Surviving the Ebbs and Flows of Business Cycles

Survival's really important and before you set your aspirations on rapid large scale growth you need to think about surviving and surviving in a way that's responsive to the natural absent flows of business and economic cycles we went through a very deep recession and no one why happened to be in capital very intensive industries; oil and gas, forest products and real estate did not really have the staying power to fulfill the vision. Now fast forward 10 years later and Canary worth is about 175000 people that worked there Paul White's vision was proven to be absolutely the right vision but perhaps 10 years ahead of his time and without the capital and staying power at that to would withstand the ebs and flows of the of those cycles, so capital structure matching of assets liability survival first before setting your site on the next big grand or shiny object making sure that you are able to withstand those would be sort of the first lesson. And the 2nd lesson is more recently from a startup that we started about 5-6 years ago when the residential real estate market called home optima where I'm going to say on the surface it looked really easy the industry was right for disruption people needed data driven tools and methodologies more informed decision making especially millennials and the younger generation were buying homes for the 1st time and what we discovered is that it was really tough it was tough because the regulatory framework the monopolistic practices of certain players in the sector because again we needed strong capital the multiplicity of sites and different avenues where people could get information and also the perception that anything on the Internet should be free and therefore there is no value revenue monetization tools that we can implement that would actually allow us to generate revenue to sustain that business the business model was right the application that we'd run was outstanding we weighted really well, we had 10000 users but we could not develop a revenue monetization platform to make it really go into that mainstream curve that we needed it to go into to make it scale throughout Canada.