The first and last job I would ever hold was as a junior forest ranger for the Ministry of Natural Resources in Cochrane, Ontario. I was 16 at the time. Cochrane is known for its polar bears and being the birthplace of hockey player and legendary donut purveyor Tim Horton.
Read MoreShortly after the sale of a controlling interest in InQuent Technologies, I spent a considerable amount of time speaking at universities and to business groups on the subject of entrepreneurship. I enjoyed sharing my experiences in these venues. It was mutually rewarding. I believe that entrepreneurship is in the public interest, and I seek to actively promote this belief in Canada and abroad.
With increasing commitments in the past few years, I have had less time for public speaking. It was suggested to me that blogging would be an ideal platform to spread my entrepreneurial gospel and engage a much larger audience than I could reach through speaking engagements. This proved to be true, as my posts attracted a growing readership. Unfortunately, my time does not permit for new commentary at present. Archived posts may be accessed below.
The following posts were published online in 2006 and 2007.
I had always been a computer hobbyist. I taught myself html and coded my first website in early 1995, prior to leaving for McGill. The site was for my father's achitectural practice. I built the site for him mostly out of my own interest in better understanding web development. That he was quoted thousands of dollars by a design firm to build a site also caught my attention. This was the era of static websites - web design was a simple task. This experience led me to the business I would start in my first year at McGill - DynamicWeb Design.
Read MoreAny entrepreneur worth their salt is constantly thinking about how they can both defend and increase their market share. For us, the answer came courtesy an email from KPN, the incumbent Dutch telecom. They were interested in selling our products to hundreds of thousands of business customers they served in the Benelux region. They wanted to know if we could situate our web and application hosting platform in their data centers and integrate our software with their legacy billing, customer care, provisioning and operational management systems.
Read MoreMy interest in promoting a culture of entrepreneurship is not limited to the for-profit sector. I've had the opportunity to befriend a number of social entrepreneurs over the past six years. These non-profit bootstrappers often follow a very similar path to their profit-oriented counterparts. While the parallels are remarkable, the hurdles to success are usually greater for the social entrepreneur. It is often far more difficult to raise money, foster an environment of economic efficiency, promote technological and operational change, and measure success in the charitable sector.
Read MoreI was recently quoted in a story on startup fundraising where I was identified as a "Venture Capitalist". This is not the first time I've been incorrectly labeled a VC. I can see how the confusion could arise - my operating entity for direct early-stage investing is named "Aprilis Ventures" and our website homepage identifies us as the "venture capital company of angel investor Jesse Rasch".
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