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- January, 2008 (34)
- Well Chella: After getting
- BC is luck to have Mr.
- Thanks for writing, Kaelley.
- Hello Chip Wilson, I am a
- I thank u 4 your
My old friend Peter
This past winter, my old friend Peter Thomson, a proverbial lover of wine, women and song if ever there was one, died suddenly. I felt a grief that was shared by hundreds if not thousands of Vancouver businesspeople who had also been touched by him.For 17 years, Peter was the Director of the BCIT Venture Development Centre (VDC), the oldest entrepreneur training operation in BC – and to my mind still the best. In that role he inspired, guided, and trained hundreds of would be entrepreneurs, most of whom are still operating businesses – sometimes in the second, third and fourth iterations. more...
Up the capital ladder
The B.C. government has finally announced the launch of its BC Renaissance Capital Fund. The concept is that the government will seed—with $90 million over five years—a large slush fund to assist B.C. technology, clean-tech, life sciences and new media companies at critical points of their lives.But the fund's structure is causing much confusion and some cynicism among people who apparently don't have a clue about how venture capital works. For instance, a sticking point among many is that the fund will provide money to six venture capital firms, most of who have little to do with B.C. more...
Man of the north
In 30 years, he's ascended to the uppermost stratum of world business.As a youth, Tom Albanese fled a small industrial New Jersey town for Alaska. Albanese, now 50, is the first American CEO of the venerable London-based mining giant Rio Tinto PLC, which last year took over Alcan Inc. in a $38-billion deal. He went to university in Fairbanks, Alaska, for degrees in mineral economics and mining engineering. more...
A berth in the majors
Verrus is a case of an “overnight” success that took seven years. It began way back in 2000 after a few young technology workers began searching for a problem that new mobile technology might be used to solve. more...The one-foot wave
Service businesses are typically feast or famine, and that’s especially true among the more creative services. But that hasn’t stopped thousands of dreamy entrepreneurs from leaping into their own businesses based on a particular skill or expertise. more...RIP: A stupid tax
One of the dumbest concepts ever to come down the pike died a welcome death in the flurry of year-end government cleanups just before Christmas.The province passed legislation to restructure the Vancouver regional transportation authority and in the process killed the hated Vancouver parking tax TransLink imposed in 2006.
This was a classic “tax-the-rich” concept that could only come out of the woolly-headed thinking of a bunch of small-town dinosaurs caught in some kind of '70s class-war time warp. more...
Aging gracefully
Intrawest ULC, the venerable Vancouver-based ski-hill operator that owns Whistler Blackcomb and nine other ski resorts around North America, discovered in 2005 that it was beginning to feel the passage of time.Having started out as a ski-resort real-estate developer, it had become a retailer of sports gear, a resort owner and manager, a housing developer and the operator of a luxury adventure travel agency. By 2006 it was a wide-ranging resort conglomerate employing 22,000 people. more...