May 13, 2018This past week, I as well as a group of respected colleagues, were confronted with the dilemma to choose between the following quotes to decide which of the two is more inspiring to me: 'I have a dream' or 'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses'.
April 15, 2018A problem I've seen often in high-growth companies is an inability to scale storytelling. Typically a founder is the first sales representative at the company, and they're selling their vision which is easy to articulate because it's all in their head - they made it up.
March 28, 2018By now we think we're pretty smart - we've made it easier for folks to navigate and read one of the most complicated things in the world to read - legal documents. But then along has come 'smart contracts', to remind our team at my beloved Clausehound.com that there's always someone smarter out there.
March 04, 2018Startup founders are often 'sipping their own Kool Aid'. In the early days of a startup company, the founders often envision and believe with almost cult-like intensity in a product or market need that sometimes no one else can see.
February 19, 2018This dog is travelling to New York City!! We’ve just been accepted into the Canadian Tech Accelerator New York NYC, and will be opening an office in Manhattan in the next few weeks. We’re hopeful that this Year of the Earth Dog brings us plenty of learning and growth over here at the ‘Hound.
February 04, 2018This week my beloved Clausehound.com was accepted into the CTA New York accelerator. Our small team has been scattered around the countryside this month with team members in Ottawa, Toronto, Boston, London (Ontario) and now New York at the same time. Managing a distributed team is a puzzle that I’m eager to solve.
January 20, 2018I had the pleasure this weekend of judging the 2017 IBK Business Plan competition which brings MBA students from around the world in a head to head elimination competition, showcasing the next big thing.
January 13, 2018And what an education it was. I never considered myself to be the entrepreneurial 'type' – whatever that means. My vision for how my career would unfold was extraordinarily ordinary: finish undergrad, go to law school, get a job through the on-campus recruitment process. And that’s what I did until my first year of law school led me to a detour.
January 07, 2018Whether you’re building innovative products at large companies or small startups, you shouldn’t have a long roadmap. Actually, chances are that if you’re a startup, you probably haven’t even thought of building a roadmap because you’re so focused on getting the initial product to customers. As a large company, this isn’t the case.
December 30, 2017So you have an idea. It starts in your head and your excitement leads you to bring it to the world. You describe it to some folks. Some of those folks understand it, some don’t.
December 15, 2017This is a guide to help you, probably a high school student, navigate your life as you’re trying to figure out the world. I’ve had multiple conversations with students in the last few weeks, and everyone has similar struggles.
December 11, 2017I just watched this video on spirals and it struck me that pattern matching is very important to us collectively. Pattern matching is helpful.
November 25, 2017I’ve been researching the concept of 'openness' in organizations. I came across this concept when I watched this fireside chat with Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian at Startup Battlefield Australia, released one week ago. I've been a fan of Atlassian products for years (our company uses both Bitbucket and Trello daily as important tools for our business operations).
November 18, 2017Our team is growing at my beloved Clausehound.com, and that is great. It is no longer a big panic to get from version to version or from demo to demo. New staff and old staff are starting to create their own groups of friends and this has prompted me to think about the kind of culture that we want to be known for.
November 10, 2017For this week's Founder's Only I dug into Faheem's podcast archives. Faheem Moosa is a member of Founder's Only, and he and I were MBA friends over a decade ago. Faheem assembled a great collection of stories from new company founders who have decided to leave 9 to 5 jobs to start a business.
November 03, 2017Julie Zuzek 'the Corporate Yogi' and I have been friends for nearly a decade, and I have often tried to apply her approach to the 'entrepreneur mindset' over the course of my own founder journey. I had a chance to recently listen to her podcast series on co-founders.
October 20, 2017Originally posted on Startups & Venture Capital, Dominic is the Founder of TWG and a member of Founder's Only. Dominic and Rajah have been friends for Dominic's more than half of Dom's Fourteen Year Journey.
October 06, 2017As soon as I met Jennifer and Upside Foundation of Canada, I liked what they were all about. Their foundation promotes the allocation of 1% of your company’s equity to a charitable purpose. Reserving a portion of your wealth is not new or unique.
September 29, 2017Originally posted on Linkedin, with additional comments from discussions with Founders Only. When you’re a young, broke student, beers are like gold. The difference between then and now (I hope) is that as adults, we don’t have a general ledger tracking who owes who a Budweiser, two rum and cokes, or three bites of a footlong sub.
September 15, 2017Orignally posted on Huffington Post, with additional notes as provided to Founders Only. Transcendental meditation is having a moment. Everyone from Hugh Jackman to Oprah is an avid fan. Even Wall Street is paying attention.
September 01, 2017Reposted from Assaf's original post on Medium. Life events aren’t evenly distributed. Changes seem to bombard us in clusters as if they conspired on timing, prying us from the calm of everyday life, and distracting us from getting on with our plans.
August 25, 2017I like starting things, I don’t like ending them. So maybe I’m not the right person to be writing a post on walking away. But I've seen many businesses begin and fail.
August 18, 2017We had a chance to talk to Sam Natur, President and CEO of Bullfrog Insurance about his Founder journey. Here were some of the highlights from his conversation with Rajah Lehal, Founder of Clausehound.com.
August 11, 2017There was a call today asking for Sundar to resign from the CEO role of Google around, as the New York Times has phrased it, 'diversity drama'. Diversity is a touchy subject these days, and we were proud to see a fellow Founder’s comments on their approach to diversity in last week’s Journey post.
August 04, 2017This article was originally posted on Medium. Additional notes added within this Founder's Journey column. Amazing news this week from the Tribe! We just hit the century mark for the number of employees worldwide.
July 28, 2017Originally posted on tbd. I have always been an entrepreneur, period, and feel a little bit precious—and discounted—when the modifier ‘social’ is in front of it.
July 21, 2017This article was originally posted on medium. There are a lot of secrets when it comes to starting a business. The first secret I discovered when I started my own business, designing toys that teach empathy and failure, was that entrepreneurs barely pay themselves for at least the first few years.
July 13, 2017If there is one thing I am sure I have in common with Clausehound founder, Rajah Lehal, it’s that I am positive, that when starting his own company, he was told by nearly everyone he bumped into that the sector he was going after was too unique and would never change.
July 07, 2017This article was originally posted on Medium. Here’s something you learn when building teams: at a certain point, growing the team adds to its capabilities by frustratingly less than you thought.
June 26, 2017I was recently asked to speak at Big Data Toronto on the topic of machine learning and AI, and I decided to speak to a question on my mind that I have been struggling with: what are the implications of the replacement of junior staff in an organization by software-based solutions?
April 07, 2017I recently chatted with some folks at LinkedIn and their messaging around business vision really stuck with me: Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.
March 03, 2017Do you sometimes feel like your job is repetitively getting more boring? In my years of working in big business, the snails pace of decision-making combined with rigidity around roles and responsibilities were difficult to bear. If you feel the same way now, here's a suggestion: don’t quit your job and remortgage your house to start a business (just yet).
January 05, 2017 Be it resolved that I will go with the flow. Be it resolved that I will let myself be open to the chaos. Be it resolved that 2017 will be the breakthrough year for my beloved Clausehound.
November 15, 2016We took our eye off the ball. I’m writing, of course, about the current political turmoil south of the Canadian border in the United States and its ripple effect felt around the world. How can I/we get from individual-thinking and into a social consciousness?
October 12, 2016Some say you don’t become an entrepreneur - you’re born an entrepreneur, but I certainly didn’t start my career as one. After a dozen years climbing the monkey bars of large organizations, I traded my corporate attire for an irregular paycheck, uncertainty, doubt and worry. This week I was asked to speak to a class of students on my journey in starting a new business and so I sat back and thought about the steps that I took that brought me here.
July 25, 2016There has been a lot written up about changes to the legal industry. As a start-up lawyer, upstart small law firm founder, and legal tech CEO, I have often thought about, argued, discussed, observed and speculated about legal industry shifts (albeit quietly, and to myself).