I watched the BlackBerry movie the other week and right away I thought, “whoa, is Jim Balsillie really like that?” Supposedly, kind of. Either way, it was a good movie that naturally ended with the fall of BlackBerry, with Balsillie not getting an NHL team,… Read More
All posts tagged “venture capital”
Toward a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship
One way you could oversimplify the Canadian economy is to say that it revolves around three things: natural resources, real estate, and high immigration. (You can tell me I’m wrong in the comments below.) More recently, we’ve also been touting the growing number of tech… Read More
Micromobility ridership in the US from 2010 to 2021
The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) has just published this report on shared micro mobility in the US from 2010 to 2021. And it’s a good look at how this space has evolved over the years. According to the report, the first modern… Read More
State of Crypto
Everybody wishes that they bought companies like Amazon way back when they first went public, and then held them until today. If you did that, you would of course now be rich. But what would you have had to deal with along the way? Well,… Read More
Is crypto just snake oil?
As I understand it, databases are pretty important to technology companies. Here is an excerpt from a recent post by Albert Wenger talking about why he and his company (Union Square Ventures) believe that web3/crypto is going to unlock new value for our society: As… Read More
The World After Capital
Years ago I wrote about a book that venture capitalist Albert Wenger was writing — in public I would add — called The World After Capital. The public bit is interesting. As he was writing the book over the last ten years or so, he… Read More
The 25 top-funded proptech startups in Canada
Proptech Collective has just published their inaugural 2021 Proptech in Canada report. Here are a couple of screen grabs that you all might find interesting: What these images should tell you is that the Canadian proptech landscape is fairly Toronto-centric, but that it’s also very… Read More
Rich people and nerds (in Miami)
Back in 2006, Paul Graham penned an essay about how to be Silicon Valley. Since then, it seems like every city on the planet has tried to replicate the successes of the Valley. At the time, his argument was pretty simple. Geography used to be… Read More
The origins of carried interest
In the world of finance, carried interest is the share of the profits in an investment that a manager (of said investment) earns in excess of what they may have contributed to the partnership. For example, let’s say that a manager is putting in 10%… Read More
The case for speculative asset bubbles (and happy new year)
This is an interesting perspective. It is from Fred Wilson’s annual what-happened-this-past-year post: But here is the thing about speculative frenzies – they are generally directionally correct but off in their order of magnitude. And they finance the trend that they are directionally correct about.… Read More