September 2014

There were 2 posts published in September 2014 (this is page 1 of 1).

We Should Be Building Empires

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Last chance to get your tickets to this incredible event!

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 for 100 or 1,000 years.

We need to startup building empires.

In 2008 we held a conference in Toronto. Some of you might remember it. We were going to call it something like StartupNation, StartupConf or something else,. but we decided to call it StartupEmpire. Why?

We thought it was important to put a stake in the ground about the kinds of companies Toronto startups needed to think about building: Bigger, badder and more resilient.

Next week we are re-doing it. StartupEmpire is taking place in Halifax this time, a startup community that is in much the state that Toronto’s was 5+ years ago. It’s time to focus our gaze out in to the world and to say ‘”I’m coming for you.”

You can hear from some of the most ambitious and experienced entrepreneurs in Canada right now including April Dunford, John Baker, Dan Martell, Bala Kamallakharan and a lot more.

Get your tickets now, there are only about a dozen left!

Making Canada SAFE

It has been 9 months since PG announced the YC SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity). The Winter 14 batch included Canadians: Taplytics, Send With Us, Piinpoint, Minuum, Gbatteries and others. (There have been an increasing number of Canadian companies since Chris Golda and Michael Montano headed down in 2008. Maybe there should be a new drinking game: how many Canadian YC companies can you name?). This usually means a trickle down effect of culture, term sheets and deal structure. But I haven’t seen a SAFE used in the wild.

Until now.

Thanks to Aaron and Cobi at  Taplytics, Dan Debow, Jesse Rodgers at Creative Destruction Lab and Tom Houston at Dentons for providing a working draft for Canadian companies of Cap, No Discount SAFE.

I have also seen angel deals using Laberge Weinstein and Cognition LLP that are using the SAFE as the starting points Canadian companies (h/t @ddebow). It seems like we might have a functional alternative to convertible debt.