As Trump Tightens Legal Immigration, Canada Woos Tech Firms: But Canada Is Not Silicon Valley

There Is More To High-Tech Immigration to Canada Than Meets The Eye

My long-time business partner and I, one of us in Canada and the other in Silicon Valley, earlier this year launched a business targeted at bringing immigrant entrepreneurs to Canada, Vendange Partners. http://www.vendangepartners.com

From our years’of experience in Silicon Valley and with technology entrepreneurship around the World, we knew that many of the best and brightest young entrepreneurs abroad dreamed of bringing their ideas to the United States to forge their skills and their new companies.  But from our discussions both in California and overseas it is clear that Trumpism is having a profoundly negative effect on this flow of talent into the American economy, both individual technical talent and entrepreneurial teams looking to start companies and raise capital.

The Canadian government and some of the provinces, particularly British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, and to some degree the Maritimes, have done a commendable job of promoting high-tech immigration and entrepreneurship.  The Global Talent Stream visa is an excellent vehicle as described in The New York Times article included in this post. Global Talent Stream attempts to address the need for technical talent for companies already operating in Canada.  The competition for such talent and the salaries offered in the United States are a major problem for Canadian companies, particularly in AI and robotics. Theoretically at least, a Global Talent Stream applicant with an employer lined up can be working in Canada within about two weeks.

The so-called “startup visa” program for founders and already established teams wishing to set up in Canada is more complicated.  The program requires a committed investment from a “designated” Canadian investor and a letter of endorsement among other requirements before the visa is granted. The difficulties of doing this are something of a Catch-22. In practice in the past, endorsement letters were written by government listed “designated” investors without actual investment, but this still did not result in a wave of high-tech startups coming to Canada. The only other option is for entrepreneurs to bring a significant amount of their own capital with them to Canada.  This option has led to abuse. At its original launch under the Harper government, the startup visa program, unfortunately, became a magnet for immigration scams.  Hence, the startup visa program remains over-subscribed with applicants bringing their own capital to qualify for the “startup” visa for up to five founders.

Finally,  There is also simply too little smart Canadian venture capital and too many startups competing for the limited funds. It is also commonly acknowledged that Canada’s investment institutions and the Canadian financial mentality are not well-aligned with the Silicon Valley investment culture. Major U.S. pension funds like the California Public Employees Retirement System (better-known as CalPERS) annually invests 10% of its entire portfolio in venture capital funds. The same cannot be said generally about Canadian pensions funds and investment banks, as one example of the differences. Much lower risk debt capital and convertible debt seem to be more popular products in Canada.  In defense, it is often pointed out that the Canadian economy is roughly one-tenth the size of the United States. Yet, on a relative scale, the Canadian venture capital industry still does not compare well. Add to this the fact that the Canadian government has historically been far behind other OECD industrialized nations in R&D investment in innovation and you have major problems.  Anecdotally, the sheer amount of money and number of available investors in Silicon Valley alone is well-over 5oo compared with a mere handful in Vancouver. When the more than one thousand local indigenous BC startups actively seeking capital are layered onto the available sources of risk capital in Vancouver, there is major local competition before the immigrant entrepreneurs even arrive in Canada. Looking for risk venture capital in Canada, a la Silicon Valley is problematic.

With that candid and sobering analysis of high-tech immigration to Canada, for individuals who have taken the time to do an in-depth analysis of themselves, and the pro’s and con’s of such a major move, Canada may still offer many advantages to entrepreneurs, and those advantages are only likely to improve over time.

Vendange Partners

 

Smartphone Classroom Participation Startup Top Hat Monocle Strengthens Its Team

A couple of weeks ago I was asking myself about the current “clicker” classroom participation technology at UBC.  Why did the university implement a proprietary technology with no other practical use, which cost students precious dollars?  It was instantly obvious to me that the students already owned the devices needed to accomplish electronic classroom participation: their smartphones, tablets and laptops.  Even more compelling for me, it could provide a way to reduce the classroom distractions caused by these devices.  It turns out that the reason that the students devices were not being exploited for teaching and learning was fear of “the cloud,” privacy and where the data was being stored, which are legitimate concerns.  It turned out that there is a Canadian company that has created an app that does everything I envisioned and solved all the privacy issues to the satisfaction of a number of educational institutions in British Columbia and across Canada. I am now a trial use of Top Hat Monocle and I am very impressed with it.  I went so far as to introduce one of  Top Hat’s marketing people to the UBC Vancouver IT expert on apps like this.  It is my hope that Monocle can be a breakthrough application for classroom use.

Classroom participation startup Top Hat Monocle strengthens its team with addition of elite CFO and CPO (via Pando Daily)

Toronto-based classroom education startup Top Hat Monocle takes a contrarian position on students’ smartphones. Rather than insist that they put them away, which we all know is a losing proposition, the company uses the devices to drive engagement and participation. Today, the company has beefed up its executive team, announcing the addition Ralf Riekers as its new Chief Financial Officer and Malgosia Green as its Chief Product Officer.

Riekers was the first employee at marketing automation startup Eloqua, where he spent 12 years in areas including finance, operations, product deployment, and customer operations. Eloqua was recently acquired by oracle for $871 million four months after its IPO. At Top Hat, he will focus on improving the company’s back-end processes and managing relationships with the venture community.

Green founded India-based education marketing firm Savvica in 2007 to help students worldwide choose schools to match their needs, and before that was the director of product development for Affinity Labs. At Top Hat Monocle, she will take over the product road map and also promises to “aggressively market” the company’s products.

Top Hat Monocle offers allows students to respond in real-time to instructor questions and polls using their Web-enabled mobile devices. They can also use these second screens – assuming the teacher’s black board or projection screen is the first – to engage in interactive discussions, pose their own questions, download notes, and submit work, among other functions. The company’s products are used at over 250 universities worldwide.

Following an $8 million Series A financing in July from Emergence Capital Partners, iNovia Capital, SoftTech VC, Golden Venture Partners, and Version One Ventures, and the company raised a subsequent $1.1 million strategic round in January, bringing its total financing to $10.7 million. The Top Hat Monocle team has since explode from 20 to 80 employees in the last nine months. According to COO Andrew D’Souza, we should expect additional high profile hires in the near future, including specifically a VP engineering, VP sales, and VP marketing.

Ask any investor or experienced entrepreneur and they’re likely to tell you that success is dictated more by the team that is leading a company than by the idea or the market itself. Top Hat Monocle has the benefit of being in a space that is ripe for disruption, at a time when investors and educators are desperately seeking solutions. Today’s announcements should only strengthen the company’s ability to execute on this massive opportunity.

Enactus UBC Faculty of Management Leadership Team Closes Out It’s First Year

The Enactus UBC Faculty of Management Leadership Team. Left to right front row: Stormy Johanson, Adam Prarie, Julia Moody (President)

Left to right back row: Jesse Shopa, Joey Gidda, David Mayes (faculty advisor), Chris Janiewicz

The formation of the University of British Columbia (UBC), Faculty of Management chapter of Enactus occurred only three months ago, under the guidance of Dean Roger Sugden, but the Enactus student leadership team has already attracted nearly two dozen members, all of whom, including the leadership will return next year, to build the organization for handoff to future Faculty of Management students. Meanwhile, many of our current Enactus members will be off to destinations around the World for the summer.

The Enactus Canadian national organization encouraged us to get out there and just start “doing something” rather than debating the chapter’s by-laws and getting bogged down in meetings.  The team did exactly that, and have already conducted a local food drive that collected over a quarter ton of grocery items prioritized by the Kelowna Food Bank, in only four hours.

The Enactus FOM team have also introduced themselves to the Enactus team at Okanagan College, and observed OC‘s dress rehearsal presentations for the Enactus national competition to get an idea of what we need to do next year.

The global impact and reach of Enactus was made evident to us this week when I was contacted by Doina Olaru, the Enactus faculty advisor from the University of Western Australia in Perth, who is currently on the UBC Okanagan campus conducting research. Doina had somehow found out about me, and asked to meet. I quickly arranged for her to also meet with our student leaders. We were all left in awe by Doina’s story of what she and her students had accomplished in five short years with limited funding. The UWA Enactus team are three time Australian national champions for their projects, and have also appeared at the Enactus global conference.  In addition to creating domestic Australian projects, the UWA team have created award winning projects in Kenya, India and Ghana, all in less than 5 years. Needless to say, our team hope that we can have a bit of their success rub off on us, and we have plans to build our relationship with Doina and to meet her team, as two of our UBC team will be Going Global in Australia very shortly.

Our most important early development has been the emerging plan for a major “Tier Three” project. Tier Three Enactus Projects are those which provide ongoing benefit to the community over multiple years, engage and employ a significant number of local community people in need.  In discussion with our Enactus national field director in Toronto, we learned that of the 63 Enactus chapters at universities across Canada, there are only 2 chapters currently with Tier Three projects. The Enactus national organization is obviously very eager to increase this number. We have shared our early conceptual ideas with the national Enactus organization and they are very enthusiastic and supportive.  For now, our Tier Three project remains under wraps while we do our “due diligence” and seek the endorsement of our key stakeholders, and community organizations who will also need to support the project.  We are hopeful that we can begin early piloting of our Tier Three project over the summer.

Finally, we have reached out to the community for financial support and we are well on our way to obtaining those local community partnerships.

For further information and to join our local Enactus chapter, contact Julia Moody’s mobile 250-801-6402 or mine: 250-864-9552. Or email us at enactusubco@gmail.com.

ABOUT ENACTUS. 

www.enactus.org

A community of student, academic and business leaders committed to using the power of entrepreneurial action to transform lives and shape a better more sustainable world.

entrepreneurial—having the perspective to see an opportunity and the talent to create value from that opportunity;

action—the willingness to do something and the commitment to see it through even when the outcome is not guaranteed;

us—a group of people who see themselves connected in some important way; individuals that are part of a greater whole.

Can Big Data Raise Graduation Rates?

BY RICHARD NIEVA
ON APRIL 9, 2013

Collecting data and statistics is nothing new in education. Educators have been using Blackboard’s analytics software for years. But what is new is the sheer amount of predictive analytics that is available. President Obama recently announced that he wants America’s college graduate ranking to go from 12th place in the world last year to first by 2020. To accomplish this, our nation’s schools and educators will need to harness the power of big data – at least that’s what Toronto-based education startup Desire2Learn says.

The company, founded by CEO John Baker while attending the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Canada, in 1999, trades in educational predictive analytics. Desire2Learn, which has raised $80 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates and OMERS Ventures,  does things like help a student pick classe in which he’ll get the best grades or keep an eye on his progress. Clients include the New York City public school system as well as universities like the University of Arizona, the University of Memphis, and the Harvard School of Business. The company’s class selection software seems compelling, but for all the hoopla surrounding big data, the company will need to nail the predictive element to be really valuable.

Desire2 Learn peddles two products. The first helps students effectively pick courses toward their degrees based on how well they will likely do in them. Baker describes it as a recommendation tool a la Netflix or Amazon. It will, for instance, tell a liberal arts type how he will likely fare in an engineering class by scouring his past classwork (or high school transcripts if he’s a freshman) and compare his academic record to other students who have taken that class. Baker claims it can predict if a student will pass or not with 90 percent accuracy and even settle on his letter grade with 92 percent accuracy.

The second gathers data on how a student is actually doing in a class and spots red flags like a bad grade on a quiz, or, more subtly, rushing through an online assignment. Then a teacher can intervene, and the program can do things like suggest additional reading. For a teacher, the software can also suggest what lessons will better resonate with a student. For example, if a student does

better on a quiz after watching a certain type of video, the software can recommend a similar one.

Of course, this data-centric approach to education isn’t without pitfalls. It can serve to funnel students into the easiest courses and discourage them from challenging themselves.  Why shouldn’t a student take an engineering course even if the almighty algorithm informs him he isn’t likely to ace it? What happened to education for education’s sake?

Nevertheless, it does help in one regard.The Tennessee Board of Regents, which includes six universities including the University of Memphis and Tennessee State University, said it saw a 24 percent decrease in dropouts in one year after using Desire2Learn software. At California State University, Long Beach, the graduation rate rose 3.3 percent since deploying the software. It was the largest one-year jump for a four-year period.

In the info graphic that the company supplied below, it shows t

hat every year students graduate with about 12 credits that don’t count toward their degrees, causing them to spend more time in college, which reportedly costs taxpayers about $6 billion in the form of things like grant money and tuition subsidies, according to Complete College America.

Baker says that for a struggling student — either academically or financially — those extra units can help lead to the decision to drop out. And a high dropout rate is a data point that’s of use to no one.

Reachli

Reachli is a startup to watch. I saw the former Pinerly present at Plug & Play in Sunnyvale last August, and met the founders, when our UBC FOM student, Jonas Fung, hosted a Canadian startup event at Plug & Play. Reachli came out of U of Toronto.. Needless to say, I was impressed… The business model at the time was a blend of Web analytics and viral marketing, with a tag line about “turning browsers into buyers,” which has been the bane of social media marketing efforts. The conversion rate is abysmal. I “got it” immediately,and I am pleased to see them moving forward.. Good luck Reachli!

Toronto Emits Way More Carbon Per Day Than New York City

Yesterday, New York City‘s Sustainability Office put out this video to graphically visualize the reality of how much carbon, in tonnes is produced by New York City in one day..

The amazing fact from all of this is that Toronto apparently produces almost 15% more carbon per day than NYC… Then add the fact that urban environments, by their nature tend to emit less carbon than suburban and rural areas.

Is this why Canada missed its carbon reduction commitment by more than 30%???

I am deeply perplexed by climate change deniers.  I have had in depth conversations with scientists and engineers who follow the “scientific method,”  and though the preponderant majority of scientists are convinced by the data that they have collected, others seem consumed by the elegance of their “method,”  and how the scientific method offers them an opportunity to become famous by looking for possible flaws in the data.    I do understand that point. Copernicus and Leonardo Da Vinci were pioneers of elegant new ideas. But at some point the law of diminishing return applies, and you must acknowledge that Copernicus is right. More weird, many focus on denial of the fact that human activity and fossil fuels are the base explanation in the data.  It is all just natural cycles.   One said to me that the scientific method is not democratic.

By now one would assume that while we may find minor issues, no one is going to become the next Copernicus or Leonardo by denying human caused climate change. In frustation with climate change deniers, I have offered the position that “sustainability is the right thing to do, either way.”

Of course, there is documented evidence that the Koch brothers and others have a financial and political agenda, and are actively funding climate change denial…

To me it is just mental masturbation as our grandchildren face living with our environmental mess..  Right wingers say the same about Keynsian economics and deficits.