spelton

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Round13 Capital puts founders first

Scott Pelton, Bruce Croxon and John Eckert - Round13 Capital

Round 13 CapitalWhat’s interesting about the Round13 Capital announcement today isn’t the size of the fund – they are targeting $100MM. It isn’t the people who are involved – they are amazing. It isn’t the LPs – they are different. The team, Bruce Croxon, John Eckert and Scott Pelton, are bringing together a group of entrepreneurs to serve as mentors. This is not uncommon in the US with a number of funds like SoftTech VC, Felicis Ventures, Founders Fund and similar to Founder Collective (if you are interested read the Kauffman Foundation’s Do Entrepreneurs Make Good VCs? [PDF]).

“Venture capital firms with a greater fraction of entrepreneur VCs have better firm performance. The positive relation between entrepreneur VCs and performance is stronger for venture capital firms specializing in high-tech industries and in early-stage investment.”
— Do Entrepreneurs Make Good VCs – Entrepreneurial Finance and Innovation Conference – The Kauffman Foundation

The Round13 Capital team has done an amazing job of bring together founders with exits as both LPs in the fund, and more importantly as mentors for their portfolio companies. This is a critical differentiator for Canadian entrepreneurs. Hopefully the Round13 fund will close and they can start funding Canadian entrepreneurs soon.

Round13 Investors/Founders

This is great new for Canadian entrepreneurs!

Where are the Canadian VC bloggers?

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I’m awarding Mark MacLeod (@startupcfo) of Real Ventures the Canadian VC Blogging Superhero Badge. Mark is producing world-class class content focused on SaaS Math including:

This is content that every entrepreneur looking to understand the basic metrics and mechanics of a SaaS business should read. Mark is the one Canadian VCs producing must read, world class content. It is the first time a Canadian VC has been producing content since Rick Segal switched teams (we’re much happier with Rick playing for the entrepreneurs). Rick’s post on Inside the Process is still the de facto standard for understanding the fundraising process from a VC perspective..

I keep wondering why more Canadian VCs don’t produce content.  It’s not like they don’t have access to blogging tools or the understand of how they should be used. For example, Inovia Capital uses their blog as a promotional tool for their portfolio and their activities in the community (not to pick on Chris, John, Kevin and team because they are really an amazing entrepreneur friendly firm that any entrepreneur would benefit from having involved in your company).  We have others like Boris Wertz blogging about his portfolio and his analysis of the industry including his support activities like StartupVisa Canada. It is just that in comparison to quantity and quality of US investors exploring the power of the medium to reach potential entrepreneurs. We have had some other interesting attempts like DigitalPuck.ca and The C100 to bring together Canada focused investment discussion. The other very interesting blog is Mark R McQueen’s blog (@markrmcqueen). But why are there only 2 Canadian VCs writing interesting content for the medium they are investing in?

Using the terrible “the Canadian market is one-tenth the US market” you might deduce there should be only 10 interesting US VCs blogging. Bullshit. Larry Cheng provides a list of 100 VC blogs by traffic, some of which like Rick’s blog are no longer active. Here is my short list of 30 very interest US VCs blogs you should be reading (or at least on your radar).

  1. David Skok (@bostonVC)
  2. Fred Wilson (@fredwilson)
  3. Mark Suster (@msuster)
  4. Paul Graham (@paulg)
  5. Dave McClure (@davemcclure)
  6. Albert Wenger (@albertwenger)
  7. Brad Feld (@bfeld)
  8. Roger Ehrenberg (@infoarbitrage)
  9. Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz)
  10. Mark Andreessen (@pmarcablog)
  11. Chris Dixon (@cdixon)
  12. Jeff Bussgang (@bussgang)
  13. Nivi and Naval – Venture Hacks
  14. David Hornik (@davidhornik)
  15. Fred Destin (@fdestin)
  16. Josh Kopelman (@joshk)
  17. Will Price
  18. Bill Gurley (@bgurley)
  19. Mike Arrington (@arrington)
  20. Ed Sim (@edsim)
  21. Seth Levine (@sether)
  22. David Cowan
  23. Scott Weiss (@W_scottweiss)
  24. Bijan Sabet (@bijan)
  25. Lightspeed Venture Partners
  26. Mark Peter Davis (@markpeterdavis)
  27. Mike Hirshland (@VCMike)
  28. Larry Cheng
  29. Rob Go (@robgo)

Maybe if you compare at the Q2 investment comparison it’s $7.5B by NVCA vs. $328MM by the CVCA where Canadian investment is 4.37% or the US VC market is roughly 23x bigger. It doesn’t matter. It seems that an interesting blog with insight and analysis of the market and trends is a requirement to differentiate and attract entrepreneurs in the US market.Why not here? Are Canadian VCs just lawyers, bankers and accountants with no real insight into market trends or company operations that can help entrepreneurs? I don’t believe that. So why are only 2 Canadian VCs actively blogging and providing insights? Is it that there is a limited number of potential deals and VCs already see every interesting deal? Is it that they are worried about competing against US led deals and don’t want to expend the effort to write a high quality blog? Do Canadian VCs not understand the medium?

It doesn’t matter. This is an open call for any Canadian VC to become an active blogger on StartupNorth.ca we’d love to have you write insightful pieces about the funding, market and landscape to help educate and inspire entrepreneurs.