This article was originally featured on Stephanie Hughes Journalism.com

WHEN YOU THINK OF AN INTERNET SPAT between two opposing viewpoints, you probably wouldn’t expect a crown insurance lending corporation and a few major real estate companies to be at the center of it. Then again, you also probably wouldn’t expect an unprecedented global pandemic of COVID-19’s scale, which was enough to push the Canadian Mortgage Housing Corporation (CMHC) to change its tone on the real estate outlook. …

The court of public opinion is a very delicate place, and a company like AirBnB — with all of the unsubtle characters that brought it success — show just how quickly an organization can find itself on the jury’s bad side.

AirBnB was founded in 2008, marketed as a discount accommodation service for cash-strapped travellers and a way to earn quick cash from your empty house if you decided to take off for a week or two. It also gave people operating a legitimate bed and breakfast a place to list their location.

Even more valuable than the profits investors make in the stock market are the hard lessons they learn along the way… Thing is, the lessons are only valuable if they’re actually learned.

I’ve been meaning to write about this topic for a while since the year 2019 presented an interesting case study with (often misplaced) vaulting optimism in tech companies from venture capitalists. It was the year where investors seemed to have ditched the age-old wisdom of putting your money on a company that had a secure business plan, was either profitable or had a clear path to profitability, kept…

If you worked an office job many years ago and five o’clock rolled around, you would stretch, gather your things, and clock out for the day. Maybe you’d even leave a half-hour earlier if it’s a Friday. It’s five o’clock freedom and you’re probably running through weekend plans, chores to cross off your to-do list — anything other than your workday.

Speed up the clock to the dawn of a new decade: the 2020’s. Today, as five o’clock rolls around, you might not be thinking about weekend plans or chores or anything along the lines of your personal life. …