Episode 2: Current Economic Climate: Identify Opportunities & Emerge Stronger than Before

These days there has been this surge of people who are developing influence within their specific corner of the market. They are digital creators who specialize in a niche and begin to establish themselves as experts in their field. 

The rise of influence has been less about celebrity, but these days it’s a strategic advantage for many entrepreneurs who want to build relationships, and ultimately leverage their personal brand to build their businesses 

Here’s the scenario: You are building your business, building your product and getting some critical traction. You want to move faster and start finding more customers and get ready for potential investment. But you are a small team, have limited social media presence.  

One thing you are good at is understanding the real estate industry. You were a former broker and now realize that this sector needs some major disruption. You are passionate about solving this problem. But for the sake of your growth, you realize you need to make an impact by establishing yourself as a thought leader in the real estate space.  

How do you do it?  Many startups don’t realize the value of establishing their own personal brands. With the rise of social media, that has closed the gap between promotion and community, there are endless opportunities to establish yourself as a tech leader that helps you and your company as you grow. 

We were happy to welcome two founders who are effectively building their tech brand on social media. 

Stephanie Lipp, Cofounder and CEO of MyCoFutures North Atlantic and  

Staci LaToison, founding Partner of Dream Big Ventures  

We’ll uncover their journey, why they decided to do it, understand the importance of authenticity, a critical ingredient in defining their presence. They will provide advice on how early stage founders can develop opportunities by building their personal brands and establishing themselves as tech leaders. 

Growth Hackers' determined that the greatest indicator of startup success is resilience: 

“You might feel that things are moving slow in your company – that is natural. You may make decisions, that, in retrospect may lead to undesired consequences, or perceived setbacks in your goal to reach critical milestones. If you are an entrepreneur building a brand new startup, you probably have trouble seeing any light at the end of the tunnel from time to time.” 

It’s how far startup success is defined by how far an entrepreneur is willing to go and wait to see its startup succeed. 

One often overlooked reality about startups is that launching and sustaining one is not as straightforward as successful entrepreneurs might lead you to believe. Even with the current resources available to aid the growth and development of startups, persistent challenges remain. As a budding startup entrepreneur, be prepared to navigate numerous obstacles and endure difficulties. 

Startups face many challenges in their journey to scale.  An entrepreneur’s ability to effectively manage these issues as they surface is a sign of your character as you grow. 

Many of these challenges are dependent on the relationships you create and cultivate along the way. What stories never get told are the failures that transpire because of these relationships. They could come from opportunistic clients unwilling to pay for services rendered, or from toxic employees or cofounders. They could come from once-enthusiastic partners willing to drive more value through their own relationships, but ultimately default on this promise. For many founders, these failures are hard lessons they take to the new set of relationships they encounter.  

• Developing the right team 
• Finding the right partners and vendors 
• Selecting the right VC 

Personally as a CEO, determining your limitations and making the decisions you think are right for the company, in those moments.

We were excited to host Devin Ramphal, Sector Manager for Innovation and Technology at the City of Brampton’s Economic Development Office and formerly CEO/Cofounder of Clean AIR which was acquired in 2023 and Jennifer Cameron, Co-founder and CEO of INVRS and formerly the founder of hyperWALLET, which was acquired by Paypal in 2018 for $400Million. 

Both had important stories as founders who have navigated relationships in their startup journeys and provided some great insight from their own experiences to help founders build resilience. 

Will 2024 will be another challenging year for startup founders?  

The world bank came out with the following prediction for 2024: 

“Global growth is projected to slow for the third year in a row—from 2.6% last year to 2.4% in 2024, almost three-quarters of a percentage point below the average of the 2010s. Developing economies are projected to grow just 3.9%, more than one percentage point below the average of the previous decade.” 

They are dubbing it the “Weakest Half-Decade Performance in 30 Years" 

This is a so-called recession that never really came (because of low unemployment, despite higher interest rates)  there are indications similar to what we’ve seen at the start of the Ukraine/Russia war (2 years ago) that set off an economic fallout that saw the steep fall of Crypto and NFT and, in parallel massive investment pullout from overvalued startups  that received millions in funding during the pandemic. 

This time while the global economy is in a better place, mounting geopolitical tensions.  Innovation will take a hit as we’ve already witnessed at the end of 2023 with rising tech layoffs 

 “Amazon saw the most workers laid off in 2023 (27,410 workers) followed by Meta (21,000), Google  (12,115) and Microsoft (11,158).” This continued as we ventured into the new year with more layoffs from Big Tech 

In the fall of 2023 David Wright, Investment Analyst remarked, “Investor returns in the VC industry have not always paid up for the risks involved in private investments.” 

Wright noted that in the last 4 decades, VC fund performance had its ebbs and flows with the mid-to late nineties being the standout period. “The average returns from VC investments have consistently hovered around 9%, comparable to public markets,” but Wright highlights that the more telling metric is the “1.8% returns indicating that there is a disproportionate performance that favors a handful of VCs while the “majority have largely underperformed.” 

Will investors be more measured and discriminating in their search for promising ventures this year? For founders, what is in store for them as the year unfolds and how should they be managing their businesses to improve growth, increase their visibility to investors, and to essentially weather this uncertainty? 

We were pleased to host three seasoned startup advisors and investors: 

Bryan Duarte - Bryan Duarte is a Social Venturist, Serial Entrepreneur, a Professional Engineer and has over 30 years of experience in the Energy Industry. He is the Managing Partner at BlackTech Capital and our newest EIR at Altitude Accelerator. 

Glenn Nishimura - Glenn Nishimura is the Principal and Chief People Strategist at Nishimura Consulting, based in Toronto, Canada. As an experienced advisor, consultant, and mentor, he helps early and growth stage startups and scale-ups across North America, Asia, and Europe to build and optimize their teams, culture, and people operations. 

Olga Cruz is a Senior Associate at impact investing firm Good & Well. She leads the impact management practice and sources, analyzes, and invests in early-stage Canadian businesses. Her prior roles involved investing in healthcare and agricultural innovations. She also dedicated her efforts to supporting entrepreneurs in conflict-affected regions, guiding them towards investor readiness. 

Check out the full article on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hessiejones/2024/01/29/is-2024-the-year-of-investor-restraint-and-startup-resilience-eight-experts-weigh-in/?sh=65a49935678a

AI has consumed the tech space and mainstream business. What implications does generative AI have on cybersecurity? Will it change the threat landscape for better or worse?  At Collision, Hessie Jones interviewed Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password to discuss the implications to personal information and how will passwordless technology help combat these threats. 

As of February 2023, 850 million people globally don’t have an ID: no birth certificate, national ID–a legal identification that enables access to basic services like setting up bank accounts, getting a job–a system we’ve taken for granted in the West. Solving the identity problem becomes more pronounced as societies become increasingly digital. This will further elevate the need for secure and convenient ways to verify a person’s identity as they transact and communicate online or remotely. This comes at a juncture as we face many problems with impersonations, deep fakes, AI generated media and content where safety and trust become just as crucial especially as generative AI accelerates.  

We welcome Riley Hughes, CEO of Trinsic, leading infrastructure for issuing and accepting reusable ID credentials from a network of providers. Riley has been early to the Self-Sovereign Identity space. He's worked with communities that have been evolving the technology and governance in this area and with his company, he is paving the future for how we manage our identities. 

Theodora Lau recently wrote a Linkedin post called "Where are the Women?"

This was a timely post that responded to the slap in the face to many women, who have made incredible strides to affect substantive change in AI, who saw the NYT article that snubbed the work of prominent women like Fei Fei Li, Timnit Gebru, Kate Crawford, Joy Buolamwini, Meg Mitchell and others too numerous to mention. 

This article came off the week of drama that saw Sam Altman re-installed as the  CEO of OpenAI, when 5 days before, he had been fired.

What we’re witnessing is an increasing polarization within the industry where, despite the significant efforts of women engineers, data scientists, policy makers and professionals in AI, there continues to be a lack of recognition and respect for their work and their voices in industry, and in the media.   

This continues to be contentious and women across the AI world are rightfully angered at this perpetual lack of respect for the cumulation of work that has been done by women, and the non-binary community – the perpetual underrepresentation of these critical voices. 

This comes at a time when everyone– researchers and mainstream– are worried about the further development of AI technology and its implications for humanity:  jobs, lack of access (knowledge, skills, economic, geography, income), where representation matters as these technologies are built. 

Theodora Lau is the founder of Unconventional Ventures, a public speaker, and an advisor. She is the co-author of The Metaverse Economy (2023) and Beyond Good (2021), and host of One Vision, a podcast on fintech and innovation. Through her work, she explores the intersection of financial services, tech, and humanity. 

Theo’s recent blog post  had me nodding my head and questioning why this is happening? I reached out for a much-needed conversation.

Will new emerging technologies assist engineers in enhancing their capabilities or will their jobs simply be done for them? At Collision, 2023, Hessie Jones met with Maxim Fateev, CEO of Temporal and Anand Kulkarni, CEO of Crowdbotics.

Both organizations are making it increasingly easier for engineers in light of the advances in Generative AI. One school of thought: it's much easier to replace certain aspects of desktop jobs than replace labor skills like carpenters or construction workers. Everything that works well in AI is happening behind the screen currently, but not so much in the physical world and these may be the the jobs most vulnerable.

How has automation impacted current engineering roles and practices? Have there been areas within this segment that have already been disrupted? How do both see the future role of the engineer?

The future of the internet is really all about building on the promise of Web3 is about a decentralized internet, that brings more powers to creators, where monetization dispels of current ad models, and where people become the owners/purveyors of their identity and the things they create.  

I met Julie Smithson at Decoding Tech in Toronto. Julie is CoFounder of MetaVRse & XR Women, host of the Polys Awards & Working and building in immersive technologies since 2010. Julie has been instrumental in educating about the metaverse and pioneering capabilities across different sectors. 

We will learn more about Web3 aka the Metaverse, where it is today and what is the promise of society tomorrow.

From the sidelines, reading the media reports on the weekend of November 17 it was a series of irrepressible events that unfolded that weekend and the coming days. It was considered a tumultuous weekend, a series of uncontrolled outcomes, each with its own significance to the fallout of OpenAI and its employees. While the world watched this drama unfold online, no one would have guessed the outcome of events that transpired within the course of the coming days: the firing of Sam Altman… the quitting of OpenAI president, Greg Brockman and the threatened resignations from 700 employees of Open AI… to the requested resignation of the Board… to the hiring of Brockman and Altman as new MS employees… to the final decision to reinstate Altman as CEO of Open AI with new board members in tow – all in the course of 5 days. 

What these events with Open AI and Microsoft have signalled are some unprecedented implications for the AI community, its researchers and more importantly the more far reaching impacts to the society for which AI is built.

So what does this all mean...
 - when a nonprofit side, with no financial incentives is unable to effectively oust an executive because of legitimate safety concerns
- when a structure that was put in place to mitigate the risk of unilaterial control of advanced AI  and was essentially was usurped by the same capitalistic forces - this structure were designed to prevent

We welcome Christoph Schuhmann, Cofounder of LAION.AI, Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network, a non profit organization, who has a large community of volunteers, data scientistis, researchers, practitioners developing applications in this field, to weigh in on the events of November 17-21, 2023 and what it means to the AI Community

We are currently living in a time of greater uncertainty.  The Pandemic has created an environment that caused us to abandon the safety of what we once knew to be the tried and true, the way things have always been done and to trust in our instincts to create an environment that is safe, productive, effective without risking loss to the team or the culture.  

Some companies within the technology industry have led the way during the Pandemic: the first ones to be able to adapt to remote work, with ready infrastructure to easily morph while the traditional in-person organizations struggled.  But now, everyone begins to see a new world and how it’s evolved; what are the expectations from employees? No longer is anyone expecting that we go back to status quo. Companies need to be different, think differently and adapt to the new world – we are not going back. 

Leadership needs to lead the way in navigating these new expectations and how things change or not.  We will be talking about leadership for startup founders. 

We welcome Carlos Granda former Google VP Customer Success, advisor and mentor and someone who frequently talks about the role of leadership and creating a culture that can sustain a crazy or horrific event like the world lived through the pandemic.