Scenario: Your primary competitor has just been randomly acquired (not sure by who yet) and they are deprecating support for all their users within 2 weeks. All existing customers are being referred to your platform. How would you manage this transition so it's flawless and to maximize user acquisition? #goodproblemtohave
Food for thought
(source: www.cbre.us/research-and-reports/Scoring-Tech-Talent-2017)
Varun Mathur shared a link to the group: StartupNorth.
Toronto is the birthplace of modern A.I.:
This article is about the ImageNet dataset -- but it explains in vivid detail what transpired back in 2012. First came the dataset, then the model from Toronto, then others got "inspired" from it too, then more datasets, more models, more startups...the Cambrian explosion we are witnessing today and it might just be a start of the fantastic decades ahead.
"Two years after the first ImageNet competition, in 2012, something even bigger happened. Indeed, if the artificial intelligence boom we see today could be attributed to a single event, it would be the announcement of the 2012 ImageNet challenge results.
Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, and Alex Krizhevsky from the University of Toronto submitted a deep convolutional neural network architecture called AlexNet—still used in research to this day—which beat the field by a whopping 10.8 percentage point margin, which was 41% better than the next best."
"The 2012 ImageNet results sent computer vision researchers scrambling to replicate the process. Matthew Zeiler, an NYU Ph.D student who had studied under Hinton, found out about the ImageNet results and, through the University of Toronto connection, got early access to the paper and code. He started working with Rob Fergus, a NYU professor who had also built a career working on neural networks. The two started to develop their submission for the 2013 challenge, and Zeiler eventually left a Google internship weeks early to focus on the submission.
Zeiler and Fergus won that year, and by 2014 all the high-scoring competitors would be deep neural networks, Li said.
“This Imagenet 2012 event was definitely what triggered the big explosion of AI today,” Zeiler wrote in an email to Quartz. “There were definitely some very promising results in speech recognition shortly before this (again many of them sparked by Toronto), but they didn’t take off publicly as much as that ImageNet win did in 2012 and the following years.”
The data that transformed AI research—and possibly the world
qz.com
The ImageNet competition ends today. But its legacy is just starting to take shape.
Rohan Jayasekera, Ali Nawab and 15 others like this
Varun MathurThe original paper: www.cs.toronto.edu/~kriz/imagenet_classification_with_deep_convolutional.pdf
12 hours ago · 1Tim Draper's SEC Initial Coin Offering comments
Paul Marek, Mohsen Shahini and 1 other like this
Mohsen ShahiniCould be an opportunity for Canada. Wonder how much this SEC's ruling will impact Kik's upcoming ICO plan.
9 hours agoNilay GoyalWhile having clear definitions would help, but would not do much as it is very easy to go around them. There are a lot of governance (and regulatory) issues with ICOs. Alan Wunsche (from tokenfunder.io) recently wrote a great article highlighting some of these issues: [email protected][email protected]017-8c8bb...
8 hours agoHey folks! As a former Tucowser, I get asked a lot about acquiring domain names. I normally just send people to Name Ninja and today I learned that Bill (former Tucows colleague and fellow Startup North alum) created this handy guide that deserves to be shared with the group.
Andreas Ua'Siaghail, Jordan Satok and 7 others like this
John Philip GreenPrice ranges here look about right, and appropriately wide We bought Housekeeper.ca recently to go with our Housekeeper.com, so can vouch for the .COM vs .CA price ratio I wonder what our Montreal friends Kyle & Wolf paid for Bus.com this year!
13 hours ago · 3Jevon MacDonald shared Creative Destruction Lab's photo to the group: StartupNorth.
Applications are open for all the CDL streams. More details at www.creativedestructionlab.com/
All CDL national sites are now accepting applications across all streams. Don't miss your chance to apply!! bit.ly/cdlapply
Praveen Varshney, Elena Yunusov and 17 others like this
Hey everyone! We have a few extra Executive VIP passes for Techweek Toronto that the Hired team wants to make available to the StartupNorth community here. We’re very excited to be participating in this year’s event, hosting this year’s Hiring Fest at MaRS Discovery District on Thursday and moderating this year’s panel discussing what it takes to hire Elite Engineering Talent with leaders from FreshBooks, DIVE Networks, Shopify and Klipfolio. Please PM me or leave a comment if you’re interested in joining!
Naomi Elana Zener, Klipfolio and 9 others like this
The advantages of diversity seem to resonate strongly with this group. You can see it in the articles that are posted here, the experiences that its members share with us, and in the positive comments and replies to them.
However, the way I see 'diversity' used here is almost always as a proxy for gender or race. When you exclusively use it in this way, you end up reducing the complexity of it, and overlook all of the other factors that go into having a diverse workplace. Instead of doing what often feels like virtue signalling, if you want to have a sincere push for diversity, I think you should make a good-faith effort to consider all of its aspects. For example, one's socioeconomic background is a strong predictor of many things in life, but is seldom mentioned in StartupNorth.
With this in mind, I'd like to hear what everyone thinks are some other overlooked elements of diversity, and how you're addressing them.
Yohan Mahimwala, Manjula Selvarajah and 16 others like this
Rob HunterI wrote an article about this for YC's Macro a few years back - 100% agree. Socioeconomic-background diversity is severely lacking in much of startup land - although I'd argue that compared to the US, "high" socioeconomic-class Canadians typically are much more empathetic and aware of what "lower" socioeconomic-class people are going through - there's just a much bigger middle class, and not quite as much inequality between the have's and the have-not's. blog.ycombinator.com/the-mcdonalds-quotient/
1 day ago · 6
Simran KambojAgreed. I think age is also important.
1 day ago · 3Rohan JayasekeraAlso, whatever types of diversity help to reflect the audience of one's product or service. At one organization our audience was pretty much the Canadian population, and I was unhappy that our content producers were so heavily young and urban and left-wing.
1 day ago · 1Eva WongWe think and talk about this a lot Borrowell. Gender and ethnicity are the most visible and obvious, and so get the lion's share of the attention. But agree with others that diversity of thought matters. We try to ensure that we're attracting and retaining newcomers to Canada, the LGBT community, introverts/extroverts, etc. and have a fully accessible office for the less able-bodied.
1 day ago · 9Beth NennigerHere is a great set of questions if you want a starting point for understanding your own or your team's privilege & oppression: tinyurl.com/ybte2ubu
1 day agoNick RaynerTHANK YOU. Is diversity all we talk about now in this sector? Well I agree. Okay gang, let's go to every successful company in India and Africa and tell them they need more white people. Majority-Japanese companies too, they need way more white people. How about Majority-Aboriginal companies? If any of them don't have white people in there, that probably means they're not living up to their full potential. This is exciting, let's take on these bigot companies.
1 day agoSean Silcoff shared a link to the group: StartupNorth.
Sam Sebastian leaves Google, stays in Canada and joins Weather Network parent Pelmorex.
Sam Sebastian exits Google Canada, named president and CEO of Pelmorex
theglobeandmail.com
The high profile hire is an endorsement for Canada’s tech sector
Amy Zhou, Karla Congson and 23 others like this
David PullaraGreat hire for Pelmorex - Sam is an inspirational leader and overall great guy.
1 day ago · 2Was on a call this week with a Toronto based company who plans on hosting a small tech focused event in the Fall for private and public Canadian companies to meet institutional investors, family offices etc.
Surprised to find out they are asking companies to pay a few thousand dollars to pitch. Haven’t seen this model in several years. In my opinion the ecosystem is alive and well. Curious to know if in recent history companies have had success paying to pitch?
Anita Chauhan, Jameel Somji and 3 others like this
Michelle McBaneJust say no
2 days ago · 19Eric FaustI use to host events where we'd invite like 10-15 VC groups and charge people $100-300ish for the event. They'd get 1 on 1 conversations with each VC so they could build a relationship. I found those who built relationships were the ones who were successful versus those pitching. What's your company called? If you can connect with me on LinkedIn I can provide some intros to different VCs to see if there's a fit. Post-rev I'm guessing?
2 days agoSarah SeitzSounds very silly, unless they have a legit track record with facilitating that kind of one-stop shopping w/o strings attached.
1 day ago · 1Ben LucierI'm not in the market, but I'd never pay several thousand dollars for an audience. It's not THAT hard getting an audience through a trusted referral.
1 day ago · 4Mark EvansThe pay-per-model is a non-starter.
1 day ago · 6Peter DavisonPay to play is a) outdated b) is so red herring 1999 c) so industry standard circa 1997
1 day ago · 3Lauren Crerar LintonNo. Startups have limited resources and finances and should NOT pay thousands to pitch. It is just wrong. There are other ways to fund these events.http://cixsummit.com/2017/submit_to_present/
1 day ago · 8Sarah SeitzAlso makes me wonder how serious investors are if they need money from you to start.
1 day ago · 1Bohdan ZabawskyjIts fundamentally 'dodgy'
1 day ago · 2Ivan TsarynnyNo! It's a huge red flag for tech sector in my opinion
1 day ago · 2Qasim VirjeeHell no
1 day agoIan NicholI was talking to a family office and here is their rundown: They have a network of +2000 bankers, etc. who funnel them potential deals. They review several each day, deep dives on a couple a week, pursue a couple a month, make offers on ~20 a year and are a winning bid on 2-3. Short story - good companies are in short supply. "Real" investors, vs tire-kickers, are in hunting mode.
18 hours ago · 1Xitij Ritesh PatelIMO, if you feel it necessary to pay others to speak to them about investing in your company, it raises a red flag to me about how much you value your own company. Investors should feel privileged to be able to invest in your company and vision, not the other way around. Of course, there's a delicate balance you have to achieve between being humble and being confident.
16 hours ago · 1Chris SnoyerYork Angels charges a bunch of admin fees. Nowhere near as greedy as a few thousand, but it still kept us from pitching. It's a cost of doing business, and if the sum of those fees are an absolute drop in the bucket against one solid investment that they may miss out on.
12 hours ago · 1
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