Venture Partners are not full partners of a VC firm (who can write cheques for investments) but are usually brought in by a partnership to find new investment opportunities and manage portfolio companies. This is exactly my role with Acton Capital – while the fund is primarily focused on European investments, my role is to help with North-American deal flow. At the beginning of the week we announced our first deal on this side of the pond, a $6 million Series B investment in cloud-based legal management platform Clio. I am very excited to join the board of the company and work with the two founders Jack Newton and Rian Gauvreau to help build their company.

So as an entrepreneur, if you work with a venture partner of a VC firm, you need to understand his/her role. One the upside, venture partners are usually seasoned entrepreneurs and executives that have generally a deep understanding of your space and your company. At the same time, they are not the ones writing the cheques which might lead to complications in the investment process as they have to build internal support for the deal.

Related articles

• Clio focuses on legal space that’s ‘ripe for disruption’ (blogs.vancouversun.com)
• Vancouver’s Clio secures US$6-million venture capital investment (business.financialpost.com)

But more importantly, it was an amazing year for Canada’s start-up ecosystem – there is a new generation of angels and VC’s emerging in this country, more and more US VC’s are leading large financings rounds in Canadian start-ups, local start-ups are nailing it in SaaS, a few wordclass incubators have sprung up, organizations like the C100 are starting to make a real impact, and we have had a very healthy M&A activity this past year. What we still don’t have – and are probably many years away – are enough anchor companies.

2012 will most likely be a much tougher year for start-ups worldwide. We might have seen the end of the easy access to early-stage money and a recession might be around the corner in Europe and North-America. But despite these short-term challenges, I remain extremely bullish on the opportunities for Internet companies. We are still only at the very beginning of the Internet cycle so keep your heads down, focus on your long-term vision, build product, listen to your customers – and build those missing anchor companies!

Happy holidays to all of you and to an even better 2012!

Image via CrunchBase

Unbounce makes building, publishing and A/B testing of landing pages super-easy. It does not require any IT involvement and puts the marketer into the driver seat. This makes the product so successful and is the basic SaaS value proposition: let the user be the buyer and offer him a risk-free monthly subscription plan.

I have watched the team over the years bootstrapping their business – heads-down building product, listening to customers and building a great reputation in the marketplace. Now they felt it was the right time to raise money to scale the business even faster and they assembled a top notch group of investors led by Mark MacLeod from Real Ventures.

I really hope that many other start-ups look at Unbounce as a role model for their focus on solving a real problem, understanding customer needs and building a great product. Congrats, Unbounce team, well done – excited to be aboard!

P.S.: Funding announcement happened 2 weeks ago but only got around to blogging about it now.

Related articles

• Canada – land of SaaS? (wmediaventures.com)

Image via CrunchBase

Education is – besides health care – one of the verticals with the most amount of opportunity still left in the digital world. And still a lot of innovation in this space in the past few years was rather incremental (e.g. online test prep, language learning) than ground breaking.

Things are starting to change and I was very excited that I got the opportunity earlier this year to invest alongside Union Square Ventures in Edmodo, a social learning network for teachers, students and schools. Edmodo “provides classrooms a safe and easy way to connect and collaborate, offering a real-time platform to exchange ideas, share content, and access homework, grades and school notices”.  It has the power to help teachers engage students and allow students to reach their potential.

Education in the digital world feels like the 2nd or 3rd inning of a 9 innings baseball game and there is a realistic chance that we will not only be able to redefine in the next decade how students learn but make education universally accessible. I hope that Edmodo can play a crucial role in that process.

The company announced today a huge Series B round led by Matt Cohler from Benchmark and Reid Hoffman from Greylock with both joining the Edmodo board, helping the company to execute even faster on its vision to build the educational graph for learning.

Related articles

• Edmodo:The Total Classroom Solution (freetech4teachers.com)
• Innovation in Education (usv.com)
• Greylock And Benchmark Lead $15M Round In Social Collaboration Platform For Classrooms Edmodo (techcrunch.com)
• Edmodo Wants To Make Social Networking A Learning Experience (forbes.com)

• SaaS companies (like e-commerce companies) have a much easier time to monetize their product than most consumer internet plays as monetization doesn’t depend on scale like every ad driven monetization. This means that those companies require way less funding and most of them can be built on smaller seed and angel rounds which is ideal for the sometimes restrictive funding environment we face in Canada. Unbounce, a company I recently invested in, even bootstrapped their business to thousands of paying customers before they took funding to scale their business.
• The second reason is linked to sales & marketing. Traditionally, purchasing decisions for enterprise software were driven by IT departments which translates into a lengthly and costly sales process favouring those software companies that have the strongest relationships into the decision makers at the buyer. Geographical proximity plays a large role in building those relationships which in turn makes it very hard to build large enterprise software companies outside of the Silicon Valley. SaaS starts to remove IT from the purchasing process, meaning the user and the buyer are, increasingly, the same person – the product quality is now much more important than relationships and the chances of building a big SaaS company anywhere in the world have increased dramatically.

Related articles

• New investment: SilkStart, SaaS for membership organizations (wmediaventures.com)
• Forrester: SaaS Providers Should Go Vertical (devx.com)
• Why Human Resources Software Start-Ups Are On Cloud 9 (blogs.wsj.com)

Image by miketippett via Flickr

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 nail their pitches today.

Reflecting on the past few months with the GrowLab companies, I am reminded of a few things:

• Never ever underestimate the power of a strong and engaged network of mentors – especially as first-time entrepreneurs you can avoid an incredible amount of pitfalls if you get the right advice as the right time.
• Never ever underestimate the power of a great pitch – most entrepreneurs don’t spend enough time creating (and telling) the story of why their start-up is worthwhile investing into. A great pitch doesn’t get created over night but is the result of many, many refinements, trial pitches and feed-back loops. Don’t treat it as a side project, it is one of the most important things a CEO should focus on.
• And last but not least, never ever underestimate the power of a platform that elevates you above the noise of the ever increasing start-up activity – we have seen an explosion of the numbers of start-ups in the past couple of years and it is becoming more and more important to find ways to break through the noise and leave a mark. Accelerators with a good reputation are probably the best platform to do so these days.

Related articles

• Finding Signal In The Noise Of Demo Days (avc.com)
• What the BC technology industry really needs (wmediaventures.com)
• GrowLab announces startups of its ‘accelerator program’ (canada.com)

But the TapBuy product really speaks to 2 larger opportunities for start-up entrepreneurs in the m-commerce space.

The first one is in building m-commerce infrastructure: in the same way that companies have figured out in the past year that the digital advertising infrastructure (ad serving, targeting / re-targeting) needs to be rebuilt for mobile as the existing web products are far from optimal for the mobile platform, m-commerce presents the same opportunity for the commerce vertical. The mobile check-out experience (that TapBuy focused on) is certainly one of the most broken pieces but there is clearly more new infrastructure to be built.

The second opportunity is around discovery: in the same way that news are now mostly consumed on mobile phones, commerce can also shift to mobile but requires a very different kind of shopping experience that is much more focused on discovery / serendipity than in a web environment (which is still largely driven by clear purchase intent / search). Tapdeals is a first attempt of KimaLabs for this problem in the deal space but again, this is still a mostly unserved area.

Looking forward to seeing more innovation in m-commerce in the upcoming years – it feels like very early days.

Related articles

• EBay to drive mobile commerce innovation with open system (textually.org)

Daniel Chu and his team are some of the hungriest entrepreneurs I have seen in a long time and I am sure that they will run with this company long and far – excited to be part of it going forward!

Image via CrunchBase

We have not truly celebrated entrepreneurs since the generation of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison – entrepreneurs got respect, awards, sometimes biographies but never the attention of top athletes or celebrities. Steve Jobs has changed this – he became a mass media phenomenon with a deep impact beyond the technology circles. I hope that many thousands of kids and teenagers from around the world now have a new role model and got inspired to become entrepreneurs trying to change the world.

This might be Steve Jobs’ greatest legacy. RIP.

• While I was exclusively focused on consumer internet companies when I started in 2007, this focus has expanded to SaaS (GoInstant) and mobile (Flurry, Kima Labs, Rewardloop) start-ups since.
• A similar expansion happend in the geographical focus. While I originally only invested in the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada, 5 of my last 6 investments were either based in Eastern Canada, New York or the Silicon Valley.
• What has stayed the same is the focus on investing in passionate entrepreneurs with deep domain knowledge, great product and design instincts and a desire to change the world.