow encoded in the DNA of one nation’s culture more than another, shaped and influenced by how much public policy favours free-market capitalism versus socialism, or all of the above?
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As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked serial entrepreneur Jason Flick to share some of his insights on getting tech to market with lean thinking. This is the first of his commentaries and we welcome your feedback.
By Jason Flick
You would have to be living under a rock not to have heard about the billions in venture capital flooding into the Valley. Venture firms raised over $60 billion in Q1 2011 alone. Some companies are ramping from zero to billions in revenue in years rather than decades. Students fresh out of school are being offered six-figure salaries, four-month signing bonuses and iPads to come on board. (VentureBeat summed it up well in this recent story.)
Of course, these stories seldom report that for every company like this, there are 99 others that flounder and end up as large financial craters.
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By Jason Flick
