A comment left on a recent Wall Street Journal article was made by “Jeremy B5″. While initial readers clearly knew this wasn’t me, some folk have taken the comments to heart, so I wanted to both address the comment head-on, as well as talk about one of the core issues of commenting today.

First and foremost, this comment was not made by me. Anyone who knows me or has seen me comment would clearly know this for a few simple reasons:

  1. I always comment as me. Even when I later end up sticking my foot in my mouth or saying something stupid, I put my name beside it. I happily sign in with FaceBook Connect or similar services when possible so that folk know it’s me.  I don’t use psuedonyms, I don’t comment anonymously. And, hell, let’s be honest: if I did, I wouldn’t use a weird version of me to do it.
  2. Come on, CEOs don’t get their own company’s names wrong. While Word sometimes capitalizes “b5″ as “B5″ at the start of a sentence, I’m religious about getting it right. Hell, at b5 we actually have a plugin that rewrites all references and all misspellings we could think of to the right name (feel free to try it on an official blog, not sure I have the plugin running here). It’s “b5media” or “b5″. Not “b5Media”, “b5 media”, “B5Media”, “B5 Media” or any other variation. And, as my team  knows, if I’m going to combine “b5″ and “Jeremy”, I’ll do it as “b5jeremy”. Lowercase everything. I’ve, in the past, used terminology like b5ads, b5shirts, b5gear, b5ranch, b5tweetup, etc.
  3. The biggest reason is that this clearly isn’t how I think about the current situation or about Brightspark.

Mark and the team at Brightspark are completely professionals and, with their operational experience, some of the best VCs in the country. Not only do I believe Mark’s story that the reason they didn’t raise a fund was so they could focus on their internally incubated projects (probably not how he’d describe it, but y’know), I’ve heard from several LPs that they would have happily invested again (in case you’re wondering about ass kissing, several of these LPs have told me funds they wouldn’t invest in again – and then didn’t, so I believe them).

Brightspark no longer actively investing (they continue to support their portfolio companies, actively, including b5… and that support has been invaluable during these tough times because their operational background is critical to our success) is bad for Canada.

But, I’m excited for the future of what they’re doing, as them gaining more operational experience, especially online and media experience, will help dozens of companies should they return to VC (and I sincerely hope they do).

In short, the comment wasn’t made by me, doesn’t represent my views and and is completely unhelpful to the growth of startups in Canada.