From April 2008 - You know you have been around too long when... How should I finish that line? Let’s see. When you have 250 columns still posted on the Internet for any search engine to find... When your wife has stopped complaining about the very late Thursday nights or very early Friday mornings every couple of weeks... When the Premier of the province was Glen Clark and Priceline.com went public the same day as your first column... When the Canucks used to miss the playoffs with regularity (oh, sorry... that’s quite current!)... So here we are. Thanks for coming. Hands up any of you that read my April 6th, 1998 column... on April 6th, 1998. OK, none of you. Well if you had, among the many pearls of wisdom my 31 year old brain had contrived was the fact that BC’s technology industry needed big anchor companies to thrive. Duh. What penetrating insight I had. My favourite part of that first column was that I thought, at the time, we should bet big on hydrogen as the next gold rush. That Ballard Power was the next Intel. Ummm. With apologies to the many fine engineers and staff at Ballard, it didn’t quite turn out that way. Hydrogen is still a peripheral green technology 10 years hence. Other clean technology has leapt to the fore.

From June 2007 (two months before they were bought) - School’s out and the kids have more free time. If the weather is crummy (a sure bet these days), then perhaps your little ones are playing indoors on the computer in virtual worlds, like Habbo Hotel, Webkinz, Neopets and BC’s own Club Penguin. If you have kids between 7 and 14, no doubt these names are familiar to you. If not, these names are as foreign as fullheadofhair.com would be to me.

From April 2006 - Venture Capitalists invested US$1.6B in companies in Canada and US$21.7B in the US in 2005. While we busy money managers have been doling out this capital to companies that we hope will become Google or Skype someday, we are dwarfed in size by another class of investor: the individual. Aaaah, the angel. The most important cog in the investment cycle.

From February 2005 - Creo – Latin word meaning “to create, make”: One of BC’s biggest success story and the first local technology company to reach CDN$1B in annual sales (in 2001) has been sold to Kodak after 22 years in business. Almost US$1B in cash for Creo shareholders is a nice price given recent tribulations at the Burnaby and Annacis Island company. In announcing its US$174M quarter today, Creo showed good revenue growth from last year to support the price paid. But profit is still pretty small, hence the < 2x revenue sale price. For comparison, Crystal Decisions was bought for nearly 10x revenue by Business Objects 20 months ago. Creo did create something big for our local industry. Now what will happen to it and how will it affect the rest of us?

From November 2004 - In a November like this one 2,327 years ago (323 BCE), a young man died of what is believed to have been a form of pneumonia. He had been born into privilege, tutored at the finest institutions by the thought leaders of his day and had his personality shaped by early conflicts around him. At the tender age of twenty, a huge stroke of fortune thrust him into the leadership role of the world's largest and best army already poised to take over the known world. He died at 32, only twelve short years after that stroke of good luck made him leader. In the twelve years, he never lost a battle against an enemy and established control over 90% of the civilized world through brute force and clever politics. His name was Alexander the Great. Since a very well publicized movie about Alexander is coming out next week, I had been thinking about this legendary figure in world history and thought there were a lot of parallels to a modern figure of technology, Bill Gates III. So if you will indulge me this week, I thought I'd share a few connections about a form of leadership that worked for two great men.

From February, 2003 - You heard me speak of the “thin” middle of the technology industry in BC in my last column. I also told you that it was largely anecdotal evidence that lead me to the conclusion as the data on this industry is tough to track down. In fact, the only good data was on financing and those companies financed by venture capital. So, I went in search of companies that make up the middle of the industry, the survivors of early stage… the growth companies. But I added a twist: I wanted companies that would have been missed completely by the VC data I referred to last time. I wanted to find the success stories that didn’t raise a nickel of VC and didn’t go public. Why? Well, they would have a meaningful story to tell that today’s entrepreneurs need to hear and they also don’t get featured in a VC-centric world of early stage companies.

From July 2002 - The summer is never slow for news. You'd think that people would just kick back, relax and wait for September. They do it in Europe, don't they? Apparently not. At least not in Paris, France near the Place Georges Pompidou. Home of Business Objects SA, a $500M a year business software maker. The new headquarters for Crystal Decisions, bought last week for US$300M in cash and roughly US$520M in stock. What happened? Where did the bellwether IPO (initial public offering) go? Why isn't Crystal Decisions its own company with a fresh US$170M in its jeans ready to take on the world and make its new public shareholders happy? Why did our local success story, organically grown in Vancouver to 1,700 employees and over US$200M in revenue decide to become a branch office for its slightly larger competitor?

From March 2001 - I have published the Early Stage Technology Index (ESTI) in this column every month or so. According to absolutely no known quantitative measures, I have tried to indicate the pulse of the early stage technology market in BC. I ask myself a few questions and then make up a number. The questions I ask to assess whether it's a good time to be in a start-up are: · Is it a good time to raise money in this market now? · Are there talented people ready and willing to take the plunge into a risky start-up? · Is the overall technology market, or even selected sectors, expanding? · Are there any positive intangibles (change of government, new IPOs locally, new R&D facilities)?

From March 2001 - Thinking of subject matter for a column (or any media for that matter) these days is difficult. There seems to be only one story worth discussing: When will the bad times end? It's on everyone's lips. Brave faces are put on the loss of wealth. Nervous laughter follows a comment about when one bought Nortel or PMC-Sierra thinking they had bought bottom. So far, and I would include myself in this camp, most people feel that this is a short (less than one year) phenomenon. But an annoying thought is creeping in to everyone's thoughts... what if this is going to be much longer? Paul Kedrosky wrote in the National Post a week ago that, before mid-February, most people expect a "V" where the market will bounce back sharply and the graph will be the shape of that letter. Now, most people are thinking the shape is more of a "U" with a slower return to where we have been. Appealing to my tendency to pop culture references, Paul stated that more and more, 2001-2002 might be "brought to us by the letter "L"". That would suck.

From November 2000 - Ann Landers was almost run out of the business when she surreptitiously tried this. I'll be up front. I'm recycling old articles this week. The reason I am recycling is that the topic that I wrote about 2 and a half years ago just turned 100 three months ago. I have pictures to prove it. You have read here that we need to celebrate our star technology people and promote them to the rest of the world. Well, here's an original, THE original tech star with roots in Vancouver.

From October 2000 - Brent is away, so let's talk about him. In case you hadn't heard, Brent Holliday (the normal occupant of this space) is a venture capitalist. Contrary to what you might have heard or read elsewhere, most venture capitalists are surprisingly nice people. On a train-ride index of financial type companionability, they rank somewhere between short-sellers and investment bankers.

From August 2000 - A year ago, a small company of some 60 people was bought by a US technology juggernaut and I gushed about how it was the deal that put BC on the map. HotHaus was bought for US$280 M by Broadcom, making it the largest private technology company purchase in Canada to that point. A few months later, the Albertan pig farmers at docSpace trumped HotHaus with a US$562 M purchase by Critical Path. If you are keeping score at home, we have a new leader: Abatis Systems of Burnaby, bought for US$636 M on Monday by Redback Networks. That's almost a billion (with a B) US greenbacks spent acquiring just two companies in the Vancouver area in 12 months. If BC made the map last year, this deal helps solidify its presence as a "place to be". Batten down the hatches, Martha, this place is about to get crazy...

From July 1999 - I'm sure you did the same thing. A few years ago, when you first heard the name, you thought to yourself, "I've heard of them. I buy their tomatoes and red peppers at Safeway." C'mon, admit it. You did to. And then when you heard that they were a technology company and they spelled House like this (Haus), you thought to yourself, "What a dumb name!" Yes you did. Me too.

From April 1999 - In one year on the job as technology columnist I have covered a lot of ground. Scrolling through the archive gives one the impression that I seem to have an opinion on just about anything. The cynic in the crowd might say "de-focused". I prefer "well-versed"... So, it behooves me as an opinionated pundit to look forward at the next year and give my forecast of the BC technology scene. The PwC Technology Forecast was held on March 31st. If you didn't go, you missed a good presentation and you didn't get the book.

From July 1998 - Last week, I rambled about what motivates high tech employees to work. The key message was that compensation is not the be all and end all of attracting and keeping workers. Most of the article focused on younger engineers and programmers. I did touch on senior management and the trouble of attracting the experienced leaders of young technology companies. More than a couple of responses to last week's diatribe pointed out that very fact. So, OK, here is the antithesis to last week's hypothesis: Money does matter to older folk that have families and long track records in industry.

From May 1998 (Radical almost went belly-up in 1999 and then successfully sold to Vivendi in 2002) - I'd like to tie together a couple of points that I have made in some of my previous columns. To do this I will use a local company and its industry as an example. The company is Radical Entertainment (Disclosure: BDC Venture Capital is an investor in Radical and I am on the board of directors). A few weeks back, I argued that developing a critical mass of expertise and infrastructure for high technology in BC might require an anchor company, a billion-dollar cauldron of innovation and knowledge. I argued that the company could be Ballard Power Systems. I am pleased to share a couple of tidbits that have happened in the past week leading towards that end.

From April 1998 (My first column) - I have had professors, colleagues and various technology insiders tell me that they key to creating a fertile knowledge economy in BC is having an "anchor" technology company. The popular thinking goes like this: Once attaining this lofty status, the company should spin-out companies in a related field and have smart, energetic people leave to start their own new companies. This attracts capital, lawyers and other frightening but necessary people in suits. The multiplier effects benefit the community as a whole and next thing you know, you have become the next Silicon Valley. Sounds rather utopian, doesn't it?