What does a Venture Partner do?

Most people know me as an early-stage investor in now over 30 internet companies through w media ventures and more recently, as a co-founder of the Vancouver-based start-up accelerator GrowLab. Lesser known is the fact that I also work as a venture partner for Munich-based Acton Capital. So what does a venture partner actually do? […]

Demo Day

Today is GrowLab‘s first demo day with the 5 companies from the first cohort showing to over 50 investors what they have worked on since mid August. I am incredibly proud of all of the teams – they worked very, very hard for this moment and I have no doubt that all of them will […]

Relaunch

The products of start-ups sometimes evolve so quickly that the communication of those changes falls behind – websites suddenly appear outdated and stale compared to the real story. This is how I felt when I looked at the w media ventures site a few weeks ago and decided that it was about time for a […]

Pivoting

It is not uncommon for start-ups to pivot their product and / or business model a few times and the right pivot at the right time can determine success or failure of an early-stage company. The Startup Genome project found that “startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better […]

The Art of the Investor Pitch

I gave a talk yesterday at Bootup about the “Art of the Investor Pitch” – Maura Rodgers did a great job summarizing it and here is the full slide deck. Being good at pitching investors is one of the key success factors for entrepreneurs so have a look at the presentation to see if there […]