Bijan Vaez

B.C.’s got tech. This program helps prove it. Innovate BC just dropped $2.5M to help early-stage companies pilot their tech - not in theory, in real workflows. Up to $500K per project to: • Validate performance • Attract early customers • Actually close the gap to adoption This isn’t grant theatre. It’s go-to-market fuel. Startups like VoxCell and MarineLabs are already using it to level up. This is what supporting tech looks like, clearing red tape so builders can scale faster. If you're backing B.C. innovation, back stuff like this.

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What if the future of AI looks a lot like the rise of Shopify—but happening 3x faster? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Back in 2012, launching a Shopify store was an edge. You could spin up a hoodie brand on a weekend, run $2 CPM ads on Facebook, and actually make money. Shopify had just 40,000 stores. CACs were low, and the arbitrage was real. But over time… Shopify crossed 1 million stores in 2019 By Q1 2025, that number hit 4.6 million+ Categories like apparel now have 550,000+ active stores And the early alpha is gone—CACs outpaced LTV for most new entrants years ago Eventually, building a store became the easy part. Competing became the hard part. And now AI is moving even faster. We’ve gone from a few AI-powered tools in 2021… To over 3 million GPTs, 1.5 billion GenAI app downloads, and hundreds of new startups emerging every month. The barriers to entry are lower than ever: No inventory No fulfillment No engineers (just a ChatGPT prompt, some n8n and Lovable work over a weekend) Which makes me wonder: 💭 Are we watching the Shopify-ification of software in real time? 💭 How long before CACs in AI software outpace the value created—just like DTC did? 💭 What moats will matter when everyone can launch an app in a weekend? If history rhymes, then the winners won’t be the first to launch—they’ll be the first to: Own a proprietary data source Get embedded in high-retention workflows, ideally multi-player mode Create agent-like products that do the work, not just assist it - leading to higher ROI and a 10X better product The Shopify era showed us what happens when creation gets democratized. Now we’re about to find out what happens when automation does. Founders: build faster, yes—but also build deeper. Investors: speed still matters—but so does staying power. Curious—what are you seeing in this new wave?

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During a small group session at CDL Vancouver, one of the mentors asked me: “What if a big tech company releases something like what you’re doing and destroys your business?” I’ve been asked that question more times than I can count. And honestly — it’s a fair one. But it also reminds me of what early Instagram founders must’ve heard when they were raising money: “If Facebook adds photo sharing, you’ll be dead tomorrow.” We know how that story turned out. The reality is, large companies can’t react to every new idea. They have massive machines to run, quarterly goals to hit, and existing roadmaps that can’t bend to every new signal in the market. If they try to be too reactive, they lose focus on what makes them work. By the time a startup’s idea becomes a credible threat — it’s often already too late for the big guys to respond. Startups like Cielara AI have one superpower: focus. We can pour all our attention into a single, painful customer problem and solve it beautifully. That kind of deep empathy and speed just doesn’t scale well inside a big company. Big tech has to build for the masses — we get to build for the few who care deeply. That’s why: - It took years for others to catch up to AWS, - Signal still thrives next to WhatsApp, - And Google Search is now being disrupted by ChatGPT. So when people ask, “What if Big Tech just builds it?” — my answer is simple: They could. But by the time they do, we’ll already be somewhere new.

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Twitch founder Justin Kan once said: “1st time founders obsess over product. 2nd time founders obsess over distribution.” 💡 I couldn't agree more! Distribution is a multiplier on product. You can have an amazing product—but if no one hears about it, it's like multiplying by zero. In fact, building distribution is often harder than building the product itself especially when AI tools and "vibe-coding" make product creation faster than ever. That’s why smart founders focus on distribution early. The lack of distribution is often a greater risk than not having a perfect product. Agree or disagree? — 📌 Free 7-day AI strategy crash course: https://lnkd.in/gGXqGssc

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The best founders build from empathy. Identifying empathy within a founder is something I've learned to index on over time. When we talk about venture investing, we often anchor on “defensibility.” IP. Moats. Network effects. Distribution advantages. These are all important. But the earliest signals of a truly defensible company often start with deep customer *empathy*. I’ve met with hundreds of founders building in noisy markets where the playbooks are still being written. Time and again, the most compelling ones weren’t just trying to “out-feature” the competition — they were deeply attuned to a specific customer pain. They spoke with clarity, not just about what they were building, but who they were building for. As an investor, I’ve learned that when a founder is building from empathy: 💡 They know their customer’s pain points better than anyone else 🧪 They obsess over feedback and iterate with purpose 📈 They create products that pull users in, not just push them out 🛡️ And in the long run — that’s what makes a product defensible So yes — we still look for moats. But moats built from empathy often prove to be the most durable!

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VAMP = Winter is coming RDR, Ethoca and Verifi are extremely expensive. It’s not just the $15 - $35 per incident fees but the entire cost of losing the transaction. Chatted with a merchant yesterday and we broke it down for a $100 order: $35 RDR $20 Product $10 Shipping $5 Processing $10 Reserve $40 Cost of advertising One friendly fraud chargeback can reduce the merchant’s revenues by $120. Those are funds that could have been reinvested to increase advertising and generate an extra 3 sales. Meaning the merchant’s future revenues also took another $300 hit. A single friendly fraud chargeback caused a combined $400+ in decreased revenues. This also lowers revenues for the entire supply chain: Manufacturer, fulfillment, CS, ISO, agent etc. Whoever can stop, block and prevent the friendly fraud chargeback will become the next dominant solution for the ecommerce industry!

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Startup Founders: this is the secret 🤫 to raising money for your startup: Investors are desperate to find great companies to invest in. Angel investors put money into founders and business ideas that solve a big problem for customers that could be potentially huge and explosively growing market. VCs want to deploy capital to help companies grow. Companies the have proven their business at a basic product-market fit level. If you cannot get investor interest in your company, there is usually one of three reasons: 1) You are too early for the investors that you’re pitching to. 2) You don’t have a solution that addresses a big customer problem in what could be an large and explosive market, where you have an unique value proposition, and a sustainable competitive advantage. At least from the investors perspective. So this could be true, or a perception based on your inability to convince them with evidence. 3) The investors don’t beleive in you and your team. This can be hard to swallow. But not all investors are the right fit for every team. And you may need improvements in your team. There can be a number of reasons behind this one including: (a) they don’t think you have the business, technical, and/or market domain expertise to win; (b) they don’t know, like, and trust you; (c) they don’t think you have the ‘right stuff’ to stick it out when things get rough. You can mitigate or eliminate ALL of these issues. It comes down to the secret: Build better companies. A lot of ‘entrepreneurs’ don’t want to hear this: The problem isn’t the investors. It is you. Great businesses with great teams and stellar leadership always get funded. It may take creativity and tenacity and a lot of investor ‘NO’ answers, but they ALWAYS get funded. Agree or disagree?

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Anthropic just stomped onto the funding stage with a $30B Series G led by GIC and Coatue, valuing Claude at a $380B post-money milestone. 🚀 The round stacks a who's-who of backers- D. E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, MGX - plus continued bets from Microsoft and NVIDIA. This signals real enterprise demand, with Claude now the workhorse of choice and a run-rate around $14B, hundreds of millions in deals, and eight Fortune 10 customers on Claude. 📈 Claude Code is exploding: $2.5B in run-rate revenue, 4% of GitHub public commits coming from Claude Code, and a growing ecosystem of Cowork plugins that turn Claude into specialized pros. HIPAA-ready Claude for Enterprise and Opus 4.6 showing AI can actually ship safe, scalable, end-to-end work for finance, legal, and data-heavy teams - and it’s still on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. 🤖 All this, while the posters claim a new frontier in safety, performance, and scale that will 'drive long-term adoption'. 🔥 #Anthropic #Claude #EnterpriseAI #SeriesG https://lnkd.in/dD7fbdfV Created By LastPosty http://lastposty.com https://lnkd.in/dzW9mtNt

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What if AI could do the job of your next 3 hires? At Shopify, that’s now the expectation, not the experiment. Their CEO just made AI a requirement before any new headcount. This leaked memo from Shopify’s CEO, Tobias Lütke, is making waves...and for good reason. Before any team can justify a new hire, they have to prove the job can’t be done with AI. Not “maybe try it,” not “see how it goes”—AI efficiency, full stop. It’s bold. It’s direct. And it might just be a preview of what’s coming for all of us. Even if you’re not at Shopify, this is something every SaaS founder needs to think about: • Are we hiring out of habit, or necessity? • Are we using AI to reduce operational drag or just talking about it? • Are our teams being trained to experiment, share prompts, and improve workflows with AI tools baked into the process? I don’t run a SaaS company. But I spend every day talking to the people who do. And this feels like a line-in-the-sand moment. The AI First future is no longer theoretical. It’s happening inside orgs with thousands of people, at scale. Curious to hear from other founders: Would this work in your team? Would love to know how you're making AI First real in your ops, hiring plans, and product decisions. Drop your thoughts 👇

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A lot of founders don't pursue ideas they're interested in bc they're afraid that it might be built by big companies. This might be true but the fact that you're building something now makes pivoting to a similar idea or focusing on a vertical much easier in the future. You will already have built a great team, talked to many users, and learned a lot more about what it takes to build. You will have a huge head start against startups that are just starting. When OpenAI released the realtime API, it felt like the death of a bunch of AI voice startups. But now it seems like those startups are thriving even more (Hume, Sesame, Elevenlabs) Just build the thing you want to build, and pivot if necessary.

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We reviewed our latest wireframes for our R&D platform today, and the biggest takeaway had nothing to do with software. It was empathy. 🔵 Most of our clients are brilliant operators, but they’re not tax experts and they’re not product designers. 🔵 They don’t know our definitions, acronyms, or sequence of steps. The good news is that our job is simple: - remove friction, - speak plainly, and - guide people like we would want to be guided from the dark. Empathy is a competitive advantage. Especially in tax. That’s why we’re building a proprietary platform to claim R&D tax credits in a variety of fields. Wine, CPG, engineering and many more in addition standard software dev projects. Easy UX, backed by a small army of ex-Big 4 vets at Tax Hack Accounting Group. Launch coming soon 🥊

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I spy a commerce shift: From Composable to Shopify. Over the past five years many agencies and software vendors – Enterspeed included – have been advocating composable. But in the past year I’ve seen a significant shift back toward Shopify. Despite all the good intentions and clear benefits, it now seems like project overruns, bad experiences, and the massive AI wave have pushed organisations back to basics. At the moment, many of our conversations are with enterprises who “just” want a Shopify setup – one that can handle the core needs and evolve quickly and efficiently into the new AI reality. But, of course, that introduces other concerns. Because how do you automatically update (often multiple) Shopify shops, especially with all the requirements of ingesting data into Shopify? Don’t worry – we’ve got you covered 😇 Enterspeed can help you distribute data across multiple shops and make sure variants, languages, currencies, bulk imports, and incremental updates are taken into consideration – minimising manual work and helping you stay focused on what matters. This isn’t (entirely) about bragging about my team or our latest innovation. Promise! But I really want to highlight this interesting trend. Even enterprises are starting to realise they’re not all that special and could actually go with a strong standard platform like Shopify if they make a couple of smart business decisions. Shopify is accelerating new areas such as AI, MCP, and A2A with big players like ChatGPT, so it makes sense for enterprises to enter these playing fields alongside the biggest innovator in the commerce market. Winning tomorrow might be more important than being special 🙂

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💥 Metropolis Technologies Raises $𝟭.𝟲𝗕 💥 Funding comes in 2 rounds: $500M equity round led by LionTree and $1.1B from J.P. Morgan. Metropolis is now 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 $𝟱𝗕. With the fresh funding, the plan is to take their "recognition and payment-automation" tech beyond parking assets. This would include retail stores, drive-throughs, gas stations, hotels and partnerships with real estate/asset owner. Congrats to Alex Israel, Peter Fisher, Courtney Fukuda, Travis Kell, Ryan Hunt,Chris Sherman, Robert Bland, Paul Rooney, Lookman Olusanya and the rest of the Metropolis family. #fundraise #parkinginvestment #parking #parkingindustry #metropolois Parking Today Media Parking Network B.V. National Parking Association International Parking & Mobility Institute (IPMI) Tim Maloney Advisory Tim Maloney Reservations Lab

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Shopify Editions this year felt less like a product leap and more like a land grab. They’re building lighter versions of tools agencies and tech partners already offer, then dropping them into the stack with a Sidekick smile. Helpful for SMBs, sure. But for serious brands and their partners, it’s starting to feel more like crowding than collaboration. SimGym is clever until you’ve run 100 real CRO experiments. Sidekick’s “insights” won’t replace your BI stack. And Agentic Commerce still skips the hard parts—like controlling where your products show up, how they’re priced, and what data you get back. Agentic Commerce is where the puck is going. But until Shopify solves data transparency and merchandising control, AI-driven surfaces are just window dressing. If Shopify wants to win the mid-market, it’s not about building what partners already have. It’s about nurturing the ecosystem, not nibbling at it. — Gurudev Jaidev Vikram Onkar Himanshu Ankit Abhijeet Hemant Amit Hemalatha #Shopify #DTC #eCommerce

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Y Combinator just deleted Canada from its investment list. 17 years and hundreds of startups later, the world's top accelerator told Canadian founders to incorporate somewhere else or stay home. As of November 2025, YC's standard deal terms dropped Canada from permitted investment jurisdictions. Now it's US, Cayman Islands, or Singapore. Canadian founders who want in have to flip their corporate structure before they apply. Garry Tan, YC's CEO (born in Winnipeg), said he loves Canada but told founders to "just convert to Delaware C Corp." This isn't new. It's the same pattern I've watched for years. Brilliant IP comes out of Canadian universities. Over $50 billion in annual R&D investment. But more than half of that IP gets assigned to foreign companies because the capital and infrastructure to commercialize it isn't here. We're world-class at invention. We systematically export the value. The pre-traction funding gap forces founders to go elsewhere. The risk-averse VC ecosystem won't write first checks into IP-based companies before revenue. So innovators either die waiting or leave. YC didn't create this problem. They're acknowledging what's already true: if you're serious about building a globally competitive company, the path of least resistance runs through someone else's jurisdiction. This isn't about patriotism. It's about structural design. Canada built an innovation system optimized for research output, not commercial capture. And now the best accelerator in the world is making that explicit in their deal terms. The question isn't whether founders will incorporate elsewhere. They will. The question is what happens to the ecosystem when the best ideas are structurally required to leave before they prove anything.

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Great traction and momentum from Canadian-founded Gumloop. The business was started as a side-project in Vancouver, and the company maintains a significant YVR operation (although HQ is now in SF) https://lnkd.in/ete74a8n

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Shopify's CEO just articulated what will become the business standard by late 2025: "Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI." This isn't just a clever cost-cutting measure. It's the first phase of a major workforce transformation I'm seeing unfold with my clients. 2025: AI efficiency becomes mandatory, not optional. Companies will require teams to maximize output with existing resources before adding headcount. 2026: AI agents begin replacing entire functions. The transition from AI-assisted to AI-automated workflows will accelerate, particularly for repetitive tasks. I've witnessed this progression firsthand with sales teams across multiple industries: → Marketing teams now manage 5x more campaigns with the same staff → Sales reps have cut meeting prep from hours to minutes while improving quality → Pipeline growth of 30% within weeks of implementation What makes this shift different from previous tech waves is the speed. Companies aren't getting years to adapt – they're getting months. The most forward-thinking leaders I work with aren't asking "Should we implement AI?" They're asking "How quickly can we transform our workflows?" This isn't about replacing humans wholesale. It's about fundamentally changing how work gets done: ➡️ Administrative tasks become automated ➡️ Research becomes instantaneous ➡️ Personalization becomes scalable ➡️ Decision-making becomes data-enhanced By 2027, there will be three types of companies: those native to AI workflows, those still emerging into them, and those who've fallen behind completely. Where is your organization on this journey? P.S. If you're interested in seeing what a practical AI implementation roadmap looks like for sales teams, let me know. I help companies navigate this transition without the hype or panic. #AITransformation #FutureOfWork #BusinessStrategy

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ANNOUNCEMENT: @claudeai just dropped a huge upgrade today and we've already built it into Shipper. Claude Code Opus 4.6 can build native iOS apps from scratch and get them live on the Apple App Store. We just launched this in Shipper as a way to empower Claude to: → Build complete native iOS apps → Recreate existing apps for iOS → Autofill your App Store listing (app icon, images, descriptions, keywords, privacy policy etc.) Claude Opus 4.6 can do all of the above in one prompt for ~$0.13/app... Ready to publish from the first prompt & built in minutes, not months. Try it on Shipper by asking Claude to "build an iOS app for x.com" or "create a native iOS app for my business"! To celebrate, we're giving away free credits randomly to people who repost and comment "SHIP" :)

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A Founders Guide to The Long Build™ - Physical AI Thesis Part III This one is for the builders. In this final post, my partner Will Porteous and I along with insights from builders in the trenches and investors who play the long game share our guide for founders building intelligence in the real world. A few core takeaways: • Sim before steel: Runway is precious, model the system behavior • Capital intensity is not the enemy — misaligned capital is • Build complete solutions before you talk platform • Hardware opens the door, software wins the room • Trust is earned through resilience, not hype

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