Tech Uncensored - An Altitude Accelerator Podcast

This is one of the video interviews we conducted at Collision, Toronto June 17-20, 2024. Resilience is not your traditional insurance provider. Dr. Ann Irvine is the company's Chief Data & Analytics Officer, and has spent her career sitting at the intersection of data science and cybersecurity. We spoke to Dr. Irvine about managing cyber risk in the changing cybersecurity landscape and the...

A critical milestone in scaling a startup for growth involves building a high-performing and well-rounded team that can make or break a venture's success. The guiding hypothesis is that we tend to gravitate towards people with similar interests, and values. That is a foundation at the very early stages for moving the company the right direction. There is complexity in finding the right fit tha...

Hessie Jones met Ryan Pannell over a decade ago when she first ventured into entrepreneurship. At that time, he was an executive producer and it was the film industry where he began his career, working his way up to be a writer, producer and director. He directed his first feature film, Dragon City, when he was 26 years old. In 2001 he moved into startup and pioneered cryptographic web-based messa...

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as one of the most powerful and versatile artificial intelligence technologies of our time. By training massive neural networks on vast datasets of human-generated text, LLMs have developed an unprecedented ability to understand and generate human-like language with robust fluency and comprehension. This breakthrough has unlocked a wide range of innovative...

With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the speed of adoption, how we communicate, how we research, how we improve our productivity has greatly transformed society. While these powerful tools offer remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation of more accurate human-like language, they have also introduced new challenges and risks to the practice of cybers...

By 2050, 70% of the world’s population is projected to live in cities.  We will evolve into an increasingly urban economy. Urban centers will adapt and evolve to meet the needs of their growing populations.  Urbanization can lead to 1) economic growth, 2) improved living standards, and 3) cultural diversity. Some key stats about the rise of the urban populations:  The world’s urban population has...

David Peterson, known as the Optimization Coach, assists growth-stage companies in 2X their revenue growth to achieve their 10X goal. He helps them become more appealing to investors or (if they choose) achieve their status as a successful founder-owned businesses.   At this juncture, early-stage founders are already generating revenue and may aim to raise a successful Series A round, therefore th...

Product Market Fit is a make-or-break factor for startups. Even the best products can fail without market demand, while an average product can succeed if the demand exists.  What does success look like once companies reach this critical milestone? The product resonates with the market means that:  Customer actively buys, uses and recommends the product to others in sufficient numbers...  Enough to...

Demand Generation is a broad marketing practice aimed at creating awareness and interest in a company’s products or services. It involves using various tactics across numerous channels, such as content marketing, social media ads, and more  While the practice has been around for as long as brands have existed, it has undergone some significant changes and formalization over the past few decades. ...

Today we’re facing headwinds in this fast-paced tech economy.  There is this global race to win in the advancement of Artificial Intelligence between the East and the West, however there are clear impediments that persist to drive change in current technologies that are hampering the speed to win.  There is this realization of the how brittle our systems are because of the harms, the bias and the...

These days there has been this surge of people who are developing influence within their specific corner of the market. They are digital creators who specialize in a niche and begin to establish themselves as experts in their field.  The rise of influence has been less about celebrity, but these days it’s a strategic advantage for many entrepreneurs who want to build relationships, and ultimately...

Growth Hackers ' determined that the greatest indicator of startup success is resilience:  “You might feel that things are moving slow in your company – that is natural. You may make decisions, that, in retrospect may lead to undesired consequences, or perceived setbacks in your goal to reach critical milestones. If you are an entrepreneur building a brand new startup, you probably have trouble se...

Will 2024 will be another challenging year for startup founders?   The world bank came out with the following prediction for 2024:  “Global growth is projected to slow for the third year in a row—from 2.6% last year to 2.4% in 2024, almost three-quarters of a percentage point below the average of the 2010s. Developing economies are projected to grow just 3.9%, more than one percentage point below...

AI has consumed the tech space and mainstream business. What implications does generative AI have on cybersecurity? Will it change the threat landscape for better or worse?  At Collision, Hessie Jones interviewed Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password to discuss the implications to personal information and how will passwordless technology help combat these threats. 

As of February 2023, 850 million people globally don’t have an ID: no birth certificate, national ID–a legal identification that enables access to basic services like setting up bank accounts, getting a job–a system we’ve taken for granted in the West. Solving the identity problem becomes more pronounced as societies become increasingly digital. This will further elevate the need for secure and co...

Theodora Lau recently wrote a Linkedin post called "Where are the Women?" This was a timely post that responded to the slap in the face to many women, who have made incredible strides to affect substantive change in AI, who saw the NYT article that snubbed the work of prominent women like Fei Fei Li, Timnit Gebru, Kate Crawford, Joy Buolamwini, Meg Mitchell and others too numerous to mention.  Thi...

Will new emerging technologies assist engineers in enhancing their capabilities or will their jobs simply be done for them? At Collision, 2023, Hessie Jones met with Maxim Fateev, CEO of Temporal and Anand Kulkarni, CEO of Crowdbotics. Both organizations are making it increasingly easier for engineers in light of the advances in Generative AI. One school of thought: it's much easier to replace cer...

The future of the internet is really all about building on the promise of Web3 is about a decentralized internet, that brings more powers to creators, where monetization dispels of current ad models, and where people become the owners/purveyors of their identity and the things they create.   I met Julie Smithson at Decoding Tech in Toronto. Julie is CoFounder of MetaVRse & XR Women, host of th...

From the sidelines, reading the media reports on the weekend of November 17 it was a series of irrepressible events that unfolded that weekend and the coming days. It was considered a tumultuous weekend, a series of uncontrolled outcomes, each with its own significance to the fallout of OpenAI and its employees. While the world watched this drama unfold online, no one would have guessed the outcom...

We are currently living in a time of greater uncertainty.  The Pandemic has created an environment that caused us to abandon the safety of what we once knew to be the tried and true, the way things have always been done and to trust in our instincts to create an environment that is safe, productive, effective without risking loss to the team or the culture.   Some companies within the technology i...

In 2020, when the Pandemic mandated the move to remote work, Turing raised $32million in Series B funding to define a future where companies could push a button to spin up their engineering team instantly. In 2021, Fast Company listed Turing as one of the most innovative workplace companies. In great company with the likes of Asana, Atlassian, Gitlab, Slack, and Zoom, Turing defines itself as an i...

The value of the distributed ledger is baked into the promise of Web3, where equity, access and accountability occur within a shared governance and self-organizing ecosystem; and where creators can truly own what they produce and enable and control new value creation.    We’ve purposely left out the word, “Blockchain” in this title because it has become synonymous with Cryptocurrency. The value of...

2023 is a year that has been marked by technological leaps. It is not surprising to see the confluence of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics which promises to reshape industries and redefine labor.   Today there are about 3,000,000 industrial robots around the globe, with roughly 400,000 new robots entering the market every year. And the global market is expected to reach almost $43.8 billi...

In a digital environment rampant with adoption of emerging artificial intelligence technologies, data continues to drive considerable value. The risk to confidential and personal information continues to be an ongoing threat. Enter decentralized identity, an emerging paradigm of digital identity that champions the principles such as individuals having control over their own information and being a...

Great fundraising stories require robust financial models. Founders looking to raise capital need to be able to effectively articulate performance and future activities by defending their numbers. Investors want to understand your overall business strategy and the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ behind your performance and your projected financials.  Your ability to answer questions at the macro and micro lev...