Focusing on attention and credit is stalling Canada’s long term growth. There is a lot of support for founders to start their business in Canada. With over 200 non-profit organizations, a number of venture capital backed programs, grassroots community support, and new spaces with support programs starting every month. More founders have more opportunities to get the support they need. …

For the summer of 2021 I took on an important project, coach a baseball team of 15 and 14 yr olds. These young men worked their butts off to become a competitive team that finally found a way to win games by the end of the season. It wasn’t easy. …

Canada must stop avoiding the consequences of doing nothing and build. This started as a thread on twitter. This version has more words. The lack of innovation and competitiveness in Canada is exposed in our Covid response. Up until Covid there were few to no consequences for doing the minimum. We, as a nation, can argue like faculty over parking spaces…

On April 20th the team at EigenSpace hosted our first info session. It was our first chance to talk to entrepreneurs about what we are doing. Prior to that, we only had one on one conversations. The info session made us explain ourselves. …

Why they matter to a start-up By Nigel Stokes Most start-ups need money. It is the first obsession of founders. It’s the fuel for the fire. Founders believe it will solve all their problems and ills. It won’t. We often simplify financing, we shorten the funding rounds to the name used to describe the shares, pre-seed…

Startups are hard. In Canada there has been a lot of effort to make it a little less hard with a large collection of fantastic programs and ecosystem development. Over the last 10–15 years we have seen some positive results and an overall increase in funding. …

For lunch on Wednesday March 24th I sat on my front porch for a conversation with Laura Simpson of the Halifax based (but with a global team) Side Door to talk about how things are going and explore her view on building a company. We didn’t record it but here…

Something is happening in startups and ecosystems in Canada. They are working. Companies that started over 10 years ago are showing results. But the people that built the ecosystem have moved on. Forgotten in the recency of our modern storytelling and/or simply focused on different things. One might observe that…

Organizations that carry the title of Innovation Hub have come to exist across the globe as a tool many nations use to enhance their ‘Innovation Economy.’ As organizations, they generally leverage attention from stakeholder groups and encourage the growth of technology driven businesses. In general, these organizations are oriented heavily…