Posts tagged capital
Canadian startups cashing chips way too early?
Jan 25th
by Christine Wong
Assessing the debris of the Research in Motiondebacle – longtime co-CEOs swept aside, stock price in shambles, failed PlayBook launch and customer confidence rocked by service outages – it’s easy to forget this fallen giant was once a Canadian IT startup.
Christine Wong
While founder Mike Lazaridis and his former co-CEO Jim Balsillie took heat for occupying the top jobs at RIM for far too long (27 and 19 years respectively), today’s startup founders seem to be hanging up their entrepreneur’s hats way earlier. There are no outlets that officially track tech startup M&A deals. But according to an unofficial count by Techvibes, there were 35 Canadian startups acquired in 2011, up from 27 in 2010.
Why are so many Canadian tech startups cashing in their chips early instead of soldiering on to grow and develop their companies into the next RIM (pre-meltdown, of course)? Read the rest of this entry »
Will flow-through shares program help finance tech firms?
Mar 12th
During the past three or four decades, Canadian policy makers at both the federal and provincial levels have tried just about every trick in the book to finance technology companies, particularly those that are at an early stage in their development.
In the early 1980s, we had the Scientific Research Tax Credits (SRTCs) that allowed technology companies that were not yet profitable to predict in advance what their R&D expenditures were going to be during a certain year and then effectively sell those expenditures to taxable corporations and individuals for use as tax write-offs. The troubles came about when the companies were asked to verify their expenditure to the tax authorities. Many CEOs and CFOs ended up in jail or spent years dealing with aggressive tax auditors. Read the rest of this entry »
