It takes a certain kind of crazy to get into building a company around hardware. To invent something from scratch that people find valuable is hard enough at the best of times, to do it by creating a physical manifestation of that is near impossible for many reasons. Then to…
I love working. I love that feeling when you know you are contributing to building something greater than just you. Call it work ethic or elbow grease or being reliable — call it whatever you want — but doing the work is what makes me happy. This wasn’t always the…
We all have an ego. It varies in size, weight and visibility, but we all have one. It is human nature to want to mean something in the world or to be admired for something that we’ve accomplished. It starts as a child looking for approval from a parent or…
When I was a kid I only loved Elvis Presley and baseball. These were both incredibly important and influential in their own way but weren’t things that I could realistically do anything with. But go ahead and ask me who played centre field for the Montreal Expos in 1983. Then…
Failure used to be a thing to avoid. The last thing you’d ever want to do is fail — especially at business. This fear of failure was motivation. Failure was hard to admit and harder to recover from mostly because of the way we interpret the perception of others on…
I used to think I had a screen problem and then everyone started working from home. Now I KNOW I have a screen problem. I sit at my dining room table all day and stare into my computer. There are some days where I have 6 hours of video calls…
I prefer video calls. There is something to be said about seeing the other person respond to the conversation in real time. Body language is reactive and those nuances are irreplaceable if you plan on having meaningful conversations that move your business. The thing that makes video so powerful is…
We are all having a hard time as we try to rationalize the impact that a global pandemic has had on the way we live. It’s horrific and fascinating. Horrific because of the massive economic and social damage it has inflicted so quickly. Fascinating because it is forcing a decade…
Sometimes I honestly think we are living in a massive life simulation. That our ancestors actually managed to upload humanity into a computer and we are all figments of this experiment. Humanity’s evolution is playing out in a box somewhere — the culmination of all our technical achievements. The great…
This generation of Canadian innovation certainly does stand on the shoulders of giants. There is an invention legacy in Canada that, given our population, outperforms most other countries. Our inventions have had transitional impact at a global scale — back when we took it seriously as a nation. It is…
American Idol from home is a prime example of how to do performances and interviews from remote locations during self isolation.
I just turned 50. Age was never something that shook me. Maybe when I was younger I would think about being 50 and wonder how anyone can be that old and still mean something. I think I was pretty dumb. As far as milestone ages go this is one. The…
When the 2009 financial crisis hit my company I was confident we could ride it out. We had endured a pretty rough ride but our revenue was well up year over year. Sure, it was revenue that was harder to find but we did it. Then early 2010 happened and…
When I was in my 20’s and knew everything I would wonder why anyone would listen to ANYONE with grey hair. They wrote books instead of blogs. They still listened to CDs instead of downloading music from Napster. They wore suits not hoodies. They were OLD. What real value could…
Nearly 6 million Canadians have either lost their job or been impacted because of the pandemic so far. That’s nearly 1 of every 6 people in the country. Words that are floating around like “unprecedented” don’t even accurately describe what is going on. I think we have to invent a…
