Shopify stumbling, Rogers resilient, recession fundraising

Tobi Lütke Shopify
All bets are off.

It has been a tough week for Canadian tech.

It started well enough, with the BetaKit Podcast being nominated for “Outstanding Technology Series” in the Canadian Podcast Awards.

“That’s the pull quote. ‘Amber Mac: things are crumbling.'”
 

Then came news of layoffs across a slew of Canadian e-commerce and FinTech companies: Shopify, Coinsquare, and just today, Clearco. The layoffs have impacted hundreds of employees across Canada, and are just the latest signal that the tailwinds that fuelled growth to unprecedented levels in the last two years have come to an end.

Fortunately, we have special guest Amber Mac to join us for an award-nominated edition of our monthly AMA episodes (Amber herself has two podcasts up for awards) answering listener questions.

Topics covered on this episode? Mostly more bad news: Rogers reporting higher profits despite its second outage in the last year (welcome to #Competitiontown), and how the failure of our government’s commitments to high-speed internet for all is impacting Canada’s digital divide.

But we also offer some tips (and hope?) for early-stage entrepreneurs looking to fundraise in our current downturn to recession economy. So it’s not all bad, right? Right?

Let’s dig in.

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The BetaKit Podcast is hosted by Douglas Soltys & Rob Kenedi. Edited by Kattie Laur. Sponsored by Diuca.

Feature image courtesy Collision (Flickr).

Douglas Soltys

Douglas Soltys

Douglas Soltys is the Editor-in-Chief of BetaKit and founder of BetaKit Incorporated. He has worked for a few failed companies and written about many more. He spends too much time on the Internet.

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