ITs pivot point
Last week I blogged on the New Florence innovation blog about the Startup Genome Project, a benchmark of hundreds of startups and why they fail or succeed. One of their findings was “Most successful startups pivot at least once. Startups that pivot once or twice raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and [...]
Come On Silicon Valley, We Can Provide a Better Rx for Jobs!
Fortune magazine has an article running that Techmemed about some advice Barrack Obama is getting about jobs from Silicon Valley Heavyweights like Kleiner VC John Doerr and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. They’re all about Education and Immigration Visa Reform as the path to creating jobs, along with plugs along the way for their own ventures. Here [...]
Evernote Celebrates Birthday by Joining the Billion Dollar Club (Really?)
Evernote has recently celebrated their third birthday. I also recently had my 21st birthday – it feels good to be able to legally grab a drink finally. (Hey, if Evernote can lie about their age, so can I…). Joke apart, I have no idea why a company would pretend to be half as young as [...]
The Gravedancer Fund
It’s painfully obvious and we should stop ignoring the facts: RIM is catering and there is nothing that can be done to save them, short of firing the confused people who are running the show these days. I won’t comment on what exactly is happening at RIM, there are more than enough people doing that [...]
Founders: The Bubble Clock is Ticking
The incredible valuation of the LinkedIn IPO can only be interpreted as one signal: the Bubble Clock has started ticking. So long as it continues to run, we will live in a reality distortion where valuations are insanely high, capital is cheap, and smart businesses can leverage that to hyper growth. When it stops, we’re [...]
Coradiant acquired by BMC software
On the heels of yesterday’s acquisition of Tungle, BMC Software has announced today that they have acquired Montreal’s Coradiant, which was co-founded by Year One Labs partner Alistair Croll. We are happy that Montreal has managed to win something in the last few days. The price is currently undisclosed, but the back of the napkin calculation tells [...]
Mixed Results during 1Q11 for our SaaS Portfolio
Back in January I had read some reports indicating that after a strong 4Q10, the US economy was showing the signs of a slowdown. During January and February in particular businesses slowed their investment activities. These sobering reports were counterbalanced with more upbeat reports that small and larger enterprises continue their switch to SaaS solutions [...]
Spanning Cloud Apps Raises $2 Million Series A Round of Venture Funding From Foundry Group
Spanning Cloud Apps, the makers of Spanning Backup for Google Apps, today announced that the company has secured $2 million of funding from Foundry Group, a Boulder-based venture capital firm. Launched in September 2010 and spun out of Spanning Sync, Inc., Spanning Cloud Apps will apply the resources to continue to build on the company’s [...]
How a Market Maker Sees Software Firms/Entrepreneurs
Is your software firm growing at an acceptable rate? Why can’t it grow more? Check out this expert interview into the dynamics of growing a great software company and getting the liquidity event you’ve dreamed of.
Startup Festival coming to Montreal – Why it’s important
I know that David just posted about the upcoming Startup Festival, but I thought I would add my own thoughts: I have definitely been getting the feeling that the whole “startup conference” format is getting a little stale. The same formats in the same cities with most of the same speakers. The real benefit of [...]
