The first rule of real estate

Before you read this, go read Mark MacLeod’s post on Who not to take money from…. It’s not related to this post, but a great post for entrepreneurs to read when talking about investors.

RT @Cmdr_Hadfield Chris Hadfield 19 Jan With a long tradition of hockey on the shore of Lake Ontario, introducing Toronto - Go Leafs Go! @MapleLeafs pic.twitter.com/iZdN2yZb

If geography doesn’t matter, than why do plane tickets cost so much?

“When it comes to raising funds, I just don’t think the geography matters that much. Good solid product that solves an actual pain can find it’s way to investors any where in the world thanks to the internet.” – Adeel vanthaliwala

I read a lot of comments like Adeel’s. And I agree that geography might not be the most meaningful filter, it still impacts startups in raising capital. It is far easier to raise money from a broader range of sources today, than it was 10 years ago. Changes to Canadian Tax Act (Section 116) have helped open the border to outside capital. There has also been a rise of new Canadian funds that have all closed in the past 2-3 years including: OMERS Ventures, Relay Ventures, Rho Canada, BDC Venture Capital, Real Ventures, Version One Ventures, Golden Venture Partners, Tandem Expansion Fund , Georgian Partners, etc. I worry that comments don’t take into consideration the complexity and challenges of raising capital. The impact of geography on raising capital has been reduced, but geography does still affect startups raising money.

Fugetaboutit!

The best advice on geography is from Brad Feld in 2007:

  1. Don’t worry about it
  2. Be realistic about the available resources
  3. Find the local entrepreneurial ecosystem – now!
  4. Don’t try to get investors to do unnatural acts
  5. Don’t play the “we can be virtual” game

From the point of the investor, geography probably doesn’t matter that much. Unless of course there is a limitation in the partnership agreement that limits the geography where the capital can be invested. There are other more practical concerns about having remote startups including legal and or taxation concerns (see Section 116). Or the ability for a startup to leverage personal/professional networks for hiring, business development, etc. And none of this describes the challenges of having to spend 6 hours flying each direction to attend a board meeting. But beyond that, proximity is not a requirement from the investor side. Good startups can be located anywhere.

“Local brewers = geography matters. As macrobrew VCs are increasingly spending time in multiple geographies (separate from their HQs) there is real potential to differentiate along knowing that you can actually sit down and see your VC face to face. For some that’s important, but for some that’s a negative. Just as some people here in Boston prefer drinking Cambridge Brewing Company ale; others could care less it was brewed locally.” – David Beisel

I like David Beisel’s   model of the VC industry starting to become more similar to the beer industry. There are larger funds, local funds, specialized funds, and individual partners. They all matter differently to entrepreneurs depending on the company, stage of development, location, etc. Understanding the available resources and your ability to access them are key.

Traction trumps geography

Non Linear Growth

There is going to be the inevitable argument about companies raising money from foreign VCs. The great news is since the changes to the Tax Act and the fall of Section 116, we have a lot of examples:

Not to belabour the point, it is possible to raise capital from foreign investors in Canada. But the level of traction demonstrated by most of these companies was very high. For example:

“Since HootSuite’s Series A financing, we’ve grown from 200,000 users to almost 2.5 million! We’re proud of our progress and are looking forward to the future with more success on the roadmap.” – Andy Au, Hootsuite

According to my calculation that’s a 431,690% CAGR of the registered users between when they announced their Series A and Series B financing. Go big or stay home. Traction and growth trump geography. Paying customers, a scaleable business. Being able to demonstrate that for every dollar that goes into the business you understand how many (more) dollars come out. You need to be able to demonstrate appropriate milestones to mitigate risk.

Avoiding Unnatural Acts

“Don’t try to get investors to do unnatural acts: Assuming you are looking for capital, focus your energy on two categories: (1) local investors – either angel or VCs and (2) VCs that are interested in the specific business you are creating. In category #2, “software” is not a specific business – you need to be a lot more granular than that. Your chance of #2 is enhanced by a relationship / investment with someone in category #1, so make sure you focus enough energy on that early on.” – Brad Feld

The secret here is that social proof that VCs are doing deals north of the border is not enough on its own. You need to focus your efforts, and assuming that you’re doing everything you can to hit accretive milestones you still need or want to try to avoid doing unnatural things. A local investor is not required, but it can be a signalling risk about the team, market, product, or other, i.e., what am I missing if local investors are cold? (There are situations where you can imagine an entrepreneur choosing to avoid local investors, particularly if they have had a deal go sour in the past, but usually the entrepreneur discloses this very early).

What to do about location?

  1. Fugetaboutit!
  2. Start nailing concrete milestones that demonstrate traction and mitigate the risk associated with your business.
  3. Get connected to your local community. Look for events like Founders & Funders, Elevator Tour or GrowTalks to have initiate low risk conversations with both local investors and entrepreneurs that have raised capital.
  4. Do your research! Use AngelList, Google, Bing, LinkedIn, portfolio pages, etc.  to find partners following and investing in companies in your very specific vertical.
  5. Figure out who locally is investing locally and figure out how to get a warm introduction and find 30 minutes to meet.
  6. Listen, ask questions, try to figure out what is missing, what is the biggest risk factor and how you might mitigate the risk.
  7. Rinse and repeat with non-local investors aka get your ass on a plane and keep hustlin’ (go re-read Mark Suster’s Never ask a Busy Person to Lunch).

When a Massive Opportunity Knocks!

Editors Note: This is a guest post by Chris Arsenault (LinkedIn@chrisarsenault) a tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. Chris is the Co-Chair of the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX), a board member at the Canadian Venture Capital Association (CVCA), a Supporter of the C100, among other things. Follow Chris at chrisarsenault.wordpress.com or on Twitter @chrisarsenault.

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The last few weeks have certainly proven to be extremely promising for Canadian Tech Entrepreneurs. Almost $80M of equity financing has recently been secured from some of the top investors in the world to help build our next generation of massive tech companies. It’s even more exciting when you realize that these funds are going to three especially young, dynamic and opportunistic companies, all of which are in our backyard!

Beyond the Rack

Beyond the RackYona Shtern, Robert Gold and the team over at Montreal-based Beyond the Rack (“BTR”) lead the way with a whooping $37M financing round that should propel the company to new heights yet unseen on the Canadian eCommerce front. BTR has quickly established itself as an eCommerce leader by showing the market that Canadian companies really do know what a “hockey stick” revenue growth chart looks like. The teams’ ability to build such a big company in such a short time frame has earned them our utmost respect. We initially met the team and reviewed their business plan in late 2008; by 2011, they were already ranked as one of the fastest-growing online retailers in the entire world. Yona was also wise in choosing his investors, be it industry specific angels or great VCs such as Panorama Capital, iNovia Capital, Rho Canada, Tandem Expansion, BDC Venture Capital, Highland Capital Partners, EDC and Montreal Start Up. If you aren’t a Beyond the Rack member, don’t wait – register now, and you’ll be impressed!

Shopify

Shopify - LogoJust down the road from Montreal is another world class eCommerce team. Ottawa-based Shopify recently closed a $15M second round of financing. Tobias Lutke, Cody Fauser, Daniel Weinand & Harley Finkelstein have developed an industry leading eCommerce platform that is already being used by thousands of leading online retailers around the world. The team, their vision and commitment to execution all combine to make Shopify one of Canada’s tech leaders in an extremely high growth global market. Unfortunately, we missed the boat on the opportunity to work with them, but our friends over at Bessemer Ventures, Firstmark Capital, Felicis Ventures and Georgian Partners were more than happy to come aboard. I’m expecting to see Shopify rise above the tide over the coming years and establish itself as a global leader in its space.

Fixmo

FixmoThe most recent team to announce a substantial equity-financing round is Toronto-based Fixmo. Led by its founders Rick Segal, Shyam Sheth and Joyce Janczyn, Fixmo just announced a $23M round. This investment round included both existing investors (iNovia Capital, Panorama Capital, Rho Canada and Extreme Venture Partners) and an impressive syndicate of new lead investors: Silicon Valley-based Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Washington-based Paladin Capital Group and Hong Kong-based Horizons Ventures. While the company’s core vision has not changed over the last two years, the product development road map has evolved at a rapid pace. Within an extremely short time frame, Fixmo launched a series of Government and Enterprise products, acquired two companies (Conceivium Business Solutions and Chocolate Chunk Apps), established a series of key partnerships and practically jumped ahead of every other Mobile Risk Management solution provider in the market. Obviously, the founders didn’t do it alone, but the sheer fact that Rick was successful in attracting some of the best talent out there (Bruce Gilley, Jonas Gyllensvaan, Tyler Lessard, Lee Cocking, John Yuen and others) speaks to the long term execution ability and potential of Fixmo.

Ambition coupled with Execution

The average tech financing round in Canada is under $4M. Therefore, the aforementioned three companies basically raised as much cash as 20 average Canadian tech startups combined. Obviously, I get nervous when I see a company (portfolio or not) raise such a large chunk of cash. Why? It’s not because I like the small size of the average Canadian financing rounds. Rather, it’s because I think that too much money for a young business can be as bad as or worse than not having enough. $15M-$40M rounds for Canadian tech companies are amongst the largest we have seen this side of the border in over 10 years. That being said, I do also think that Canadian Tech Entrepreneurs are now entering a phase of Ambition coupled with Execution. We have lived through too many years of “lack of ambition”, quickly followed by “lack of execution”, not to mention the much lamented “lack of capital”. However, we are now seeing deals done where massive amounts of ambition and execution converge, and capital is becoming available to build large tech companies right here in our own backyard. With more companies able to raise the amount of funding they truly need to generate hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, not only we will stop selling our companies short, they won’t need to move down south. Hopefully other investors will note the phenomenon, and future startups won’t have as much trouble raising the capital both from Canada and into Canada. And that’s good for all of us.

At iNovia, when a massive opportunity knocks, we answer! I’m expecting to be sharing a lot more stories about successful Canadian entrepreneurs, and how they’ve built hugely successful companies here as they compete globally for resources, capital and market share. There isn’t much stopping the entrepreneurs driving Canada’s next generation of large tech companies, and for the likes of Beyond the Rack, Shopify, Fixmo and many others, this is just the beginning.

Congratulations to all the teams mentioned in taking important steps on their paths to success!

Below some article worth reading with regards the above companies:

Editors Note: This is a guest post by Chris Arsenault (LinkedIn@chrisarsenault) a tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. Chris is the Co-Chair of the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX), a board member at the Canadian Venture Capital Association (CVCA), a Supporter of the C100, among other things. Follow Chris at chrisarsenault.wordpress.com or on Twitter @chrisarsenault.

OMERS Ventures ramps up with Howard Gwin & Derek Smyth

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It’s has been a long time since Canadians have seen the creation of a new 200MM+ venture capital fund. It was back in June 2010 that OMERS announced the creation of the INKEF fund. OMERS and ABP have since gone their separate ways with ABP running INKEF Capital focusing on high tech startups in the Netherlands. And OMERS creating OMERS Ventures focused on “investments in the Technology, Media, Telecommunications, Clean Technology and Life Sciences sectors in Canada and the US”.

A little more than a week ago, OMERS announced that they had hired Howard Gwin (LinkedIn, @howardgwin). Who I’ve been quoted as saying “he really is the best VC in Canada”, mind you Howard was buying the drinks at the time…

And it looks like they have added fellow Edgestone alumni Derek Smyth (LinkedIn, @derekjsmyth). I’ve heard the announcement is due later today, but OMERS Ventures announced Derek Smyth as part of the team today, Derek’s profile is already part fo the team at OMERS Ventures. Derek is another rockstar going to OMERS. Prior to joining OMERS Ventures, Derek co-managed two VC funds at Edgestone Capital Partners. He also has operational experience that includes his former roles as President and CEO of solutions provider Bridgewater Systems, and as COO of California-based Ironside Technologies Inc.

Derek and Howard were instrumental at Bridgescale in running the Digital Puck and Mentor Monday events that helped connect Canadian entrepreneurs. I’m hoping that these guys continue to invest in connecting, engaging and supporting all entrepreneurs (along with their portfolio). The ongoing support of the C100 and AccelerateTO already show that OMERS has a larger operational budget that allows them to support and sponsor community activities.

The future looks bright for OMERS Ventures.