Read more about how we’re thinking and where we’re investing here.
Recent Posts
Entrepreneurship
I recently wrote about how to build an ideal investor base if you find yourself in the fortunate position of being oversubscribed in the round you are currently fundraising for. In that post, I mentioned “help in hiring” as a quality that might be potentially valuable to you when considering the right investors. When we talk […]
Entrepreneurship
Part of the job of a VC is to deliver on the promises they made to investors when raising the fund. Every VC defines their investment scope by a combination of thesis (e.g. invest in network-effect driven business), thematic interest (e.g. invest in AR / VR companies), stage (single stage versus lifecycle investment), ownership targets, […]
Version One
On April 19th, I swore in as an American citizen after living in the US for nearly eight years. I am lucky that my immigration process was pretty frictionless. Those of you who know me understand that I’m a proud Canadian. I’ll likely never give up the “u” in words like colour and behaviour. And […]
Entrepreneurship
When we think about pitches, most of the focus is on entrepreneurs pitching investors for capital. But VC can be competitive, particularly for interesting deals, and in many cases, the pitch meeting is a two-way street. Some of the best later-stage investors walk founders through an institutionalized “reverse” pitch. If you find yourself in the […]
Crypto / Blockchain
I recently returned to Harry Stebbings’ 20 Minute VC Podcast, where we chatted about all things crypto…where the crypto market is today, how it compares to the Dotcom bubble of 2000 and why crypto is the biggest disruptor to hit VC in a decade. You can listen to the episode here. We covered a wide […]
Crypto / Blockchain
We recently organized another crypto dinner in Toronto, bringing together the local community and a bunch of people that were in town for EDCON (the Community Ethereum Development Conference). Most of the dinner conversation centered around recommendations on how the Ethereum Foundation can play a more active role in developing the ETH ecosystem. Throughout the […]
Entrepreneurship
In the past year, a few of our portfolio companies have introduced regular skip level meetings into the organization. These are direct meetings between managers and team members who are one or more levels below them… for example, board members meet with senior managers (without the CEO) or the CEO meets with team members (without […]
Crypto / Blockchain, Entrepreneurship
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 […]
Entrepreneurship
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 […]
Entrepreneurship
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 […]
Portfolio
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 […]
Entrepreneurship
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 […]
Crypto / Blockchain, Portfolio
We are very pleased to announce our investment in Axiom Zen, the maker of CryptoKitties. We participated in the $12M Series A alongside our friends at USV and a16z. And, we are excited to be working with the CryptoKitties team to create the leading crypto collectible platform. If you’ve missed the CryptoKitty mania, it’s a […]
Marketplaces / Social / Collaboration / Network Effects, Portfolio
We’re pleased to formally announce our prior seed investment in the London-based car subscription company, Drover. And we’re even happier to announce that Drover has just raised a £5.5 million Series A round. We co-led the £2 million seed investment with Forward Partners, and today Drover is announcing they’ve closed a Series A round, which […]
Crypto / Blockchain
One of the major advantages of the blockchain is that token models make it much easier to incentivize users. For example, during the early days, you can hand out tokens to reward early users and solve the chicken and egg problem that so many social platforms face. With decentralized platforms, the value that is created […]
e-Books, Favorites, Marketplaces / Social / Collaboration / Network Effects
Note: We’ve updated this handbook — read the latest and greatest 3rd edition here! About two years ago, we put together The Guide to Marketplaces. It compiled many of the insights we’ve learned from working with great marketplace companies and analyzing the industry. One third of Version One portfolio companies are marketplace companies, and with […]
Entrepreneurship
When we developed our core beliefs, we spent considerable time thinking about our investment philosophy, as well as how we should work with our portfolio companies and what kind of resource we want to be. Specifically, we included two points involving our role: 5) We can make the greatest impact as a Seed investor. The seed […]
Entrepreneurship
As investors, we want to have an impact. We want to help entrepreneurs, build sustainable companies, improve lives, and change industries. When I think back to those situations where we’ve made the biggest impact on entrepreneurs, they’ve all got one thing in common: they were all times when we believed when others didn’t. For example, […]
Crypto / Blockchain
Decentralization maximalists argue that you cannot trust a centralized organization and thus, everything should be decentralized. And thanks to the advances in blockchain technology, that’s now technically possible. These proponents of decentralized platforms can offer up numerous reasons why the decentralized world is superior; the chief two reasons are avoiding censorship and eliminating the rake […]
Entrepreneurship
Over the past couple of years, I have been asked to give input on tech policy for all levels of government: city, provincial, and federal. This has been both informally and formally through committee work. I feel lucky to live in a country where elected officials seek input from industry to come up with the […]