I recently scanned through a copy of Leonard Brody and David Raffa’s Everything I Needed to Know about Business I Learned from a Canadian, which came out in a second edition this year. Interesting concept for a book, and the publicist directed my attention to the two Albertans featured by the authors: Garret Camp and Joel Cohen.
What, you haven’t heard of them?
Both, in fact, are 30-somethings of some achievement – but not in the league of, say, Clive Beddoe or Ron Southern or Rick George – who these days live in California.
Camp was the driving force behind StumbleUpon, a search engine that works a little like TiVo in finding things on the web you’ve never heard of but might be interested in. He and some colleagues from the University of Calgary moved to Silicon Valley to be closer to their venture capital partners in 2006 (see “No Place for Nerds” in the June 2007 issue of AV). A year later they sold out to eBay for US$75 million. (Now, incidentally, StumbleUpon is having trouble fulfilling the vision for its new owner and is the subject of a lawsuit over the sale.) In an extremely short chapter in Everything I Needed, Camp expounds on planning by not planning in the fast-moving information and communication technologies space.
Cohen was a writer and producer for The Simpsons – not, I might point out, during the show’s glory days in the 1990s but rather from 2001 to 2007. He has some insights to offer about the longest running TV comedy’s idea factory, but I’ve got to think the authors could have found better representation from Alberta, someone who had built something lasting from the ground up. You can’t accuse them of Eastern myopia; there are good examples from B.C.: Stuart Butterfield (Flickr), Geoffrey Ballard (Ballard Power), Jim Pattison (Pattison Group) and Terry McBride (Nettwerk Music).
Beyond the blind spot for Alberta, I found the book better in concept than execution. Sometimes it feels like the authors are coaxing an idea about business from a story of entrepreneurship that suggests something else. If you’re looking for relevance to the Alberta experience, I don’t suggest wading through the 350-plus pages of this book.
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