Categories: It Happened to Me

I am SO Bringing This Up at My Next Annual Review / George, I Owe You a Coke

In both the upcoming podcast interview I did with Elliot and Ross and in a TalkCrunch podcast, Elliot credits me with telling Tucows that the web calendar application Kiko was up for sale, which in turn triggered the acquisition. When I posted it to our internal mailing list, I was thinking “Oh, it’s a long shot, none of the higher-ups will ever consider buying it, but wouldn’t it be nice if we did?”

(When he mentions me in the interview — it’s around the 4 minute 45 second mark — he calls me “a blogger of some renown”.)

Needless to say, I am so bringing this up at my next annual review.


Of course, I had to hear about Kiko’s going up for sale from somewhere or someone, and in this case, it was a someone named George Scriban. I’ve known George since my first year at Crazy Go Nuts University back in 1987, and we’ve been involved in all sorts of ventures together, from playing in the same band and working at Clark Hall Pub (he was a bartender, I was a DJ) to the working together during the Dot-Com bubble at OpenCola and his being the Best Man at my wedding. George IM’d me about Kiko, and I in turn sent a message to the Tucows Powers That Be.

This isn’t the first time that George and I have played “Outside Cop, Inside Cop” with a CEO. Back in early 2000, I was getting VC hints from George over the phone while I was doing dog-and-pony demos with Cory Doctorow in front of Canada’s largest venture capitalists. It put me in very good standing with OpenCola’s CEO, Grad Conn, and eventually landed George a job at OpenCola with the hip title of Iron Chef Business Development.

So George, in the words of Charles Montgomery Burns: I owe you a Coke.

Joey deVilla

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