A Refreshingly Honest Postmortem from Standout Jobs' Ben Yoskovitz

In May Techvibes reported that Montreal Standout Jobs had been acquired and everyone including its investors touted it as a success and a feather in Montreal's startup community.

Montreal's Ben Yoskovitz penned his portmortem analysis of Standout Jobs today on his blog and it turns out the "exit" wasn't a financial success.

Yoskovitz seems to have been prompted to write his analysis after read Eric Ries’ blog post Stop lying on stage.

I appreciate Eric’s point-of-view, and I’ve had similar experiences watching people on stage, publicly addressing an audience and omitting key points of their “startup’s story”. Investors do it too. Everyone does it (I think it’s human nature.) But there’s a big difference between “on the record” and “off the record”. People should be smart enough to know the difference. And there are some bridges not worth burning (at least completely.) Even more importantly, there’s just some things that aren’t meant for public consumption. Perhaps in those cases the stories (or “legends!”) shouldn’t be promoted whatsoever, because they’re only half-truths…

It's not often the we get to read a honest and detailed portmortem from a Canadian startup, so I encourage you all to head over to Yoskovitz's Instigator Blog to have a read.

The silver lining to this story is that Yoskovitz has moved on to Year One Labs - an early stage seed accelerator based in Montreal. So he'll be able to share his experience with the next round of startup entrepreneurs coming out of Montreal.