We were on the third floor of the Rotman building. Students, teachers, and entrepreneur darted in and out of the presentation hall hosting a Creative Destruction Lab session just across from where we sat. Robbie had just presented his startup’s latest progress on data analysis from IoT devices using Quantum…

Building an AI using off-the-shelf technology should be a walk in the park. Programming languages like python have dozens of libraries to make your AI project a breeze. All you need is to: Ask a simple question. Have a mountain of clean, viable data that backs up a course of…

Aman, Alberto, and I jumped on the video call; Cameron dialed in moments later. Our snag and why we three reached out to Cameron: should we invest a $100,000 and build the app to attract customers and investors to our fitness startup? We had a web-based proof of concept that…

Engaging is Scary The idea of going to a bar alone terrifies me. I think about myself too much. How do I smell? What do others see when they see me? On and on my thoughts race and I become anxious and that anxiety increases as it psychosomatically seeps out of my pores…

Two MBA buddies and I ran a fitness startup for about two and a half years before we shutdown. We completed the exploration stage, but ultimately decided the risk-versus-reward rubric did not paint an appetizing picture. …

“So you guys just get together and drink then?” Yuriy asked over beers on Dale’s patio. “No” I said. Yes, my inner critic responded. “We’ve actually made some good progress. We’re going to a fitness conference next week and we’re pretty close to a working prototype.” You have a bunch…

At my startup, we built a weight-plate-motion tracking app using Xamarin, accelerometers, and a raspberry Pi. We installed the app on an old android phone. I told my kids not to touch the phone, the weight machine, or the sensors. The app only ever had one unique user: me. After…

“Have you heard of Shapelog?” asked Neil outside the Egym demo trailer. Neil worked for Egym and we just met at the Canfit conference. Egym had this motorized weight machine that provided resistance on both the push and pull action along with this little pathfinding minigame that forced users to…

By and by, I could have bought a track car with that money and saved myself a few steps. I lack imagination sometimes. Instead, I convinced myself that first I needed the MBA; then I needed the startup; finally — when it was justified — only then the fancy car. …