Is crypto investing different from VC investing?
Six months ago, Boris wrote an important post about why the blockchain is disruptive to VC. As a quick summary, here’s why: It requires a new investment thesis: where is value accrued in a decentralized platform? It requires a new way of investing: tokenization by nature makes projects more liquid It might inspire a new […]
The promise (and risk) of pre-emptive funding
If you run a hot start-up, you’ll probably have VC’s ask if you are interested in getting a pre-emptive term sheet – you don’t have to do a full fundraise but can get similar deal terms as if you had done one. It sounds like a win-win for everybody. You can get back to building […]
The risks of scaling too fast, too soon
While preparing for some recent LP presentations, we took a close look at all of the companies that we exited in Fund I. There were ten exits out of a total of 20 investments. These were all “early exits” with mostly unsatisfactory outcomes for everybody involved, especially the dedicated and talented founders who had poured […]
Q1 2018 in Review: Portfolio News and Activities
Happy Tuesday! Hope you had a great Easter! It’s hard to believe that a whole quarter has flown by. In just the first few weeks of the new year, we saw a lot of M&A activity in our portfolio: @Mattermark (by @FullContact), @MemoAIHQ (by @coinbase), and @GoPike13 (by $CSU.ca). But there have been other big things happening across […]
Women in Tech: Improving balance in the workplace with more creative hiring
With March being International Women’s Month, I had the honour of moderating an event, “Women Shaping the Valley: A Celebration of Female Technologists” at the Computer History Museum (where I sit as a member of their NextGen board). We had an incredible panel of female technologists: Julia Grace (Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering, Slack) Amber Feng […]