Ten years ago today, an unnoticed article was posted on an unknown website with a simple message: Welcome to Entrevestor.

Yes, today is the 10th Anniversary of the launch of Entrevestor, and we’ve spent a nostalgic week thinking back to the early days of the venture. The past 10 years have been fantastic, and we’re really looking forward to what’s ahead. We’re staying in the region, and hope to increase our staff and programs in the coming months. (More on that below.)

It took a year or two for us to find our feet, and the early days were shaky. Entrevestor started when Shawn Hirtle, the Head of Communications at Nova Scotia Business Inc., suggested in the summer of 2011 that we launch a news site to report on the new tech startups that were gaining momentum.

It seemed like a good idea. I’d already been working with Bob Williamson of the Jameson Group on Invest Atlantic, which had launched in 2010, and saw the potential in the sector. Bob had wisely insisted from the word go that Invest Atlantic be a regional, not local, event, and Carol and I similarly set out to launch a regional news site covering startups.

The community and its ecosystem were vastly different then. Radian6 had just announced its $326 million exit, so there was a lot of excitement, but there were no links between the startup groups in the four provinces. Propel ICT was on the cusp of launching its first accelerator, Launch36. Mary Kilfoil and Ed Leach had yet to launch their startup courses at Dalhousie. The big events were I-3 in Nova Scotia and Breakthru in New Brunswick.

And there wasn’t a lot of startup news. We told people in those days that we would write one article a week and a string of briefs when we had enough material. One New Brunswick veteran of the sector told me we’d never find that much news.

At first, that was a shrewd observation. A day after announcing our launch, we posted something saying Invest Atlantic would return that year. Then 10 days later, we had our first interview with an actual founder – Yan Simard of Fredericton’s Zaptap. (Simard is now CEO of Kognitv Spark). My interviews in September that year included one with 23-year-old Patrick Hankinson, who had launched a company called Compilr, which he would sell several years later for more than $20 million.

It was slow going and we didn’t think Entrevestor was going to sustain our family. In March 2012, I accepted a position with a financial firm in Calgary and we got ready to head out West. Then two things happened. First, readership and interested started to grow in Entrevestor, and not just in Nova Scotia. And second, securities regulators busted the financial company and the division I was going to be working in got shut down. We stayed in Atlantic Canada.

In the ensuing nine years, we were propelled forward by the surging growth and success of innovation-driven companies in Atlantic Canada. We experimented and tried new things. We tried expanding into Kitchener-Waterloo in 2015, but had to retreat because the economics just didn’t work.   

The smartest move we made was beginning to build the Entrevestor Databank and produce our annual Atlantic Canada Startup Data report. It’s a premium product that generates the revenue we need to provide free news.

Our competition has risen dramatically in 10 years. Journalists’ interest in innovation in the region has increased several-fold. Organizations like the Allnovascotia.com group and CBC St. John’s are doing great work covering startups. Our valiant team of three still breaks news, but we don’t own the space like we used to.

In the last decade, we’ve also had a lot of fun and made many friends. The startup story writ large has been good news, but we’ve covered some failures and controversy. My favorite story was our profile of Kirt McMaster, the Cape Bretoner who was aiming to put “a bullet through Google’s head” with a cell phone operating system that would compete with Android.

My favorite photo was this shot of Matt Vance, Founder of Matt’s Got Balls (later Castaway Golf). This company, which retrieved golf balls from water hazards, was also responsible for my favourite headline: “Matt’s Got Balls – And Great Margins”.

My favourite quote came from a Waterloo-based entrepreneur, Chanakya Ramdev, whose company SweatFree Apparel made shirts that would never develop armpit stains: “The opportunity to attack the atrocity of sweat stains is a super cool thing to do,” Ramdev told me in December 2015. “If 10 years from now, no one in this world suffers from sweat stains, I think that’s a great way to spend 10 years.”

Entrevestor now is in growth mode. Though Carol and I had been planning to move to the UK and spend summers in Nova Scotia, we’ve changed our plans and will be based in Atlantic Canada for the foreseeable future. We’ve moved to Bedford, NS (what a great spot!) and hope to hire again before too long.

Our reporter Avery Mullen and I are working hard on developing a Canadian Oceantech Databank, which will underpin our growing coverage of ocean technology. One thing I find interesting as a journalist is that when we identify a coverage area we want to grow, the first thing we do is develop a databank on that sector. It shows that we’ve learned a thing or two in the past 10 years.

In closing, Carol and I would like to thank all the people and organizations who have supported us in the past decade – including all the founders who fill out our surveys each year. We couldn’t survive without them. We like to think of ourselves as a traditional community newspaper, except for the tech community. And we are thankful for the way the community has rallied around us.