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 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 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 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.