Startup post

I have long admired Chad Comeau’s efforts to preserve and promote Acadian culture through apps and games. Now, Comeau is back with a new cooking app called Clare Cuisine +, Yvette d’Entremont reports:

His latest project included spending time in the kitchen with not only the traditional Acadian dishes from his childhood, but also food representative of his home community’s newer residents.

“When I just had this quick idea of ‘Oh, it’s a cooking app for Clare,’ of course I just thought of the classics, the traditional stuff,” Comeau recalled in an interview.

But then Comeau reached out to newcomer communities as well. He rented a community kitchen, and got everyone together to cook and share recipes for the app:

He said the Lebanese breakfast pizza recipe contributed by “local pizza guy” Wissam El-Jakl has since become a huge hit with him and his friends.

“Having everyone come in and meet each other and cook and share all their recipes together was super cool,” Comeau recalled. “Their (newcomers) contributions bring a richness to the app that wouldn’t be there if I had just focussed on the stuff I grew up with.”

Comeau has also come up with an ingenious solution to the problem of trying to manipulate your phone with buttery or floured fingers. I downloaded the app this morning, and look forward to cooking some of the dishes. (That Lebanese breakfast pizza goes to the top of the list.)

Click or tap here to read “Video game developer cooks up app to share culinary creations of Nova Scotia’s Clare region.”

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Zane Woodford has reports on last night’s virtual meeting of the Board of Police Commissioners.

Much of the meeting focused on morale and recruitment. Officers are disrespected by society, ground down. But there is hope on the horizon, in the form of a new $100 million dollar headquarters for Halifax Regional Police:

Coun. Becky Kent, chair of the police board, said she’s toured the existing building.

“That certainly can’t be helping, too with the morale and the spirits of people and those all continue to weigh down on people and then that also contributes to the capacity and the resolve to stay healthy and all those things, so it all matters,” Kent said.

$100 million is nearly double the cost of building the Central Library.

Click or tap here to read “Board chair, chief say new station, paid training could boost Halifax Regional Police recruitment.”

Please read all the way to the bottom of Woodford’s story, for the bit on the new Board of Police Commissioners logo.

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Because of the recent flooding, Halifax is increasing the number of garbage bags residents are allowed to put out. The HFX Recycles app has a notification with the details:

Garbage set-out limits will temporarily be increased from 6 to 8 bags of garbage, until Friday, August 18. Each bag of garbage may be substituted for one bundle of flood-related debris…. Apartment buildings with up to 6 units will also temporarily be increased from 4 to 6 bags per unit… 2 bulky items total for the building, no flood-related demolition, construction and renovation debris.

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The Big Story podcast yesterday featured Dr. Kent Moore, who teaches atmospheric physics at the University of Toronto. Moore was visiting family in Nova Scotia during the torrential rains and flash floods, and he spoke with host Jordan Heath-Rawlings about how Nova Scotia is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

Moore talked about the “extreme warmth of the ocean temperatures off Nova Scotia” and how they contributed to the extreme rainfall, by putting more moisture into the atmosphere. (The warming, he said, is from a combination of climate change and “shorter-term climate fluctuation.”) Then he said:

I think Nova Scotia is a little bit sensitive, for two reasons. First of all, as the ocean warms up, we’re going to see more impacts of that warm ocean. And that generally means more evaporation, more humidity. I was quite actually surprised leading up to that rainfall event. It was really humid in Nova Scotia, more so than it usually is. And again, that was the impact of that warm water off of Nova Scotia that was allowing lots of evaporation happening. And so we’ll see, I think, more humidity events in Nova Scotia, more thunderstorms — thunderstorms aren’t that common in Nova Scotia, and that will happen moving forward. And the other climate kicker for Nova Scotia is the hurricanes as the ocean warms up. Again, not local ocean warming, but this is now ocean warming farther south. We’ll see more intense hurricanes in Nova Scotia as well… As the ocean temperatures warm up, those hurricanes can maintain their strength for longer. And that will also, I think, lead to more intense hurricane events in Nova Scotia.

Moore also gave a great explanation for how to think about the increase in extreme weather events:

One way I like to think about this is suppose you have a dice, OK, it’s got six faces on it. You paint three of those faces red, you paint three of them blue and you roll the dice. And if it’s red, that means you have a warm summer. If it’s blue, it means you have a cold summer. That is sort of the way you can think about climate. On average, we’ll have some warm summers on average, we’ll have some cold summers.

What climate change does is it changes the nature of the dice. So maybe now there’s four red and there’s two blue. And so when you roll the dice, you’re going to get, on average, more hot summers or more rainy summers and less cool summers or dry summers…

The thing to realize is that we’re not going to see another 300 millimetre rainfall event probably for a few years. But they’re going to become more common. If the last one was back in 1971, we might see another one, let’s say in 10 or 15 years. So that’s the kind of way it’s going to go. On average, our climate is getting warmer. On average, we’re going to have more of these extreme rainfall events, but we’re still in this nature where it’s maybe four faces are red and two faces are blue. As time goes on, as we continue to change the climate, more of those faces turn out to be red.

The other day, on my way to CBC, I tuned into the Todd Veinotte Show for a few minutes. I still have a fondness for phone-ins (I was on my way to CBC to appear on one), but a few minutes of the show is usually all I can take. It’s hard to miss the Todd Veinotte Show, since the CityNews Halifax (formerly News 95.7) schedule is so thin it consists largely of repeats of the show.

Anyway, in my few minutes of listening I learned that a lot of rain fell in 1971, so it’s BS to say the recent rainfall was caused by climate change. Also, talking about climate change is “virtue signalling” and the wildfires were caused by human activity, but we blame climate change because it’s “the flavour of the month.”

Meanwhile, in his interview with Heath-Rawlings, Moore says:

I studied with a scientist who won a Nobel Prize in physics a couple of years ago for work he did in the 1960s, predicting what doubling CO2 would do. So the science was settled in the 1960s.

Before moving on, I want to put in a word for the Big Story podcast. Heath-Rawlings is empathetic, knowledgeable, opinionated, thoughtful, engaging, and never fawning. These are good qualities in a host.

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I have not read Quentin Casey’s biography of John Risley, so I have no opinion on it. Generally, books about rich people (and I have read a few) don’t interest me, because I don’t find them particularly instructive. That’s OK. Not everything is for everyone. Besides, if Nimbus, the publisher, sells a bazillion copies, that will help fund their publishing books that don’t sell a bazillion copies. (This is how every publisher works.)

I did, however, listen to Casey being interviewed by Jeff Douglas on CBC’s Mainstreet Halifax show yesterday. In asking Casey a question, Douglas said this:

I was just talking with Alex Mason, with our producer here, as we were coming down to the studio. And I was thinking about guys like John Risley, and… Alex had said, it’s like Wayne Gretzky, you know, it’s like Shakespeare — these people are next level.

Casey later added:

Trying to be John Risley is like trying to be Warren Buffett. You know, it’s like his mind works in a way that yours doesn’t, so you’re not going to be able to duplicate what he’s done.

I also learned that Risley used to be in the pinball business, so perhaps I should read the book to find out if he owns any pinball machines, and which are his favourites. Maybe he’ll drop by a tournament at the Propeller arcade.

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The words “communist” and “sailing club” or “yacht club” don’t typically go together. But there is a group in New York trying to make sailing accessible for everyone, and you can read about them in this very enjoyable article by Arielle Gordon, published at Hell Gate:

[De facto captain Gavin] Schalliol underscored an inherent collectivism in sailing: “Boats are these self-contained living quarters where you can provision for it, you can have your own water and electrical systems on board.” And if they pick up some life skills along the way to make their lives off the boat more independent, that’s a nice added bonus. “Sometimes I think, ‘Oh, I really should learn how to fabricate stuff with wood,’ or ‘I really should learn how to fix up an electrical system,'” Schalliol said. “And that all sounds really boring. But if you do it on a boat, suddenly, it’s fun.” …

The group owns one boat, the 30-foot Rosa Lux, purchased for $400.

Despite its name, the Communal Luxury Yacht Club got its start firmly on dry land. The initiative began in 2019 as the Ridgewood Yacht Club, as an informal meeting at Woodbine, a community hub in Queens. At the time, the collective was closer to a reading group. Its members pored over nautical charts and practiced knot-tying while they discussed books like “The Many-Headed Hydra,” a “history of below” of the “Atlantic proletariat” who brought class consciousness to the ocean from the 1600s to the 1800s. The impetus to take the group to the sea came from a former member, Duncan Ranslem. “Duncan had this vision he imparted on a lot of other people,” Schalliol explained. “These old fiberglass boats from the ’70s and ’80s are unloved because the generation that learned how to sail them is getting on in years. But they’re also completely indestructible.”

The early days of the Rosa Lux weren’t exactly smooth sailing. While purchasing the boat was surprisingly easy, there was still the issue of getting it to Brooklyn from its origin port in Mount Sinai, a tiny hamlet on Long Island. “It was an odyssey getting it all the way down to Sheepshead Bay,” Schalliol said. “We had to bring it all the way around Long Island Sound through the East River. We had planned to motor most of the way because it was a long way, but then halfway through, the motor broke down.” They ended up docking at City Island for a few months while they regrouped, but for Schalliol, the experience only strengthened the self-reliant nature of the project. “I just thought that was really cool that we could just improvise when things messed up,” he said. “Systems were relatively simple, such that we could understand them and we could kind of try and fix them ourselves.”

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A company called CB Insights has a goldmine of a page on its website, called (as of yesterday) “463 startup failure post-mortems.” The name is fairly self-explanatory. The page consists of brief summaries of why startups failed, with links to media stories about them, or to blogs or other posts by the founders themselves.

Like many tech, innovator, disruptor (choose your own bullshit adjective) companies, CB Insights has trouble articulating what it does. From the company’s “About” page:

Tech is disrupting every business and industry. We’re here to help.

We’re on a mission to enable every organization to make smarter decisions about tech. Whether it’s finding a new game-changing vendor or understanding a new market, it’s easier, faster and smarter with CB Insights.

All made possible by the smartest, hardest-working team in tech.

From this, I gather that the purpose of the 463 startup failure post-mortems is for founders, CFOs, and other important people to glean insights about what went wrong with previous startups, so they can avoid the same pitfalls. The archive of post-mortems goes back a decade or so.

We hope you're enjoying our work. If you'd like to support us with a recurring subscription, please click this button. We really appreciate it.

To be fair, a lot of the failed startups are biotech and pharma companies. These are high-risk ventures. You try to develop new drugs, it’s important work, and you know your chances of success are low. C’est la vie. But I don’t know what lessons there are to learn there. You can’t predict ahead of time how clinical trials will go.

One way to look at the rest of the list is that it offers a lot of food for thought. Another way to look at it is that it’s comedy gold. But the kind of comedy that makes you laugh, and then leaves you feeling pissed off — in this case over the astronomical amounts of money invested into absurd ventures, and thoughts about actually useful things that could have been done with that money.

I showed admirable restraint in not spending all of my day yesterday on this web page, but I did glean some pretty entertaining/maddening material.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

I was thinking I’d save the best for last, but I don’t know if you will read all the way to the end, so here goes.

Zume “initially drew $446M to disrupt the pizza industry.”

Let me pause here for a moment, to let that sink in. Half a billion dollars. To disrupt the pizza industry. How were they going to do that?

…the plan was to equip delivery trucks with robotic pizza-makers and smart ovens so that pizzas could be cooked to order while en route to customers. However, the startup ran into a number of technological issues, like cheese sliding off pizzas, and burned through cash faster than it could generate revenue. After pivoting to sustainable packaging development in 2020, it did not raise any additional funding and eventually closed its doors.

One of the reasons your homemade pizza, no matter how good it is, does not equal a proper, well-made pizzeria pizza is you can’t get your home oven hot enough. I doubt the robot truck “smart ovens” got hot enough either. Plus, there’s the whole cheese-sliding-off-the-pizza thing.

Half a billion dollars.

Here’s a great idea: in a world awash with streaming video Tik Toks and more, you can engage Gen Z sports fans by charging them to stream individual clips. Noted sports betting pitchman Wayne Gretzky was one of the backers of this dud.

Mobile live sports streaming startup Buzzer shut down its consumer app at the end of June 2023. The company — backed by sports stars like Michael Jordan, Naomi Osaka, and Wayne Gretsky [sic] — enabled fans to stream short-form clips from sporting events for 99 cents. Driven by changing consumer demands and market constraints, the company decided to shut down its mobile app and move toward licensing its technology to other streamers instead. However, the shift was ultimately unsuccessful.

I might understand if this thing was trying to get off the ground in 2002. Another US$40 million+ down the drain.

GloriFi was — are you ready — an “anti-woke” bank catering to neo-conservatves.

…the startup ran into a number of issues related to product development, vendor disputes, and its workplace environment. In a statement on its website, the company cited startup missteps, economic challenges, reputation attacks, and negative media coverage as the driving forces behind its closure.

The damn media just wouldn’t give Old GloriFi a chance.

This is another one of my favourites. A flying car company, backed by Google co-founder Larry Page. Why did the business not take off? According to founder Sebastian Thrun:

“No matter how hard we looked, we could not find a path to a viable business.”

I can’t understand why.

Wait, maybe I can.

No, not a cellphone provider, but sprinter Usain Bolt’s e-bike and scooter company

Bolt Mobility… stopped operating in a number of the cities that it served, leaving public officials to deal with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inoperable equipment that had been left behind. A number of its clients unsuccessfully reached out to the company to request information and assistance with equipment removal, with some reporting that emails to Bolt contacts and its CEO went unanswered. At the time, it wasn’t clear if the startup had permanently halted operations in all of its locations, but mounting accounts of service shutoffs and continued silence on Bolt’s part did not paint a promising picture. In a statement at the start of August [2022], the company released a statement on its website explaining that its inability to raise necessary funding had led it to shutter operations.

Business newsletter Morning Brew compared the company to someone who clogs the toilet at a party and then makes a hasty exit.

Sometimes when you stay at a hotel, you want to order room service. But what if that whole process could be… disrupted?

That was the logic behind Butler, which burned through $50 million U.S. before shutting down. Now, I don’t work in the hotel industry, but my assumption is that you want your room service staff to be reliable and trustworthy. If they have some loyalty to the hotel, that’s probably a good thing, too. Disrupting room service by outsourcing it to a company that probably pays shit wages seems like maybe not such a great idea. I would love to know which hotels had signed up for this.

Despite sharing a message that it was still afloat in mid-May [2022], on-demand virtual room service platform Butler had actually laid off its entire workforce of 1K employees a few days earlier. Reports later indicated that the company had indeed folded. The closure came as a surprise to its hotel client base, leaving many scrambling to find alternative options to cater to their guests.

I thought I’d also go back and take a look at some of the failed startups from the heady, pre-pandemic days of the early 2010s.

Fancy buses that cost far more than regular public transit.

Each bus had a wood-trimmed interior outfitted with black leather seats, individual USB ports and Wi-Fi. The buses also offered a steady stream of high-end snacks, sold via app.

My guess is that people who want black leather seats and other ridiculous trappings of luxury don’t want to take the bus. But what do I know. I’m just some idiot writer who has never gotten $2.5 million in financing.

Indian “tech-enabled delivery-promotion service provider.” I like the succinct description of why this one failed:

It was becoming very difficult to sustain operations at that level with no funds. This business requires money to scale up and without funds it’s very difficult to break even.

The next three are also from 2013-2014, and I appreciate the founders’ self-awareness about all the things they did wrong.

Goal: Disrupt parking and become “the Airbnb of parking.” One of the founders wrote at length about what went wrong:

More folks are hunting for parking spaces than exist parking space owners who are willing to share. This is the problem we weren’t able to solve, and a problem that still exists today for folks taking their own stab at the driveway sharing business…

Our failed attempts at the “ZipCar for parking”, “Priceline for Parking” and “Groupon for parking” models followed in the months thereafter. And then we gave up. At the time, I was convinced that the industry wasn’t ready for our innovations. I was convinced that property managers and parking operators didn’t “get it” or just didn’t care.

That just can’t be the case. And it wasn’t…

The truth is, as co-founders of HelloParking we huddled together to decide on ideas that sounded nice, built prototypes, put on our salesman hats, and didn’t understand why we weren’t closing deals. And then we rinsed and repeated. We pivoted because pivoting seemed like the right thing to do.

But we never defined clear hypotheses, developed experiments, and we rarely had meaningful conversations with our target end-users. And while we had some wonderful advisors in the parking industry, we should have met with everyone we could get our hands on. Worst, we rarely got out of the building.

Still not sure what this one does, but the post-mortem gives some clues.

So why’d RiotVine fail?

How often are you just searching for something to do? Once a month? That’s not nearly enough to generate the traffic you’d need. Then there’s the competition: Eventful, Going, Upcoming, and Facebook. All have had millions poured into them. The lucky ones were acquired.

I’d argue that they are all pretty bad, but I blame that on the content; events are terrible content. If you already know about an event, you don’t need an event site. If you don’t know about it, you’re probably searching for something to do and the majority of events will not interest you. Even SEO is an issue; events expire and are pretty worthless after that.

To be fair, I think it’s very possible to create a compelling product that addresses this. We mapped out our vision of it, but we would’ve spent another three months head down developing it, without a business model or any way to keep paying the rent.. and Facebook would just end up ripping it off.

The founder/writer of the post says he is applying the lessons he learned from RiotVine’s failure to his new venture, Spotly. But, sadly, the link to the Spotly website is dead.

Essentially, a HelloFresh ahead of its time. You would select a recipe from the company’s website, and it would deliver all the ingredients (other than salt, pepper, and oil) to your door. I thoroughly enjoyed (and I don’t say that in a snarky way) reading founder Michael Bohanes’ self-aware, entertaining assessment of what went wrong:

On the first day, we had exactly… 3 orders. 12 orders in the first week.

This will be the number one lesson I will never forget and the absolute key to understanding Dinnr’s failure — we were not solving anyone’s problem. I should have found that out in my initial market research, especially in my 1–1 interviews.

However, we committed the big mistake of presenting people with the idea and asking them if they liked it and would buy it. And when people said yes, WE thought they meant

“launch it and I will buy”.

In reality, they meant

“I’m not entirely excluding the possibility that one day, when Ocado trucks run out of gas, supermarket doors get blocked by red-hot lava and restaurant waiters will, due to a mysterious leak of radioactive fumes emanating from commercial kitchen equipment, all be zombified and eat patrons’ brains, yes, in that case I might be tempted to purchase a trial product from you. Once. Then I’ll take a risk with the zombies.”

This turns out to be the original sin of Dinnr — there never was an opportunity. And whatever we did later to try to breathe life into it (iterating on the website, different marketing tactics) was akin to giving aspirin to a deathbed patient.

Bohanes now runs a company called Alpha Lead Academy: “We help you implement The Funnel 🔻and The Pot 🍲 in your business -“

At some point today, I am going to bring up the big tin of olive oil in our basement, and implement the pot (pour oil into it) and then the funnel (pour oil through funnel into bottle).

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Harbour East – Marine Drive Community Council (Thursday, 6pm, HEMDCC Meeting Space, Alderney Gate and online) — agenda

No meetings

Public Discussion (Thursday, 4:30pm, NS Health Innovation Hub, Nova Centre) — with researcher and psychologist Christopher Mushquash; rsvp and info here

05:00: Atlantic Sun, container ship, arrives at Fairview Cove from Norfolk, Virginia05:30: Don Pasquale, car carrier, arrives at Autoport from Zeebrugge, Belgium06:45: Nolhanava, ro-ro cargo, arrives at Pier 31 from Saint-Pierre11:00: USCGC Forward, coast guard cutter, arrives at Dockyard13:00: Pijlgracht, cargo ship, sails from IEL for sea15:00: NYK Constellation, container ship, arrives at Fairview Cove from Caucedo, Dominican Republic15:00: AlgoScotia, oil tanker, sails from Imperial Oil for sea15:30: Don Pasquale moves to Pier 916:30: Atlantic Sun sails for Liverpool, England16:30: One Falcon, container ship (146,287 tonnes), sails from Pier 41 for Dubai18:00: One Apus, container ship (146,694 tonnes), arrives at Pier 41 from Colombo, Sri Lanka20:30: Don Pasquale sails for seaCape Breton16:00: Mary A, superyacht, sails from Sydney for Baddeck18:30: Mary A arrives at Baddeck

Everybody’s talking ’bout the new grid in town.

Philip Moscovitch is a freelance writer, audio producer, fiction writer, and editor of Write Magazine. More by Philip Moscovitch