Tech Uncensored - An Altitude Accelerator Podcast

Entrepreneurs have big ideas. They have a vision for how they want to change the world. They’ve validated their idea and want to get started in bringing this to fruition. They need someone who can, not only build this for them, but someone who is willing to become a significant member of the team to help in its growth and commit to the long term. 

Finding the right technical cofounder goes beyond the skills necessary to build a great product.  There are many other soft-skills required; there are expectations to be managed. 

In this envir...

It’s been called the toughest jobs in industry. For startups who are building their business from the ground up, finding the right customer who is willing to buy your product can be daunting.

This is where all companies start out. They have an idea. They go out to talk to people to validate the idea. They build it with all this feedback in mind. And they identify the ideal customer profile that would benefit the most from their product, put this target list together and they’re ready to go out and sell. 

For start...

We are all familiar with the phrase “Fail Fast”.  The “fail fast” philosophy values extensive testing and incremental development to determine whether the idea has value.  The important goal of the philosophy is to cut losses when testing reveals something is not working and quickly try something else known as pivoting.  The goal is not to perfect the concept but get it good enough to get it out to the market, then continuously improve it through market feedback. 

We spoke to Ralph Christian Delos Santos of Biofect Innovations; Pushkar Kumar and Chitral Angammana, of NanoRial Technologies Ltd – two companies...

We see it time and again. One of the last things companies invest in when they’re starting their company is marketing. The developer is hired before the marketer. The product is designed without consideration of who it’s for.  The product is tweaked without talking to a customer. Marketing strategy takes a back seat to product strategy, and this is a fatal flaw. 

One of the most common marketing myths?  Marketing is the same thing as Promotion. In fact, Promotion, which includes PR and advertising, is ONLY one subset of marketing. But this misunderstanding is the reason...

For many start-ups developing a financial model is a daunting task.  Why are they necessary? How do I build one? What should it include? Geoff Simonett, Investor, Advisor, Entrepreneur-in-Residence and formerly one of the founders of GreenSky Capital, and currently the President of Pinelands Capital, joins us to tackle this challenging topic for many startups: the importance of building a financial model; the fundamentals, and what it means as the foundation for their business.

Have we finally arrived? Has technology finally given us the ease and convenience that we’ve been striving for?  
  
From ChatGPT, Dall-E2, Lensa, Generative AI is all the rage... or is it just hype?  
 
ChatGPT has been known to generate emails or replies on any given prompt. It is now a threat to Google search by delivering relevant web results. It can generate text summaries from video and write your tweets and comments and replies. But the same technology has also been known to generate darker capabilities like creating malware, generating phishing emails, steal information and eer...

In 2022, the state of global venture capital funding reached $74.5 B in Q3 of 2022, minus 34% quarter over quarter loss and the largest quarterly percentage drop in a decade according to CB Insights. 
 
This marked a 9.5% quarterly drop and 7 quarter low – with just under 8000 deals being done in Q3 2022. 
 
For many startups will 2023 follow the same trend from the last 2 quarters of 2022? There are pundits who say the recession, if it happens, will be shortlived because it is Fed Induced, in an economy that is growing. 
 
For startups, they need to consider funding options in light of...

Ontario has mandated to go Carbon Neutral based on 1990 levels by 2040.  The primary sources of emissions are homes and buildings (57%) mainly from heating and water by natural gas, transportation (36%) and waste (7%) landfills.   

We welcome James Sbrolla, Startup Advisor, President & CEO of Cleantech Capital, and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Altitude Accelerator to discuss the opportunities in cleantech and how government regulation can hasten innovation and maximize returns for Cleantech founders.

Subscribe to Tech Uncensored on Youtube
Subscribe to our Weekly Tech Uncensored, LinkedIn Live Newsletter
Register and gain access to advisors, programs, and our extraordinary network

<...

The failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) flooded our attention this past week. The Twitter Run on the 18th largest bank in the US followed with a weekend frenzy for regulators announcing they were willing to backstop all deposits over and above the initial FDIC threshold of $250K. To underscore the importance of this event, by the end of 2022, SVB had $209 billion in assets. It was a “lone source” of support for startups in Silicon Valley. The pace to remediate this potential contagion and calm the markets has been swift. The ripple effects continue to be felt, including here in C...

The problem: For women entrepreneurs, the #1 structural barrier is attracting investment. If you’ve been paying attention, the recent $350Million investment to Adam Neumann, a white male founder, well networked in the VC community, and former founder of failed IPO, WeWork, sent ripples across a startup community that has long been accustomed to disproportionate investment funding.   

 

These stats continue to be echoed time and time again: less than 3% of female led founders and less than 1% of female minority founders receive venture funding. 

 

Dominic Madori-Davis of TechCrunch encapsulated the plight of the underre...

In this episode we invite Carmine Pizzuro, President of eCamion, Patrick Marion, VP of Product Development at inmotive and Arthur Kong, Director of Project Development at Ngen Canada join Samie Husain discuss the Electric Vehicle Infrastructure market: the challenges each of these companies faced as early startups; the opportunities as the industry transitions to EV and the issues with respect to infrastructure and supply chain.

Subscribe to Tech Uncensored on Youtube
Subscribe to our Weekly Tech Uncensored, LinkedIn Live Newsletter
Register and gain access to advisors, programs, and our extraordinary network

Follow...

Funding from venture capital is a critical financial resource for tech startups. But do you know why venture capital companies pass on a company? How do they VCs evaluate startups? In this discussion, our host, Sam Husain, invited two VC partners, Matan Hazanov and David Harris Kolada, who have been working with startups for years. Watch the discussion and get the “myths” of VCs busted.

Subscribe to Tech Uncensored on Youtube
Subscribe to our Weekly Tech Uncensored, LinkedIn Live Newsletter
Register and gain access to advisors, programs, and our extraordinary network

Follow us:<...

Since the prosperity of Web 2 and social media platforms, Twitter has become a place for people to connect with others and to build communities together. However, Elon Musk interfered the operation of Twitter significantly and impactfully, leading to the communities on Twitter being more fragile than ever. In this episode, our host, Hessie Jones, invited Mia Shah-Dand and Alaric Aloor to discuss what is the most critical challenge and how businesses rebuild.

Subscribe to Tech Uncensored on Youtube
Subscribe to our Weekly Tech Uncensored, LinkedIn Live Newsletter
Register and gain access to advisors, programs...

In this episode, we invited Paul Barter, Entrepreneur in Residence, Strategist and Professor; Pam Banks, Executive Director and Samie Husain, Venture Services Manager – all of Altitude Accelerator to talk about the big things that are going on: recessions, technology space, cryptos, and startups. Meta laid off 11,000 employees and Elon Musk is planning to lay off 75% of Twitter’s employees. The news is reminding us of the recession. But how do we discover the hidden opportunities behind the news? 

What should startups do to weather the storm?

Subscribe to Tech Uncensored on Youtube
Subscribe to ou...

We are live from the Metaverse and 5G Conference in Toronto. This is our premiere episode of Tech Uncensored. We speak with disruptors in the Metaverse space:

Lorne Sugarman, CEO of Metaverse Group, the first vertically integrated real estate company focused on the Metaverse economy in the world. We discuss the rise of Decentraland, the overvaluations in Crypto and the impending Metaverse winter and when it will realistically move into mainstream. Milton Toledo, CEO of 3DVR. With over two decades of architecture and interior design experience, Milton has a mission to disrupt the space of the convergence of 3...