Waterloo Tech Highlights for November 2024
Our goal is to provide you with a monthly primer on significant news events from private Waterloo-based technology companies in 5 minutes or less.
Last issue of the year – we don’t publish on Jan 1 so have a great Christmas.
RunQL raised $1.6M a few months ago in a round led by Mistral Ventures that also included MaRS IAF, Inovia, Velocity and other angel investors.
Evercloak received a $250k grant from the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator.
Swap Robotics raised US$3M from Array Technologies with an additional US$2M available on hitting some milestones.
Palitronica made a $1.9M sale to ISED (Canadian Government) to provide their solution to National Resources Canada.
Intellijoint completed its first live surgeries in Saudi Arabia.
Vena Medical completed 4 cases in November. One involved imaging during an acute stroke to find the original source of the stroke and prevent a recurrence or reocclusion.
Shinydocs recorded their first $ of revenue from their new online customer self-service portal.
RideCo came in at #16 in the Deloitte Fast 50.
Chris’ Thoughts
Things We Learned in 2024
While I have my own story below of something I learned this year I asked a few CEOs to share their biggest learning of the year. Here’s a few good ones.
Be able to adjust how much you value the profit percentages vs the growth percentages. And then think about how quickly you can switch the weights from one to the other if market conditions change.– Mike Rossi, CEO, Smile.io
Who you know matters as much, or more, than what you know. This was true (or at least we perceived it to be true) about our opening up sales in new jurisdictions, our approach to Canadian government relations, and fundraising. People are ones who set up rules, and those same people have the ability (or knowledge) to circumvent/navigate them. In the world of remote work, relationship building has to be deliberate and can be a competitive advantage. – Anonymous CEO
When you feel inundated with bad news, you need to make your own good news and not wait for other good news to show up. Life is not always fair, but God is fair... don't mix those two up. – Michael Phillips, CEO, Vena Medical
A standout theme for the year was "founder mode". When I look back at 10 years, my biggest mistakes were watching hired managers try basic orthodox approaches to things that need more careful steering and reaction like what comes instinctively to founders who know their industry. Delegate and cede control with good guard rails and have your managers understand how to think like a founder or end up paying full retail price for staff who deliver less than you could have done yourself. – Jason Cassidy, CEO, Shinydocs
In the enterprise, there's cost cutting fatigue: Tech was purchased, partially deployed and then it had to be ripped out alongside of the people that bought it in the first place. This has left the enterprise buyer with PTSD. Over the past 6 months, enterprise readiness for AI has accelerated. I was personally summoned to a leadership team meeting for one of the largest FIs in the world, to talk about AI Avatars. I wouldn't have predicted such an accelerated curve on willingness to adopt. – Mike Litt, CEO, Vidyard
What I learned in 2024
I tend to learn by doing and wanted to try and really apply all the AI hype to something specific. Since my family are big fans of sourdough and we have a connection to a great family business that makes Sourdough Pasta, I set up a distribution deal with them and eatbetterpasta.com was born as a Shopify store and my goal was to build it out using as much as possible using AI tools. I hoped to put my learnings into AI and not into e-commerce and thought that if I get proficient with the AI tools then the site will run itself.
Well things didn’t turn out that way.
On the AI side, it takes a lot more coaching and programming to get an AI into character and automate tasks than most people can muster. And if you don’t know what a great content marketing person thinks or does to begin with then it’s hard to coach an AI tool to take on that personality and execute. Even the content and suggestions that GPT and other tools generated, there was a constantly laborious task of copying and pasting and formatting and updating links and scaling pictures and renaming links and so forth because connecting the knowledge to the work remains difficult. There’s more I can learn to automate AI for sure but I’m having to lean into AI implementation experts to get anywhere it seems.
On the content marketing side, I’ve had to learn much more than I wanted to. For months I had only a couple visitors a day to the site and 100% of the messages I got were from people trying to sell me their services to “fix” my site as opposed to buyers. Every third-party Shopify AI app tells me about some problem with my site and they can fix it, but it feels like getting advice on diet and weight loss – everybody has an opinion and many of them conflict with each other. Also, most people lie about how great their system really is.
Things are steadily improving but my dreams of an AI agent finding influencers and activating them and sending them a few free bags of pasta automatically remain far away. I’ve had to learn more about meta data types, and image scaling and cross linking, and picture naming conventions and a dozen other things I don’t know about yet to really make this work.
Through it all, this is what I learned:
- Google started as the easy way for the long tail to get discovered online. No longer. If you don’t pay somebody or really know what you’re doing or advertise with them, your small web site will never get discovered no matter how good it is in a specific niche.
- I avoided working on the project because it was frequently frustrating and had. As somebody who coaches others to dig into the hard things instead of just checking off the many, it has been humbling to see my own advice staring back at me.
If you’re inclined to help, I’m all ears. If you’re looking for a great gift for yourself or others – Sourdough Pasta from eatbetterpasta.com might be just the thing you need!
Have a great Christmas break and thanks for your interest and feedback over the year. We all appreciate your interest in the great things happening in the Waterloo Tech community.
Waterloo Tech Highlights is a communication initiative run by a group of experienced investors and strategists who would like to receive and share real news about the vibrant Waterloo, Ontario tech community.
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Chris Wormald @cwormald