Jevon MacDonald
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Should you pay to pitch an angel group? What the data says
We have seen a pretty amazing wealth of information about financing models and structures come to light in the last 10 years. It wasn’t that long ago that VC and Angel financing were dark arts which few entrepreneurs understood. We have always worked hard to demystify startup financing on StartupNorth and have done a long series of articles which was focused [...]
What you need to know about starting a startup in Atlantic Canada
Building a product and growing a startup is a different experience no matter where you live. In many ways every startup experience is completely unique and totally predictable all at the same time. The goals, struggles, opportunities and outcomes are each different and geography is one other thing that can be thrown in the mix. [...]
The only model that matters: Founders First
There are a lot of models that people throw around for how to build a strong startup community. There are a handful of types of players in each community, so there are many permutations of “who gets what” and how resources are moved around. It gets complicated, fast. So there is a model that I [...]
If not an Angel Network, then what?
David posted a pretty in-depth piece on the First Angel Network this week. This followed an awesome discussion on TechVibes about angel groups over the weekend. The structure and funding model for First Angel Network were a pretty big surprise to me when I moved to Halifax 3 years ago. Frankly it is pretty easy for us [...]
The companies I should have paid more
Building a startup is hard and managing ops is really hard. Devops are hard and expensive. Luckily these days there are some amazing companies making it way easier to build the startup of your dreams. Frankly, I don’t think they are getting paid nearly enough while some are getting paid way too much. What apps [...]
Less boardrooms, more dinner tables.
People have become really good at pitching. The art has turned in to a bit of a science and if you do ever find yourself in front of a room of people it is par for the course for you to “nail it”. The pitch, it seems, is dead media. It’s time to stop obsessing with [...]
The Upside Foundation – Give back a little while you are busy taking over the world
One thing that has really been exciting for me in the last 3 months has been the Salesforce Foundation. When Marc Benioff founded Salesforce he committed 1 percent of stock, 1 percent of employee time and 1 percent of licenses to charity. It’s an incredibly small amount of equity and resources but it has had [...]
Why The Idea is Bigger Than Everything
I was doing some thinking a few weeks ago about why I am a founder. Everyone has different reasons they look to in order to get through the long grind of being a founder. It’s tough and very thankless, so you need to find the tangible reasons that you can look to both to measure [...]
Why I’m a Founder
Dave says we can’t all be founders. He’s probably right. At some point though, I decided that I wanted to be a founder. Lately I’ve been thinking about why it has been so important to me over the last 10+ years to keep at it, even when it didn’t make a lot of sense. A [...]
Canadian VCs are being cut loose, and that’s a good thing
Mark MacLeod just wrote a post about Canadian VC that cuts to the chase If there are any clouds on the horizon, they relate to the disappearance of the US / Canadian border when it comes to VC. When I first entered the startup World, you had no choice but to raise seed and series [...]
