When Bessemer Venture Partners recently published their map of major cloud players, I was surprised…
Version One
2011 was an amazing year – made 10 new investments (most ever!), sold one company (Sparkbuy to Google) and started GrowLab with an exceptional team of co-founders. But more importantly, it was an amazing year for Canada’s start-up ecosystem – there is a new generation of angels and VC’s emerging in this country, more and […]
When Bessemer Venture Partners recently published their map of major cloud players, I was surprised…
2021 might be remembered as the year the world started to fully embrace the opportunity…
2011 was an amazing year – made 10 new investments (most ever!), sold one company (Sparkbuy to Google) and started GrowLab with an exceptional team of co-founders.
But more importantly, it was an amazing year for Canada’s start-up ecosystem – there is a new generation of angels and VC’s emerging in this country, more and more US VC’s are leading large financings rounds in Canadian start-ups, local start-ups are nailing it in SaaS, a few wordclass incubators have sprung up, organizations like the C100 are starting to make a real impact, and we have had a very healthy M&A activity this past year. What we still don’t have – and are probably many years away – are enough anchor companies.
2012 will most likely be a much tougher year for start-ups worldwide. We might have seen the end of the easy access to early-stage money and a recession might be around the corner in Europe and North-America. But despite these short-term challenges, I remain extremely bullish on the opportunities for Internet companies. We are still only at the very beginning of the Internet cycle so keep your heads down, focus on your long-term vision, build product, listen to your customers – and build those missing anchor companies!
Happy holidays to all of you and to an even better 2012!
Portfolio
It’s been an eventful quarter (when has it not?), and somehow we’ve already crossed the halfway mark of 2025. We wanted to take a moment to highlight just a few of the wins, milestones, and momentum we’ve seen this past quarter. As always, there’s a whole lot happening behind the scenes that can’t be shared […]
The V1 family kicked off the new year with fresh energy and no shortage of…
At the end of Q1, we anticipated that a tech sector slowdown is ideal for…