StartupNorth

Category: Angel Investors

  • Less boardrooms, more dinner tables.

    People have become really good at pitching. The art has turned in to a bit of a science and if you do ever find yourself in front of a room of people it is par for the course for you to “nail it”. The pitch, it seems, is dead media.

    It’s time to stop obsessing with your pitch and start building relationships.

    If you are going to raise financing for your new product then you need to learn what it means to build relationships.

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    We started Founders and Funders on the basis that you would never want to accept investment from someone you couldn’t eat a meal with. What better way to find out than to eat a meal with them? It works incredibly well.

    You need to find ways to end up at more dinner tables and in less boardrooms.

    Also: Eat with your mouth closed ya filthy animal.

    Funny story. When I was raising an angel round for my latest company I met a fairly prominent investor for lunch. I ordered a $15 sandwich combo. He got two doubles of Grey Goose, the Rib Eye, and a glass of wine. Then dessert! The shithead then stuck me with the bill! I kid you not. He then got in his car and drove off, I contemplated calling in the DUI. The hell if I was going to let him invest in my company. It was worth the $120 it took to figure it out.

    I tell every entrepreneur that story, and I name names!

    Then there was the time I met with Steve Anderson at a crowded bar. You should consider an invitation to meet an investor at a bar or restaurant a golden ticket. Steve came in, he was starving. I was a bit nervous so I didn’t eat much but we shared some appetizers. He was cool as shit and I knew I wanted him in my round before that meeting was over. Having a coffee and being forced to sit in a corner of a busy bar helps you get almost every “is this guy/girl legit? can I talk to him/her without needing to watch myself?” sort of stuff out of the way.

    I met another investor at a Yogurt shop (he gave a fake name and told them my name was Mike). Another one in a Tiki bar and another in a co-working space.

    Get out of the boardroom. Loosen up. Your pitch sucks but your product is cool, and you are even cooler.

  • Brokers, Smokers and Midnight Tokers

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    In the past couple of days, I have seen a few emails from what could be best called funding brokers. They “facilitate” deals between early stage companies and potential investors. All for a consulting fee, usually for a percentage of the amount of funding raised. They have connections to high net worth angel investors and relationships with venture capitalists. Typically the fees and the engagement are model on investment banking particularly as related to later stage M&A deals.

    It’s not a surprise. It’s a well established model. The Lehman model (we all know how well Lehman Brothers worked out for the rest of us) is 5% on the first $1MM raised, 4% on the second $1MM, 3% on the third $1MM, and 1% for capital above $4MM. It changes with equity versus debt financing, reducing to a 0.5-2% fee on debt rounds.

    And particularly in later stage deals and M&A it is probably more accepted (acceptable?). In the transaction there are 3 potential parties:

    • Startup
    • Funder
    • Broker/Finder

    Typically the person contracting the broker pays the fees. This means that it’s either the VC paying the fee, but if you are the startup it means that you’re paying the fee. And that fee is either increasing your dilution or decreasing the amount of the round. You can look at it as just paying fees like you pay your accountant or lawyer.But why, oh, why are you willing to give up chunks of your company this early to do things you are capable of doing yourself.

    What does a VC think about brokers/finders?

    Jason Mendelson published his take on “finders” back in 2007:

    “Most venture firms don’t like the idea of brokers being involved and most venture financing documents have a clause that the company warrants that there are no brokers involved. Remember, the company’s money that is paying the broker is, in fact, the VC’s money that they invest in you.”

    Jason continues “good VCs have plenty of proprietary deal flow, so they aren’t relying on brokers to show them deals”. If you can’t get in front the right investors, you are probably doing it wrong. There are a very limited set of high tech, emerging business model, high potential growth investors in Canada. Need a ‘show me the money’ list? There are other ways to raise your profile as a startup and get in front of investors. Andy Yang wrote a great piece about getting the most out of AngelList as a startup. If these channels aren’t working for you, you might want to go back and ask yourself is it the funders or is it me? What do I need to do to make my company more attractive to potential investors? Customer development? Product development? Etc.

    How do you spell MBA?

    We love to heckle MBAs, mostly because we’re all jealous that we don’t have one. But is it a requirement to raise funding.

    “On the other hand, skills i bet won’t be important as much in the future:

    • having (only) a big rolodex or (offline) network
    • having a traditional MBA or investment banking background

    Both of these are still important, but will become commoditized and marginalized by the availability of such information from online systems for social networks & reputation, and by the relentless advance of access to capital from a variety of channels.” – Dave McClure

    No one is arguing that brokers shouldn’t get paid. The model is relevant. People work hard to build trust, reputation, networks and knowledge. With later stage deals the relationship, private placements, increased valuations, connections with CEOs and funders, it makes sense. But as Dave McClure rightly points out the value of the specific skills are changing. Particularly at the very earliest stage.

    There is a great discussion on OnStartups about the finder’s fees. You can see the tension between entrepreneurs and investment bankers.

    Social Anti-Proof

    I don’t like finder’s fees for early investment rounds. Whether you call that seed and series A, I don’t know. I just don’t like seeing that capital taken out of the hands of the entrepreneur from operations. So just don’t do it.

    As the company matures, the existing investment banking model doesn’t feel wrong. Many of the relationships, matchmaking, guidance feels like something you pay for, only after the deal closes. I feel like really early stage companies that have hired a broker must be broken, i.e., there must be something fundamentally wrong with the  team, the market, the advisors, etc. if they are unable that might explain why they are having difficulty raising an early round.

    So it’s very wrong early. Ok later.

  • How to get the most out of AngelList: As a VC and as an Entrepreneur

    I love AngelList.  I truly believe it is disrupting the way early stage deals are being discovered and funded.

    When I was with BlackBerry Partners Fund (now Relay Ventures), I used AngelList to virtually meet and screen tons of companies.  I set up Super Fridays for myself, filling my mornings and/or afternoons with back-to-back 30 minute calls with 10-12 companies.  I really recommend this to any young VC looking for both dealflow and honing their game.  The velocity and juxtaposition of all these entrepreneurs, pitches, and companies really taught me how to evaluate deals along the VC spectrum:

    • (NO) polite and immediate no thank you
    • (NOT YET) check back with traction
    • (NOT SURE) send me your pitch deck so I can another set of eyes on this
    • (POTENTIALLY) let me bring this up at the next Monday partner meeting and see if someone bites
    • (YES) holy moly let me get John Albright right now

    All told, I probably screened 150-200 companies every three months on AngelList alone.  Ultimately, after all those Super Fridays, the firm funded two great companies: PubNub and ClearFit.

    Now as I sit somewhat on the other side, running Extreme Startups, I am spending time trying to get VCs to view our companies’ AngelList profiles.  To help figure out what companies should be doing on AngelList to help maximize their exposure, we at Extreme Startups recently had a session with Ash Fontana from AngelList to get his advixe.  Ash shared some best practices that I’d like to share with our community.  His advice included a lot of great tips and some common sense details that time-crunched entrepreneurs might glance over.

    Company Profiles

    1. Fill it out completely.  All the sections and tabs.  Comprehensive profiles are definitely the best so that there is both pertinent and substantive information.  One good tip is for the Founder Bios – include university info as well as some investors search for key schools.
    2. Be open / generous with information.  Specifically for the Fundraising tab, the Deal Terms should be filled out.  You don’t need to put valuation, but some indication helps investors looking for certain price ranges or structures (convertible note vs. equity).
    3. Use graphics – slides, screenshots, graphs, and videos to make a static page pop.

    Key tips to stand out

    • State the most original thing or function your product and company does.
    • Information about the market size is key.
    • Name something extraordinary about your company or founders.
    • State the hardest problem you solve.

    How do you get featured?

    For those lucky four startups on the feature page on the front page of AngelList, what is the process to get there?  It’s curated by Ash, who uses a number of different tools to track interest and traction.  Note that there are now over 80,000 startups on AngelList, with ~100 getting added every day.  Only five get featured per week – so only top 0.5% have the chance to be featured.  We are lucky to have our alumnus Granify on the feature page!  ShopLocket, SimplyUs, and Verelo all have great profiles as well (shameless plug).

    So what should you do after your profile is up?

    1. Be active.  It’s a social network.  Start and engage in conversations.  Follow interesting companies, entrepreneurs, and investors.  Comment on people’s status updates.  Refer interesting deals to other people.
    2. Be proactive.  Reach out to investors and advisors.  Ask for referrals and recommendations!
    3. Match your offline activity to your online profile.  Add an advisor or investor?  Make sure you AL profile reflects that.  Have your network post and share your traction and successes online!

    Other AngelList resources recently launched

    • AngelList Docs is in beta, but only for US incorporated companies for now.  It’s a great resource to close your deal online, industry standard docs and no legal fees.
    • AngelListTalent recently launched and helps startups recruit, and talent identify great jobs.  It uses a double opt-in structure, so you only get shown the jobs of the companies you follow.  It’s a great resource for recruiting.

    Hacking AngelList articles

    Lastly, Ash mentioned he loved and supported the hacking AngelList posts.  Somewhat analogous to the black art of gaming the iTunes stores, there are ways to succeed on AngelList outside of what is included in this post.  I just googled and found a couple of hits.  There are the most useful imho.

    Final thoughts

    I really hope more Canadian companies use and publish on AngelList, Gust, and others.  It’s a great way to get your profile out to Canadian, US, and international investors.  Not to mention its a great way to help entire cities and regions get noticed for great deal flow.  Maybe some young VC down south will start arranging their own Canadian Super Fridays…

    Please follow me on AngelList! (and Twitter).

  • 7 Ways To Rock a Startup Accelerator Mentor Day

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter  or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in August 31, 2012 on RocketWatcher.com.

    I spent the day yesterday at FounderFuel for their Mentor Day. If you aren’t familiar with FounderFuel they are a very successful startup accelerator based in Montreal. And what a day it was – 8 startups pitched and then did roundtable breakout sessions with over 50 mentors including VC’s, angel investors, entrepreneurs and senior executives. Here’s my mentor’s perspective on how a startup can really get the most out of a day like that:

    1/ Pick your Target Mentors Ahead of Time: 50 mentors is a lot and they represented a wide cross section of folks that have deep experience in different consumer and business markets, and have a range of skills from technical expertise to sales, marketing, finance, and legal experience. Selecting a subset of the mentors with experience relevant to your business will help you target your discussions.A handful of the teams that needed marketing help reached out to me by email before the day and that helped to make sure that we connected at the session which I thought was pretty smart.

    7 Ways Rock a Startup Accelerator Mentor Day2/ Ask for Feedback on your Pitch: The mentors are both experienced pitch artists, and listen to pitches a lot. What better folks to give feedback on what worked and what didn’t work with the pitch you just gave? In this case the companies are all still in the early stages of the accelerator program so it’s a great time to get feedback that will improve the ultimate pitch you give on demo day. The feedback will also give you a feel for the differences in what an Angel investor might be looking for over what the more traditional VC’s are looking for in a pitch. “Tell me one thing that would have made my pitch better” or “What was missing from my pitch?” would both be great ways to start that discussion.

    3/ Ask for Specific Help: The mentors are ready and willing to help but they can’t guess what you need. Coming with a set of specific requests helps shape the discussion in a way that is most helpful to you. Don’t be afraid to ask for specific introductions – even if the folks in the room don’t have the answers you need, chances are they know someone who does.

    4/ Listen, Ask Questions (and Filter later): – The mentors yesterday came from really different backgrounds and had worked in a broad range of industries (consumer, gaming, retail, enterprise, financial services). Sure we’re all smart folks but you wouldn’t believe how different our opinons were about questions the startups were asking. For example, at my session with Openera – a tool for automatically organizing files and attachments –  we got into a discussion about selling to consumers versus enterprises as a starting point. I ALWAYS tilt toward enterprises when people ask me that because I know/love enterprise sales. The mentor beside me, Yona Shtern, the CEO from Beyond the Rack on the other hand thought selling B2C (or B2C2B) was just fine. Only Openera can decide who’s got smarter advice for their business (yeah OK, in this case it’s probably the smarty-pants Beyond the Rack guy but hey you get what I’m trying to say here). Another example – in the discussion with InfoActive (a very cool tool that lets you easily create beautiful interactive data visualizations), I immediately saw the applicability to creating interactive marketing materials. I’m a marketer, that’s the obvious use case for someone like me.  The mentor beside me (James Duncan, CTO at Inktank) on the other hand saw the value in selling to IT departments that needed a way to easily create good looking dashboards to help IT communicate to the business side of the house. That’s a great use case that a marketing person like me would be unlikely to immediately think of. Both ideas might be worth investigating but only InfoActive can really decide that. Avoiding “mentor whiplash”, as the FounderFuel gang refers to it, is a critical skill for startups in accelerators that have deep rosters of active mentors. Remember too that time is limited so you don’t want to waste it having a long debate with a single mentor over a specific point. Listen, probe a bit if you need to, and then move on. You can always schedule follow-on time with a specific mentor to explore an idea later.

    5/ Take Notes:  You put a couple of CEO’s a VC, a senior exec and a CTO at a table together and guess what happens? We talk. A lot. Not only that but the conversation moves very quickly from one point of view to the next. Some teams were recording the sessions but the room was loud (did I mention we talk a lot?) and figuring out who said what later might be a challenge by voice alone. Having someone taking notes is a good idea to make sure that you’re capturing ideas as they are flowing.

    6/ Work the Edge Time: By far the best way to get 1 on 1 time with a mentor yesterday was to do it over the break or over lunch. That also gives the mentor a chance to ask questions they might not get a chance to in a round table session.

    7/ Don’t Forget Everyone’s a Potential Investor : The VC’s are easy to spot (and there were a lot of them there) but most of the mentors I talked to are also doing a bit of angel investing as well. For companies at this stage anyone that’s willing to invest time with your company might also be likely to invest cash as well.

    So there’s my advice. I’m sure the other mentors all have different opinions – yep, we’re funny that way.

  • Thoughts about accelerators

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    Most people love to just give advice as if it’s set in stone. These thoughts cannot be applied to every startup, use your own judgement and do you own due diligence.

    Rewind to 2009, we had a stellar year. We had created Tether.com from a simple idea to millions of dollars in revenue. I evaluated various aspects of this success and realized we were paid huge dividends because we made a significant difference in the way people were able to work. At the young age of 21, I faced two options:

    • Retire
    • Continue creating disruptive products and change the world

    Luckily (or unfortunately) I took the second option, creating products that would hopefully disrupt markets. I decided the market I wanted to disrupt was computer programming.

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    Being from Nova Scotia, a small province not really known for its stellar technology, I was faced with two options:

    1. Fund my own startup out of pocket, or
    2. try to raise money.

    We’re known for lobsters, which is a far stretch from computer programming.  Raising cash locally was a stretch, particularly given the very early stage of the business. And while it feels like a feeding frenzy in the Bay area, most US-based investors wouldn’t know where Nova Scotia is on the map (while Jevon [LinkedIn, @jevon] is trying to change that, outside of Boston many might still have a hard time finding us) and putting capital into an early company in a location they don’t know felt very unlikely.

    The best option was to self-fund Compilr with the expection to go from initial idea through to revenue much like we had previously done with Tether.com. We had an idea,  we had a team that was capable of building, we had users signing up to use the service (our user base had grown 13x in a 3 month period), but we had no revenue. And we were running out of cash. Getting people to pay turned out to be very challenging. More challenging than it was with Tether.com.

    At some point, I realized that I needed help. The help probably wasn’t cash. Raising millions of dollars in funding, wouldn’t solve our problem. The money could extend our runway, give us more time to increase our output on features, bug fixes, but if no one would pay for the product – it didn’t matter.

    If money alone wasn’t the answer, maybe it was accelerators that could help (I hear there might be an incubator/accelerator bubble or something). I applied to Y-Combinator with a video from my beautiful rented apartment in Dominican Republic, but ultimately was turned down. I applied to a local entrepreneur competition, Compilr placed 3rd  but sadly there was no financial benefit. At this stage the product went to the back-burner, the development team focused on other projects, the question was: what to do next?

    “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” – Wayne Gretzky

    SeedCamp logoAn angel investor introduced me to Seedcamp. And while Seedcamp was Europe focused, they had a strong portfolio of very early stage software companies. Long story short: I applied, invited to pitch in New York, and was accepted to the program. Going to an incubator was a big decision. I was getting mixed advice from my mentors, with some mentors telling me “you are an idiot for valuing your company so low” and others saying “Seedcamp had over-valued the company given the traction”.

    It’s a hard decision, but ultimately I decided that the small percentage I was giving up Seedcamp was a good fit for Compilr and me. Seedcamp was providing value to help Compilr, and if I was successful we could return the favor so they can invest in other entrepreneurs. It felt good, like a fair trade.

    I’ve determined that startup accelerators can provide returns even beyond the bottom line (or the post-money valuations). Here is what entrepreneurs should expect from an incubator:

    Validation
    When an accelerator says, we like your idea and your team and want to give you a small bit of cash, this is significant validation. I think this is the death row for most startups. If your team doesn’t get any validation, will it just become a “back-burner” project. Accelerators can help provide entrepreneurs early, meaningful validation.
    Exposure
    Always insure that your accelerator is able to provide you with adequate exposure. Every time we were involved in a Seeedcamp event we saw about a 30% increase in traffic, which was easily identifiable from those particular events. Accelerators are press whores, they want just as much exposure as you. Weasel your way into anything that could be related to you.
    Accountability/Focus
    Being a single-founder with a crazy idea, accountability sometimes goes on the back-burner. As a founder/CEO sometimes you have ideas that are completely inaccurate and have no foundation. Having a team that can slap you around a bit, when you decide you want to pivot from an online IDE to an online garden center is a great asset.
    They don’t solve your problems.
    My reason for joining an accelerator was simply, if I get enough smart people looking at my business, I’d get to revenue faster. The fact is you could have the most brilliant advisers or mentors helping you, but they still can’t solve your problems. They just aren’t connected into the industry like you.  In the end you need to make strategic decisions on where you want to go.
    Competitiveness
    Joining an accelerator, is always competitive. Being apart of an accelerator provides a degree of competitiveness. When your teammate just raised $910k from top US investors and you haven’t done shit, you instantly feel like you want to go out and raise $2m.
    Prepare to insult everyone
    The worse part of having really great mentors, is when you are in a rut, they’ll tell you “they told you so”. If you didn’t follow a mentor’s advice they may shun you, they may refuse to give you advice on the “basis that you don’t follow it”. The biggest problem if you take one mentors advice, you will insult another.

    Can I help? If you think I can help, shoot me an email: [email protected]

  • Extreme Demo Day

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    Extreme Startups has announced the Demo Day for the first cohort of companies. We’ve written about Extreme Startups in the past, we’ve covered some of the cohort including Shoplocket, and we think a number of cohort qualifies as Hot Sh!t (Jeff Lawrence (LinkedIn, @datajeff) of Granify; Michael Curry (LinkedIn, @mikecurry) of Verelo and Andrew Louis (LinkedIn, @hyfen) of ShopLocket).

    Extreme Startups

    Companies presenting at Demo Day are:

    Get a ticket or an invite

    There are no shortage of events for startups in Toronto, ranging from the originator but currently offline DemoCamp to the reinvigorated SproutUpTO. But DemoDay is shaping up to be an exciting event, with a full house, I heard that there were over 400 confirmed attendees with a large number coming in from Montreal, New York, Boston and the Bay area.

    The demos are happening on June 19, 2012 from 1-4pm. There is a post demo social happening starting at 8pm. StartupNorth is proud to be supporting both the demo event and the evening social.

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  • CVCA, #FFdemoday and AccelerateMTL

    Chris Arsenault (LinkedIn, AngelList, @chrisarsenault) sent me a message yesterday about writing about the CVCA conference. And I was looking at the conference trying to figure out why as an entrepreneur that I might want to attend this event. It is “the premiere networking and professional development event for Canada’s venture capital and private equity industry”. Well I don’t work in venture capital or the private equity industry, and the professional development I can get that at Ladies Learning Code or Udemy or O’Reilly. So why should I care? Maybe a “free Blackberry Playbook” would get me to pay for the registration. Disclosure: RIM is a sponsor of StartupNorth, though we don’t have any free Playbooks. 

    Then it struck me.

    1. FounderFuel DemoDay
    2. AccelerateMTL
    3. CVCA

    My goodness, this is an incredible opportunity for Canadian entrepreneurs. If you plan this correctly, you can connect with investors, other founders, folks form NYC, Boston, the Bay area. While the specific sessions at CVCA aren’t necessarily my cup of tea, you could sit in the lobby at the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth and meet every investor in one shot.

    CVCA attendees will have a “free Blackberry Playbook” . Just like LinkedIn, I’d be building an HTML5 optimized version of my application and making sure as hell it works like gold on a Playbook (which has a great implementation of WebKit browser). You could call the Fairmont and set up an espresso stand and give away coffee to everyone that demos your application. Hell if nothing else a big sign with “Free Latte” for all of the hung over CVCA attendees and have a student running to a local coffee shop for fulfillment. Great opportunity to get out and hustle.

    On top of all of this you get to see some brilliant demos at Founder Fuel. This is going to be a killer event, and you could make it a very interesting opportunity to get in front of potential investors, partners and folks from outside Canada for relatively little cost.

  • 2011: Glass Half-Full or Half-Empty for Canadian VC?

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in February 14, 2012 on MarkEvansTech.com.

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    First, the good news about Canada’s venture capital landscape. In 2011, investment activity climbed to the highest level in four years ($1.5-billion), a 34% increase from 2010, although it is still significantly below the record activity ($2.1-billion) reached in 2007.

    The bad news is there’s still not enough supply to meet rising demand, plagued by “continued weakness” when it comes to fund-raising.

    The good news-bad news scenario was spelled out in the Canadian Venture Capital Association’s annual report. For those of us in the glass half-full camp, the increase in investment and the number of deal is cause for optimism.

    As well, 2011 saw a spike in M&A activity with 34 deals, including two each by Google, Facebook, Zynga and Salesforce.com. And there was a flurry of incubators and accelerators established, including Extreme Startups last week.

    Before anyone gets carried away, Canada’s venture capital landscape is a long, long way from being solid, let alone robust. There’s still not enough venture capital for seed, series A or major rounds. And don’t expect U.S. investors to pick up the slack.

    In a press release, CVCA president Gregory Smith said there is concern about whether enough fund-raising can be dong to support the demand for investments. This situation was illustrated by the fact new commitments to Canadian VCs were flat last year at $1-billion.

    “Canada has a historic opportunity to become an innovation leader,” Smith said, adding that “in order to act decisively on this opportunity, we must first overcome challenges to supplying VC funds that, in turn, supply entrepreneurs.”

    So what’s the solution? How can Canada’s venture capital community do a better job of supporting the startup community? There is not easy answer to a problem that has been around a long time and doesn’t look to be changing any time soon. It’s not going to be an easy fix from government or U.S. investors or institutional investors waking up to the idea of venture capital investing.

    Perhaps the answer to the problem is this: success. If more startups and mature high-tech companies are acquired, that could (emphasis on “could”) encourage investors (angels, VCs and institutional) to get more involved. Success has a strange way of helping people to see the light or new opportunities that they otherwise would have dismissed or not seriously considered.

    That said, success is a double-edged sword. Without enough financial support, it is hard for startups to have enough powder to become acquisition targets. If they’re not interesting targets, there’s no acquisitions and, likely, less interest from investors.

    So which side of the fence do you sit on? Are you bull or a bear about Canada’s VC landscape?

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in February 14, 2012 on MarkEvansTech.com.

  • Extreme Startups

    Extreme Startups

    Rob Lewis and TechVibes is reporting that ExtremeU (you can read our past coverage 2009, 2010, 2011) has launched a new Toronto based incubator that leverages their experience over the past 3 years. Mark Evans provides additional details that includes “$7-million in funding from Extreme Venture Partners, OMERS Ventures, Rho Canada Ventures, BlackBerry Partners Fund and BDC.”

    Extreme Startups includes a who’s who of  the Toronto startup scene as mentors:

    • David Ossip
    • Daniel Debow
    • Anand Agarwala
    • Michael McDermentt
    • Ameet Shah
    • Albert Lai
    • Leila Boujnane
    • Ali Asaria
    • Noah Godfrey
    • Ray Reddy
    • Rick Segal
    • Salim Teja
    • Derek Seto
    • Nick Koudas

    Congrats to Andy Yang, Sunil Sharma and Amar Varma in getting this thing launched. Plus how can this not be awesome with Andy Yang as Harold and Sunil Sharma as Kumar in Extreme Startupping.

    Andy Yang and Sunil Sharma go EXTREME STARTUPPING

     

  • Wave Accounting closes $5MM from CRV & OMERS

    Wave AccountingLooks like US VCs are continuing to look at deals in Canada. Wave Accounting announced a $5MM Series A led by Charles River Ventures (CRV) with follow on participation from OMERS Ventures. It is great to see Devdutt Yellurkar (LinkedIn) looking north of the border. Devdutt has an amazing track record at CRV and previously at Rho Ventures, Sterling Commerce and Yantra Corporation. Guessing based on the press release that Devdutt will join Peter Carrescia (LinkedIn, @pcarrescia) from OMERS Ventures on the Wave Accounting board.

    Great news for startups, we’ve now seen Matrix Partners (TribeHR), Union Square Ventures (Kik & Wattpad), CRV (Wave Accounting), Bessemer (Shopify), Freestyle/Greylock/Embracardo (GoInstant) and one other Sand Hill Road firm all make active early investments in Canada. This doesn’t include the Canadians that have raised during stays in the Valley during YCombinator and 500Startups – Vidyard, Upverter (True Ventures), BackType (True Ventures), Kiip (True Ventures), Rewardli (500Startups) and others.

    This is great for Canadian entrepreneurs.