Read more about how we’re thinking and where we’re investing here.
Recent Posts
Entrepreneurship
Last week was a rough week. I can be a pretty open book when it comes to my personal and professional life (though I’m not going to delve into the details here). As I shared what I went through, the kindness and encouragement from family, friends, and colleagues helped tremendously. I proactively sought support from […]
Portfolio
Happy Canada Day to our friends and colleagues north of the border, and Happy Fourth of July to those of you south of the border. We hope everyone is having a great start to summer. Here’s a quick recap of the key activities and announcements from this past quarter. Welcome to the V1 family! We […]
Health / Biology
A few years ago, I explored the idea of a healthcare marketplace model. At the time, I imagined it would be pretty difficult to build a true marketplace for several reasons: low frequency and high unpredictability of use (because thankfully, we’re not always sick), the monogamy issue (people prefer to stick to the same doctor once […]
Data / AI / ML
This year we have seen privacy become top of mind for the general public, the media and “big tech.” The business model of Google and Facebook (collect as much data as possible about users for highly targeted advertising) is under attack. Europe’s legislators were addressing some of these privacy concerns when they put into effect […]
Entrepreneurship, Marketplaces / Social / Collaboration / Network Effects
Good to Great is one of those iconic business books that every founder, CEO and business leader should read at some point. In the book Jim Collins identifies eight common traits that “good to great” companies share. It has been a decade since the book was published, and not every company that Collins used as a […]
Health / Biology
Imagine a future, maybe 20-25 years from now, when there’s a smart toilet in every home. Picture it: the smart toilet, a device that collects our fecal matter and provides information about our health via our microbiome. The human gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem (consisting of trillions of bacteria, viruses, fungi) that is receiving […]
Entrepreneurship
I have been on cloud nine since Saturday night. As a long-time Toronto Raptors fan, my hometeam is headed to the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history. Throughout this playoff run, I have been thinking a lot about high performing athletes, and what we can all learn from a champion’s psychology. One […]
Entrepreneurship
Over the past few months, we have been running a series of posts where we profile one of the many incredible operators in our network. These operators are generous enough to share their expertise and wisdom, and we are lucky to do deep dives into unique topics. We’ve already learned about marketplaces from Bala Subramaniam, Head […]
Portfolio
We are excited to announce our investment in Dolly, where we participated in a $7.5M funding round alongside Unlock Venture Partners and Maveron. Like other peer-to-peer marketplaces, Dolly connects people in need of services with people who are ready to provide them. Dolly’s app connects individuals and businesses with local truck owners (“helpers”) to […]
Entrepreneurship
Bill Campbell has long had a legendary reputation as one of the best coaches of all time, but until now, only the people he worked with got to understand and experience the power of his approach. That’s why it is so great to see that Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle have written a […]
Portfolio
We are very excited to announce our investment in Kobalt, a new security as a service company. Security is increasingly on everybody’s mind, with several high profile, large scale hacks over the past few years. Here at Version One, we had our own unfortunate incident (and learning experience) only a few weeks ago. Yet while […]
Crypto / Blockchain, Portfolio
We are extremely excited to announce our investment in Guesser, the easiest way to engage with Augur prediction markets. Among all the crypto opportunities, we are most excited about crypto native opportunities – and prediction markets are clearly native. We spent some time with Augur right after it launched (you can read about that initial […]
Entrepreneurship, Marketplaces / Social / Collaboration / Network Effects
Over the past few years, the term “managed marketplace” has become so widely used that Bill Gurley from Benchmark recently tweeted that it is not clear to him what the difference is between a “managed marketplace” and a “true marketplace.” I think this is an important discussion to have and I am trying to develop […]
Entrepreneurship
Six weeks ago, we kicked off a new series where we profile an awesome operator in our network to learn about his/her work and contributions to his/her organization and community at large. Our inaugural guest was Bala Subramaniam and we asked him three questions on marketplaces. This time, I am very excited to introduce Sin-Mei […]
Crypto / Blockchain, Portfolio
Over the past few days, you may have seen news about Celo cross your newsfeed. Today, we are thrilled to share that we were early backers in the company (since January 2018) as it announces it’s most recent $30M raise led by A16z and Polychain. What exactly is Celo? It’s an open and open-sourced crypto-powered […]
Portfolio
We’re already a full quarter into 2019, and as expected, it’s shaping up to be a busy year. The Version One portfolio is filled with great startups doing incredible things, and here’s a selection of what has been happening (that we can talk about publicly): Company news and product releases: Outreach launched Galaxy, the app […]
Crypto / Blockchain
Crypto / blockchain has always been as much of a business model innovation as a technical innovation… Technical innovation: running a decentralized ledger / platform at scale Business model innovation: issuing tokens to give users / participants in the platform a stake in the project By issuing crypto tokens, platforms gave early users an incentive […]
Entrepreneurship
Over the past couple of months, we have written about a range of themes that have been interesting to us lately. Through public brainstorming, we have met some inspiring entrepreneurs, been introduced to some cool companies and received some great feedback. All in all, we have been enjoying the process of refining our thesis in […]
Entrepreneurship
Start-ups, by definition, are risky. But traditionally, start-ups have looked for the least risky position in the value chain. And for many, this is being a platform. Successful platforms build an ecosystem of contributors that create content for the platform. Or, they build a marketplace where sellers decide which products might sell or not. In […]
Version One
Here at Version One, we had two nightmarish weekends in early February when our accounts were hacked by pretty sophisticated and aggressive hackers. As we’ve since learned, hackers love weekends, because it’s a time when targets may not realize the hack right away and the customer service at service providers is limited. But thanks to […]