These guys have the kind of experiences that can give you a firm view of the current state of innovation and finance in the United States and Canada.

From Oct. 15, VentureBeat article ..

"This summer, Y Combinator created a new program called the YC Fellowship, for investing in early-stage startups outside of its accelerator program. Today, the first of the 33 companies to be accepted has launched. Called Clearbanc, it’s a banking service that’s specifically geared toward helping self-employed Americans get paid faster."

On Nov. 24th we have Clearbanc Founder Andrew D'Souza in a chat with Fortune's Matt Ingram.

Andrew D’Souza is a serial entrepreneur, currently building a startup in the financial services space. He is an Advisor to Kik and Wealthsimple. He was formerly President of Nymi, a wearable platform focused on identity and security (raised $15M), and the COO of Top Hat, a mobile learning platform for the classroom (raised $22M). Andrew led external functions for both companies, including sales, marketing, business development, recruitment and fundraising. He has also advised a number of early-stage startups through their fundraising and M&A processes, totaling over $100M in equity investment and exits.

After studying Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Andrew began his career as a consultant with McKinsey & Company’s media practice and has been an advisor to a number of education-focused non-profits and multiple Canadian startups. He has contributed opinion pieces on education technology, the Canadian startup ecosystem, and startup hiring to Mashable, Business Insider, VC Journal and the Toronto Standard.

Guest Interview by Mathew Ingram, Fortune

Mathew Ingram is an award-winning journalist who has spent the past two decades writing about business, technology and new media. He is currently a senior writer with Fortune magazine, and prior to that was a senior writer at the San Francisco-based online media company Gigaom. Before that, he spent 15 years at the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto as a reporter and columnist. He was the newspaper's first online columnist and its first blogger, and was also the paper's first Communities Editor -- a position that involved developing the Globe's social strategy, as well as policies and training related to Facebook, Twitter, online comments and other tools. He is also one of the co-founders of the mesh conference. You can find him on Twitter, as well as on Facebook, and on LinkedIn.