Still working through your holiday shopping list? Stuck on deciding what to give your loved ones this holiday season? We’ve rounded up a collection of one-of-a-kind gifts for every person on your list. 

Here are 8 unique gift ideas you probably haven’t thought of yet.

For the interior design enthusiast

Give the gift of interior design and help someone experience the luxury of having their space professionally designed. 

Daakor’s experts in interior design are passionate about helping clients turn their visions for their home into a reality. From start to finish, Daakor’s interior design is personalized to your tastes, time and budget. 

Give a Daakor Design Plan to help your loved one take out the hassle of furnishing their home and help them create a space that looks and feels like a sanctuary.

For the foodie or dinner party host

From deluxe charcuterie baskets filled with gourmet goodies to smaller baskets filled with sweet and savoury snacks, FreshSpoke has curated delicious gift baskets at a variety of price points. 

Best of all, FreshSpoke’s products are all made locally, so you can spread joy while supporting farmers and food artisans. These gift options are wonderful corporate gifting ideas but also great for friends and family. Gift cards are also available in any denomination.

For the news buff

If you have that friend or family member who is constantly keeping tabs on the news, gets sucked into polarized politics or is an avid follower of conspiracy theories, the Ground News Premium plan is for them.

Ground News has tools that enable you to objectively see the political coverage bias of any story on the internet, and easily access a myriad of different perspectives on that very same story. 

Ground News is unveiling its new and most comprehensive package, the Premium plan. With the Premium plan, you or your loved ones can identify bias in the news (whether you read it in-app, online or on your Twitter feed) and get a balanced all-sides view of the news.

For the content creator or music lover

Staats makes personalized Spotify and Apple Music song plaques and Creator Awards – perfect gifts for music lovers, budding content creators, and loved ones.

The company’s journey started on the App Store building a custom trading card maker, and along the way they developed some amazing products to share with the world. These gifts have become viral trends! Today, in the Staats app, users can customize these items and purchase them, but the company also sells them separately on Etsy.

The gift that gives back

Rumie is changing lives just 10 minutes at a time. One in six young people are unemployed as a result of COVID-19. Rumie aims to replace the time youth spend on social media each day with an engaging learning platform that delivers transferable life and career skills. 

This holiday season, donate on behalf of a friend, colleague, or family and give a gift to a whole world of young learners. A donation will contribute to Rumie’s 2021 goals: Create 250 Bytes, fill 1 million jobs, and reach 1 million youth. 

For the sentimental friend

When people receive a surprise group video gift, they universally love it, and are often drawn to tears. However, there’s a lot of effort and technical skills involved to create one.

Celebrate makes it easy for anyone to create, collect and share a group video. The app guides the users through the entire process, giving them easy-to-use editing tools, avoiding much of the complexity of full-featured general purpose editing apps.

Key features of Celebrate include an invitation wizard guiding users to create a compelling request that includes video, text, suggested topics, and due date, and an Editing Suite to add text, music, GIFs, cards, pictures and do basic editing.

For the homeowner

Think Uber, but for snow removal! LocalStudent is an online platform that connects customers to students that can help with various services, changing the way that students find work. 

This winter, LocalStudent is offering on-demand snow removal. Support students looking for work while giving your loved one the ability to sleep in and skip shovelling the driveway on cold winter mornings.

Buy a gift card or get a free quote today at localstudent.ca.

For the best (worst!) dressed

Want an effortless way to get a man a perfect gift? Get him a gift card. Mannr is a luxury personal styling and delivery service for men. Mannr allows users to conveniently shop with the help of a dedicated professional stylist and get personalized options available from any brand.

This holiday season, Mannr’s has an exclusive offer for gift cards: buy a $300 gift card and get $350 worth of services, or buy a $500 gift card and get $600 worth of services.

Are you a DMZ member with a product that makes a great holiday gift? Let us know and we’ll add you to our gift guide.

Our world has fundamentally changed, and the future of business has changed with it. As entrepreneurs, our biggest concerns from eight weeks ago, such as “How do I manage my dilution?”, have been replaced with “How do I survive the next month?”

Then, capital was freely available and we had a good handle on customer behaviour. Now, investors have sidelined themselves to take care of their companies and customers have done a complete 180. We no longer operate in the old state of normal, and there’s little point in looking back.

If you’re a tech startup founder, this might well be your first economic crisis – even your first market cycle change. Stress levels are high and difficult decisions need to be made every day.

What is an entrepreneur to do? Where to focus efforts? What questions should be asked? To survive or even thrive in the new normal, entrepreneurs must be asking themselves five questions:

1) What is my legacy approach and how is it hindering me?

Think back to when you started your company. Was it you and your cofounder working around a kitchen table? That’s when your legacy approach was first formed. How you made decisions together, how you defined your priorities, how you structured your company. Then you grew from a team of four to eight to 16. Your organizational structure was solidified, and your early culture was born. As you went from your series A round to your B round, you gave investors different rights and you established different classes of shares. All of this defined how decisions would be made and who had a seat at the table.

Now is the time to reassess this legacy approach and consider how it might be hindering you. Does it take a week to get a decision from your board when it should only take a day? Is your reporting structure causing needless frustration? Do some stakeholders have too much say in your day-to-day? Are you handcuffed by a certain process? All of these issues can bog you down and get in the way of decision-making.

Time is in short supply. It should be measured in days, not weeks or months. All your time should be spent on anticipating the future, preserving optionality and extending your runway, not on dealing with old issues that don’t serve the new normal.

2) How can I increase my speed and agility?

Entrepreneurs that come out of this crisis intact will take time now to increase their speed and agility.

In the absence of a crystal ball, the best thing they can do is maximize their ability to turn on a dime. Swiftness and flexibility will also help you maximize your cash runway and give you optionality – two critical factors that will determine who survives and thrives.

Don’t forget, many great iconic companies were born in times of crisis – General Motors, General Electric, Google, Apple, Microsoft. These companies weren’t created during market highs, but times of extreme stress. They knew that by staying speedy and nimble, they’d be able to go where the puck was headed.

3) What stays and what goes?

COVID-19 is already forcing society to question what’s essential and what’s not. It’s shown us our dirty habits and wastefulness. We’re wondering whether norms developed decades ago, like maintaining a sprawling office instead of allowing employees to work from home, are still relevant.

Now is the time to adopt a lifeboat strategy: Take what you need and leave what you don’t. As we paddle to safety, we have a unique opportunity to jettison what was bogging us down – to clean up our balance sheets, look at our options, extend our runways, reassess our table stakes. 

4) How should I use the time now to think through the next wave of innovation?

Governments have acted quickly to help Canadian companies extend their cash runways. They’ve given entrepreneurs time to think through next moves. This is a big opportunity for Canada’s tech sector: Although we punch above our weight class in discovery and innovation, we’re well below where we could be in terms of commercialization.

Difficult as is it, this crisis will lead us into a new economy founded on innovation. This will create enormous opportunities in emerging industries, such as telemedicine, patient-centred digital health, AR/VR and digital experiences, online learning and education, business continuity technology and virtual event management.

Looking to the future, we should expect that there will be more crises of this scale. Another pandemic is possible, even likely. The impacts of climate change will continue to be felt. Our world is changing rapidly and now is the time to think big and innovate fast.

5) Who can I turn to for good advice?

For the past 11 years, we’ve been living in a bull market cycle – for many entrepreneurs, the only cycle they’ve experienced. The new normal can be intimidating.

Now is the time to find the right advisors. Someone who can be a true sounding board and co-pilot. The best advisors may not default to existing board members since investors can sometimes make suboptimal decisions in order to protect their slice of the pie. Entrepreneurs should look for people who have gone through difficult market cycles before, people who understand how not to cling to the bubble. Seek out support that you think will move your company in the right direction.

In conclusion, now is the time to take action. Not tomorrow — today. If you don’t make hard decisions now, your company might become a victim to another – one that’s faster or more agile. Right now, clinging to the past is your biggest boat anchor. It may be hard to see, but the future is your biggest opportunity. You can do this. And where you can’t, the right people can help you through it.

By DAPHNE GORDON

To thrive in a competitive global marketplace, Toronto-based startups must embrace the humble-brag, says Abdullah Snobar, executive director of the DMZ, a world-leading, not-for-profit tech accelerator in downtown Toronto.

“Sales is the biggest segue to success” he explains. It’s going to help make a start-up a global enterprise down the road.”

But the sales pitch often doesn’t come naturally to tech startup founders, many of whom got into the game because they saw a consumer problem and had the know-how to build a technological solution.

“If you look at Canadian culture, we’re not known to be assertive,” he says. “So for entrepreneurs, it’s about embracing the humble brag. Not being arrogant, but being proud of what you’ve been able to accomplish.”

That’s why the DMZ launched a sales accelerator in 2016. Designed to help tech businesses become global enterprises, it helps companies grow from startup to scale-up.

Capital Follows Sales

The program focuses on developing an aggressive sales method, building a sales-oriented team, providing marketing support and equipping founders with the leadership skills they need to create global impact.

Throughout a four-month period, world-class mentors assess a startup’s needs and customize a growth strategy that encompasses all aspects of the business.

The capacity to create revenue is what startups need now, says Snobar. The program helps founders realize that capital follows sales.

“For us, this is a new narrative” he says. “Toronto has been in an episode where we’ve been helping a lot of early-stage companies come to life, become market ready…Now they need to acquire customers that can get them to scale.”

The DMZ ranked #1 in the world

Located at Yonge and Dundas Square, the DMZ at Toronto Metropolitan University was ranked as the top university-based incubator worldwide by UBI Global in 2018.

It’s home to as many as 70 startup companies at any given time, providing open-concept spaces on six floors of an office tower that looks out over the square.

Each quarter, six startups are accepted into the sales program. They relocate their teams to set up shop in an environment that’s meant to create a sales mindset – complete with a gong to bang when a deal gets made.

Starting in 2019, the accelerator is expected to expand significantly, quadrupling the size of the quarterly cohorts.

Mentorship makes a difference

The DMZ’s sales program helped Casalova an online real estate marketplace that streamlines the processes of buying or renting a home, scale up in 2017.

The company now boasts a downtown headquarters and a staff that includes a team of independent sales agents. Thanks to a $2.5-million investment from Aviva Ventures, a U.K. – based fund, Casalova is on track for more growth in 2019.

“Our business wouldn’t be where it is today without the DMZ” says Ray Jaff. Casallove co-founder and CEO, pointing to the accelerator’s community of startups, accountability structures and introductions to investors as factors in the company’s success.

But what really helped Casalova crack the code of scaling was mentorship from the DMZ’s coaches, who were embedded in the business and helped the company refine day-to-day practices as well as leap large hurdles.

“It was helpful to have access to people who had been there, done that,” says Jaff. “I knew I could try to learn on my own, through trial and error, or I could have a 30-minute sit-down and save months and thousands of dollars in lost time.”

Exposure to a global marketplace

Participants in the accelerator program attend events with founders from across the region and intimate workshops with industry leaders. They also go on a two-week, multi-city road trip to key global markets such as New York and San Francisco for curated, one-on-one meeting with customers and investors.

The overarching goal is to create a competitive sales mindset so startups can reach their full potential. If they’re acquired, they can earn what they deserve.

“The mindset has changed,” says Snobar. “Whereas before it was a major milestone to be acquired for a million dollars, now the stakes are higher. Now we’re saying: Let’s become a sales behemoth.”

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