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 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 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.