Category Archives: startup

Fastest Growing Company in North America List

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This just in, we’re ranked 367th on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™, a ranking of the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and energy tech companies in North America. It’s been a busy year and to be on this list validates a lot of things we’re doing right at eCompliance. Being 1 of only 23 other companies in Toronto is even more special because the city is a growing epicenter of tech companies in Canada. Toronto even competes with prominent cities like San Francisco and Seattle in the US in terms of total number of tech jobs and growing tech markets!

Earlier this summer a significant $40 million investment came from Alcumus Holdings Ltd. This marks five M&A’s and one angel investment (totaling over $55 million) that I’ve been a part of as head of software development (11 years). With a little fun and to recognize that you learn new things everyday… here’s a picture of my Deal Toy, used to commemorate the closing of a business deal!

Luu Duong Deal Toy 2019

closeup deal toy

I’ve never heard of a “deal toy” before getting one of these, apologies to all the investment bankers, private equity associates, and venture capitalists out there that probably have a dozen of these in their offices!

Wonder what 2020 will bring for new challenges and professional growth? Hope it’s even bigger than 2019!

Experiencing products through conversation

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Amir Shevat, VP of Product at Slack.com presented a great perspective at Lean Startup Conference 2015. The talk was titled “Irrational Products – How to avoid bad product calls”, where Amir talks about experiencing products through a conversation. These conversations can be used by Product Managers to validate their products. His example starts off by taking someone from the crowd and asking him to come on stage. Then Amir, pretending to be the product, and the volunteer being the user, proceeds to ask questions to the user about giving up his username and password to start using the product. Amir explains how the conversation gets awkward, especially since the user didn’t get any perceived value from the product yet. But this irrational behaviour is often the conversation users have with a lot of products (at Google they call this the “wall of login”). Amir recommends having these conversations, aka “talk the app”, to make rational product calls. To see the full presentation as well as a few more recommendations from Amir on making the right product calls check out the recorded video session.