Is social dead?
At Version One, we’ve centered our investment thesis around companies that leverage network effects. We have talked at great lengths about them in marketplaces and in artificial intelligence and machine learning startups. Social platforms can have incredibly strong network effects, but we’ve been relatively quiet on the subject. And, we’re not alone. It seems like a long […]
Our Q2 2016 Round-Up
Hope you had a great Canada Day and Fourth of July weekend! Here’s a quick recap of some of this quarter’s news clippings for V1 and our portfolio companies. Keep in mind that these are just the things that have been announced publicly; other equally important and interesting things have been happening behind the scenes […]
Thoughts from the road: building startups and collective ambition outside Silicon Valley
Just a few years ago, if you wanted to do something big, you needed to go to Silicon Valley. It meant frequent flights or moving your company to San Francisco to raise money from Bay Area VCs. Times are changing, and these geographical barriers are beginning to break down. Waterloo has another unicorn with Kik. […]
Our Guide to Marketplaces, now summarized in a deck
Six months ago, we published A Guide to Marketplaces. Marketplace companies comprise an important part of our portfolio and investment thesis and we recognized the shortage of content out there specifically geared toward marketplace startups. We compiled a lot of the insights we learned from working with great marketplace companies and wrote a handbook. It […]
Understand learning profiles before hiring
The average 25-year-old has already worked 6.3 jobs, and will have 12-15 jobs before their working career is finished. The portrait of the job-hopping millennial is a stark difference to Gen X and Boomer workers who may have stayed with the same job and employer for decades. Another study found that millennials have almost twice as […]