Sitting at the centre of the region’s hottest startup market, Genesis has undergone changes in the last year that the guy in charge says are really a few “tweaks”.

Just after his first anniversary as Genesis CEO, Ed Martin spoke with Entrevestor in a phone interview and discussed the evolution of the innovation hub over the past 12 months. The changes have come about as the advent of artificial intelligence has accelerated the development of products and funding has dried up for early-stage startups – all of which led Genesis to modernize its programming.

“The essence of it all is it’s all basically the same; we’ve just made some tweaks,” said Martin. “We’ve done more work around ideation, so we have a new program called Startups 101.

“One reason we want to get more people thinking about startups is it’s never been easier to get started. You can spin out a basic MVP in a couple of days whereas it might have taken you months before.”

Martin’s CV shows he has the experience to lead founders in the early stages of startups – not to mention the later stages of their entrepreneurial journey. He founded Clockwork Fox Studios, creator of the popular education platform Zorbit's Math Adventure, in 2014, and sold the company to Carnegie Learning seven years later.  In 2022, Martin became the Director of the Memorial Centre for Entrepreneurship, helping students and others in the university community launch companies.

Last November, Martin took the helm at Genesis, an organization with a clearly defined progression of programs. New entrepreneurs, many having come through MCE programs, joined Genesis by going through an introductory program called Evolution for about 10 weeks. The best graduates of Evolution went on to Enterprise, a three-year residency at Genesis during which participants ideally launched a product and gained customers.

That has changed so the progression now looks like this:

Startups 101

This two-hour virtual workshop teaches all the basics of launching a new business, and Martin says that all starts with “finding good problems” for the entrepreneurs to solve. It includes lean methodology with an emphasis on talking to lots of potential customers and other people. It also features a sprinkling of AI instruction and how to use large language models to develop tools quickly.

Martin emphasized this program is open to a broad range of people, not just students. “We really think there’s a lot of people interested in starting a business, especially the mid-career professionals who think startups are too much of a risk (to leave their jobs),” he said. “We help them to understand you can get going within that safety blanket of the full-time job.”

Evolve

Evolution has been replaced by a similar program called Evolve, and the big difference is in the emphasis. The main emphasis of Evolution was teaching founders to pitch, with the goal of helping them to raise the capital needed to grow the company.

“We’ve now moved away from the idea of ‘the pitch’ to focus on really deep problem validation . . . acute enough and repeatable enough to build a product around,” said Martin. Evolve works with the founders on deep market research and truly understanding the problem they have set out to solve. With so many founders attacking similar problems, Genesis aims to help its founders to understand their problem better than anyone else, said Martin.

Membership

Genesis used to celebrate welcoming founders into its cornerstone Enterprise program, then celebrate their graduation three years later. Martin said the organization wanted to get away from that focus on a three-year period and place all the emphasis on success. With AI changing methodology, he said, three years is a long time.

“We really opened things up at Genesis and now we just say, ‘Welcome to Genesis and you can access our community,’” he said.

There are still resident companies at the Genesis facility halfway up Signal Hill, but there are also co-working spaces for entrepreneurs who are in the centre sporadically. Overall, there are now about 45 companies enrolled in Genesis.

The Genesis AI Garage

This new component of Genesis isn’t so much a program as a part of what Genesis offers the St. John’s startup community. The AI Garage pairs recent AI grads with founders and alumni to build smarter, faster, more scalable technology, usually over a three- to four-month period.

Martin said Genesis aims to bring three benefits to the startup community through the AI Garage: first, to increase capacity by increasing the portion of the community involved in AI; second, to develop AI talent as more people grow familiar with using and developing the new technology; and third, to generate more startups as AI specialists at the Garage get their own ideas for companies.

One thing to bear in mind about Genesis is that it’s at the centre of the hottest startup community in Atlantic Canada, and Martin and his crew are determined to keep the party going. February will mark the fifth anniversary of Nasdaq announcing it was buying Verafin for US$2.75 billion – by far the largest exit ever in the region. Since then, new champions have emerged like Spellbook (which announced a US$50 million funding round last month) and Colab Software, which this week unveiled a US$72 million Series C round. Then there’s a gaggle of emerging companies coming up behind them, such as SiftMed, Trophi.ai, Sparrow BioAcoustics, and Swiftsure Innovations.

“It’s on fire,” said Martin of the Newfoundland and Labrador startup community. “Spellbook and CoLab are two unbelievably fast-growing companies. They are true Canadian success stories. I think any city across Canada would love to have a company like that and we have two of them right here in little old St. John’s.”