As I mentionned in my post, I realize that I was really lucky thanks to Quebec government subsidies and that the financial ramifications are significant. However, you can often have your employer subsidize part(or all) of your tuition.
Ultimately, the value of an MBA is significant but the decision to undertake one is very personal. You have to weigh your own value for education with the cost you'll incur.
This is an awesome project and has fostered some great seed-stage projects. It's a key part of the ecosystem that's putting Montreal on the world stage for tech startups.
I think they can revoke a certificate, but I don't think these certs need to be signed by Apple to be effective. If they aren't, they probably just show a warning.
Set aside the debates on healthcare, the awful reality of this man have to raise funds to keep him alive, or any other political rhetoric.
Most of us, even the most starving bootstrapper of the bunch, has enough change in his/her pocket to make an impact on a real human life.
Let's not brag about what we donated, or how much, or if we donated at all. But please everyone, let's reach out for someone who needs us like every good human should.
Ridejoy looks great, but Canadians out there should really take a look at LiveRides (http://liverides.com)
Their app does what Ridejoy does and more - it even lets you securely communicate and track where a driver is when he/she is on his/her way to pick you up.
I'm really glad to see people in this space. I'm fed up of big oil and driving my car alone. Driving should be a social experience with friendly people that doesn't hurt the planet needlessly.
We're hiring a full-time iOS developer who wants to help bring visibility, discoverability and monetization to the millions of blogs and online publishers across the web by creating awesome mobile/tablet app experiences for them.
Hey guys, great use of Pieceable to innovate the app feedback piece. I like your templates too!
How are you guarding against other upstarts in this space like ooomf (http://ooomf.com) that are also bringing great design to mobile app landing pages (where launchrock et. al. don't shine as much?)
Also, any hope to solve the app preview problem in a way that doesn't use Flash so that it can run on Mobile Safarai?
We're hiring a full-time iOS developer who wants to help bring visibility, discoverability and monetization to the millions of blogs and online publishers across the web by creating awesome mobile/tablet app experiences for them.
I've been thinking a lot about this as we finish up our tenure at a Canadian accelerator and are getting our seed round together.
In MBA school, you learn about stuff like discounted cash flows and how they are ultimately what is used to value a company. (Comparables and multipliers are really just proxies for the notion of what the present value of a company's cash flow is)
Then you get out and start raising a round, you throw valuations around in the air and to most outsiders it seems illogical. I think this comes about because many founders simply aren't financially literate enough to do more than say "If AirBnB is worth X, then we must be worth at least Y"
Some people get excited by these uninformed valuations, others write blog posts and call it a bubble. In my opinion, the truth is somewhere in the middle. This crop of entrepreneurs learned some big lessons from their older brothers. They've learned the importance of revenue and having an unfair advantage. With a few exceptions, my experience leads me to say that most entrepreneurs are trying to build real businesses and are not gaming the funding community. This is very different from the IPO fever of the dot-com bubble. (Not to mention the fact that the size of many seed rounds today would barely cover a month of runway in 1999)
Capital is out there but the funding environment is not loose and there is less cash in the system than there was the last time around. TechCrunch and YC make it look easy, but fundraising is still fucking hard. Anybody who's pounded the pavement or sat through months of due diligence only to miss closing date after closing date will confirm this.
Instead of arguing on what our companies are worth, we should all be focussed on building a strong, diverse and healthy North American tech industry. It's time to get back to work and stop giving a flying fuck about what some investor thinks you're worth. Debating whether or not we are in a bubble are simply unproductive.
One big reason we went US was to avoid Bill 101 and all the language restrictions it entails. It was going to really slow us down. We also like the access to US capital that setting up in the States allows for.
An LLC is an amazing thing that we don't have in Canada. It provides limited liability while freeing you from the governance requirements that a corporation has. As a bootstrapped startup, it really sucks to have to deal with endless paperwork to keep your corporate veil in order.
Carl Mercier posted a really good blog entry from a local Quebec perspective, check it out:
One of the reasons we formed a US LLC (we're Canadians) when building Appifier was to work with Stripe. They're simply the best way we've found to handle online payments without the headache.
I can confirm that at the moment our experience (other than some foreign ownership headaches that were promptly resolved by their support staff) has been entirely positive. Integration was a breeze and the reporting is top notch.
Sorry about that. We redirected all of our traffic from our marketing vps to our appserver (heroku) to handle the load. Check back tomorrow for the terms or send us an email.
I did change my standard of living somewhat - I didn't travel this year as I usually do, cut out most useless expenses and took public transit whenever I could. We need surprisingly little to live when you think about it. At the same time, I made sure to take on small paid projects to keep fed.
I don't have any dependants, but I am married and contribute to the household financially. That hasn't stopped, I just had to take it into account when planning my runway.
I'm 28. At this point it's an experiement, If I can turn this into a business I will, if not, I'll dive back into the salaried way of life. It's a great way to live, but I just had to give my dream a shot.