Vancouver’s big on Drupal. On almost every corner in Gastown you’ll find a passionate advocate who’ll talk your ear off about its flexibility, the benefits of leveraging its community of developers and the extent to which out of all the choices for Content Management platforms it sucks the least.
But surely the primary function of a [...]
Gradual Change
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Why WordPress Will Make Drupal Irrelevant
Navel Gazing for Dummies
I’m all for the emancipatory power of the blogosphere and the various tools and services it idolizes. But occasionally don’t you want to have a Kingsley Amis moment and long for a more evolved and sophisticated level of discourse?
I realize it’s boring to play the disillusioned elitist card, but it all gets a little wearing [...]
Why You Shouldn’t Build The Next Twitter
When a company like Twitter raises a large B round at a giant valuation for a pre-revenue company it tends to send ripples of scorn through the tech community. People were similarly bewildered and upset when Slide got their $550 million valuation and of course livid when Microsoft’s strategic investment in Facebook valued the social [...]
Debt is Your Friend
I attended a great talk by Rick Segal of JLA Ventures this evening, hosted by my friends at BootUp Labs. Sort of a primer on the process you go through to raise VC money. Outsiders often have the best insight, and as an American running a Canadian VC fund, Rick’s better placed than most to [...]
Getting Funded in Canada
I just got around to reading Paul Graham’s post on the VC industry’s reluctance to change its investment approach, despite evidence that its model might be broken. It’s hard to argue with the point that it costs less than it used to to create many kinds of technology-based businesses, and by extension that a valid [...]
And now for something completely different
It really is so lame to start a blog and then promptly abandon it two months in. In my defence, I’ve been working on something new.
In ways both good and bad, I usually act on gut instinct rather than methodical research. About five days after meeting Carrie McCarthy and Danielle LaPorte I rather presumptuously suggested [...]
Success Factors
Investors and entrepreneurs often pitch business models by describing them as a fresh or niche-focused take on a high profile success story. Angel investor Jeff Clavier allegedly described parenting social network, Maya’s Mom, as “Dogster for moms”, but this unfortunate example aside the point is simple: apply a business model that worked elsewhere to a [...]
Big Brand Free
Funny, I was looking through the kitchen cupboards today and realized that, except for some razor blades, I haven’t bought any mainstream consumer packaged goods for a long time. I’m sure I can’t be alone. Even though profits remain healthy at the big CPG companies, it’s developing markets that are primarily driving growth.
Actually, there were [...]
Penny Wise, Pound Foolish
Large, slow-moving and bureaucratic companies are an easy target for critics, but so what, it’s often fun and illuminating to pick on easy targets. Particularly when they descend to the pettiest behavior for the sake of cents today that will cost them dollars in customer loyalty tomorrow.
I returned a DVD to my local Rogers Video [...]
Mobile Advertising’s Unknown Unknowns
A friend in the investment banking industry once cautioned me about working for a public company traded on a junior exchange. In his words, “the value never catches up with the promote.” By which he meant that a story that’s been sold simply to drive up the share price isn’t sustainable in the real world, [...]