Fariha Imran

Some interesting thoughts in the inexorable march forward of each AI generation, but also the limits to where AI really shines. In terms of repurposing exisitng content, there seem to be some real value adds here - but exactly how useful this 'professional' podcast really is remains to be seen.

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My 7-year journey via Maple VC with Clay. Thanks Josh Scott at BetaKit for covering the story. I was first introduced to Kareem Amin through a fellow Canadian expat and now Maple founder, Michael Hershfield of Accrue Savings. They first met working at Sailthru in NYC where Kareem sold his first company. In 2016, Kareem started to tinker on new ideas with his cofounder Nicolae Rusan and I was fortunate to meet them at this time. This happened to align with me establishing Maple 1 in November 2016 on the simple thesis of backing Canadians building in America. We noticed that Canadian expats, who graduate from Canadian universities, go on to build some of the biggest companies in tech – Uber, Slack, Instacart, Notion, Faire, Databricks, Cloudflare, Roblox and most recently, OpenAI. Kareem and Nicolae seemed to match this pattern as two graduates from McGill University building in the US. In 2017, they landed on a very clear mission to make programming accessible to all. They painted a picture of replacing the black terminal that developers use, with a spreadsheet that is connected to the internet which could allow non-developers to automate work. What we saw immediately that gave us conviction was a very big ambition (making programming accessible to all) with a unique insight (using a spreadsheet) via a new method of no-code tooling. This reminded us of the early days at Uber: The promise to deliver you anything (big ambition) by starting with a black car that takes you from point A to point B (unique insight) via your phone (new method). We first committed to investing in Clay in Jan 2017 before the company had a lead. In June 2017, we were thrilled to learn that First Round Capital was going to lead their Seed. Sequoia Capital led the Series A in June 2019, which was surprising, since we had no revenue and were still figuring things out. However, the low-code no-code category was starting to take off. Then, they spent the next 3 years figuring out where to focus. During this phase it was fascinating to witness the many disbelievers. We had folks tell us that we should mark this investment to $0. In late 2021, they decided to narrowly focus on automating sales and this turned out to be the big unlock. Varun Anand joined as a cofounder leading their GTM efforts. The timing played out beautifully with new LLMs that we could use to automate growth in a way that hadn’t been done before. Clay relaunched in Feb 2022 with $0 in revenue and has not looked back since. We 10x’d two years in a row, all organically, achieving 100k users, 2500+ customers, and 11k people exchanging ideas in our Slack community. Maple has tripled down since the Seed through the Series B which was just led by Meritech Capital. We have a strong feeling that Clay has a real shot at realizing that vision they first shared with us 7 years ago.

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We've seen this so many times. Your brand/customers/product is unique, but that doesn't mean you should reinvent the wheel with your commerce/marketing stack experience. When brands choose heavily-customized tech stacks, it usually leads to high implementation & maintenance costs. But more importantly, it makes it difficult to iterate down the line. You'll be stuck with your "custom" ecom site, loyalty program, unique UX for years - while your competitors will blow past you with "out of the box" tools.

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This is a really good post by Ghassan Halazon. It's easy for armchair quarterbacks to say "Canadians sell our companies out too early", or "we don't think big and therefore sell out early", but it's never that simple. I don't agree with Ghassan that first-time founders should always take the offer (eg. Google could have sold to Yahoo in 1998, and I'm sure Shopify had multiple interested suitors on their path to an IPO), but he's probably right in most situations. The first exit I had as a VC was a 5x return over about 4 years. I recall the negative comments I received from people in the ecosystem that we sold out too early to the Americans (Microsoft was the acquirer), and that we weren't thinking big enough. But none of those critics saw the slowing sales pipeline, or the increasingly competitive sales cycles, or the churn rates, or the difficult fundraising. No matter how good things are, there are always risks to the business. Most companies plateau long before they achieve a market dominating position, and distinguishing between approaching that final plateau vs. just a slowing blip before the next growth wave is difficult for entrepreneurs that are usually 'half-glass-full' people. And, on a related point, despite what many say, it is never that companies sell out early because they lack the access to capital needed to scale. They may lack capital at a valuation they desire, but that's different, and in fact a datapoint on where a business is on its path to plateauing or market domination.

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Sidewalk Labs (Part of Google), another showcase of Canadian politicians bending over for a big US corp, with ZERO tangible results 💩 Roxana and I attended a "private investor demo" session in 2019. A block of wood was passed among the audience, supposedly the NEXT BIG BREAKTHROUGH in urban development! Demo concluded, by observing a piece of wood! Building blocks of future skyscrapers! The promise? With this, Google will build a "Smart City" for us, the peasants of Toronto, in Queens Quay 🏖️🏢 Sidewalk Labs' website now points to a newer Google scam, it reads: "Build Sustainably with Google Earth"! Bait and switch, but let enough time pass so no one remembers 🤢 https://lnkd.in/gd3B-a6m Guess now the investors and Ontario Government | Gouvernement de l’Ontario have shit loads of these wooden blocks, ready to shove up somewhere, to find a use for! All because the name "Bloomberg" sounds authoritative enough to our ears? Surely that's capital well spent, instead of investing in local talent! 🤔 Will Canada's tech ecosystem ever crawl out of Silicon Valley's shadow, and stand on its own? ⌚👀⛔

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Canada's VCs should also be on the map! @Phil Chen (Brex) for the inspiration (PamPam City is awesome!) Toronto: 36 VCs and counting. Who are we missing? BetaKit Siri Agrell Satish Kanwar BDC Georgian Inovia Capital Golden Ventures Panache Ventures Radical Ventures Brightspark Ventures OMERS Ventures MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund Relay Ventures Real Ventures Ripple Ventures Staircase Ventures Two Small Fish Ventures N49P Ventures Information Venture Partners Highline Beta Portage Round13 Capital Graphite Ventures GreenSky Ventures Whitecap Venture Partners Amplify Capital Good News Ventures StandUp Ventures GroundBreak Ventures Genesys Capital Plaza Ventures Sixty Degree Capital Impression Ventures Kensington Capital Partners Limited Lumira Ventures Alate Partners Storytime Capital First Ascent Ventures

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Shopify Hydrogen's massive momentum and capabilities! 🚘 If we look under the hood of the Shopify Summer Edition, there are a lot of interesting things to be uncovered. One of them definitely is Hydrogen and its exploding feature set/ecosystem. 🤓 Features: (benefits of the features you can find underneath) - All out visual editors for marketeers/webmasters - Fully dynamic data/content editing in CMS and Shopify - Pre-built commerce / B2B components - Complete freedom to build anything that is possible on the web - Extremely high performant front ends - Server-side personalisation - Server-side A/B testing - Migration from liquid to Hydrogen (even step by step) - Optimistic UIs - Background page reloading - Global fast hosting included in your Shopify subscription 🤑 Benefits: - Freedom for your marketing team to build pages in a visual editor, just like in Shopify's online store - Save time by editing content from the website editor, wherever the content/data might live - Save time in development because the basis is provided, only spend time on what makes you unique - Zoom in on the features that make your brand stand out by incorporating product builders, name it and it can be built - Higher conversion because of real, deep personalisation - Higher conversion because of deep A/B testing functionalities - Save money and spread out investment due to step by step process, only focussing on what really makes the difference - Snappy UIs for better conversion --> The freedom and possibilities that are arising on the platforms are mind blowing. Features are churning out at an impressive pace which compounds over time to yield an incredibly flexible and valuable tool. #shopify #hydrogen #summeredition

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Toronto Startup Guide for Founders. Thank you Yoran Beisher and Michael Liu for pulling this map together and for keeping it up to date 🙌 #CommunityBuilders Now, who can do this and update the old Montreal Startup Guide for Founders?

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Just had to share this gem from Collision Conf in #Toronto. Among the #startups and VCs, I spotted a guy with a shirt saying, "Ask me about my CAC." Naturally, I asked. Sebastian Fallenbüchl, BASc., the wearer, shot back, "My CAC is getting lower as you just approached me." Genius. Seb’s witty remark was more than just a laugh — it was a reminder that business is about people. Metrics like CAC are crucial, but so are the connections and conversations that drive them down. Takeaway? Be #approachable. Humor and humanity can make all the difference. Thanks for the insight and the laugh, Seb. Here’s to more moments like these! #Networking #BusinessInsights

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By popular demand, I'm sharing the list of all tech events in Toronto for May here 👇 https://lnkd.in/eQc5yhjY Whether you're looking to learn from the best founders in the city, getting introduced to your next lead investor, hoping to land that next tech role, or just hang out with some of the coolest people changing the world, with over 130+ tech events on the list, there's bound to be something for you! My recommendations for events coming up? 1. Start with Toronto Tech Fest's exclusive Opening Gala experience (formal wear, food, drink, speakers, and secret passwords 🤫) 90% of all tickets sold, grab the last ones before they're gone! https://lu.ma/TTFGALA 2. Come see what people in the city are building at Demos Only! with Google. If you think you have the chops, sign up to demo what you're building yourself! https://lu.ma/qkmyfpyp 3. 6 of the top female founders will be battling it out at the Woman Founder Pitch Battle at the 6six. Signups are still live and pitching slots are open for women founders currently building their businesses. https://lu.ma/he8edd0d 4. Close out the week with a 1000+ person Founder Rooftop Mixer Party at Lavelle. This is shaping up to be the biggest startup gathering of the season, with an opportunity to meet, mingle, and learn with top founders, investors, operators, and business executives from across the tech space. https://lu.ma/b7jlqx2w If the list was helpful, please consider dropping me a like 👍 and helping to repost 🪃! Mell Truong Frank Chen Eric Lay Parry Chan Arda Erturk Victor Ou Oliver Xin ✨ Interested in more events in May? Check out lu.ma/torontotechfest for a whole month of amazing May tech events in Toronto! 👉 Got questions on the hottest tech events? Chat with us and stay in the know: lnkd.in/gNiWyJXv 📣 Want a list of all the tech events happening this month in Toronto? Click below 👇

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The AI hype bubble is almost over. When investors refused to fund new AI startups because they know they’re going to fail, then the AI hype bubble is starting to fail. Even the most clueless, Investors now know that this is a bubble waiting to burst like the metaverse bubble and the dotcom bubble. And nobody wants to be left, holding the back on this bubble. The era of free money iis over with interest rates sky high. When big tech companies are losing money on AI and the bigger AI startups are demonstrating that they are all dead and struggling to even have revenue, then no one is interested in funding, smaller AI startups that they don’t believe will be profitable anytime soon. People aren’t waiting for an AI unicorn to break out. They are waiting for Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and similar to start buying distressed AI startups. Collapsing companies and minimal paths to profitability doesn’t help a space that was already overhyped. Don’t forget in all this mess that the unfortunate reality is that engagement and retention don’t match installs and downloads. What I mean by this is the most basic of mobile tracking were ignored. You don’t judge success in the mobile market based on downloads or installs, but rather based on retention and engagement. What this means is, it’s not actually impressive for OpenAI to get to 100 million users quickly if 2% of them retain. The question is not how many people signed up for a free account. The question is how many monthly active users and daily active users do AI startups like OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Stability, and others have. And how many are paying customers? And what we are finding is that retention is in low single digits. The reality is that AI startups are getting users the way that mobile free to play did. And they haven’t found a way to actually make money on that. Don’t ask an AI startup how many users signed up. Ask them how many DAUs and MAUs they have. Ask them what their ARPDAU is. What you will find is that every number is low. AI startups have no idea how to do monetization, and they don’t have regular active users in any volume. What this points to is that they’re all going to fold or get bought.

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Spent a wonderful week in Canada with family! Now back to business.. Here's your weekly AI update: 🔙 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐏𝐚𝐬𝐬: 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐤 Week 51 | August 5 - August 11 The OpenAI Brain Drain Industry: 🚨OpenAI co-founder John Schulman leaves for Anthropic; President Greg Brockman is taking extended leave through the end of year. What's interesting is that three of their most technical co-founders (Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Andrej Karpathy) have all left the company now. This then begs the question - is this a result of natural silicon-valley attrition, or is there something deeper going on here? And moreover, how will this impact the technical moat that OpenAI has built over the years? (https://lnkd.in/gztRKhwV) 🚨Google announced that new Gemini AI-powered features will be incorporated in a variety of home devices, such as Google Home and Nest (https://lnkd.in/gV2QacAQ?). It also announced a significant reduction in token cost of Gemini 1.5 Flash (https://lnkd.in/gbNe6yNU?) 🚨Figure releases Figure 02, it's newest humanoid robot. Figure has been actively testing robots with BMW at a manufacturing plant. Figure last raised $675M Series B in February 2024, valuing the company at $2.6 billion. (https://lnkd.in/gZnPSke4) 🚨Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta's Q2 earning call that to train Llama 4, the company will need 10x more compute than what was needed to train Llama 3. (https://lnkd.in/g5pEPrTw?) 🚨Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, renewing claims that the company is betraying its founding aims of benefiting the public good rather than pursuing profits. (https://lnkd.in/gAk5grU6) Financing and M&A: 🚨Groq raises $640m in Series D at a $2.8B valuation. The round was led by Blackrock Private Equity Partners with participation from other investors such as Neuberger Berman, Type One Ventures, Cisco, KDDI, and Samsung Catalyst Fund. (https://lnkd.in/gRtKQKvW?) 🚨Hugging Face acquires Seattle data storage startup Xethub. The HF team plans to integrate Xethub's backend storage technology, enabling developers to host more large models and datasets than currently possible. CEO Clem Delangue 🤗 confirmed this was the largest acquisition the company has made thus far. (https://lnkd.in/g8fJ-BjT) 🚨OpenAI is leading a $60m Series B funding round for Opal Camera, a maker of professional-grade webcams(https://lnkd.in/gMT9dkTG) 🚨ProRata.ai a company that has invented an attribution technology to properly compensate content owners, has raised a $25m Series A, led by Prime Movers Lab, Mayfield Fund and Revolution Ventures. (https://lnkd.in/gumjbWmj) R&D: 🚨Alibaba Group releases Qwen2-math, a SOTA model for math-specific tasks. (https://lnkd.in/g8Jh3M7T?) Other Interesting Resources: 🚨 Between May and August, more Humane AI Pins were returned than purchased (https://lnkd.in/gy56qpKm?). 😯

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🚀 Just had an incredible experience meeting Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans in Toronto! Here's a mind-blowing stat: OnlyFans has paid out $15 billion to creators since 2016. Yes, billion with a B. 💸 The company takes 1/5th of the payments generated. With over 3 million content creators on the platform, it was fascinating to discuss the future direction of the business - which really has a ripple effect... OnlyFans has already shifted culture and how we think about creators. But their next big wave goes beyond content and culture—it’s about challenging traditional banking norms. With its massive financial footprint, OnlyFans is pretty well poised to reshape the financial landscape for lawful, profitable businesses often marginalized due to stigma. (👋 Shoutout to Sextech School founders, Women of SexTech, and other businesses that struggle to transact or even open business bank accounts.) Keily’s background as a partner at a law firm specializing in cyber, privacy, and security makes her the fit to take on the big banks. I love learning about how people found their ways into these sorts of spaces - for her, OF was a former client (and a fav client). I learned so much in our meeting. One last nugget that stood out: OFTV (their safe-for-work streamer) just licensed their first reality show to Netflix! At this point, the mainstream influence of OF, whether it's in entertainment or financial sector, is undeniably having a hand in what our future looks like.

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A friend of mine starting their finance brokerage asked for advice on how to have a loan calculator built for their website. I don't do much hands on development anymore, but I thought to put AI to the test. I used Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Cursor IDE to build and design this calculator from scratch in all but 19 minutes and 57 seconds. This used to take developers and designers hours, even days ( in corporate ). It cost me about $1 in API calls and about 20 minutes of my time. Modern UX / UI, Functional calculations, Interactive tool tips, Mobile responsive, it's got it all. - I believe AI helps professionals get to their finish lines faster. Not only in R&D, but across the board, such as in management, operations, finance, etc. More on this later. - If you want to a step by step video, comment "How" and I'll send you the behind the scenes video. Until next time ✌️

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For the last 11 years, I've had the privilege of teaching product development, design, and entrepreneurship to talented computer science students at the University of Toronto. While having access to the latest educational resources is crucial, what I’ve found truly transformative are the skills of critical thinking, creativity, and vision. These are the tools that drive innovation and change. I couldn’t agree more that staying up to date is important, but applying that knowledge in a unique, forward-thinking way truly revolutionizes the future of work and industry. What further skills should people develop/learn to complement their AI education? #AIeducation #futureofwork #careerdevelopment #backtoschool https://lnkd.in/g6TQEwqF

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New experiment and data show how business leaders use generative AI. If you don’t, or doesn’t train your employees on how to use AI properly, they are already less productive but mostly, might may make errors that harm the bottom line.

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Congrats team Lodestar Space to closing this £2.5M pre seed round! Off to the (new space) races. At Inflection.xyz we are committed to pioneer sovereign computation as the biggest leverage for human progress. The space economy will help us provide valuable services from imagery and connectivity on earth all the way to in space semiconductor production, energy harnessing, regulating the earths climate and becoming an interplanetary species in the long run. Object manipulation is a very present bottleneck for repair, refuelling and other services. As opposed to tele operated robots that come with high latency, connectivity issues, human failure and high costs Lodestar Space is taking a different approach. By leveraging new materials, additive manufacturing and advancements in AI and in-space „edge“ compute capabilities (see our portfolio Cryptosat) they enable autonomous robotics operating in real time and far beyond human precision. Based on their space specific data set - robots and objects behave very differently at 0 gravity, extreme light conditions and temperatures - new applications and interfaces become possible. Data network effects are expected to accelerate development across verticals. Read more about the company’s value propositions, team and vision on https://www.lodestar.space Reach out if you see room for collaboration!

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If you want the next-generation AI platform to manage your cap table, ESOP, CN and Warrant, use Mantle. Great job, Amit J. 🙌🙌🙌 - Thanks, Jason (Jay) Hum, for recommending this excellent platform

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