Tech Uncensored - An Altitude Accelerator Podcast

Ontario has mandated to go Carbon Neutral based on 1990 levels by 2040.  The primary sources of emissions are homes and buildings (57%) mainly from heating and water by natural gas, transportation (36%) and waste (7%) landfills.   

We welcome James Sbrolla, Startup Advisor, President & CEO of Cleantech Capital, and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Altitude Accelerator to discuss the opportunities in cleantech and how government regulation can hasten innovation and maximize returns for Cleantech founders.

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The failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) flooded our attention this past week. The Twitter Run on the 18th largest bank in the US followed with a weekend frenzy for regulators announcing they were willing to backstop all deposits over and above the initial FDIC threshold of $250K. To underscore the importance of this event, by the end of 2022, SVB had $209 billion in assets. It was a “lone source” of support for startups in Silicon Valley. The pace to remediate this potential contagion and calm the markets has been swift. The ripple effects continue to be felt, including here in Canada. What are the implications to startups in Canada – on their business, the economic outlook in the coming months? More importantly, is there a silver lining in all of this?

We welcomed Steve Foerster, Finance Professor, Ivey Business School, Western University; Paul Barter, Entrepreneur in Residence, Altitude Accelerator; and Andrew Opala, Board Member, Altitude Accelerator and General Partner, Preference Capital, who tackle the questions to which startups have been seeking answers.

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The problem: For women entrepreneurs, the #1 structural barrier is attracting investment. If you’ve been paying attention, the recent $350Million investment to Adam Neumann, a white male founder, well networked in the VC community, and former founder of failed IPO, WeWork, sent ripples across a startup community that has long been accustomed to disproportionate investment funding.   

These stats continue to be echoed time and time again: less than 3% of female led founders and less than 1% of female minority founders receive venture funding. 

Dominic Madori-Davis of TechCrunch encapsulated the plight of the underrepresented founders– the women, the visible minority founders who have journey through a relentless search for equity, and who have personally experienced this regression from being unable to break this glass ceiling – to now an impenetrable concrete one: 

“One cannot out-educate, out-network and out-assimilate the systemic barriers designed to discriminate against them.” 

In this episode we speak to 2 Underestimated founders, Stephanie Lipp, Founder of MyCoFutures NA (a company a next gen materials cleantech startup, developing a durable textile using mycelium, the root system of fungi) and Azar Azad, Founder of AI VALI, a startup developing AI-powered GI endoscopy video image analysis and speech recognition services for the clinical space. Both Azad and Lipp are passionate in their pursuit to disrupt the clinical space and the fashion industry.   

We will also speak to Bryan Duarte of Black Tech Capital and Giselle Melo, GP at MATR Ventures, who are building equity in a system that has done little to support emerging female founders.  

What keeps these founders up at night and how do they overcome their challenges?  For emerging fund managers, is it possible to disrupt a system that has seemingly worked for years, and change the “hearts and minds” of the majority and make way for necessary change? 

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Website: https://altitudeaccelerator.ca/podcast/

In this episode we invite Carmine Pizzuro, President of eCamion, Patrick Marion, VP of Product Development at inmotive and Arthur Kong, Director of Project Development at Ngen Canada join Samie Husain discuss the Electric Vehicle Infrastructure market: the challenges each of these companies faced as early startups; the opportunities as the industry transitions to EV and the issues with respect to infrastructure and supply chain.

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Funding from venture capital is a critical financial resource for tech startups. But do you know why venture capital companies pass on a company? How do they VCs evaluate startups? In this discussion, our host, Sam Husain, invited two VC partners, Matan Hazanov and David Harris Kolada, who have been working with startups for years. Watch the discussion and get the “myths” of VCs busted.

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Website: https://altitudeaccelerator.ca/podcast/

Since the prosperity of Web 2 and social media platforms, Twitter has become a place for people to connect with others and to build communities together. However, Elon Musk interfered the operation of Twitter significantly and impactfully, leading to the communities on Twitter being more fragile than ever. In this episode, our host, Hessie Jones, invited Mia Shah-Dand and Alaric Aloor to discuss what is the most critical challenge and how businesses rebuild.

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In this episode, we invited Paul Barter, Entrepreneur in Residence, Strategist and Professor; Pam Banks, Executive Director and Samie Husain, Venture Services Manager – all of Altitude Accelerator to talk about the big things that are going on: recessions, technology space, cryptos, and startups. Meta laid off 11,000 employees and Elon Musk is planning to lay off 75% of Twitter’s employees. The news is reminding us of the recession. But how do we discover the hidden opportunities behind the news? 

What should startups do to weather the storm?

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We are live from the Metaverse and 5G Conference in Toronto. This is our premiere episode of Tech Uncensored. We speak with disruptors in the Metaverse space:

1. Lorne Sugarman, CEO of Metaverse Group, the first vertically integrated real estate company focused on the Metaverse economy in the world. We discuss the rise of Decentraland, the overvaluations in Crypto and the impending Metaverse winter and when it will realistically move into mainstream.
2. Milton Toledo, CEO of 3DVR. With over two decades of architecture and interior design experience, Milton has a mission to disrupt the space of the convergence of 3D and VR worlds and help customers acquire property and build business in the Metaverse. We discuss how enabling people to design their space in a disruptive way changes the game for interior design.
3. David Krauss, Packet Architect in the Office of the CTO, Ciena, which provides equipment and software services that provide bandwidth for network. In this interview, we define decentralization, ownership in the new web, what will this mean to individual identity and how the Metaverse will not necessarily be defined by web3 technologies. 

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Website: https://altitudeaccelerator.ca/podcast/