StartupNorth

Category: Startups

  • RIM acquires Tungle

    Congratulations to Marc and the Tungle team. Tungle announced their acquisition by RIM. Tungle had previously raised $1.5M from JLA, Desjardin, and angels and $5M from Commonweatlth. This is a great addition for the RIM team to continue to build out an application suite for the mobile office. Mark MacLeod (@startupcfo) provides additional thoughts and comments on the acquisition:

    Clear Problem

    Tungle just made sense. Finding a time to meet is a huge pain. This may not be the sexiest, flashiest market, but it is huge. Every business person feels the pain.

    Pivots

    We didn’t have this term back in the early days, but Tungle sure went through some pivots. When I joined it was a peer to peer client a la Skype. And it was S-L-O-W.  The service today bears little resemblance to that early product.

    Data-driven

    All startups but especially SaaS startups should be data driven. Tungle was no exception to this. We even built our own custom system (known as Knudderforce) and tracked daily, weekly and monthly stats. Those stats triggered many actions, automated outreaches, etc.

    Luck

    All good outcomes have an element of luck. I am sure there are many examples in Tungle’s case, but the one that stands out for me is closing our Series A funding in September 2008 just as Lehman Brothers crashed and the markets started tanking. If we had been only a few weeks later we might have had a much tougher time closing the round.

    Focus, focus, focus

    I’ve seen many teams get distracted as they grow. The CEO is off attending conferences, the company moves from market to market, etc. Tungle was laser focused on solving its’ users’ scheduling needs. At one point we were doing usability sessions every day. We reached out to every new user. We just stayed focused.

    Platform

    When we first were getting started, investors wondered if this was a feature vs. a product. Fast forward a few years and it is on its way to being a full fledged scheduling platform with APIs for other companies to use.

    Strategic engagement

    An ideal startup for me is one that can develop conversations with potential strategic partners as a natural part of its goto market strategy. This presumes you are building something that is important to the big players and assumes that you have a CEO capable of establishing and building those relationships. This was definitely the case with Tungle and this announcement is just a logical outcome of this reality.

    The icing on the cake for me is that this is an all-Canadian deal. The Tungle team will be staying in Canada and continuing to make things happen.

    Shared calendaring continues to be a difficult problem as you move to the edge of an organization. Just think about how difficult it is to see availability and schedules of people who are not on your GApps domain or your Exchange Server. Tungle gives RIM a leg up in having tooling like BBM and email and now calendaring that blurs the edge of the organization.

  • ‘Punch a Banker, Hug a Developer’

    Fun and quick interview I did in Montreal a few weeks back about the state of the early stage investor and entrepreneur ecosystem.

  • Sponsor Post – It’s getting cloudy out there

    VM FarmsI was approached by David Crow with an appealing proposition; we would help StartupNorth.ca by migrating their site to our infrastructure and have us manage it, and in return we will become a sponsor and have our logo placed on their site. You can read David’s post about all about it.

    In addition I was also asked to be a guest author on the site and provide my thoughts on various topics on the subject of web operations and the cloud – a topic I am quite familiar with. I spent some time thinking about what I should write for my first post, but that decision was made for me late last week.

    Photo by Elite PhotoArt - William and Lisa Roberts
    AttributionCC BY-ND 2.0No Derivative Works Some rights reserved Photo by Elite PhotoArt

    On April 21st, Amazon’s primary storage service (Elastic Block Store or EBS) in their North Virginia Availability Zone decided to kick the bucket. This failure is the equivalent of pulling out your computer’s hard drive while it’s running. The implications were likely dramatic for many businesses running on their cloud. As I watched many of my favorite sites (HootSuite and Reddit to name a couple) showcase their 500 error pages, I couldn’t help but think about how helpless the owners felt as Amazon worked hard to get their service back up and running.

    I won’t get into the details of what happened with Amazon, as you can get a good hour-by-hour breakdown of events from Amazon directly (http://status.aws.amazon.com/). Instead, I’d like to outline some of my thoughts and take-away lessons.

    This failure rekindled some old fears I’ve had since the sky started clouding over. Considering the amount of resources and engineering required to build massive multi-tenant infrastructures, equally massive failures only seem imminent. Don’t get me wrong, Amazon has done a phenomenal job building arguably the world’s largest and most successful cloud deployment. They have some of the best and brightest engineers this industry has to offer, but it’s still worth thinking twice about putting your business up in the cloud.

    I’m reminded of a series of meetings I attended with my previous employer in which NetApp (one of the leaders in online storage) pitched their latest and greatest cloud storage solution. We were looking to build our own cloud and hence selecting the right storage solution was absolutely critical. As the well-informed NetApp architect diagramed the proposed architecture on a whiteboard, I was struck by how many “dependency lines” were connected to the NetApp unit. Inevitably the question came up of what would happen if the unit itself failed. The answer was simple: buy 2 of them. Simple answer, but effectively doubles the price tag. And buying 2 doesn’t necessarily prevent all types of failure.

    Amazon was likely bit by one of these failures (post-mortem has yet to be released). Surprisingly, this nearly 5-day outage did not breach their 99.95% uptime SLA (99.95% is equivalent to roughly 4.38 hours of downtime per year). This is because the SLA is only applicable to their EC2 service, and not EBS (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/). Amazon is not legally obligated to reimburse any of its customers. Eventually though, most will likely forgive them since their service is so revolutionary compared to the old rack-and-stack hosting model.

    ???363? macro
    CC BY-SA 2.0 Some rights reserved photo by svofski

    Still, some harsh realities were realized this past week. So what can be learned from all this? Below I’ve identified 4 key points, which I bring up time and time again.

    1. Build for Failure.
      This is by far the most important point I emphasize. Whenever I advise my clients on a proposed architecture, I always ask the question “can you tolerate component X being down for a day?” Framing the question in that manner will highlight the realities of complicated systems – failure will happen, you need to plan for it. As a side note, I find it ironic that Amazon’s tightly coupled infrastructure requires application developers to do the opposite and build their application around Loosely Coupled Design. It is unfortunate that we need to change the way we deploy our applications to fit the provider but it is a necessary evil.
    2. Read the fine print carefully.
      Make sure you read through the SLA before you agree to the terms. This may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how many people gloss over this. Understand that uptime guarantees are usually not all encompassing, such as the case with Amazon.
    3. Explore alternatives.
      Not all cloud infrastructures are alike. The allure of the cloud is that it abstracts away the underlying implementation, but you should still do your homework and investigate the design decisions made by the vendor. The level of complexity should be factored into your decision making process.  Like others, who worked out solutions to avoid such problems, we at VM Farms take a different approach to building redundancy into our Cloud.
    4. Identify your Achilles Heel.
      It helps to diagram your setup and draw dependency lines. If you notice any “hot spots” or “single points of failure” (SPOF), focus your engineering team on them and do what you can to mitigate those risks. Sometimes budgets or design decisions will prevent you from avoiding them. However, make sure you know what they are and incorporate this into your decision making process.

    Instant resource availability will make any CTO’s mouth salivate. Just make sure you know what you’re getting into. When it rains, it pours.

  • Controlling Burn (Part 2)

    I think helping failing startups is going to be a great business opportunity in the next 12-18 months. In fact, anybody want to do a startup about helping failing startups. All those overvalued frothy companies are in for an interesting surprise when they find out that their angel isn’t going to forever bridge them to nowhere.

    So a few last tactics.  Part 1 is here.

    Pricing

    There is often a fatally flawed line of reasoning , (its probably doubly fatal for subscription business models) that goes something like this “lower price, sales increase, more customers, life is better”.  Its flawed, but not because sales won’t go up, but because you get crappy customers who churn off 3-4 months later and bad mouth your product. And thats probably more expensive than not getting the customer in the first place.

    Photo By Todd Shaffer

    When you do price and offer testing, you need to include usage & churn analytics.  This sucks because you may not have useful data on churn for 3-6 months.  So figure out your key usage metrics and understand how they relate to churn.  Customers give all kinds of warning signs before they churn (such as they stop using the product).  Setup your price tests by cohorts that you can track usage data.

    If anything, in a cash crunch, you want to raise price and have less better-quality (i.e. cheaper to serve) customers.  But not all businesses can raise price without significant relationship repair.  So an alternative is to figure out how to pull cash forward.  For instance give discounts if users prepay for a year.  Give discounts for closing fast to enterprise customers.  Change how you bundle your pricing.

    Don’t Give Up

    I think this is the number one piece of advise I can give.  Keep pushing forward.

    I’d love to see stats on when and how founders & CEOs leave their startups. You hear horror stories about CEOs getting forced out, but from my anecdotal evidence of other startups, I’d wager that more CEOs leave than get forced out and they leave/give up right around this point. Or they get “acquired” in a great nobody benefits acquisition but the team can at least do something new.

    You can’t give up. You have to survive. Smile & enjoy life, you are living to see another day.

  • Does your startup need to be massive?

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and investor Howard Lindzon of StockTwits and SocialLeverage. He was born and raised in Toronto and has a soft spot for his hometown and Canadian entrepreneurs.  Follow him on Twitter @howardlindzon or StockTwits @howardlindzon.

    Photo by Paul (dexx)
    Creative Commons License - By 2.0 Some rights reserved Photo by Paul (dex)

    In 2008, I was using every speaking chance I was offered to preach that there was never a better time to start a web business. I also put my money where my mouth was and invested in more companies than I could afford and started Stocktwits.

    Let’s assume you followed the advice and failed. Most startups do. You were Lindzon’d. Sorry.

    Good news…you learned a lot and the funding market, never easy, is more open than ever.

    Better yet, the mentoring system and pool of talented angel investors looking to reinvest has never been wider and deeper.

    Techmeme, Hacker News, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, LInked In, Twitter, Facebook and of course Stocktwits ….all better than ever for connecting, getting smarter about starting businesses and finding the right trends to ride. Y combinator may be too crowded, but Tech Stars, Founder Labs and Startup Weekends are open.

    It is a little intimidating right now to take the first steps because of the bubble talk, startup revolution, competition and massive reach of the last group of leaders. There is not one Tiger Woods of startups, there are 5 you will ultimately stress yourself out comparing yourself too…Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Zynga and Groupon.

    Don’t get caught up in the ‘I need to be Massive’ talk. It’s a trap. Take the ‘Massive’ lessons of geniuses like Reid Hoffman from this great post and than get to work on getting massive one step at a time.

    The game of Risk and world domination is won from the corners of the world unless you can roll non stop 6?s. Don’t bet on that stuff and don’t pitch your investors on stuff they won’t believe.

    Editors Note: This post was originally published on HowardLindzon.com on March 23, 2011 @copy;2011 Howard Lindzon. Republished with permission.

  • Our newest sponsor: VMFarms


    AttributionShare Alike Some rights reserved by Arthur40A

    It was at StartupDrinks or the StartupNorth Meetup when I was talking with Christopher and Hany at VMFarms about our hosting woes. StartupNorth.ca had been offline for about 24 hours, and we were in the dark as our previous hosting provider was trying to recover from a disk failure. Now we don’t have particularly complex hosting requirements, but one of the requirements is uptime. We’d like our services to be available to entrepreneurs 24x7x365. Mind you we’re not willing to pay for 99.999% uptime (learn more about high availability). I would have been ecstatic with “three nines” aka 99.9% or 8.76 hours of downtime per year. But we had failed to meet that requirement at we were approaching 99.5% uptime and without a foreseeable solution we could hit “two nines” (99% uptime) if something wasn’t done by us or the hosting provider.

    We have been very lucky. We had been able to host StartupNorth.ca on a shared hosting solution that allows us to operate our WordPress installation, StartupNorth.ca, a custom Django application, StartupIndex.ca, and some custom development (stay tuned) built in PHP5 + MySQL + Apache2 for $20/month. Cheap if you compare it to what we could be paying. It worked for a long time but I was in the dark and I couldn’t see a light indicating there would be a path to salvation.

    I had met Christopher and Hany a few months before. I personally love the business. In fact, I think I pitch Scott Pelton (@spelton) a similar idea back in the summer of 2010. With Christopher and Hany there is a core team of experienced developer operations and network operations professionals that have cut their chops deploying and supporting high availability leading edge web applications at Avid Life Media (PHP, Rails, Django, etc.). At StartupNorth, we are big proponents of supporting our local ecosystem. We use:

    There was no reason other than cost that we should have our server applications hosted with a non-local provider.

    I approached Christopher and Hany with a proposition. The should sponsor StartupNorth, the sponsorship is an in-kind sponsorship. They provide hosting and support on their infrastructure. We add their logo to StartupNorth web site and page footers, plus we give them the opportunity to write a few posts. The posts aren’t meant to be marketing fluff. I’ve ask the VM Farms team to talk about their real-world experiences including:

    • their experience using different cloud services;
    • network architecture and application hosting for advanced web & mobile applications (think application server, MongoDB or Hadoop clusters plus relational datastores);
    • when/how startups should evaluate the different performance vs cost trade-offs in advanced applications (there’s nothing wrong with choosing AWS but when should you look for alternatives)

    We are incredibly picky about our sponsors. We are even more picky about the posts and authors we ask to join us. We take our reputation and the commentary we provide about the Canadian startup ecosystem very seriously. We’re hoping that we can help educate entrepreneurs about advanced network infrastructure decisions and the impact these decisions can have on costs, performance and growth. And with the team at VMFarms, we have some partners that are experienced and capable of providing a unique 3rd party view of AWS, Rackspace, GoGrid, Azure, Linode, etc. and traditional hosting environments.

    We’ve been on VMFarms for about 30 days now. We have had 2 outages in those 30 days. Both outages have been my fault. Hany and Christopher have been on the ball and responsive to help me diagnose, identify and fix the issues.

    1. Upgrading WordPress 3.1 to 3.1.1 – the Unix user permissions and file access settings I configured on the web directory do not allow the FTP user to write to the web directory. WordPress automatic upgrade requires an FTP user (though we connect using FTP-SSL). I ssh’d to the server, wget the update and “tar -xvzf” to the wordpress directory. This overwrote the .htaccess file and broke the Apache rewrite rules. Resolution time: approximately 15 minutes (because I insisted on doing it myself).
    2. StartupNorth.ca unavailable on April 19, 2011 – turns out we let our DNS registration expire due to an expired credit card. It was identified by 2 users (thank you William and Scott (@scotthom). Hany debugged in about 15 seconds and it required Jevon (@jevon) to renew the DNS registration.

    The team at VMFarms have been fantastic. They are helping StartupNorth immensely. I’m really looking forward to some additional discussion about developer operations in startups (should be interesting given my network infrastructure does not yet include VMFarms – we’re github, Heroku and AWS EC2 + S3).  I’m wondering what John Philip Green (@johnphilipgreen) uses at CommunityLend, Pete Forde (@peteforde) at BuzzData, Daniel Debow (@ddebow) at Rypple, David Ossip (@dossip) at Dayforce, Chris Sukornyk (@sukornyk) uses at Chango, and Mike McDerment (@MikeMcDerment) at FreshBooks use to host their different application layers.

  • ExtremeU 2011

    Extreme Venture Partners

    Our friends over at Extreme Venture Partners have announced the recruitment for the Summer 2011 Cohort of the Extreme University. We written about the past programs:

    The program has historically taken entrepreneurs that need to develop and grow. It has provided them with funding, space, education, access to some of the best entrepreneurs, marketers, business developers and engineers around. While the timeline for success has been different, the companies like Visibli, Uken Games, and Locationary have grown into 3 very strong, very hot Toronto based startups.

    The 2011 Program has been updated based on the learnings from the past 2 years. Accepted entrepreneurs get:

    • Seed capital
    • Mentorship
    • Collaborative office space and shared resources
    • Shared Expertise
    • Network and Connections

    We can argue about if this is fair market value or not, when compared to other seed programs. The Extreme Ventures team is revamping the details of the program. The changes take one of the best programs available and make it even more compelling for eager, resourceful entrepreneurs. It will really redefine incubator programs.

    Why do I say that? Well I spent the first 3 months of development at Influitive living in the XtremeLabs space with the 2009 & 2010 cohorts. I chose to bring my startup and cofounders into this environment because it is the best in Toronto. There is an energy, a vibe of entrepreneurship, community, support and shared pain. There are world-class people like Fred Wilson that visit at the invitation of your office mates (thank you William). XtremeLabs and Extreme VP are launching world-class efforts like Hatch Labs with IAC will continue to bring the best in the world through the space. It is a great environment with the best people I have worked with anywhere – looking at you Farhan Thawar (@fnthawar) and Rick Segal (@ricksegal). All entrepreneurs can benefit from just being in the environment.

    Who are they looking for?

    We fund technology-oriented companies, with a focus on web or mobile-based software, but we are open minded to different ideas. We are looking for smart and fast-moving teams to participate. Typically all members of the two-four person teams will have strong technical abilities. We are looking for founders who have a unique understanding of a real customer problem and an innovative idea for solving that problem.

    If you’re a startup looking for my personal favorite shared space and program you should consider applying to ExtremeU.

     

  • Seed Funding – Some New Considerations

    Seed Funding
    AttributionNoncommercialNo Derivative Works Some rights reserved Photo by Pictoscribe

    I started writing this post while working on my presentation for Enterprise Toronto‘s Small Business Forum 2010 on raising capital for high growth businesses. I’m by no means an expert at this topic, but there are a lot of basics that entrepreneurs and growth businesses can learn about both the type of capital and when to raise it. But Manu Kumar‘s (LinkedIn) must-read post (and the comments) about his Thoughts on Convertible Debt got me to thinking I would publish my list of resources. And Adeo Ressi‘s (@adeoressi) thoughts on Year of the Startup Default includes implications for entrepreneurs raising a lot of debt, because if Series A funding is more difficult to find than getting traditional bank loans or other sources of capital become more difficult with a large, even capped, debt load. There are a lot implications for entrepreneurs.

    The starting point for my now almost 6 month old talk is the fantastic article by Bernard Lunn on Read-Write Web, The Capital-Raising Ladder, which defines the different types of capital that is available to startup companies and founders. The “ladder” concept is key in the article. Entrepreneurs generally have to start at the bottom of the ladder and work their way up each “rung”. Certain entrepreneurs can skip some of the rungs on the ladder particularly if they have had success in the past, i.e., it’s way easier for someone that has built a successful publicly traded company to raise angel or VC money than a student first out of school, but since much of this is a meritocracy it is easy for young entrepreneurs to demonstrate their ability to build successful companies and raise additional capital.

    The implications of Manu Kumar’s post and Adeo Ressi’s are about the prevalence of startups raising convertible debt with angel investors because it is en vogue. Nivi (@venturehacks) has provided some of the best advice on founder fundraising at Venture Hacks and some good analysis of the impact and benefits of debt for entrepreneurs in his comments:

    “Notes were good technology a few years ago but now there are better technologies like Series Seed that have many of the benefits of debt (speed, simplicity, less negotiation). And debt is pretty complicated when you really look at it. I’m guessing we’ll be back to equity in a couple years, for the better. But Series Seed and other equity docs need to be tested a bit more too.

    2. You can work around this in two ways. The company can’t pay back the debt and it converts to equity at maturity. I always include these in debt agreements.” – Babak Nivi comment on Thoughts on Convertible Debt

    The goal here is for entrepreneurs to have access to information to make informed decisions. I hadn’t thought about the impact that the potential debt load might have on Influitive’s ability to raise loans vs financing in the future.

    I’m interested in the thoughts from Boris Wertz (@bwertz), Roger Chabra (@rogerchabra), Scott Pelton (@spelton), Chris Arsenault (@chrisarsenault), Mark MacLeod (@startupcfo), Craig Netterfield (@cnetterfield), Jordan Banks (@Jordan_Banks), Ben Yoskovitz (@byosko), John Philip Green (@johnphilipgreen) and others.

    • What are the unique implications for Canadian founders in that are unique to the considerations for convertible debt?
    • What are you thoughts on convertible debt notes as an investor?

    Resources for Entrepreneurs

    Here’s my short-list of resources around the mechanics of raising money and evaluating the documentation.

  • StartupFestival – Call for Startup Pitches

    International Startup Festival - Call for Startups

    The team behind Startup Festival (which StartupNorth is a Media Sponsor) has started the call for startups looking to pitch and launch at the festival. They are looking for startups in a variety of verticals, at a variety of stages of corporate development, and looking to raise funding or attention for their companies. It’s a great Canadian event that is guarranteed to have local, national and global investors and press attending.

    Apply to Pitch

    Top 5 Reasons to Pitch at Startup Festival

    1. You didn’t get accepted to Launch, TechCrunch Disrupt or Demo
    2. You’ll be attending anyway, might as well get some great PR & exposure with attendees and speakers
    3. StartupFestival is a great bridge between North America and Europe. And you’re considering accelerating your access to European markets
    4. You’re actively raising funding and you want to get in front of the best investors and coaches in North America
    5. You’re funnier than Dave McClure and Will Ferrell should produce a webisode for Funny or Die featuring “Your Startup Life” with Claire Daines having a reoccurring guest starring role

    Apply to Pitch

  • The Paradox of Choice

    Meagphone

    Crowd at AccelerateMTL photo by Chris Arsenault
    Photo by © 2011 Chris Arsenault

    I love what is going on in Montreal.

    It’s nice. It’s concise. It’s clean. There is choice but it’s not overwhelming. It feels like there is a consolidated effort to make Montreal the hub for startups and technology in Quebec. There are other activities and groups but there seems to be a core group of influencers, activities, and events where high tech entrepreneurs can go to find others like them, potential employees, potential investors, etc.

    I look at Ontario and I am concerned. We have what should be the building blocks for a great entrepreneurial soup. And we’ve seen some spectacular successes (Bumptop, Sysomos, Pushlife among others). But there is a lot of noise. Efforts divided between regions.

    Turning up the volume

    Volume goes to 11 by John Watson
    Photo by © John Watson

    I’m not suggesting a “one ring to rule them all” strategy. There are grassroots efforts, there are provincial government efforts, there are local economic development efforts like:

    It leads to the murky waters that are the entrepreneur community and support infrastructure in Ontario. There is no segmentation. There definitely isn’t self-selection. They use similar words to describe their activities: entrepreneurship, startups, technology, media, growth, etc. As entrepreneurs there is a paradox of choice about who to listen to, where to go for advice, support, mentorship and guidance.

    We started StartupNorth as a way to document our experiences finding, using, evaluating other startups in Toronto and across Canada. It was a way to connect with others interested in startups, emerging technologies and business models, and to talk about the things in a context specific to Canada.

    I realize that the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (MRI) has added to the entities designed to enable entrepreneurs. They are trying to “spread innovation” through out the province via the university commercialization networks.  The  ONE network that has centres in Waterloo, Kingston, Guelph, Halton Region, Durham Region, Hamilton, Toronto, St. Catherines, North Bay, Sudbury, Ottawa, Mississauga, London, Markham and Windsor. The program is separate but deeply tied to the collaboration between business and academia.

    • Waterloo = University of Waterloo + Wilfred Laurier University
    • Kingston = Queen’s University + Royal Military College
    • Guelph = University of Guelph
    • Halton Region = Sheridan Institute of Technology & Applied Learning
    • Durham Region = University of Ontario Institute of Technology
    • Hamilton = McMaster University
    • Toronto = University of Toronto +  Ryerson University + OCAD
    • St. Catherines = Brock University
    • Sault St. Marie = Algoma University
    • North Bay = Nipissing University
    • Sudbury = Laurentian University
    • Ottawa = University of Ottawa + Carleton University
    • Mississauga = University of Toronto Mississauga Campus
    • London = University of Western Ontario
    • Markham = York University + University of Toronto Scarborough Campus
    • Windsor = University of Windsor

    It’s interesting that California with an estimated population that is 3.7 times larger [1] than Ontario[2] has less innovation hubs than Ontario (12 in California to 14 in Ontario). (Sure from a per capita GDP calculation, Ontario is higher (Cdn$43,847 vs US$38,956) but it’s probably not entirely a relevant metric unless you’re a politician which I am not).

    Photo by postbear eater of worlds – Some rights reserved CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

    I’m wondering if rather than satisfising constituents with perceiving innovation benefits for votes, that we need to look toward innovation, education and economic growth programs that benefit citizens. I keep wondering what we are missing because of the existing programs and repackaging of programs for Ontarios entrepreneurs. Look at the job creation from a single venture firm, Union Square Ventures has portfolio companies with over 557 open jobs around the globe (128 are in NYC + Brooklyn). This is job creation. It’s focused on creating new positions, in a variety of rolls, that hopefully will attract new talent to the location.

    Everyone loves to hates Toronto

    Let’s all hate Toronto. It’s not uncommon for Canadians to dislike Toronto. But I don’t hear the same disdain for Montreal or Vancouver. But maybe that’s because I don’t live with their large gravity well pulling me closer. I choose to live downtown in Toronto because it’s where I want to be. I understand the lifestyle choices that others make to live elsewhere. There are days when the traffic, the people, the crazy, all get to me, but I love the collision of people, cultures, and ideas (go read Richard Florida for more thoughts on the Creative Class).

    Are we missing an opportunity to raise the profile of Ontario companies because we don’t want to embrace the fact that Toronto is one of the major technology/media hubs? Are we diluting efforts by spreading the love and effort across 16 regions?