Entrepreneurship

Founder journey, startup lessons, and business strategy

  • Investing More

    Amazingly we’ve been living in Calgary for 5 years now.  The time came to renew our mortgage and while I was doing that I started the process of opening a HELOC so that we can use some of the equity in our house to invest. With today’s low interest rates it has become pretty attractive…

  • Reading about Solar

    I’ve been reading and doing some math on the feasibility of Solar electricity. Turns out that costs have dropped significantly over the last few years due to the scale of production in China that actually is currently over-supplying the demand, and new manufacturing technology that is making it much cheaper.  You can find panels for…

  • Re-invigorating Old Products

    Sometimes you need to go back and look at the things you’ve done in the past to see if anything is due for an update or refresh.  Leaving old products to go stale is a sure way to let your customers know that you don’t care and don’t provide good customer service. With that in…

  • Finishing

    There are plenty of hurdles that you have to make in order to be successful.  Perhaps the most critical is taking something all the way to completion.  When you are not working with a team this is a deceptively difficult thing to do. It takes determination, momentum and accountability to start a project and see…

  • Taking Action

    Being action oriented is one of the biggest differentiators I have noticed in the most productive people.  It’s amazing what you can get done in a day when you just take action to make it happen.  Even a small step can get the ball moving on a large project. One of my partners is the…

  • Finding Your Motivation

    The theory for motivation has been best described by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Peak motivation can be achieved when you become self-actualized – internally self motivated, however to get there you need to fulfil your lower level needs first. At each level of this pyramid you will find factors that might be motivating you.  Working…

  • Measure Opposing Indicators

    All software developers know that measuring a developer’s productivity by counting lines of code written is not an effective way to measure their output.  The correlation between the technical difficulty of a problem and the number of lines of code is not always 1:1.  Which means that one developer can write 10 lines in a…

  • Asset Allocations

    Late last week my RRSP transfer from mutual funds into Questrade completed.  It feels as if I lucked out in that the 5 worst days of the year on the market happened while the cheque was in the mail to move money. Trying to devise a strategy for investing that is both safe, has the…

  • How to Create a Billion $ Company in 8 Months

    If you want to get a sense of just how crazy the world of technology is for businesses that want to make money you need look no further than Slack. For those of you unfamiliar with Slack.  They launched a product in February 2014 which is a private communication tool for business inspired by IRC.…

  • White Shoe Syndrome

    You know what you need to do to launch your business, you have the skills, you have the idea, and yet progress is slow. Maybe you have White Shoe Syndrome. The problem with white shoes is that they are always dirty and need to be cleaned. When it is time to sit down at your…