In this episode, The Globe and Mail technology reporter Sean Silcoff discusses his fascination with the Canadian start-up scene and his decision to pursue a journalism career. Tune in as Sean recounts his origins in tech and venture capital journalism and his process for tracking down modern-day unicorns.
Keep up with Sean’s latest work: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/authors/sean-silcoff/
Click to read transcript
00:05
I’m Eric Chemi and this is Politely Pushy. Welcome to Politely Pushy I’m your host as always Eric Chemi I’m excited today because I think it’s my first ever Canadian on the show I think I I my memory might might be uh fading on me but Sean Silcoff is here from The Globe and Mail
00:20
I wanted to say okay hey you know technology and what’s tech in Canada and then all I think about is hockey and and uh you know Tim Hortons and that I don’t really think of tech but of course I’ll just skip it you wrote the book about Blackberry you wrote the book that became the
00:37
movie it was a big deal it was one of the best books of the year the year that it came out a few years ago and obviously became this famous movie so I just want to get right into that like what did what were you doing how did you get access to all these people what was
00:50
your path in journalism up to that point and then you know obviously from there I have I have so many more questions but but welcome to the show now of course I will let Sean speak well thank you for having me Eric um you know I I I’m old enough that I actually wrote about the
01:05
original .com boom back in in 2000 1999 and it hit Canada as well we had we had our share of crazy .com Nortel was a competitor of Cisco it uh later went uh went bankrupt but you know I I left journalism for a little while I came back to work at The Globe and Mail which is
01:25
Canada’s national newspaper in 2012 and I wasn’t really covering tech I was kind of writing about whatever I wanted to for the first year um and then I started writing uh little columns and one of the things I did when I came back to journalism was I looked around Ottawa
01:42
I hadn’t really covered the tech scene in about 10 years and I noticed that there was uh you know Rumblings of a tech uh renaissance going on it was very small and one of the first companies I reached out to was a a a little company called Shopify and I think it had about
01:58
40 people at the time their CEO Toby luki was on the cover of the local business newspaper and I called them up and we were having coffee about an hour later and uh available he was an hour later I’m available right now to meet I know can you believe it I mean they had
02:16
just raised I think uh one or two sort of early rounds of venture capital but it was it was I didn’t realize it at the time but it was the perfect time to start writing about tech because you know along came the credit crisis Canada was uh pretty weak on tech in the 2000s
02:33
except for research in motion Blackberry which really took off and then you know by the early 2010s it was really struggling and you know on its way down and eventually would exit the smartphone market all together but I I didn’t realize this my my timing was perfect so
02:48
I called up Shopify I wrote a little bit about tech a little bit about venture capital um you know things were just starting to crawl out from under the the you know the the shadow of the credit crisis which just devastated venture capital and venture in general in Canada
03:06
and I did a few stories and uh that led to an inbound from Jim Balsillie uh he just wrote me an email saying hey I used to be the head of Research In Motion uh everyone knew that because that was the biggest story in Canada so it was kind of surprising to get this email in the
03:21
fall of 2012 I actually thought it was a a fake email um and I said oh sure um nice to hear from you Mr Balsillie like I didn’t think this was the real guy well that’s I was going to say when you saw his name in your inbox you must have thought okay this is this is a spam
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right I’m not getting an actual email from him right like come on I just wrote a piece about venture capital in Canada which is you know there was a start of a government program like why would Jim Balsillie care about this and he cared a lot because you know he was involved
03:50
Blackberry Research In Motion was involved in this massive patent lawsuit in the in the mid um early to mid 2000s that really nearly put the company on the ropes and he had become an out outspoken advocate for IP literacy in Canada which was pretty pretty weak uh at the time
04:08
and so he saw me as someone who I guess he saw the piece and and he he saw that I put some thought into it but felt like there was the missing piece was IP so I I said okay well if this is the real guy I wrote him an email he wrote me right back and said well let’s meet I’ll be in
04:22
Ottawa in two days that’s where I I live in the Ottawa area up in Canada and there he was he showed up at this bar at the nicest hotel in Ottawa we met met for an hour for 55 minutes he talked about nothing but intellectual property it went all over my head I I had a hard
04:36
time keeping up with him um but I I remember thinking this is important and then at the end I said well Hey listen do you think you’d ever want to speak about what happened at Research In Motion because he had just left about seven eight months earlier and everyone
04:48
wanted to know what happened what was behind the downfall nobody knew that he was not ready to say anything about that so I waited and I kept in touch with him we would only talk about intellectual property and you this is what you do as a reporter sometimes somebody won’t talk
05:04
with you about sub subject but you’re like okay well they’re talking to me so let me get to know them you know maybe sort of build up their trust and then about 10 months later the company put itself up for sale didn’t end up selling but because of that he was willing to at
05:19
that point um put me in touch with a few people and that led to a story about six weeks later in September 2013 about how Blackberry blew it and this is kind of the one of these stories that you know changes your life because that story and I worked with other colleagues on that
05:37
piece um and that story had about a million hits on our website in three days which is unheard of and it really explained for the first time uh what had led to the company’s downfall what were the ingredients we we found that out through a lot of reporting and some
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doors that were opened up starting with a you know with with Jim ultimately and that led to this huge story and then you know two days later we heard from an agent from Washington have you thought about doing a book so no we hadn’t I just wanted to get the story done so you
06:08
know over the next two three months uh put together a book proposal we had multiple offers in Canada and the US we did publishing deals in both I co-wrote the book with one of the co-authors of the uh of the story Jacquie McNish and that book ended up coming out in um in
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May 2015 so you know coming up to 10 years ago uh next year and you know because I had written about tech originally and then I came back to it all those years later and really went deep on the book I came out of book leave in the fall of 2014 when I we’d
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put in the first draft of the book and I was like you know I’ve learned so much about tech I’ve really and I see that the scene is really taking off from when I started you know getting to know the Shopify people uh a couple years earlier I think I want to go a little bit deeper
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on this uh on this subject so I convinced my editors why don’t you let me write about tech it’s uh you know the scene is very nascent right now venture capital is just starting to pick up we’re seeing a lot of signs and trust me that you know if you let me run with
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this beat for a few years I’ll be writing about big companies uh that are just acorns right now and it’s now 10 years on and it’s kind of the golden era of Canadian Tech uh We’ve obviously had a big pullback like you’ve seen in a lot of places including the US in the last
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couple of years but we’ve got an awful lot of companies now that have hit the hundred million dollar revenue mark some really successful companies and I think they will really lead Canada uh help lead Canada out of the you know out of the economic turmoil that we’ve seen over
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the last couple of years there there’s so much there so you mentioned a line when you were first there you were writing about whatever you wanted for how does someone get that job what was the agreement to I’m just gonna come here you guys are going to pay me and I will
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do whatever I want right right you’re not going to let me get away with just a glib answer there are you uh so here’s the deal I had left journalism uh couple two and a half years earlier I actually went to work for Canada Post which is like the United States Postal Service
08:07
equivalent up here in communication so I was doing thing I went from writing news stories in Montreal which is where I had been to writing annual reports and uh employee magazines I was the editor of the employee magazine I even edited a contest ballot for employees once and I
08:22
got to tell you that that was actually a fun assignment because the winner was going to go to the Olympics in Vancouver as a guest I see I see okay so so you’re for the equivalent of the Postal Service the Canadian postal service Canadian postal service having a good time comms
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and you’re writing still you’re still writing I’m writing editing yeah about two and a half years in I thought well you know I think it’s time for a career change I don’t know what that change is I I called into The Globe and Mail and here’s the thing okay when you are in
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your early 40s as I was at the time um you know if you’ve left journalism you’ve got a lot of experience nobody comes back when they leave journalism like I I there’s three periods of time when people kind of leave the business on mass I think people try it out for
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years in their 20s decide it’s not for them so you see a lot of people who are initially journalist kind of leave in their 20s go off to do other things then I think a whole bunch of people leave the business in their late 30s because you know frankly they can earn a lot
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more money in other careers and their their mid-career they maybe they have kids mortgages and they’re like well you know I need to I need to up my earning potential and then you know you kind of hit what I call the buyout zone in your 50s because this is a shrinking industry
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every few years a lot of journalism outlets have buyouts and so people you either make it to retirement or that’s kind of the last gas so you sort of have these the three odd periods when a lot of people leave the business what you don’t have is a lot of people mid career
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coming back and so when I told The Globe and Mail you know be interested in seeing what you have to offer like very quickly they were very interested um as a business journalist in particular you know I’ve got a lot of experience I know a lot of the players and there just
10:01
aren’t that many people like that who are available so I got hired on and the idea was that they were starting The Globe and Mail was starting up kind of like a the Canadian equivalent of Lex which the financial times runs you know heard on the street kind of like little sort of
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sharp takes on the day’s news you know like not a full column but maybe three to 500 word tart takes on on what’s been going on and they said well we’re going to do that it’s part of this relaunch we’re doing but we’re not starting that for another nine or 10 months so I was
10:31
on tap for that uh starting the fall but you know my first day was January 2012 so I had like all that time to do what I wanted um more or less I mean I kept myself busy as a reporter does you go out and you look for stories and so leaving the Ottawa area naturally I picked
10:49
up the local paper to look for ideas and that’s where I discovered there was this nascent tech scene that was that was on the rise so I wasn’t just goofing off I was working pretty hard well I was I was figuring you did something uh beforehand in that in that gap in between so it was
11:03
helpful to hear that that experience right I I see the the poster Jacquie McNish Sean Sean in the back there the is that the book cover is that just a different poster the skeleton Blackberry there in your door yeah that’s actually the cover for the Canadian book it’s a
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little different than the uh cover of the uh International and American book although that it’s funny because the skull motif is is still there for uh for for that one too but that that’s the book that you the book cover you’d see if you walked into a bookstore in Canada
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before we before we leave that this topic what was your biggest surprise now working with book agents and and then it goes to the Hollywood scene and obviously everyone says writing a book is a lot harder than they thought everyone says if I knew how hard it was
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going to be I actually wouldn’t have done it what was your experience then in terms of the the sedy underworld business side of the the book publishing business and then the movie side of it well writing a book is a grind for sure I I like to say that uh Jacquie
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and I in the pretty much call it a year that we worked on the book that we did about three person years worth of work like it was long grueling hours the interviews went really well um you know we had to answer three questions for the book like how did this little company
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that started above a bagel store in waterloo you know become a 20 billion dollar a year phenom and redefine how humans communicate with one another because they did uh they opened the door for for the iPhone um how did it all fall apart uh so we had to answer those
12:31
two questions then also how did the two men at the center of this company the co-CEOs who were so close when they ran it that they could finish each other’s sentences how did they kind of break up like they didn’t talk anymore what was behind that and that was the hardest
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question to answer so during the writing of the book that was the thing we knew we had to get and and we finally got it uh it took a little while some digging and some prodding to get the two of them to open up about it but it was it you know it’s the core revelation of the book
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and and it was interesting when the movie was made that they picked up on that as well which was the stock option scandal uh featured in the movie so you know I think what’s interesting is you know two weeks before the book came out I was sewing the weeds with it having
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edited it and worked on the factchecking and everything I had no idea if the book was any good or not like I really had no idea if it was going to be a bomb or well accepted or anything so what I did was I had two friends read it um not close close close like best best friends
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but but like people I’m I’m close with who are you know good relationships with who I felt could give me an honest straight up answer both of them worked in in tech uh tech adjacent businesses and I got good feedback from them and so I was that point that I knew okay this
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this book’s gonna go well and um you know I don’t know I mean you know the the the media tour went well that all that stuff all kind of went well I think with the movie stuff you learn that quickly that when you sign an option deal uh which we did we had one signed I
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think within a year so it’s kind of hurry up and wait you know like um you realize well there’s lots of option deals that are signed and just because you’ve signed an option deal like that little bit of money you get up front is like might be all you’ll ever get and so
14:15
it’s kind of a surprise when the movie actually does get made and I didn’t really have big expectations I didn’t know what to expect so it was kind of surprising that you know first of all it was accepted into the Berlin Film Festival so I my wife and I went to see
14:30
it in Berlin it was kind of fun for the you know on the red carpet that was kind of surreal it was interesting you pay for your own tickets there or they fly you out there what’s what’s the what’s the comp on that well I can’t say what’s in the contract that’s confidential but
14:42
let’s just say do you get to go to Berlin for free or do you got to pay out of pocket for that uh well I paid for my ticket to Berlin but there were other premieres so um I’ll leave it at that let’s just say that there’s things you negotiate but I I won’t say more than
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that but but I did get to attend a couple of red carp premieres it’s kind of fun you know it’s sort of interesting when you see the movie um you know and the hardest thing for me I think was seeing the movie and trying to map it to the book because you know they say right
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up front this is a fictionalized version of the story and okay that’s fine but you don’t appreciate just how fictionalized it is and so I had a hard time kind of reconciling what I was seeing on screen with what we actually wrote In the book because you know my
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book our book I should say our book was like you know it’s a 250 page attempt to tell the story accurately non-fictionally to get it all right and this is like a two-hour movie that’s just trying to keep you entertained and in your seats so I learned a lot about the movie
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making process like you know facts fiction and movie desk all gets kind of like put in a blender and what it comes out the other side is like a piece of entertainment but it’s not like it’s not a documentary and it’s not like a literal filmed representation of my work
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of our work but you know like but that’s what every adaptation ever made is like you know if you watch Titanic or The Sound Of Music or Amadeus um Hamilton the show I mean these are all acclaimed works of art and uh they’re based on real life events that have been quite
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heavily changed for the screen to make them convenient palatable and watchable for two hours so you know that’s I guess that’s what I learned in the in the film making process um and uh you know and at the end of the day I mean I can stand up and talk about my work and and and say
16:29
well the movie the thing I liked about the most about the movie was that it was you know it got people talking about Blackberry and having strong opinions and remembering their Blackberry in a way that uh people just hadn’t talked about in years so that it was nice to
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get that sort of um retrospective reflection uh people had about the company and also was good for book sales so I’m glad that a lot of new people were brought to the story for the first time and and the book now has a bigger audience than it did when it came out so
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you know there’s all kinds of interesting benefits and also um you know now there’s a documentary that’s going to be coming out um and I think part of that is fueled by a desire by Blackberry people who saw the movie to say well wait a second this isn’t the
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real story uh we’d like to see a documentary made so you know people will have yet another opportunity to see a retelling of the story uh I I’m assuming this will I’m not involved in any way with it but I’m assuming it’ll be a little bit more uh accurate and and uh
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non-fictional at all so you know it’s good I mean this is an important company it was important for Canada and it’s nice to see that its story is uh is is worthy of being told in in a few different ways and you know I’m I’m happy that our story was the the first
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to do that and to really um sort of kick off this big interest and understanding of what actually had happened both on the way up and and the way down I have now you you’ve given me a few more questions I I’m trying to get to like more recent stuff but I’m just curious
17:56
real quickly if they were going to make it fictionalized did did they need to pay you to sort of an option fee could they have just made up their own story did they really need to sort of buy the rights of the book to then go and change it if the documentary you’re saying
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you’re not involved with but that one’s going to be more factualized but they’re not this it sounds like they’re not paying you for any option rights there so how how does that work from a business point of view well what what is happening with the documentary is they
18:22
actually they’re they’ve uh they’re they’ve agreed to interview a whole bunch of original executives um at the company so it’s their story you know I mean we were we were just reporting their story right in our in our story in their book but they’re actually
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you know they’re they’re going direct to source so you know I mean I assume that they’ll they’ll be able to piece together um you know and and someone who’s interviewed who’s agreed to be interviewed to me doesn’t owe me anything you know it’s their story so if
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they choose to retell it in another format you know good uh good for them uh as for the other stuff I mean that’s uh that’s the magical arts of uh lawyers and agent so I’ll leave it to uh you know I mean we told the version of the story and uh and uh you know the
19:06
filmmakers the the people who agreed to option thought it was a good story to um uh to tell and worth retelling in film format I mean we had laid out uh a story on the pages that hadn’t been laid out elsewhere so um that was good documentary evidence and and and this
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happens all the time in the film business you know um people will routinely uh option stories um you know they’ll option uh uh stories in the newspaper books that just happens you know that happens every week so I guess that was just yet another deal of that
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of that elk right right and then lastly and then I’ll move on did you learn more about yourself as a business person being part of these negotiations it’s I think your first book right the first time you’re dealing in all these things so when you said oh we negotiated these
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things how do you even know well what is the norm how do I know what I’m negotiating for because I I’ve never done this before this is not my 10th book that has been I’m not Michael Lewis right where every book he writes turning into a movie right and you know that’s a
20:05
good question well we trusted our agent um Howard Yun who had been our original agent oh I know Howard Yun I know how Howard’s great you know and Howard like you want Howard in your Foxhole when it’s time to do uh hard hardcore negotiations and he did a he did a good
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job we trusted him you know we had a few questions back and forth um you know maybe along the way there were things well can they throw this in that in it was pretty minor minor stuff though like like generally there was agreement from the outset we knew I mean you know
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anyone who signs a movie deal again you’re not expecting much but the original deal um because it was Canadian you know it’s with Canadian interest we had a I think we had a sense that there’s probably a better chance this would be made into a movie and and
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there’s probably a better chance of it being made by Canadian filmmakers then you know I we did have interest from American filmmakers but um you know it’s a very very competitive landscape and there’s a lot of stories of companies I mean the year Blackberry came out of
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course we saw all these other movies about Tetris and Nike it was and you know GameStop it was kind of an interesting year for movies about Flamin Hot Cheetos right it was an interesting year for movies about business and and about products so you know I think it’s a smaller pool in
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Canada of success stories and failure stories for that matter so you know I think we knew from the outset that that doing a deal with Canadian um film companies was probably the better deal and and and there wasn’t there wasn’t there wasn’t much to worry about and and
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and the negotiations went pretty well I would say so you know I think we were guided by a a general sense of of what would be the the the right outcome and and I think we got the right outcome and if if Jim Balsillie had not emailed you would this have ever happened I I don’t know what
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I’d be writing about now I’d probably be writing about uh you know junior oil startups or bank earnings or something like that no I you know it was a it it was lucky I you know I may have I may have been drawn to write about tech because the tech scene was really
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picking up and and because I covered the .com boom I I would have seen a lot of signals I think I would have eventually gotten there but um I don’t know I mean things happen in your life and then you sort of like everything changes from that moment and it’s hard
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sometimes to reconstruct a a what if um you know I mean in my career I’d written about all kinds of things I’d written I’d been a retail reporter I started out writing about courts and uh courts and cops back at the start of my career I wrote about banking I was writing about
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Central Banking a little bit during the the during the um the subprime crisis I was writing about a lot of that kind of stuff uh that same year um commodity prices went up and I ended up covering an a fertilizer conference I I actually pitched going to Vienna to
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cover a fertilizer conference and I this was I wasn’t forced to do this actually what Vienna is probably your your your hint there about why I pitched that but you know I I broke a lot of stories about what was happening in fertilizer pricing uh in my last year at the
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National Post uh which is where I worked before I went to the the post office so uh that’s another National Paper up here so you know your career takes you in all kinds of interesting directions uh that’s kind of what’s guided me you know I mean if I find a topic interesting I’ll
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start to pull on the thread and I’ll keep pulling as long as I find it interesting and it eventually it you know just leads you to more stories you get to know more and more people on the beat and as long as you find the beat interesting uh you know your your plate
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keeps filling up with interesting story ideas and that’s been my experience my whole career and it’s certainly the case with tech now I mean I write about tech and biotech and I write about specifically about What’s happening in Canada it’s a it’s kind of
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nichy I would think from the American point of view but you know I’m not competing with an army of reporters from uh the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg say uh to cover the Canadian Tech successes whereas if I tried to write the Canadian take on Google or Apple all
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the time I’d have a lot of company and you know I’d probably be at the back of the bus so it’s this way I can tell stories about Canadian Tech and biotech entrepreneurs for a Canadian audience and and I’ve discovered as The Globe and Mail has that there’s a huge audience
24:31
for it here and I I think they feel well served by that so I’m quite happy about that yeah it’s interesting that you say that because it it does feel like from some of the Canadian companies that we’ve talked to that there is a positive bias in Canada to want to talk about
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Canadian companies right whereas American Media doesn’t want to talk about Canadian companies typically and if and if you’re a Canadian company let’s put like you said you would have been the back of the bus right like there’s a little bit of a mismatch but I think if
24:60
you are a Canadian Outlet talking about a Canadian company you’re more likely to get traction there or a Canadian company is more likely to get coverage from Canadian media than if they’re trying to get coverage in America where all of a sudden there’s many more companies
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there’s many more bigger companies and they can get crowded up do you again I’m on on South of the Border right so you’re you’re actually in it do you do you feel like that’s generally the right way of thinking about it or am I missing something from from not really being on
25:25
that soil well here’s the thing I I read about companies that are you know typically on the on on track to be fast Growers uh become important companies I mean look at Shopify right I I was writing stories and features about Shopify when it was still small and up
25:40
and coming it’s got a market cap now of somewhere around a hundred billion dollar so it’s big and we have a lot of upand cominging companies that are on you know on the trajectory to reach you know um 10 billion plus market caps if they keep going we’re going to let it I know your
25:58
yours you got the phone ringing this is the real world though this is what happens right you have Jim Balsillie calling you I am gonna send that one to uh to voicemail voicemail there we go sorry about that I like I like that we have something real here normally someone say let’s edit
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that up you’re getting a phone call some someone has hacked into our recorded conversation here and they and they want to break a story to you so yeah that that that was actually a unicorn CEO calling me uh for real for real but uh I can call that person
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back Canadian one I assume right well that’s the thing about covering tech in Canada right so I’ll go back to that point sorry for the interruption I you know like there’s companies here we’ve got a lot of centaurs a lot of companies with 100 million or more in revenue that
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are real companies doing well growing fast you’re going to be hearing about them in the United States just like you you do Shopify now some some are already on the radar I mean there was a company here called Cleo it did a $900 million secondary and that was covered by all
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the all the all the major Publications but you know I’ve got a pretty deep relationship with a lot of them and I’m you know I’m on texting terms with with quite a few people and that’s the advantage of being in the small Market um covering all these companies and and they know that
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The Globe and Mail is a great place to uh uh a great place to be to be written about I guess and so you know that that’s and I know that some of the companies I like to cover are of Interest globally because I’ve seen some of my coverage picked up in in other
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publications so it’s interesting it’s not like like I guess the difference is like we have Canadian Banks we have a Canadian banking reporter Canadian retail reporter mining reporter uh etc. and they mostly cover um institutions that are based in Canada
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and serving Canada like our telecom reporters and I mean our banks are made double it’s like the it’s a Canadian company whose customers are also Canadian as opposed to rim whose customers were around the world even though the company was based in Canada
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yeah and most of the beat reporters here are writing about Canadian companies that are are really focused on the Canadian economy some of them are Global for sure but um you know the difference I I think with my beat is a lot of these companies start off small but they aim
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Global and if they’re successful they will be Global names uh with a very little market in Canada maybe 5% of sales and and and you know for the first 10 or 15 years of their life as they’re becoming successful it’s largely geared toward a Canadian audience so I I can
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give our readers a front row seat into the who these people are is there a cheerleading bias you think though because it’s like hey we want to support our Canadian companies we want them to be bigger I feel like in America there’s a lot of trying to crush these companies
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in the media do you feel that you’re generally positive and good you a good relationship with them or is it still getting antagonistic and you know I’m trying to break something but maybe it’s negative or companies are you know fighting you how do you feel the
28:60
relationship is yeah you know that’s a great question because tech reporters often get accused of boosterism and certainly when times are going well and you know they talk about up and to the right and companies are raising big amounts of money I mean that’s
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news and um you know a company that raised 50 million last year raised 200 million this year I mean they’re going places um and so you know you write a about a lot about that but you know and certainly in the do or not the Doom boo but I guess the pandemic boom I was
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writing about a lot of these big financings and you know you can say well those are sort of cheerleading you know that’s a fair comment but I’ll say this too when times turned down I I guess when things were going well good news was the news but then when things turned
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down bad news was the news and you know I wrote about negative stories when things were great and I’ve written positive stories when things were bad but I certainly have not held back writing about some of the absolute flameouts here you know the recaps companies that went from unicorn
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valuation to a tenth of that valuation companies that went out of business bad deals uh etc. I mean I don’t really I don’t think of myself as a good news reporter I think of myself there’s another call look at that I love it I love it it’s you’re not gonna believe this that’s another
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unicorn so but interesting so you’re getting these directly you’re not getting them filtered through a PR channel or an agency or VP of comms or are are you trying to not deal with those kind of middlemen do you want to go directly to CEOs what’s your workflow
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what’s your process like uh I have uh I actually have excellent relations with uh with a lot of CEOs and frankly it’s just easier sometimes to reach out directly to them they’ll talk to you um I don’t mind dealing with PR people they’re they’re fine um but uh I don’t
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like dealing with gatekeepers um there’s really good PR professionals that I deal with here who understand um because they they’re they’re used to pitching and they’re used to me saying no most of the time and so you know when I am interested uh I generally get quite a
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bit of help and uh people will will work well to get someone on my schedule so I know I mean whatever works you know I mean there’s certain CEOs they’ll just take your call they’ll answer your question and uh and and and they’ll they’ll help you out and then others you
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kind of have to go through the fortress of uh of PR helpers to uh to to make it happen so I I don’t know whatever works but um I’m like water rolling down a hill you know I mean if you hit a if you hit an obstacle it just you just try and go around it you mention the pitches
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that you say no to what’s the what’s the typical process I’m curious are you just getting bombarded with emails or are you getting you know one these 100 emails a day with pitches and are you even responding to most of them or is it just it’s a no unless you hear from me and
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then I’ll I’ll let you know but that’s probably less than 1% what’s the what’s your inflow and how do you stay defensive there well I tend to try to outflow like I’m looking for ideas so I I’ve got sources out there that I try to call to to keep keep tabs on um you hey what’s going on
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in the ecosystem what have you heard what’s the latest so I I would say that contributes to a lot of what I end up pursuing or I listen you know I try and pick up on trends that are happening over time or if I’ll notice that notice certain types of deals are happening or
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or um you know I’m listening for signals watching for signals a lot I get bombarded with with pitches all the time and I don’t know I I like to tell people don’t worry pitch me keep pitching don’t worry if I say no don’t worry if I don’t even respond to your email because if I only
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if I spent time responding to emails that’s all I would do all like I get a lot of emails inbound I I have a MukRack account and I like to tell people there hey don’t worry if I don’t respond I don’t respond to most things and what I like to say to people and this is
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probably very frustrating to tell someone working for a PR company is I don’t know what’s a story but I know it when I see it like I couldn’t tell you you know oh this is maybe a story that’s a story but if someone tells me something oh that’s interesting right I
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can’t define it like you can’t define it on a whiteboard this story but but you can it’s like in a college admissions office I can reject most of them but I can admit the story that I see when you send it in but I can’t tell you I can’t create it for you because if I knew that
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I would have already written it myself yeah I mean you can’t create things out of like if you see a trend happening I’m like you know you’re like oh I wonder how that’s affecting company X that’s in the middle of that or if you see a company that went bankrupt the biggest
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player in a space and and I cover one of the one of their Rivals I might think oh how does that affect them or if you know if if um yeah that kind of stuff so where you look for signals or if there’s a lot of news about generative AI disrupting certain types of older AI
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companies for example I might say oh well there older AI companies how are they how are they handling this sudden violent pivot to All things generative AI all the time so you know that kind of stuff happens but you don’t just wake up with a blank uh nothing going on in the
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morning and say oo I wonder if I could create a story out of this you know like you’re so you’re watching for signals sometimes I do read the pitches that I don’t respond to I’m like oh that’s kind of interesting or I might say didn’t I get an email about that like three or
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four weeks ago and I’ll go hunting through my inbox and there it is and I’ll respond and the PR person sometimes is surprised oh you read that you know right and and then also like startups and their PR people will sometimes pitch me you know like their seed financing we
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raised $3 million and all often take a conversation with those companies just to get to know them so tell me what you’re doing this is but usually it has to sound interesting you know if it’s like the 85th iteration on a particular type of enterprise software I might
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not be so interesting but if you’ve you know if you’ve created a new way to to do something and it’s kind of novel and neat I say that’s interesting well let me see what you folks are up to and and and I always go into those conversations and I say Hey listen you know like this
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is just to get to know you probably won’t lead to a story it might you never know but and keep pitching me and I what I say to companies is you know I may not write about you now or the next five times we talk but once we do once I do start writing about you I probably won’t
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stop so and that’s happened with a few companies here where you know I can think of one in particular um you know I met him uh met him at a conference over the egg salad sandwiches the open salads and he just started a company I think he he hadn’t yet changed the name we ran he
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had a neat backstory he was in his 20s we spoke a few more times he pitched me on the first financing their second financing we finally started covering him and they they reached unicorn status and now what they do is actually really interesting and and you know every time
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this company makes an interesting move one way or another we we try to keep on top of it so and that then that’s kind of fun when you get to know these the the founders like fairly early on in their in their Journeys and sure enough it doesn’t take five or ten years
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sometimes for these companies to reach tens of millions of dollars in revenue and and billion dollar valuation levels do you ever think about all these numbers these billions of dollars and think maybe I should just be working for one of these companies and and getting a
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little small percentage of that well sure like you know you always wonder what other career options are there for me and you know as I get older I ruled a lot of things out like uh lion tamer I’m probably not going to do that um too old to become a lawyer or a doctor um but
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I’ll be honest with you most startups are looking to fill very specific roles and you know I’m not a marketing expert so I’m not a product expert I don’t know how to code I’m not a finance person so you know most startups or scale ups that are looking to hire are looking in very
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specific functional areas my expertise uh as a journalist doesn’t fit any of them and you know I don’t know that a career going back into communications um is my thing like maybe there’s some magical totally different out of the blue interesting unique career
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opportunity maybe I don’t know it hasn’t arrived yet until then I’m quite busy and satisfied doing what I do and happy doing it what are some other companies that we should be looking at you said Shopify obviously we know they’re they’re big what are some other ones
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that you think okay they’re they’re getting buzz in Canada right now but just wait another year all of a sudden you’re going to be hearing about them in the US and globally yeah for sure well there’s a company um I’ll name a few there’s many others many many others uh
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one is Hopper and they are a travel company online travel agency they started out by offering this really interesting feature predicting when to buy an airplane air flight so let’s say you were thinking about flying from New York to Orlando you go on their site and
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they were they were um online or they were mobile only for a while um and you say hey I think about flying from New York to Orlando on you know November 20th and you plug it in and they say well you know you could buy the ticket now but if you wait three weeks the
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price is likely to go down they had a price prediction engine so they were so they were like yeah they were the only online travel agency that told you not to buy a ticket you know and that was kind of their claim to fame and they’ve gone into hotels and and now they offer
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sort of um these sort of insurance like products like cancel at any time or uh you know price guarantee the one I like is uh if your flight takes off more than an hour after the scheduled time if you’ve brought this bought this insurance product we pay for the flight
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we’ll cover the price of your flight so they’ve done well they’re they’re they’ve got all kinds of uh big global investors they’re valuated over five billion and now they’re sort of knocking at the door of Expedia and Booking.com so they’re big they’re probably the
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third largest online travel agency now so you’ll be hearing more about them um there’s a company called 1Password I think it’s the global leader in password management yeah and then there’s some other kind of cool companies like there’s a company called GeoComply out
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of Vancouver and uh they are used by online gaming companies and by streaming services to make sure that you know if you’re say you’re uh state by state or country by country rules to make sure you’re in the right spot for that particular set of off rules yeah they software I guess I
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don’t exactly know how it works but it reaches deep into your device and and it determines hey this is you know you say you’re in Utah watching programming in Utah you are this good so so they do that they’re they’re very successful um you know we have some other neat
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companies one of my favorite stories is a Sheertex and it’s a it’s not a tech company per se but um they’ve built uh they’ve built uh a new type of legging like basically they want to take over the pantyhose market with uh leggings that don’t rip the story you’re doing
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pantyhose stories well yeah it’s an innovation story it’s based in Montreal so they use the same material that’s used to make bulletproof vest so these these leggings don’t rip and the idea is that this is a clean tech play because you know if you know I don’t wear panty
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hose uh I guess you know maybe you know you know people who do pantyhose rip really easily and they get tossed in the landfill and so if you can buy a pair of pantyhose that never rips less for the landfill and so they’re actually considered a clean Tech play uh H&M has
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invested in them and is selling their products and if they’re successful their goal is to vertically integrate to make uh panty hose as cheaply as the stuff made out of nylons and then to displace this entire category and they’re not stopping with panty hose either like
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they want to probably take on Gore-Tex next um because because of the properties of this material they make so that’s a really interesting company and the entrepreneur there she’s she’s a really really impressive uh really impressive entrepreneur she’s a serial
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entrepreneur and you know I mean she’s just getting started and and has had great success so far so we’ll see where she goes that’s kind of interesting look for that yeah I didn’t think we were going to be mentioning panty hose today yeah well and I I read about
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biotech too I’ll give you an example of another company out out west there’s a company that uh combines stem cells with hydrogel and they 3D print replacement body parts wow and they’re working on something now with Novo Nordisk has entered a two and a half billion dollar
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deal development deal with them to create replacement pancreases made up of stem cells and and hydrogel that would put in your body and it would replace the function of the pancreas think about what that would do for people with diabetes so you know like that’s amazing
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that’s so interesting like we don’t know if it works yet completely it’s they haven’t tried it in humans yet it has to go through years and years of testing and stringent regulatory approvals but uh you know there’s a lot of that happening in Canada too and and I
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covered that and there’s barely anyone who covers biotech on a regular basis here so you know I don’t know why I don’t have a lot of competition in Canada to to cover what I do because I I find out these stories amazing and fascinating and and and and I love writing about this stuff
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and a lot of it doesn’t work a lot of these companies won’t succeed a lot of them will go bankrupt I’m writing about the them on the way out some of them I’ll be writing on the way down I’ve done that already and uh it just makes for a really interesting way to make a living
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why do you think there’s no competition like there’s so many people with substacks now and their own person journalism sites or they work for big big outlets how come there’s not other Canadian biotech or more Canadian tech why are you the guy how did how come no
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one’s just say hey that’s a good idea let me just copy that I don’t know I don’t know I mean we have a couple of online we we have a few online publications uh there BetaKit and The Logic that cover um a lot of the Innovation economy but biotech is is not
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covered regularly um outside of a couple markets like Vancouver does a fairly good job locally covering the local scene but not what’s happening in Montreal or Toronto for example um you know there’s not a lot of uh national publications here there’s uh post media
43:12
but they’ve had some some struggles and you know it’s a declining business right a lot of a lot of reporters um have left the business the the the ranks of reporters have shrunk quite a bit here we have uh the CBC which is kind of our equivalent of BBC or NPR but uh they
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don’t do a lot of business coverage here it tends to be very consumer oriented or just like business is bad um some some people would argue right so how do you survive then then the flip question is how do you even survive then as as the one guy still left doing this before
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someone taps you on the shoulder and said here’s your buyout that’s for someone else to answer I just come in every day try and write great stories and uh The Globe and Mail uh has has made a deep commitment and an enduring commitment to covering business
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I mean we have a the biggest deepest um mainstream media business um coverage in the Canada uh certainly of among the newspapers and conventional media uh there’s Bloomberg here of course and DOW Jones but uh you know they work for they work for a global audience um I don’t
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know I I don’t really know the answer I I consider myself very fortunate and sometimes I don’t want to ask too much I just I just keep coming in and doing my work I yeah you know but The Globe and Mail seems very dedicated not seems it is very dedicated to tech coverage I mean I
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also have a colleague at The Globe who writes pretty much full-time about AI he’s an amazing reporter and there’s other reporters who cover tech uh as parts of their beat so we we do have a a heavy focus on tech and a and a lot of dedication uh to it we don’t have armies
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and armies of reporters we are um you know we we serve a a small and very thin market across the country relative to giant market markets like the United States but uh but you know unfortunate to work for the National Paper of Canada I work the paper is owned by uh the
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family of um David Thompson and they’ve uh they’re deeply committed to The Globe and Mail uh that family has owned the paper for three generations and I know that they they care deeply about keeping Canadians informed and so I think that’s why I think that’s why the product has
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continued to be excellent and served our readers very well and then and then lastly as you talk about the companies they they go up they go down you don’t know which ones are going to succeed do you ever in your head play that game of predicting I think this one will do well
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or I think this one won’t do well and then when it either happens or doesn’t do you ever find yourself surprised that you know I thought this was going to be a great idea it didn’t pan out or I never thought this would succeed and somehow yet it did yeah that’s a fair question I mean
45:49
you’re you’re sort of taking a back based on the companies you cover because there’s so many companies that come at you well which ones are which ones are sort of interesting to cover and and I think that’s why it’s good to start to get to know them early on and not cover
46:02
them you know and watch their progress and say well get back to me in six months let me know how you’re doing and and so there’s a lot of companies that I do start covering after a few years of getting to know them and I and and they’ve sort of hit their marks they’re
46:13
growing well and you get other validation points like you talk to the venture capitalists who’ve invested in them and gotten to know them you talk to some of their customers you do an ecosystem check and and I’ll often do that with companies I’ll say well how are they doing what
46:26
are you hearing and uh because Venture capitalists you know track their performance and uh different VCs are in different funds you know once you start to ask a lot of questions of a lot of people in the ecosystem you can kind of get a flavor of who’s going places who’s doing
46:44
really well who’s really well regarded but it doesn’t always end up that well I mean some of the companies I cover that seemed like can’t miss companies have done very poorly um I’ll give you one example there’s a company that does tutoring by text and it was a really
46:59
interesting idea you know uh make tutoring available to the masses and not just people who can pay for it it’s company called paper up here they were doing really well the pandemic hit suddenly everyone was worried about learning loss and how do you keep kids
47:13
engaged with learning business exploded all these school districts in the US signed them up and you know the business just grew too fast the company was overwhelmed uh they became a unicorn investors were interested but um you know they had a lot of growing paints
47:30
and so we wrote about you know them being in the right place at the right time and their backstory on the way up and then when things started to really go south about a year ago I started writing about the downfall so I feel like I’ve I’ve written about the whole
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cycle of this company and and they’re in kind of a tough position right now because a lot of that funding um that went into school districts from the federal government in the US for COVID is is running out and the product wasn’t successful in uh the eyes of some school
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districts so they stopped using it so uh and they’ve just laid off all their tutors in Canada so it’s a company that’s in a in a in a in a tough shape so you know I don’t know it was interesting to cover that company when it seemed like a you know a great idea
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doing really really well and then seeing the turn and at every step I’ve just feel like I’ve you know I’ve I’ve served the readers fairly and accurately and and and and provided a fairly accurate and balanced um Moment In Time snapshot of where the company is and reminding
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them people of where it’s been so that that that’s that’s just one example right right there so many Sean I I appreciate the time I I appreciate you being generous with with talking to me and and going through some of these stories I could be here all day with you
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but I know you’ve got 100 emails that have piled up we know we had those two calls that you have to get back to while we were here so um this this has been super fascinating to hear your perspective and all the things that you’ve done and the depth of which
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you’re thinking about all these things because there is so much complex moving part so it’s it’s just my mind’s buzzing here so I appreciate the time Sean thank you oh thank you thank you very [Music] much thank you to my guest and thanks for listening subscribe to get the
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latest episodes each week and we’ll see you next time [Music]