Marketing & Tech Consulting | Startup Advisor & Investor | Managing Director @AdamsHamilton_ | Mentor @gchbec | EIR @ip_ontario @myLakehead 🙌⛵️@reIGNITEConf_

Barrie, Ontario
Joined December 2008
Sequoia just made a bold claim: They think the next $1T company will NOT be a software company. Their take? Services will be the new software. Because SaaS companies have spent 25 years fighting over a smaller budget in comparison. For every $1 companies spend on software → they spend about $6 on services. For reference: • A company might pay $10K a year for QuickBooks. • And $120K for the accountant who closes the books. AI has completely changed that. Now, a company can sell the finished WORK instead of the tool. Here's how the 3 models compare: TRADITIONAL SAAS • The customer buys access to software, and their own team runs it. • Growth is capped by product + distribution. TRADITIONAL SERVICES • The customer buys people's time + expertise • Growth is capped by hiring. SERVICE-AS-A-SOFTWARE • The customer buys a completed piece of work. • Software handles most of the delivery, with the provider's team on decisions + exceptions. • Growth is capped by how much of the work software can do reliably. Something to keep an eye on.
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Chris Adams retweeted
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
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Chris Adams retweeted
The PHP security team is giving advance notice: Upcoming security release Wed, Oct 21st 2026, 14:00UTC, two critical vulnerabilities, both rated CVSSv4 9.2. PHP users are encouraged to prepare to update. Earlier release if details become public or active exploit evidence.
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We đź’™ supporting Ontario institutions as they develop intellectual property and translate research into real-world impact. Since launch, we have worked with 30+ postsecondary and research institutions across Ontario, helping strengthen IP capacity and advance commercialization outcomes. Together, we're helping researchers, students, entrepreneurs and innovators access the knowledge, resources and support needed to bring Ontario-made innovations closer to market. Thank you to the institutions that have been part of our first four years! We look forward to continuing to work together to turn research into impact and advance Ontario-made innovation. @Baycrest, @BrockUniversity, @Carleton_U, @CHEO, @CollegeLaCite, @ConestogaC, @GBPolytech, @georgiancollege, @HumberPoly, @LambtonCollege, @LaurentianU, @LHSCCanada, @McMasterU, @MohawkCollege, @niagaracollege, @OCAD, @OICR_news, @ontariotech_u, @queensu, @Sunnybrook, @TorontoMet, @TrentUniversity, @UnityHealthTO, @uofg, @uOttawa, @HeartInstitute, @UofT, @UWaterloo @UWindsor, @WesternU and @YorkUniversity #IPONTurns4
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🎉 From an initial cohort of 40 clients to more than 1,700 innovators supported across Ontario. Over the past four years, we've helped innovators protect and maximize the value of their intellectual property, supporting the growth of businesses and helping advance research and innovation across the province. 🚀 To date, that support has helped protect 4,241 homegrown IP assets across Ontario, including: ✅ 3,132 protected by Ontario businesses ✅ 1,109 protected by postsecondary institutions and researchers From breakthrough research to market-ready innovations, these protected IP assets reflect the ingenuity, ambition and innovation powering Ontario's future. 💡 Thank you to the innovators, businesses, researchers, institutions and partners who have helped build a stronger innovation ecosystem through the creation, protection and commercialization of intellectual property. Join more than 1,700 Ontario innovators who have worked with IPON and discover how intellectual property can support your path to growth: ip-ontario.ca #IPONTurns4
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Chris Adams retweeted
Is your business ready to explore new markets? Starting Oct 29, small and medium-sized businesses can participate in the Trade Accelerator Program (TAP) and gain the tools, expertise, and connections needed to grow internationally. Learn more & register: bot.com/Events/Scaling-Simco…
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Nikita is right: technical moats for software are gone. Any competent team can ship the exact same features. But that does not mean software is dead. All commoditized goods are fungible by definition. The actual moats left: Distribution, taste, community, physical components, and service layers attached to the software. Ask anyone selling coffee, crude oil, securities, milk, or wheat if their product is different from their competitors. It never is. Winners understand this shift. Code as a moat is dead. Selling software is not.
Technical moats are mostly over at this point. If you’re building something that is meant to be durable, the only moats now are: • Proprietary data • Network effects • A physical component
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Chamath says IP and software were "effectively rendered worthless" this week, after people decompiled Adobe's core products and published open-source versions, as every service goes headless "The more important point I want to make though, is I sent this to Nick, there's been a couple things that happened in the last couple days, which I think are incredibly important." "There have been people that decompiled the entire, the entire big five. What is the big five? Adobe has five very, very important products in their product suite. Freeberg may know them all, but I just know Photoshop. There's like a bunch of others. Okay." "And these folks decompiled it, distilled it, and published open source versions of these things. And Rust, yeah. And I was so shocked, because I was like, hold on a second, these are like profound products that have existed and have had moats for years, and now they're just open source versions." "And then Nikita was, I think, trolling, and he was building on that idea, and just talking about GTA, because it's about to get released. I think GTA 6 is about to come out, and we'll reconstruct this." "Why is this important?" "I think that IP and software was effectively rendered worthless two days ago." "Because if you think about it, when everything is headless, so when Elon makes his services headless, Benioff made Salesforce headless a few months earlier, when all of these things are headless, and you can wrap them in agent tools, and you can connect them via MCP to other experiences, the value of IP does no longer exist in software. It doesn't exist." "And I think that probably is the most profound implication." "So, like, even in our business, we would argue with some of our customers all the time, because we'll say, oh, we'll build this for you, we'll own the IP. They'll say, no, we want the IP. We don't know how to negotiate it. And two days ago, I walked into the 8090 guys, I said, who cares? Who cares? But before, it was always a negotiation and a set of trade-offs. Now it's a who-cares thing, where, like, the IP is irrelevant." "It still takes a while for the machinery of a business, and frankly the market, to understand. But that is the most important thing that happened this week in AI, in my opinion."
David Sacks says Anthropic is run by a "religious cult" and is doing the very things it says it fears most, like opening a wet lab while warning of bio risk, and that there's an argument for sending in a federal SWAT team "But I do think that there are potential externalities from having the number one frontier model company run by a religious cult." "So, for example, they are opening a Claude-powered wet lab in the middle of San Francisco. But at the same time, they're warning of bio risk. At the same time, they say that we have to pace the frontier, they're extending the frontier. At the same time that they are saying that there's a risk of superintelligence growing beyond our control, they're programming it to grow beyond our control." "I think there are potentially huge externalities to the way they approach these things. And it's, like, insane that they call these decisions "safety." These are not safe decisions. These are crazy decisions, it seems to me." "This is why I've called this a schizophrenic company, is they appear to be not only hypocritical, but they're doing the things that they say they are most afraid of." "Like, what is going on here? This is bizarre. And I don't know where this all leads. I do think there's an argument for a federal SWAT team to come blasting in there."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The referenced open-source Adobe alternatives were not created via decompilation. Their developer describes them as clean-room reimplementations built from public specs, observed behavior and AI assistance in Rust. github.com/storytold/phot… arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/sof… frontiernow.dev/en/resources/a…
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Chris Adams retweeted
Automating a broken process doesn't fix it. It just makes the broken process run faster. With AI we are rushing to automate everything. First, justify it. Does it even deserve to exist? Next, optimize it. Only then, automate it.
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Chris Adams retweeted
I’ve signed, and now you can too: CCI and a coalition of Canadian business leaders are asking Ottawa to make it more worthwhile to bet on Canadian companies. If you believe Canada should be a better place to bet on Canadian ambition, sign here: Bet-On-Canada.ca
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Good morning. Today is going to be a great day. Let’s get after it relentlessly.
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Chris Adams retweeted
Everything big starts small and focused. 1,000 true fans is step #1, whether you want a $100K per year business or the next Uber. I’ve seen this with all of my fastest-growing and most successful startups. They start laser-focused on 100 to 1,000 people, niche-ing down as necessary with their messaging and targeting (demographically, geographically, etc.) to get to a manageable and cost-effectively reachable number. So, you may ask yourself, “Why aim for a mere $100K when I can try to build a billion-dollar business?” Two reasons: 1) Aiming for the latter from the outset often leads to neglecting the high-touch 1,000 true fans who act as your most powerful unpaid marketing force for “crossing the chasm” into the mainstream. If you don’t build that initial army, you’re likely to fail. 2) Do you really want to build and manage a big company? For most people, it’s not a fun experience; it’s an all-consuming taskmaster. There are certainly ace CEOs who thread the needle and enjoy this roller coaster, but they are outliers. Read Small Giants by Bo Burlingham for some fantastic examples of companies that choose to be the best rather than the biggest.
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Chris Adams retweeted
There's a huge opportunity right now in being the deployment layer for AI into the economy. The amount of work it takes to change out workflows in enterprises tends to be far greater than anyone realizes or would prefer. Clearly this is what the applied layer of AI is going to look like in the form of software and agents, but also it opens up new services firms opportunities. Legacy systems need to be moved to the cloud, data organization and access needs to be updated, software needs to be connected to agents in new ways, workflows need to be reengineered for agents, HITL needs to be figured out for the process, evals need to be generated and maintained, and the entire system needs to be continually updated as new models get released and new capabilities emerge. And the full list may even be longer. AI is not the same as just deploying software. Software you generally did the implementation of an existing, well understood category of technology, then stepped back and the customer kept running. With AI agents, you're delivering actual work augmentation to the organization, which has a completely different set of complexities associated with it. You're no longer deploying tools that the company is merely enabled by, you're deploying work output in a process. Completely different implementation and enablement process. As a result, this is going to open up lots of new kinds of firms and plays for existing firms to diffuse AI into organizations. We're going to see approaches by industry, by size of company, and by problem inside of companies. Traditional SIs will modernize and adapt (some will clearly not adapt as well), and new entrants will also be founded in this period that take advantage of this window. Great time to be an FDE or FDE firm.
Box CEO Aaron Levie (@levie) calls out the MASSIVE opportunity for AI deployment services: "every single one of those companies, whether that's a 50-person firm or a multi-100,000 person firm, is gonna need an army of people to go in and help them with that transformation" "when you go to that law firm and you go to that pharma company and you go to that bank, they need something that bridges the core technology to their workflow in their business process" "somebody has to go into that organization and get it set up, and somebody has to go and provide domain expertise to this model so it really understands our particular business process" Vendor FDEs are incentivized to get you hooked on their platform and to spend more money. Indie FDEs are incentivized to use the best tool for the job and to save you money. Hire indie FDEs.
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Statement on the passing of former @cityofbarrie Mayor Janice Laking. #Barrie #cdnpoli
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Chris Adams retweeted
founders finding out building a startup is 90% sales and marketing:
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The CEO of one of the largest show organisers told me the traditional event model is illogical: bring the right people into one building and wish them luck finding each other. His shows match buyers and sellers before anyone travels, and the onsite job is running the meetings.
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Chris Adams retweeted
Removing friction is the whole job description of a CEO. Find one piece of friction every day. Friction slows you down. You are solving for speed.
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A founder chasing balance is still counting hours between work and life. A founder who designs their role around purpose stops counting altogether.
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Chris Adams retweeted
The world’s biggest investors are descending on Toronto for the first-ever Canada Investment Summit. They’ll be pitched shovel-ready projects in oil and gas, mining, power generation, infrastructure and more. I hope we see some major deals announced. But I also hope our guests learn that Canadians are not only “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” We are also some of the world’s boldest innovators in AI, next-gen compute, space, blockchain and more. Invest in Canada, yes! Help us build the physical infrastructure to become a global energy and industrial powerhouse. But also help us build the digital infrastructure needed for Canada—and the world—to thrive in this new technology order. Our startups are shovel-ready. Venture capital is shovel-ready. Builders are shovel-ready. I will be at the Canadian Global Growth Forum today, hosted by @cvca making this case to global investors If you want to invest in Canada while pushing the frontier forward, consider Canada’s builder community. CC: @EvanLSolomon @FP_Champagne @buildcanada @lucyhargreaves4 @Ben_Bergen @cvca
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