After 15 years covering Atlantic Canada’s startup ecosystem, the founders of Halifax’s Entrevestor are preparing to file their final stories.
Earlier this month, Entrevestor publisher Peter Moreira announced that he, and his wife and Entrevestors editor, Carol Moreira, wil step away from the publication this fall.
“Entrevestor is the standing morning read for anything Atlantic startups.”
“We first posted on Entrevestor on Aug. 13, 2011, and about 7,000 articles later, we’re ready to call it a day,” Moreira wrote in a LinkedIn post. “It’s been a tremendous ride, and we couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve done over the past 15 years. But we’re now keen to retire and pursue other projects … so on Sept. 30, we will post our final article on this site.”
Since its inception in 2011, Entrevestor has become a leading news organization covering the startup ecosystem in Atlantic Canada. Beyond its news coverage, the publication also collects business data and publishes an annual report on the regional startup sector, which it sells to help finance the organization, and which has become an important benchmark and source of information for the region.
Moreira, who founded Entrevestor alongside Carol after being laid off from New York-based magazine The Deal in 2010, said the idea to start his own publication came after conversations with Nova Scotia’s business community.
“[They] said to us, ‘we’re seeing all these great new startups come along, and we think there’s a big story about them that’s not being told,’” Moreira said. “After a while, we thought ‘okay, maybe [they’ve] got something here.’”
Entrevestor provided a source of news for an Atlantic Canadian startup ecosystem that had traditionally been under-covered. It acted both as a source of information for people in the ecosystem and a way for burgeoning startups to earn media coverage.
“Entrevestor is the standing morning read for anything Atlantic startups… You covered the wins nobody else thought were big enough yet, which is exactly when founders need it most,” Patrick Farrar wrote to Moreira on LinkedIn.
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In the years since its founding, Moreira said the ecosystem in which Entrevestor was founded has changed, and that the two long-time journalists felt the time was right for them to move on to something new.
“Our business model was designed on basically giving away free news and making money off of the data reports we do. That model doesn’t work as well as it used to,” Moreira said. “We still think there’s a market for it. We still think the data report is valuable, and that people like and need it. It was really just time for us to move on and maybe let someone else take a stab at it.”
The Moreiras’ departure doesn’t necessarily mean Entrevestor is stopping its presses, however. He and Carol are in conversations about the publication’s future. With sparse details, Moreira said he believes Entrevestor’s mission will continue in Atlantic Canada.
“Really, I do believe there will continue to be a daily news product and a data product. Watch this space,” he said.
For now, the couple—both of whom also write and publish fiction novels—plan to ease their way into semi-retirement and focus on their creative work in the fall.
With files from Trevor Nichols.
Feature image courtesy Entrevestor.