Can we make Ottawa extraordinary?  I think so. As you probably know, I moved back to Ottawa six years ago with my wife and two kids (now three) after spending time in Europe and the US. We chose Ottawa over San Francisco because we chose family and lifestyle over business. Over these six years I Continue Reading

What are your options? There are a few things you can do as a University graduate looking to break into the Ottawa tech startup scene. Start your own Business: High risk, freedom to work for yourself, limited in job mentoring, limited financial resources. Join an early stage startup (pre-revenue): Limited to no risk, Own your work, learn Continue Reading

Sometimes we’re so caught up in our own startup that we forget that 90% of what most startup entrepreneurs do to build, market, promote, sell, and support their companies wasn’t possible 10 years ago. Today we launched a site to help you say thanks to a handful of them for their contributions to the startup Continue Reading

I’ve said many times that we have world-class talent in Ottawa.  Over the last few months I’ve been working on trying to bring some of it together to assemble a “dream team” of local startup entrepreneurs to collaborate on a high-growth opportunity – a truly “made in Ottawa” success story. Today we’re announcing the first Continue Reading

I’m excited to announce the latest partnership for Mercury Grove in local Ottawa startup IdeaVibes. Four months ago we announced the launch of our grassroots, community accelerator program and it has been a great success.  The initial three companies : ND Storefront, Vegan Cuts, and OpenEra have achieved amazing growth (we’ll be releasing more details Continue Reading

Chief Sumo Noah Kagan is going to be in Ottawa next week for an AppSumo meetup and you should attend. We’ve been working with Noah and his team at AppSumo over the last year co-promoting the great plays from StartupPlays.com and the relationship has been fantastic.  AppSumo has built an amazing and engaged user list Continue Reading

Today we launch an ambitious new project that is the culmination of what we’ve learned running startupplays.com, building webcollaboration.com, and launching the Mercury Grove accelerator. It’s called Accel.io and its like a kindle + appstore for step-by-step guides. Why we built it Having run several startups and mentoring, advising, and hanging out with many more, Continue Reading

Today we shutdown our oldest product, WebCollaboration.com, after 6 years (!) of operation.  It survived several business model iterations (corporate, free, freemium), a corporate restructuring, and many partners, employees, and friends who helped it along.  It was the first “web app” I ever built outside of a corporate client, and represents one of my deep-rooted Continue Reading

We work with A LOT of entrepreneurs at MercuryGrove. I have the privilege of doing a monthly brain drain with the very smart people in all of the MercuryGrove accelerated startups: HealthWave, Openera, Vegancuts and of course the team on StartupPlays. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how laser focused they are when Continue Reading