The Progress Magazine "People We Love" issue is now on the news stands, and it is rich in material about the startup community.

We'll be featuring more on the issue later, but several prominent people in the startup community made the People list this year. I wrote up three items, featuring: SimplyCast CEO Saeed El-Darahali; Build Ventures Co-Manager Patrick Keefe; and a joint piece on Dalhousie University's lean entrepreneurship profs Ed Leach and Mary Kilfoil.

When we asked Danielle Fong -- a Dartmouth native who now runs Lightsail Energy in California -- to appear on the list, she declined saying we should instead choose "a real hero of the NS cleantech scene" Thomas Rankin, an investment manager at Innovacorp. Progress was a step ahead of her and Rankin is on the list.

The other people featured include T4G CEO and Big Data evangelist Geoff Flood; McInnes Cooper's startup lawyer Rob Cowan; Picomole CEO John Cormier and Clarity CEO Dan Martell.

I was especially pleased to see education advocate Paul Bennett on the list. Paul was my Grade 9 Geography teacher. It was his first year out of York University. He taught me Twentieth Century history the next year, and I still benefit from how thorough that course was.