Saeid Fard

As a founder, have you ever been curious about this whole angel investing thing? This week's findfunding.vc spotlight is on an investor who's an expert in it you simply have to know: Matt Wilson, MBA from Allied Venture Partners. He: 🇨🇦 Is Calgary based 😇 Manages one of Canada's largest angle investor syndicates (now at 1,800+ members!) 🏒 Worked as a professional ice hockey referee, which he says shares remarkable similarities with investing Amongst founders, Matt Wilson, is known for bringing empathy and perspective as a former founder himself. Aside from financial support, his goal is to be the 'right' investor - one that aligns with a founder's vision, shares his network, and provides strategic insights when asked. ✉️ Make sure to pitch him, invest, scout, advise and more at https://linktr.ee/alliedvc For more, check out our funder spotlight card below along with Allied Venture Partners' profile on findfunding.vc (link in comments).

24

6 Comments

Check out this epic interview.

27

2 Comments

Try more things. Fail more often. Learn faster. Burn brighter. Plant more gardens. Launch more startups. Make more babies. Build more community. Help others do the same. This is effective opportunism. Pronoia & Purpose. E/opp is a better meme than Hiis. Just as inspiring, but more secular. Gender neutral vs. male-coded. More conjectural, less prophetic. E/opp is building & growing your mind & body. Building & growing startups. Building & growing families & communities. Effective Opportunism.

1

🚀 Just had an incredible experience meeting Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans in Toronto! Here's a mind-blowing stat: OnlyFans has paid out $15 billion to creators since 2016. Yes, billion with a B. 💸 The company takes 1/5th of the payments generated. With over 3 million content creators on the platform, it was fascinating to discuss the future direction of the business - which really has a ripple effect... OnlyFans has already shifted culture and how we think about creators. But their next big wave goes beyond content and culture—it’s about challenging traditional banking norms. With its massive financial footprint, OnlyFans is pretty well poised to reshape the financial landscape for lawful, profitable businesses often marginalized due to stigma. (👋 Shoutout to Sextech School founders, Women of SexTech, and other businesses that struggle to transact or even open business bank accounts.) Keily’s background as a partner at a law firm specializing in cyber, privacy, and security makes her the fit to take on the big banks. I love learning about how people found their ways into these sorts of spaces - for her, OF was a former client (and a fav client). I learned so much in our meeting. One last nugget that stood out: OFTV (their safe-for-work streamer) just licensed their first reality show to Netflix! At this point, the mainstream influence of OF, whether it's in entertainment or financial sector, is undeniably having a hand in what our future looks like.

277

23 Comments

Over the weekend, Tobi, the founder and CEO of Shopify, discussed the major reason investors passed on Shopify in the early days : market size. I remember that financing round, & I remember having the same concern, & making the same mistake. Living in the valley & driving on 101, the billboards & logo-adorned headquarters of successful companies provide a daily infusion of all the mistakes in I’ve made in guessing how a company or a market might evolve. Years later, I listened as Bill Gurley shared his thoughts about market size. He asked himself a question : whether the startup was increasing, decreasing, or maintaining the market size? (I can’t seem to find the link - but I have it in my notes!) I added that question to my diligence list when meeting startups. Now much later, having seen many companies create categories or reinvigorate aging ones, the question I ask myself has evolved. It’s not as the market size large enough? Instead, it the question is : do we believe this company can create the market? Market size is the output of all the players marketing, selling, building. Their efforts alter, distort, & juice the supply/demand curves of macroeconomics. It’s not a given - not an output or a steady-state CAGR. Often it’s the startups that engender the demand, change the market dynamics, & make markets massive by taking risks with products. When done right, these founders create category-defining businesses like Shopify (now worth $90b)!

350

29 Comments

Today at Antler VC Toronto, we had Michael Kravshik, CPA, CA, the founder of LumiQ come speak to us. The cohort is in week 5 of the 10-week residency. We’re still very much in the process of solidifying our cofounders and searching for product market fit. So Michael’s speech was timely, informative, and inspirational. Here were my key take-aways. 𝐎𝐧 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐟𝐢𝐭  🔸 Ideas don’t matter, the iterative test approach does; it’s more painful in the present but saves you lots of time in the future 🔸 Start with really broad assumptions, start validating those broad ideas, and then through the process of speaking to customers to get to the really narrow concepts 🔸 At one point Michael and his co-founder went through invalidating 25 ideas, which would seem discouraging but they grew and developed a lot through this process (even though they didn’t know it at the time) 🔸 At one point they did a mind-boggling 500 one-on-one interviews in the span of 6 weeks 🔸 The only sustainable advantage you can in a startup is knowing your customer better than anyone else 🔸 PMF is a moving target 🔸 PMF is treated as a verb at LumiQ 𝐀𝐝𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐅𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬 🔸 Be curious, open-minded, and be willing to kill your babies 🔸 If you keep going, you will eventually create your own luck 🔸 Lots of people get stuck in sunk-cost fallacy land, but you should listen to your gut and pivot when it doesn’t feel right 🔸 Founders have a reputation for being like cockroaches, and rightfully so, shamelessness can take one quite far I also asked Michael during the QA on what his emotionally compelling reason was for overcoming so many challenges to get the company to where it is today, and his answer was really insightful and relatable. He said that 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐢𝐜𝐞, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐢𝐜𝐞. Furthermore, if you’re not crazy AND stupid you probably shouldn’t do this! Thanks for bestowing your wisdom on us Michael Kravshik, CPA, CA and I hope I captured your words and sentiments correctly! 😃 #startups

92

15 Comments

Just opened a package from Harley Finkelstein and the Shopify team and was surprised at how heavy it was. Shopify, the platform that powers our website sent us this Milestone for processing our 1,000,000-th order. It’s an arbitrary number that carries some heft, and to those who are thinking about starting out on their own it might sound impossible. The advice I’d share from my personal 3+ year grind to our millionth order is don’t spend a second thinking about those as goals. Instead focus on blowing away your first customer, then your 10th and then your 100th and before you know it you’ll be further along than you even expected. It’s like building a brick wall, if you focus on how many bricks it’s going to take to build it, it might seem so daunting that you never start. Lay the first brick perfectly, then the first row, then move up, and before you know it the wall is built, brick by brick. Thank you to Shopify for enabling us to ship a million orders to the construction workers and tradespeople all across the US who literally build our country. Brick by brick, LFG.

1,176

199 Comments

Not many people know the story of "why" Zenhub exists...so here it goes👇 Back in 2014, the team that would come to be "Zenhub" was a scrappy group of devs and PMs working at a product studio up in Vancouver. When clients are paying you to do work, they (rightfully so) want to understand where that work is at and “when is this going to be done?” The problem was that we could never answer that question… No matter what project management solution we tried (and believe me, we tried them all), we kept coming back to the same core problem. Context switching... Ie. our devs always felt like they were being forced away from where they were working from (ie. GitHub) in order to update our PM tools. So they didn't update them. Needless to say, this wasn't leading to a productive relationship with our clients. So our devs got together on a weekend to try and fix the problem. What they hacked together was a simple Chrome extension to bring a Trello-esque "task board" into GitHub. And as they say, the rest was history. Well, not really, but we’ll save that story for another set of posts… Reducing context switching has been core to our mission from day one. But while GitHub was the home for teams back in 2014, that's changed. Today that home is Slack. While I know people have a lot of mixed feelings about Slack, it has (for better or worse) become where “work” happens in most modern organizations. That’s why today, we’re announcing early access for an entirely new Slack integration that’s going to be a game-changer for how teams use Zenhub. While platforms evolve, that idea of “reducing context switching” has remained a constant, and we’re excited to double down on that mission with Slack. With this new integration teams will be able to create, plan, and track work in Zenhub all without having to leave a Slack channel. If you want to get hands on with what we’re building and join our early access program, check out the link in the comments below. #slack #github #developers #agile #scrum #projectmanagement #devex

62

9 Comments

On Tuesday I caught up with Brandon Kuipers, one of the founders of Zox.    They have sold almost 10,000,000 products on Shopify since starting the business in 2011.   But they have been running into a problem: Like many stores, they offer hundreds of products and customers get overwhelmed and can't figure out how to find the products that are right for them.   They have solved their problem using an Octane AI smart quiz.   Here's what really stood out to me: ✅ Their quiz has solved decision paralysis for over 50,000 people so far. ❤️ Customers are loving the AI quiz, even sharing their results with each other. 🤖 The AI quiz asks shoppers a few questions, most of them free form where the shopper can type anything, and then it uses AI to write a personalized message to every single shopper and helps find them exactly the right handful of products that they will love out of the hundreds of products on the store. 🚀 They hadn't been able to make a quiz previously because they are constantly adding new products to their store. The AI quiz automatically updates itself with any new products without the Zox team needing to do anything special. ⚡ They made this quiz on vacation in just a few hours, most of which was just them thinking about what questions they wanted to ask in the quiz. I'm really excited about our AI quiz option on Octane AI. It's not our most popular quiz type just yet, but for some brands it is making previously impossible experiences possible.   We have a lot of plans for improving our AI quiz technology, we're overflowing with inspiration. I can definitely imagine a world where your quiz is creating itself (we already do this actually), automatically improving itself, and forming more and more personalized bonds with each customer.   What do you think of AI powered quizzes?

22

4 Comments

The AI hype bubble is almost over. When investors refused to fund new AI startups because they know they’re going to fail, then the AI hype bubble is starting to fail. Even the most clueless, Investors now know that this is a bubble waiting to burst like the metaverse bubble and the dotcom bubble. And nobody wants to be left, holding the back on this bubble. The era of free money iis over with interest rates sky high. When big tech companies are losing money on AI and the bigger AI startups are demonstrating that they are all dead and struggling to even have revenue, then no one is interested in funding, smaller AI startups that they don’t believe will be profitable anytime soon. People aren’t waiting for an AI unicorn to break out. They are waiting for Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and similar to start buying distressed AI startups. Collapsing companies and minimal paths to profitability doesn’t help a space that was already overhyped. Don’t forget in all this mess that the unfortunate reality is that engagement and retention don’t match installs and downloads. What I mean by this is the most basic of mobile tracking were ignored. You don’t judge success in the mobile market based on downloads or installs, but rather based on retention and engagement. What this means is, it’s not actually impressive for OpenAI to get to 100 million users quickly if 2% of them retain. The question is not how many people signed up for a free account. The question is how many monthly active users and daily active users do AI startups like OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Stability, and others have. And how many are paying customers? And what we are finding is that retention is in low single digits. The reality is that AI startups are getting users the way that mobile free to play did. And they haven’t found a way to actually make money on that. Don’t ask an AI startup how many users signed up. Ask them how many DAUs and MAUs they have. Ask them what their ARPDAU is. What you will find is that every number is low. AI startups have no idea how to do monetization, and they don’t have regular active users in any volume. What this points to is that they’re all going to fold or get bought.

38

7 Comments

🚨 Special News Rundown 🚨 Federal Budget Review now live with John Ruffolo and myself discussing how the new capital gains taxes are sending a clear message to entrepreneurs and investors: “We Don’t Want You!” Check out the full episode below ⬇️

37

1 Comment

For many startups, the ultimate sign of success is an exit strategy that provides shareholders with a return on their investment. However, what is often overlooked is the impact of liquidation preferences on these returns. Liquidation preference is a crucial term in investment agreements that dictates the order in which proceeds are distributed during a sale or liquidation. Understanding this term is essential for appreciating its effect on shareholder returns. Impact Partners client David Spreng, founder, CEO, and CIO of Runway Growth Capital, gives his POV on the topic below.

2

1 Comment

Going to #DiscoveryX tomorrow? Here are the things that I’m mostly looking forward to: ✅ Further developing relationships with the members of the Toronto investment community. No, we are not raising at Mavuus, but it's never too early to start building connections. ✅ Meeting the founders of the latest and greatest tech innovations. I love hearing about other people’s ideas and their success - it’s definitely a source of inspiration. ✅ Lastly, watching the Pitch Competition from early-stage startups. Honestly, they are my absolute favorite thing to do when at conferences. Want to learn the pitching Do’s and Don’ts? This is your place to start. Want to exchange notes on Top Things at #DisoveryX? Let’s connect.     

29

8 Comments

Product Hunt is the de-facto place to launch but it actually can be a lot more than that. In our most recent launch three months ago, I didn't "dine and ditch" like with previous launches. Instead, I actually engaged with the community and this has led to some long-term meaningful relationships. One of them with André J - who gave a ton of early feedback and has become a Stashpad power user and advocate. Today he wrote an essay about how he uses Stashpad as part of his AI writing tool stack. "Stash is a frictionless online markdown writing app that doesn't require signup. It provides secure URLs that are easy to share with people in your feedback loop. I typically ask a few people on LinkedIn for feedback. They can leave comments in the app or respond on LinkedIn." His full AI-writing stack is: 1. Perplexity 2. TextFX 3. Hemingway (also Durham-based, hi Adam Long 👋🏻) 4. ChatGPT 5. Grammarly 6. Stashpad

5

2 Comments

For those that saw part I of this article, here’s the second version that goes into more detail. If you’re running a data team or scaffolding one, these insights will help you shape your strategy and team with the right fundamentals.

44

2 Comments

For the past two weeks, I've been on the road, traveling across Canada and the US, giving talks on the intersection of AI and biotech. On a philosophical level, I feel fortunate to work in a field that is transforming biology from a specialized craft into a standardized engineering discipline. This shift is incredibly exciting. Just as mathematics revolutionized physics by uncovering nature's rules, AI and machine learning are now deconstructing biology into an engineering science. On a professional level, computational techniques are becoming central to biotech and healthcare startups, enabling close collaboration with domain experts. This transformation compels us to rethink resources, cloud infrastructure, access models, business models, and care paradigms. It's an exhilarating time for innovation and change. On a personal level, I’ve been overwhelmed by the large, diverse crowds of professionals attending my talks. They range from recent graduates from top-tier universities to mid-career and senior professionals from various technical and social backgrounds, all seriously considering careers in this space. Yes, there is hype. It takes effort to discern which companies are genuinely substantive. However, we have made significant progress, often led by quieter yet impactful startups. Yes, data silos are a problem. However, we are seeing leaders from government, academia, industry, and the private sector work together to unlock that access in an ethical and safe way to support advances. Stay tuned for some exciting news I'll be sharing soon :) #synbio #bioengineering #compbio #startups #biotech #venturecapital #artificalintelligence #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Innovation #AICommunity #StartupEcosystem

82

2 Comments

Fundraising is a Tactic, Not a Goal. It’s time for founders to revaluate the pursuit of funding. Don’t get me wrong, raising capital is a milestone for a startup and can dramatically change the trajectory of your business. It’s also challenging to pull off — everything from your approach to how you sell it, to just some luck around the timing of the deal relative to what else investors have seen all has to go in your favor. But don’t treat it like your goal — a founder that optimizes for fundraising above all else is likely not spending enough time on their customers or product. As Paul Graham says, the defining characteristic of the best founders is that they are relentlessly resourceful. Scott Belsky puts it slightly differently 👇 👉 Check out my free newsletter for more insights: https://lnkd.in/dKZQKHg2 . #starrtups #funding #founders #investors #funding #founder #fundraising #VC #venturecapital #entrepreneurship #entrepreneur #angelinvestors #venturecapital #pitchdeck

29

1 Comment

If you're a Canadian entrepreneur, investor, or founder then this past week has made it painfully clear that when it comes to innovation and economic recovery the calvary won't be coming and is in fact running in the opposite direction. The federal government and associated regional innovation support agencies (ie Invest Ottawa) are failing to look at solutions aimed at effectively addressing an overall decrease in entrepreneurship and economic activity across the nation and it is now on us, as resilient Canadian entrepreneurs, to empower those who can bring the most value to the table if we are to strive for the quickest path forward towards economic recovery and helping the average Canadian family better their quality of life. I am proud to announce that RHA Ventures Inc. has answered that call 👏 In the face of rising costs for domestic businesses in Canada and competition from abroad, RHA Ventures, an Ontario-based venture capital firm specializing in cutting-edge technologies, announced today its investment in Real Life Robotics, a Waterloo-based company designing real robots for real businesses. This investment marks a significant milestone in the development of Real Life Robotics and underscores RHA Ventures' commitment to supporting true, tried, and tested founders and Ontario’s growing startup ecosystem despite an overall decrease in entrepreneurship across the rest of Canada. “Real robots, real people, and real-world challenges are what differentiate RLR as a technology company. We could not be more thrilled to have RHA Ventures, a group of experienced founders and problem solvers, on board as strategic advisors and investors as we help elevate Ontario globally as a home for first-in-class robotics and automation technology - empowering businesses with transformative robotics solutions that unlock new levels of efficiency, reliability, and scalability,” - Cameron Waite, CEO of Real Life Robotics. The numbers clearly show that the cost of getting involved in a business or launching a new product is too high for the average inexperienced Canadian and our economy has slowed in growth accordingly. On a macro level, we are placing too high an importance on new founders in a down market when we should be rewarding and doubling down on our true, tried and tested investors, founders and legacy businesses who have shown they are willing to take the risk. Thank you, Brian Foster and the rest of the team at RHA Ventures Inc. for taking this first step of the journey with us 🙏 https://lnkd.in/gSr5TP48

63

8 Comments

2 tips from a senior partner Lightspeed (Jeremy Liew) on breaking into #venturecapital: "Suppose you’re young and have little operational experience. Instead of compensating for your weaknesses (you don’t need to go work for a startup for 10 years to gain operating experience!), spend time amplifying your strengths. What can you do that people in their 40s can’t? Can you go out and network more in the evening than they can? Do that. Do you have more time to dig into new, untapped areas than traditional investors (where no one is an expert)? Do that. Do what others cannot. Another example, suppose that you have a business or arts background, but you’re not deeply technical. You don’t need to go get a Masters in CS, or even to do a coding bootcamp to compensate. Instead, play to your strengths. Are you closer to pop culture than the average VC? Use that insight. Focus on categories that don’t need deep technical experience (e.g. e-commerce, marketplaces, SaaS) and build expertise in understanding go-to-market and industry structures." Full post is linked in the comments!

19

3 Comments