Troy Angrignon - Adventure Capitalist

30 Days of Sustainability 2007 is coming!

Troy Angrignon — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 01:32:15 -0700

30 days of Sustainability is once again happening in Vancouver. This year it runs from April 22 - May 21, 2007. I highly recommend that people go check out the temporary site and sign up for updates. The full site will launch sometime in the next few weeks.

Quieting our cities: Do they make electro magnetic pulse generators that are small enough to aim at a Harley?

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 22:57:42 -0700

I would like to offer up a business idea to an enterprising young engineering student. Develop something that operates a bit like a speeding ticket camera but that is for sound level instead. Build it so that it can sit in intersections and detect noise levels of Harley Davidsons and other bikes with modified exhausts that are so f**king loud that they echo throughout the entire downtown core at all hours of the day and night. When it senses a burst of motorcycle revving, it will send a very targeted Electro magnetic pulse blast at the bike, knocking out the electrical system on the bike. Voila. Peace and quiet and one more bike that is inoperable. If you put this on a drone balloon hovering over the city, you could also use it to detect and knock out boom box cars!

Hate noise? Check out http://www.noiseoff.org

Boris Mann explains why Vancouver is such a great place to start or join a cool company (UPDATED)

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 08:20:58 -0700

My friend Boris Mann had some great things to say about Vancouver being an excellent place to join or start a company here in this posting. However, I would add "capital efficiency", great education system, and an awesome talent pool to to the list of reasons that Vancouver is a great place to build a company.

Back in November 2005 at the IT Financing Forum, Anthony Lee from Altos Ventures talked about how he was particularly interested in "capital efficiency" and he found that Vancouver companies were, on average, 10x more capital efficient than Valley companies. At the time, they had a 75M fund open and had earmarked 4 of the 20 slots for Vancouver-based web 2.0 related companies. Anthony commented that more companies dies from too much money rather than too little and that capital efficiency = a higher Internal Rate of Return = the company is more appealing to venture capitalists.

John Berchers from Crescendo Ventures (Palo Alto, Minneapolis) whose fund had 1B under management and a currently open fund of 650M, commented that Vancouver had "great people".

And finally, Nicholas Darby from Dow Venture Capital Fund (a 400M fund inside the $48B Dow Chemical), talked about how there were only four countries that they invested in because of the great education system and good talent pool: Israel, USA, UK, and Canada.

Also, Boris was being modest and didn't include his own startup in the list. So I would add some more interesting companies to the list starting with his:

* Bryght - Boris Mann, Roland Tanglao, Kris Krug, Richard Eriksson, and Colin Brumelle's Drupal based startup that extends the Drupal platform and builds cool apps. This team works with Dries Buytaert, James Walker and Adrian Rossouw, the original Drupal team.
* DabbleDB - Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton's Access/Filemaker killer (easy database creation on the web)
* Raincity Studios - Robert Scales' Drupal/Bryght site web design firm
* Flourish Media - Karen Olsson's Web & TV production firm that produces among other things, "Universe Village" - a sustainability game/TV show for kids
* Ma.gnolia - Todd Sieling's social bookmarking application that looks nicer and does more than competitor del.icio.us.

Updates:

* EZ Systems - the open source CMS people are building a new office here with Zak Greant helping to set it up. (Thanks Ben!)

Know any other interesting companies you would add to the list? Drop me an email or add a comment!

Border wars: Plumbers union fights green building because the waterless no-flush urinals will "spread disease". Um, don't you mean they will spread "less work for plumbers?"

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 13:23:14 -0700

I'm intrigued by stories such as this one in the ABC News about the plumbers union in Philadelphia who claim that no-flush green urinals are a health threat. I wonder if the union sees them more as a health threat to the UNION DUES than to the USERS.

Does anybody have any information on negative health effects of waterless urinals??

30 Days of Sustainability: Sustainable Homes

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 06:47:45 -0800

Here are the details on one of the first Sustainability Cafés:

When: Monday, March 6, 6:30 - 8:30 pm
Where: BCIT Campus (CHBA BC, Building NW5), 3700 Willingdon Ave, Burnaby, BC

SUSTAINABLE HOMES

Description: What do you consider a “sustainable” home? What do you need to get there? Where is “there”? An innovative dialogue hosted by the Sustainable Building Centre and the Canadian Home Builders’ Association of BC.

Moderator: Helen Goodland is the Executive Director of the new Sustainable Building Centre on Granville Island and is a LEED accredited architect with over 15 years of experience in green building design, education and construction.

Please visit http://www.sustainablebuildingcentre.com for more information.

The First Annual "30 days of sustainability" has launched in Vancouver!

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 22:13:11 -0800

(If you are looking for the 2007 event information, please click HERE.)

I am very excited about our launch of the 30 Days of Sustainability. For the month of March, Vancouver will host a cornucopia of events and activities, all focused around bringing sustainability to our lives and our city.

One key component of the 30 Days of Sustainability is a dynamic, interactive website, which also launched on March 2nd, 2006. To learn more about the 30 Days, check out http://www.30daysofsustainability.com.

Special features of the website include:

a comprehensive event calendar, listing the dozens of workshops, sustainability cafes, speakers, and so much more taking place through the 30 Days;
a collection of photographs that will be taken by attendees at events all month;
A What's New section that lists all of the news updates;
an interactive 30 Questions section, where a new question will be posted each day, and the public will have the chance, along with our panel of sustainability experts, to discuss actionable things we can do to advance sustainability.

This website is our primary tool for getting the word out about all the exciting events taking place this month. Please take a minute to forward it far and wide to your sustainability / environmental / social change networks, and encourage others to do the same.

Thanks so much!

I really should just syndicate Morford's column straight into my blog: Mark comments on the insanely huge progress we have made in fuel efficient vehicles this past 30 years

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 10:44:18 -0700

Here are some of the gems from this week's excellent article:

My mother, she had this car. It was ...

Hmmmm, there seems to be a theme happening in the past few posts. Yes, it's one more smart car - now good for water-skiing!

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 07:35:55 -0700

Okay, okay, THIS is my new favourite smart car. Sheesh, there are too many cool Smart cars!!!

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 15:32:35 -0700

Massive Change - the future of global design

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 20:32:14 -0700

This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.

Free city-wide Wireless computing. First Philadelphia, then San Francisco. Now, how about Vancouver?

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 13:29:19 -0700

Fred Wilson over at the A VC blog originally noted sometime back in September that Philadelphia had launched an initiative to provide wireless internet access across their entire city.

Now he has written about San Francisco undertaking a similar venture.

I think that this is something that Vancouver, Canada should absolutely launch. Having wireless internet everywhere you go, so that it becomes woven moreso into everyday life, no matter where you are, would be a very interesting experiment. Especially now that so many PDAs have WiFi.

I agree with Roland Tanglao that paid WiFi is doomed. Who needs to pay for something as ridiculously cheap as WiFi? SBC in the U.S. is now considering moving to a flat rate $2/mo for their WiFi hotspots, an amount that to me is baffling. They are also talking about expanding from 3900 to 20,000 hotspots between 2004-2006. Hopefully entire cities will launch their free infrastructure in that same time period anyway and just declare it public utility like the streets and parks.

Big Questions, Long Views, and the Intersection of Technology and Society (UPDATED Oct 30/05)

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 06 May 2004 00:44:06 -0700

The Universe is 14 billion years old and will either either re-collapse into itself, expand into a completely diluted state, or rip apart in its 36th billion year in a runaway expansion so violent that galaxies and planets will be torn asunder in a fraction of a second. How do we manage the polarity inherent in knowing that our influence on the universe at that scale is essentially zero balanced against the fact that here in our own very small sphere of influence, we can have an effect on things around us that only exist in this little slice of time?

The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. 2 billion years ago, our first ancestors were microbes. It took 1.5 billion years before those microbes turned into something resembing fish, another 400m years for those fish to turn into mice-like creatures, another 90m years for those mice to evolve to apes, 9 m years for the apes to turn into proto humans and then we evolved from there. No matter what religion you are, you have to look at that in awe and wonder.

Now for the bad news. The sun in our solar system is expanding and it is expected that it will eventually absorb Mercury, Venus, and Earth, causing life here to only last for another half billion years. I am pretty sure that the last life forms left will be single-celled bacterium, cockroaches, and spammers. So the window of opportunity for life to develop here and then migrate throughout the rest of the solar system and Universe is about a billion years. Given that we didn't invent space travel until the first half billion were over, that window is now a half billion to get off the planet and out into the Universe. Given that we only have another half a billion years, shouldn't we all just get along, enjoy the sunset while it's that far away, and figure out how to get the hell off this planet? Of course, while we're here, we should do as much mountain biking, trail-running, paddling, travelling and exploring as we can.

By the time the Earth has hit 8 billion years, long after we are gone, the oceans will have vaporised and at the 12 billion year mark, Earth will have folded entirely into the sun. If the planet is going to be gone, does that mean I think that we should use up the precious natural resources pollute our biosphere while we are here? Of course not, that would be asinine and short-sighted. But then again, humans are not the best at extending their time-scales, nor at empathizing enough with future generations. Although that does seem to be changing in some small but important ways with the spread of the sustainable development movement. I may be a bit of an odd realist/pragmatist in the sustainability movement in that I'm not sure I believe in the implicit value of resources, plants, and animals on earth for their own sake. If they're all going to be gone anyway, that seems moot. But since these things took tens and hundreds of millions of years to develop, I do believe that we should learn from them (biology), design things based on them (biomimicry and nanotechnology), be efficient in our use of them so that we do not mortgage our children's future (sustainability), and learn how to build efficient systems so that we can spread out into the universe and live in harsher, resource constrained regions as we do so.

Of course, we're not good at passing along our knowledge on long time lines, and we're quite adaptable in the moment so maybe it is just the way of our species that we will consume all available resources where ever we go but that we will conserve it when we are pressed to do so. Sort of future-blind, but highly adaptable, with very little long-term memory. Which leads me to think that maybe Mr. Kurzweil's great leap forward really will be the best way for our species to spread itself.

Ray Kurzweil has calculated that by 2040, we will hit the inflection point of the technology development curve of mankind, known as the Singularity , an event horizon beyond which we can not possibly see with our tiny little massively parallel chemical-processing brains. By around 2040, $1000USD of computing power will be the equivalent of all human brain processing capacity on the earth combined (about 12 billion brains worth). He posits that in order for the technology development curve to be maintained, our inefficient genetic mutations will not be able to keep up, meaning that humans will essentially pass the "smart creature" torch to the robots and computers which will have the same brain processing capacity as us, but with MUCH faster substrate (silicon or otherwise, raher than our slow massively parallel chemical brains).

What is really great about this is that in a few more decades we may get to really explore questions around whether consciousness is something spiritual/other-worldly, or simply an emergent property of going beyond a particular threshold of neuronal capacity or simply a self-referential program that is convincing enough to appear conscious. I can't wait. Really.

Given Kurzweil's supposition about the double exponential rate of expansion of technology, that means there is a heck of a lot of stuff that will need to be brought to market in the next 35 years. Hence my interest in venture capital, angel investing, technology cycles and trends, and the tricky process of nurturing technology from idea to plan to funding to company to production, and eventually to some sort of exit. Hence I will be writing a lot on business and technology development.

Some of the most fascinating events are transpiring in the border wars between business, technology, society, and our natural environment. Bio-ethics - how will we use cloning? Nanotechnology - will it create autonomous gray-goo that will devour us and the earth? Bio-IT convergence - will we really build the Ceylons? What about the ability to project power and wage war - on a budget? According to Lord William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson in "The Sovereign Individual", that is one of the key factors that contributes to massive historical inflection points. As technology changes the power equation, power-structures and economies follow suit. Consider: Osama Bin Laden, a multi-millionaire (who was supported by the U.S.), is now the enemy of the American goverment. They have for the first time in history chosen to target an individual rather than a nation-state. Primarily because of the alleged threat of relatively massive power (bio-weaponry) for minimal cost. I will rant, question, and point to interesting discussions in this area as they develop.

Finally, I have some more mundane, smaller-view areas that I am very interested in as well. They include but are not limited to: Complex Systems, Emergence theory, Health & Wellness, Environmental issues, Renewable Energy, Ethics, Fitness and sport, Humour, Interesting People, Nanotechnology, Philanthropy, Privacy/Security, Sustainable Development, and World Affairs.

I wish I could remember the author who said, "I do not write what I know, I write so that I may know myself." That was very wise. That is also a goal of this blog. Thanks for reading.