Jevon MacDonald
bio here
Products are Lines, not Dots
I see a lot of founders and startups struggling with explaining what they are trying to accomplish. Many are just focused on how they are going to do the next thing. The next release, the next pitch, the next campaign. Releasing a product is not an accomplishment in and of itself. Launching isn’t either. Getting a feedback and […]
We Should Be Building Empires
We don’t build a lot of empires around here. Empires are big, they grow fast, and they use momentum to determine where to apply resources. Empires don’t respond, they set the new rules. Carnegie. Rockefeller. Gates. Zuckerberg. Lutke. McDerment. Baker. We’ve had empires come and go, but we haven’t built the sort that stick around […]
You are supposed to break the rules
Great entrepreneurs truly do not care about the rules. If you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of rules. Some come and go with the times, others never seem to go away: You are supposed to dress a certain way Finance your company this way You pitch deck should look like THIS You, in your industry, […]
Get them out of the building: Travel support from Volta
When Ben Yoskovitz moved to Halifax to join us at GoInstant he left the growing Montreal community and brought a lot of fresh perspective to what needs to happen in Nova Scotia to grow the startup ecosystem. The #1 thing he noticed was the successful startups were the ones getting out of the building and […]
Atlantic House @ Grow next week in Vancouver
The buzz has been awesome about the GROW conference next week. Just a few weeks after Startup Fest in Montreal. The summer season is moving quickly… A Startupnorth we’ve helped organize the Ontario House along with Communitech and the Waterloo community, and now we are announcing that along with Volta we are organizing the Atlantic […]
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 […]
