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Version One Ventures

versionone.vc

Version One Ventures is an early-stage venture fund investing in the next generation of mission-driven founders who are early in new areas.

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’10’15’20’25
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622 from 21 Dec 2007 to 1 Oct 2026
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monthly (15 in the last year)
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2026 13

  1. Q3 2026 Portfolio in Review
  2. Our Investment in Rio Health
  3. Announcing Our Investment in Pilot: The Internet for Agents
  4. Announcing Our Investment in Mowito: Physical AI for Robot Arms in Manufacturing
  5. Q2 2026 Portfolio in Review
  6. Announcing Fund V and Opportunities Fund III
  7. We’re Bio-Bullish
  8. Announcing Our Investment in Swoop
  9. Announcing our investment in GridBank
  10. Q1 2026 Portfolio in Review
  11. Five Posts That Define How We Think
  12. Announcing our investment in Pluto, solving last-mile delivery at the vehicle level
  13. Q4 2025 portfolio recap (+ Happy New Year!)

2025 16

  1. 2025 Year in Review
  2. Announcing Our Investment in Arctus Aerospace: Building High-Altitude Autonomy
  3. Backing Loon: Building Canada’s Digital Dollar
  4. Q3 2025 Portfolio in Review
  5. Three Years of ChatGPT: Where We Are With AI Today
  6. Announcing our investment in TRIC Robotics – Automating pest and disease control
  7. Q2 2025 Portfolio Review
  8. Our Considerations on Robotics, Updated
  9. Investing in better health: we’re delighted to announce our investment in NiaHealth
  10. Reflections after a Month Back in VC
  11. Q1 2025 Portfolio in Review
  12. Welcoming Josh Nussbaum, V1’s venture partner
  13. The rise of “India for India” opportunities
  14. A Reflection on the Past, and What’s Next for 2025
  15. Announcing our investment in Bolt. Earth, India’s largest EV charging network
  16. Q4 2024 Recap: A Strong Finish for the Year

2024 13

  1. Welcome to the V1 Refresh!
  2. Announcing our investment in Neo Financial, Canada’s leading challenger bank
  3. Q3 2024 Portfolio in Review
  4. Announcing our investment in Optimotive
  5. Our considerations on robotics
  6. Q2 2024 Portfolio in Review
  7. What We’ve Learned From Investing in Deep Tech
  8. Introducing our investment in Bedrock Materials – to produce a low-cost, easy-to-source alternative to lithium-ion batteries
  9. An update on Version One’s thesis: Backing mission-driven founders who are early in new areas
  10. Q1 2024 Portfolio in Review
  11. We’re looking for our 3rd partner at Version One
  12. Fundraising advice for emerging GP’s
  13. Q4 2023 Portfolio Review

2023 12

  1. Version One’s Year 2023 in Review
  2. Q3 2023 Portfolio Review
  3. The power of two: How AI can spark both technological and business model innovation
  4. A reflection on a decade: 10 lessons after 10 years in VC
  5. Announcing our investment in Dinari, a decentralized stock trading platform
  6. Q2 2023 Portfolio Review
  7. Announcing our investment in Antimatter
  8. Observations from my trip to India
  9. Q1 2023 Portfolio News
  10. Announcing Jobber’s $100m Series D: building a company for the long-term in an era of start-up hyper-growth
  11. Why now? Getting to the core of any investment
  12. Thinking through AI as the next new platform opportunity

2022 15

  1. 2022: V1 Year in Review and Looking Forward
  2. Resist the pressure to “outgrow” your intuition
  3. Announcing our investment in Peaze, Web3 onboarding simplified
  4. The marketplace’s role in the circular economy
  5. Q3 2022 Portfolio in Review
  6. An update on our climate & energy areas of focus
  7. Announcing our investment in Bikky, a data-first customer platform for restaurants
  8. Q2 2022 portfolio in review
  9. Version One turns ten
  10. Announcing our investment in Inflection.io – marketing automation for product-led growth
  11. Announcing our investment in Firstparty, to make it easy for companies to collect and take action on their customer data
  12. Announcing our investment in Remio, connecting business teams in VR
  13. Portfolio Review: Q1 2022
  14. Portfolio News: Q4 2021
  15. Q4 2022 Portfolio News

2021 33

  1. Our favorite blog posts of 2021
  2. 2021: The Version One year in review
  3. What will discovery look like in Web 3.0?
  4. Announcing our investment in Moment Energy – a cleantech startup repurposing electric vehicle batteries for energy storage
  5. Announcing our investment in EnPowered, a payment platform to increase the rate of cleantech adoption
  6. Announcing our investment in EnergyBank, a pioneer in long-term energy storage
  7. Announcing our investment in Gadze Finance
  8. Q3 2021 Portfolio news
  9. Resetting venture capital return expectations: is 10x the new 3x?
  10. Replay launches out of beta – record and replay web applications to fix bugs faster!
  11. Announcing our investment in Tenderly to build the world’s first end-to-end Ethereum developer platform
  12. We’re hiring a contract content creator!
  13. Q2 2021 Portfolio news
  14. Announcing Fund IV and Opportunities Fund II
  15. Announcing our seed investment into Defined, a programable data platform for DeFi
  16. The Version One Anti-Portfolio – the opportunities we missed…
  17. Marketplace innovation driven by crypto
  18. Opportunity is everywhere: we’re now investing worldwide
  19. Saying farewell to Max
  20. Announcing our investment in Filebase, the API-layer to access decentralized storage
  21. Announcing our investment in Pickle Robot Company
  22. Coinbase
  23. Q1 2021 Portfolio Review
  24. Announcing our investment in SuperRare, the leading marketplace for crypto art
  25. A checklist for your funding announcement
  26. Areas of interest in climate & energy
  27. Announcing our investment in Arweave
  28. Visions of Web 3
  29. Announcing our investment in Preemadonna, a connected at-home manicure device
  30. Smart Contracts on Bitcoin
  31. Announcing our investment in Cap Hill Brands, a next-gen CPG company
  32. Announcing our investment in SilviaTerra, a precision forestry startup
  33. Q4 2020 Portfolio Review

2020 41

  1. Our Top 3 Posts of 2020
  2. The Version One year in review and looking ahead
  3. Zero Marginal Cost Energy
  4. The pros and cons of “digital by default”
  5. Meet Our Mission Driven Founders
  6. Classifying marketplaces in a 2×2 matrix
  7. Why we look for mission-driven founders
  8. Announcing our investment in Jam
  9. Don’t Sleep on Lightning
  10. A Guide to Marketplaces: Third Edition
  11. Q3 2020 Portfolio Review
  12. Announcing our investment in Patch, a platform for negative emissions
  13. The Solar-Bitcoin Convergence
  14. The Energy Revolution is (Finally) Here
  15. Announcing our investment in Uniswap, the leading decentralized crypto exchange
  16. At last, the full promise of crypto networks is coming alive
  17. An update on Version One’s thesis: backing mission-driven founders
  18. The Future of Education
  19. Q2 2020 Quarterly Update
  20. Announcing our investment in Cape Privacy, a privacy platform for collaborative data science and machine learning
  21. Announcing our investment in Opyn, a decentralized options marketplace
  22. Announcing our investment in DemandStar, a marketplace for government procurement
  23. The API-as-a-marketplace
  24. B2B Marketplaces Revisited
  25. Is this the crypto inflection point we’ve been waiting for?
  26. BTC + DeFi = FTW
  27. The novel coronavirus could accelerate digital healthcare
  28. Thoughts on the State of DeFi
  29. Version One quarterly news and COVID-19 response
  30. Security tips for work from home
  31. The state of COVID-19 testing
  32. Announcing the Version One Opportunity Fund
  33. Regulatory arbitrage in crypto
  34. Announcing our investment in Halcyon Health
  35. Our areas of interest in healthcare
  36. Today’s opportunities in enterprise SaaS
  37. Max’s Investment Themes
  38. Hello from Max
  39. Welcoming Max Webster to the Version One team
  40. Understanding Kaplan-Meier Curves with Clio’s George Psiharis: how to measure your company in flight
  41. Recapping Q4 2019

2019 50

  1. Our top posts of 2019
  2. What’s your best productivity hack?
  3. Introducing our Startup Handbook
  4. The continuous rise of SaaS in the consumer space
  5. Announcing our investment in Scanwell Health: making healthcare more accessible with accurate, at-home medical testing
  6. Looking for opportunities in femtech
  7. The Dyslexic Advantage
  8. The four waves of crypto disruption: where are they today?
  9. The “Boom” hiring playbook
  10. Announcing our participation in Nexus Mutual, a people-powered alternative to insurance
  11. Lessons about company building from the WeWork drama
  12. Q3 2019: Portfolio News and Activities
  13. One year into Fund III: some high level stats
  14. Announcing Flow, a new blockchain for entertainment applications
  15. Reflections on my first year as GP (and six years in VC!)
  16. The Version One Promise to Founders
  17. My journey of finding a coach so far…
  18. How times have changed in twenty years…
  19. Charting return multiples over time
  20. Seven years into Fund I: charting the return multiples
  21. Still growing our team
  22. Do distributed teams need new tools?
  23. The importance of checking in
  24. Q2 2019 Summary: Portfolio News and Activities
  25. Thinking about a managed marketplace for healthcare
  26. Balancing the upside and downside of data sharing
  27. Finding and turning your flywheel
  28. How close are we to a smart toilet?
  29. What we can learn from high performing athletes
  30. What does a Head of People do? Learning from Ada’s Chelsea MacDonald
  31. Announcing our investment in Dolly, a peer-to-peer marketplace for on-demand moving and retail delivery
  32. Bill Campbell, the trillion dollar coach
  33. Announcing our investment in Kobalt, a security as a service company
  34. Announcing our investment in Guesser, the easiest way to engage with prediction markets
  35. What exactly is a managed marketplace?
  36. How Sin-Mei Tsai, Shippo’s VP of Engineering, Defines Code Quality
  37. Announcing our investment in Celo — a monetary system to create conditions of prosperity for all
  38. Q1 2019 Summary: Portfolio News and Activities
  39. Where is the value in tokens?
  40. Investing in hardware and the data layer
  41. The increased risk profile of start-ups
  42. Learn from our nightmare: tips to prevent getting hacked
  43. Three Questions with Bala Subramaniam: Marketplaces
  44. Investing in digital health and wellness apps
  45. Investing in biotech and therapeutics
  46. Building Strong Local Communities
  47. How to survive today’s volatility? Focus on what you can control
  48. 3 tips to turbo-charge your hiring
  49. Q4 2018: Portfolio News and Activities
  50. Our Top Posts from 2018

2018 50

  1. 2018: Year in review and a look ahead
  2. So you just raised your B round, now what?
  3. So you just raised your A round, now what?
  4. So you just raised your seed round, now what?
  5. Building on top of EHRs
  6. Announcing our investment in Lolli – Bitcoin for everyone!
  7. Finding new opportunities from second order effects
  8. CryptoKitties and the KittyVerse: The exciting potential of programmable assets
  9. “Smart SaaS” – the next generation of enterprise apps
  10. Announcing Version One Fund III
  11. Crypto-native applications
  12. Q3 2018 Summary: Portfolio News and Activities
  13. Scaling from maker to manager
  14. Should you include a Series A investor in your seed round?
  15. Reflecting on 5 years in VC: How to survive the marathon
  16. Congratulations to Angela Tran Kingyens, Version One’s new General Partner
  17. Three leadership lessons from Slack’s Stewart Butterfield
  18. Expanding our bio/healthcare thesis
  19. A few take-aways from the Augur prediction market
  20. Changing the narrative on distributed teams in Silicon Valley
  21. Growing our team: V1 is hiring an associate
  22. On top of the CN Tower: Understanding how we process fear
  23. Where are the opportunities for the next venture-scale marketplace business?
  24. Version One has a new look! Announcing our updated website
  25. Recapping Q2 2018: Portfolio News and Activities
  26. How to balance judgment and process when you start to scale
  27. Being Model-Driven: Lessons from Rev Data Science Summit
  28. The close: How your investors can help you bring top candidates on board
  29. VCs rarely make exceptions to their investment scope
  30. On becoming American
  31. The “reverse” pitch: Who should you have on your cap table?
  32. The Twenty Minute VC with Boris Wertz
  33. Purity versus Greed in Crypto
  34. Skip level conversations: the benefits of board members speaking with senior managers
  35. Is crypto investing different from VC investing?
  36. The promise (and risk) of pre-emptive funding
  37. The risks of scaling too fast, too soon
  38. Q1 2018 in Review: Portfolio News and Activities
  39. Women in Tech: Improving balance in the workplace with more creative hiring
  40. Announcing our investment in CryptoKitties – the wildly popular, blockchain-based pet
  41. Announcing our investment in Drover, a new way to get a car
  42. What incentives are best for decentralized platforms?
  43. Introducing the Second Edition of “The Guide to Marketplaces”
  44. Helping our founders by supporting the whole team
  45. Having the greatest impact requires believing when others don’t
  46. Optimizing the trade-offs between centralized and decentralized platforms
  47. The challenges in implementing tech policy and what government can do
  48. Some quick reflections on the current tech M&A market
  49. How to scale hiring without breaking company culture
  50. 4th Quarter 2017 Update: Portfolio News and Activities

2017 51

  1. 2017 Year in Review
  2. Our Approach to Investing in Genomics and Biosciences
  3. Technology can boost efficiency, but that’s not always enough
  4. The Four Waves of Crypto Disruption
  5. Data is the New Oil
  6. Three lessons from ten years of investing
  7. Who will be the Stripe for insurance?
  8. Our Core Beliefs
  9. Can AI become a tool to promote equality and fairness?
  10. The Redistribution of Network Effects in Cryptocurrencies
  11. V1 Data Hangout – Episode 2: How do you manage your data?
  12. Q3 2017 Round-Up: Portfolio News and Activities
  13. Three rules for VC-entrepreneur engagement
  14. Announcing our investment in Manifold
  15. Why the Blockchain is so disruptive for venture capital
  16. Four years at Version One & some thoughts on “Moneyball for VC”
  17. The shortcomings of ICO funding
  18. Organization in a decentralized world – how will decentralized platforms be managed?
  19. Takeaways from our first V1 Data Team Hangout
  20. Blockchain’s impact on marketplaces: what’s the future for decentralized marketplaces?
  21. Zero to One in Data Science: The Tophatter Story
  22. Personalized medicine can’t come soon enough
  23. Announcing our investment in Ada Support – the AI support platform that’s answering 2 million questions a month
  24. Introducing our first investment in genomics, Gencove – making genomic data accessible and useful
  25. Recapping Q2 2017: Portfolio News and Activities
  26. Please respect outstanding entrepreneurial achievements
  27. Winning with Data: More Highlights from the Data-driven Marketplace Meetup
  28. In cryptocurrencies, is it winner takes all?
  29. On-demand marketplaces: How to pull levers to reach Supply-Demand Equilibrium
  30. Recapping the Data-Driven Marketplace Meetup
  31. Entrepreneurial ecosystems: Reflections on Toronto and Silicon Valley
  32. Meet Our Latest Investment – Citizen Hex, an Ethereum Liquidity Company
  33. What’s our NPS as investors?
  34. Will Initial Coin Offerings Fund the Future?
  35. How to combat negative investor sentiment? Use your customer references
  36. Announcing our next meetup: Data-Driven Marketplaces, San Francisco, May 16
  37. Can a sinking start-up reaccelerate growth?
  38. Q1 2017 Round-up: Portfolio News and Activities
  39. Bringing Transparency to Startup Data: Our Data Repository Project
  40. Do you need data engineering before data science?
  41. Takeaways from the Domino Data Science Pop-up: Defining a data scientist
  42. Three ways to align everyone around the company vision
  43. Technology Redefined Sales, Marketing, and HR: How to Hire for these Roles Now
  44. “Understanding Social Platforms,” now summarized in a presentation deck
  45. Top Hat Raises $22.5M Series C in a Tough Vertical: What Can We Learn from their Success
  46. My next chapter of VC: More data!
  47. Congratulations to Angela Tran Kingyens, our newest Principal
  48. Revisiting the Engagement Pyramid
  49. Announcing our investment in Blockstack, The New Decentralized Internet
  50. Cryptocurrency’s second act: the rise of Ethereum and what’s in store for 2017
  51. A recap of Q4: Great momentum for 2017

2016 49

  1. A Year in Review: 2016
  2. Announcing our second eBook: Understanding Social Platforms
  3. How Indiegogo Grew its Business
  4. Abstract launches private alpha to redesign the design process
  5. Growing your B2B marketplace
  6. Should you move to a managed marketplace model?
  7. Growth strategies for marketplaces: key takeaways from a fireside chat on growth
  8. Recapping the V1 Marketplace Meetup in SF
  9. One of the few girls in the room: How do we accelerate equality in tech?
  10. Our Q3 round-up
  11. Announcing Canada Learning Code: Supporting bottom-up innovation
  12. Creative Destruction Lab West: Helping create the next generation of entrepreneurs
  13. When you get a sense of inevitability from a founder’s pitch…
  14. Introducing Umi Kitchen: A Platform for Culinary Entrepreneurs
  15. Three things I’ve learned in three years
  16. How to build the right management team
  17. The Version One website now has a bot, powered by Ada
  18. Is it time to rethink the healthcare marketplace model?
  19. Unlocking new value: adding the sixth factor in our marketplace criteria
  20. The Multibillion-dollar China Question: Should a mid-sized tech company tempt fate in China?
  21. Raising Capital for Marketplaces in 2016
  22. Announcing our newest investment, Trim: A money-saving robot for the 99%
  23. Is social dead?
  24. Our Q2 2016 Round-Up
  25. Company building: how to transition from short-term survival to long-term sustainability
  26. Some of our favorite investment themes right now: AI and machine learning
  27. Not every decision can be made quickly: how to approach your mega decisions
  28. Go Big or Go Home: It’s a binary outcome for marketplace start-ups
  29. The slowdown in equity financing is changing venture debt too
  30. Thoughts from the road: building startups and collective ambition outside Silicon Valley
  31. How did Jeff Bezos scale Amazon without destroying its entrepreneurial culture?
  32. Our Guide to Marketplaces, now summarized in a deck
  33. Learning from Jeff Bezos: Big winners pay for so many experiments
  34. Understand learning profiles before hiring
  35. Q1 Round-up: Portfolio companies in the news
  36. What does “great” look like?
  37. Stubborn on vision, flexible on the details
  38. How will self-driving cars change society?
  39. AI is moving mainstream, but are users ready to trust it yet?
  40. Is AWS the next computing platform?
  41. Move fast: it’s your biggest competitive advantage
  42. The evolution of apps: from reactive to pre-emptive
  43. The next wave of enterprise apps: Effortless and smart
  44. Our (refocused) investment thesis
  45. V1’s latest investment: Booster Fuels – on-demand delivery of gas for vehicles
  46. The rise of the vertical reputation graph
  47. Moving from the niche to the masses
  48. What’s your data strategy? Defining the data hierarchy
  49. Data, not algorithms, is key to machine learning success

2015 45

  1. Version One in 2015: A year of building, backing, and exits
  2. The Big Opportunity for Bots in Messaging
  3. Shopify’s big people investment: how a startup scaled coaching beyond its executives
  4. The evolution of the online marketplace: six big changes since Ebay
  5. The art of hiring a data scientist
  6. Our guide to marketplaces
  7. Play your own playbook
  8. Metrics that matter to social platforms (Part 3/3): measuring engagement by relationships
  9. Metrics that matter to social platforms (Part 2/3): Measuring engagement by content
  10. Metrics that matter to social platforms (Part 1/3)
  11. The most successful Bitcoin / Blockchain company won’t look like any we have today
  12. Network effects on social platforms: why the quality of user matters
  13. The most important lesson learned in early-stage investing
  14. Nine common things that start-up founders tend to underestimate or overestimate
  15. How to bootstrap your way into becoming a VC
  16. Products that help power online marketplaces
  17. On the future of healthcare
  18. Should you outsource your financial operations?
  19. Network Effects in Marketplace, Communities and Social Platforms
  20. How we determine valuations for marketplaces
  21. Marketplace KPI Dashboard
  22. How to scale a marketplace
  23. Sales 3.0: evolution of the software sales function
  24. Introducing an earlier investment: Volley, a friendly place for helping others
  25. Growing a marketplace: how to spark the virtuous cycle
  26. In the on-demand economy, disruption can come from above
  27. Our latest investment: Shift Messenger, a communication tool designed for hourly workers
  28. How to seed your marketplace
  29. What’s the right business model for your marketplace?
  30. Why there won’t be an Uber in every vertical
  31. The data we use to evaluate marketplace traction
  32. V1’s latest investment: Headout, a last minute marketplace for tours, activities and experiences
  33. The emergence of managed marketplaces: greater opportunities but a lot more risk
  34. How can a marketplace start-up disrupt the incumbent?
  35. Marketplace dynamics: buyer mindshare is key to building a moat
  36. Introducing one of Version One’s earlier investments: VarageSale
  37. Is the Freemium Model the Future of Marketplaces?
  38. How to spark demand when creating a new market space
  39. Apple killed the watch, but can it bring it back?
  40. Introducing our latest investment: Perceptiv Labs – The future of smart drone technology
  41. Customer success is important, but sometimes it’s just too late
  42. Are Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality the next computing platform?
  43. A founder’s advice on hiring a VP of Sales
  44. Looking to sell? When and how to hire an investment bank
  45. Understanding your data: the difference between correlation and conditional probability

2014 44

  1. Our 2014 in review
  2. Building your user engagement pyramid
  3. Four predictions for 2015
  4. How to start making sense of your data
  5. The importance of consistent messaging
  6. Ride the Wave
  7. Entrepreneur-investor relationships
  8. Announcing Version One Fund II
  9. Founders’ talents are the essential ingredients for your start-up
  10. Comparing Two SaaS Models: Hubspot and Moz
  11. Unique ways to solve today’s talent crunch
  12. A visual guide to pitching
  13. Introducing our latest investment: Shippo, simplified shipping for small e-commerce sites
  14. Why you need to innovate on three horizons
  15. What’s the problem with too much funding?
  16. Lessons from my first year at Version One
  17. Community building: How to give up control without losing control
  18. How to keep founders around after an acquisition
  19. What every entrepreneur should know about financing right now
  20. Introducing our latest investment: HandUp, directly helping those in need
  21. Can you build “Silicon Valley” companies outside of the Valley?
  22. What excites us in consumer healthcare IT?
  23. Introducing our latest investment: Dwellable, mobile-first vacation rentals
  24. The rise of the female founder
  25. The Hardware Renaissance is gaining speed
  26. The challenge facing Bitcoin start-ups
  27. The untapped Open Data opportunity: who will unlock government data?
  28. What type of market are you operating in?
  29. Introducing our latest investment: Mattermark – Big Data Comes to VC
  30. The future of education: the distributed school and customized learning
  31. Announcing our latest investment: Clio
  32. New investment: Upverter, a cloud-based platform for the hardware revolution
  33. The programmable web and the future of platforms
  34. The investor’s role in a founder’s three key priorities
  35. Does free/freemium work in the enterprise?
  36. Let your values lead the way
  37. Investors need to actually use their portfolio products
  38. Marketing has never been harder than it is today
  39. A good story is the key to any pitch
  40. How to overcome decision paralysis
  41. Mobile is eating the web
  42. Jelly app: the challenge of immediate primetime
  43. Can office design improve innovation?
  44. What makes a great investor?

2013 43

  1. Our year in review: a look back and ahead
  2. Our investment thesis on healthcare
  3. Growth versus capital efficiency
  4. New investment: Figure 1, a healthcare photo sharing app
  5. Bitcoin: its future as a platform and protocol
  6. The future of online marketplaces: “complex” transactions
  7. How we can improve the odds of finding unicorns
  8. 3 lessons from a customer-obsessed company
  9. Funding goes global: location is no longer your financing destiny
  10. How to really learn from your experiments
  11. How to stay nimble as you scale
  12. The truth about onboarding costs
  13. Selling to the enterprise: “Sell to few” vs. “sell to many”?
  14. It’s not easy to sell into an industry being disrupted
  15. The best way to approach investors: four tips
  16. Why Venture Capital is the Perfect Fit for Me
  17. Introducing Version One’s new analyst: Angela Tran Kingyens
  18. Bicycles, gears, and the future of education
  19. Something special is happening in the Toronto-Waterloo area
  20. The engagement threshold: transforming one-time customers into repeat business
  21. Four founders share what they’ve learned
  22. Seven life lessons at 40
  23. Key investment themes
  24. Is it time for a Chief Talent Officer? How to create local hubs for high tech entrepreneurship
  25. What’s more important: product or sales?
  26. We’re hiring an analyst!
  27. The easiest path to growth and profit is up: why startups should focus on the long-tail
  28. Talent, hard work and luck
  29. Crowdfunding: the good, the bad, and the ugly
  30. How to find funding for your hardware startup while we’re waiting for the hardware revolution
  31. When to sell your company
  32. Don’t listen to most of the advice you are getting
  33. If you need to pivot, pivot hard
  34. Re-imagining the mobile use case
  35. Does your product pass the toothbrush test?
  36. Best word of advice: Simplify
  37. Lessons from a founder: how to deal with rejection
  38. 2012 Recap and Final Close at $19M
  39. Announcing our latest investment: GroupTalent
  40. Never, ever outsource your core
  41. How to deal with the Series A crunch
  42. Mission accomplished: Startup Visa Canada is here
  43. How much capital should you raise?

2012 24

  1. New investment: tindie, a marketplace for the maker generation
  2. 5 traits of the most successful entrepreneurs
  3. How to manage your inside sales team
  4. Can enterprise SaaS products be viral?
  5. The one barrier to entry startups should focus on
  6. Traction is the new IP
  7. 4 ways to compete in Amazon’s shadow
  8. The only 2 ways to build a $100 million business
  9. How to evaluate launch success?
  10. Who Will Win the Fast Growing Online-to-Offline Sector?
  11. Focus your board meetings on the future, not the past
  12. Lean financing
  13. Reinvesting your capital
  14. Announcing Version One Ventures
  15. Hiring for Startups 101 – hiring process
  16. Hiring for Startups 101 – filling the funnel
  17. Hiring for startups 101 – new blog series
  18. “Tell me who your friends (advisors, employees,…) are and I will tell you who you are”….
  19. Breaking into the Valley? Use the “Canadian mafia”
  20. Go for passionate users, not a large sales force
  21. How to hire for your start-up
  22. New investment: Jobber, SalesForce-like software for handymen, gardeners
  23. Urgency and confidence
  24. What does a Venture Partner do?

2011 26

  1. An amazing year
  2. New investment: Unbounce, A/B testing made super-easy
  3. New investment: Edmodo, social learning network for teachers and students
  4. Canada – land of SaaS?
  5. Demo Day
  6. M-commerce opportunities
  7. New investment: SilkStart, SaaS for membership organizations
  8. Inspiring a new generation of entrepreneurs – RIP Steve Jobs
  9. Relaunch
  10. What the BC technology industry really needs
  11. New investment: GoInstant, browser sharing 2.0 (native, instant, social)
  12. New investment: Wattpad, the world’s most popular ebook community
  13. New investment: crowdfunding platform IndieGoGo
  14. New investment: Chloe & Isabel, a direct sales platform for fashion jewelry
  15. Advisors
  16. New investment: Mobile loyalty platform RewardLoop
  17. On innovation in start-ups
  18. Investor updates
  19. Pivoting
  20. Announcing GrowLab, a new start-up accelerator for Vancouver
  21. Why Google became so successful – reviewing Steven Levy’s “In The Plex”
  22. Social is the first layer you need to build, not the last
  23. The Art of the Investor Pitch
  24. The stream is broken
  25. Startup Visa Canada launched today – your support is needed!
  26. Amazon’s new Vancouver office is great news

2010 44

  1. A shout-out to the Vancouver web community
  2. What are your predictions for 2011? Here are my top 4.
  3. Looking back at my 2010 predictions
  4. New investment: Sparkbuy, the Kayak for consumer electronics
  5. Search Engine Optimization versus Social Media Marketing
  6. It has never been a better time to be an angel investor
  7. “All in” is not a wise strategy
  8. Vancouver: Wonders start here
  9. After Angelgate, a good moment to go back to the basics
  10. How to become a (successful) angel investor
  11. So where are the Canadian super-angels?
  12. Stay focused: work on the business, not in it
  13. Best practices for board meetings
  14. Techvibes TV interview at GROW
  15. New investment: Summify, a social news reader
  16. My investment thesis
  17. Pitching day
  18. New investment: Barcode Hero, a “Foursquare for shopping”
  19. What GROW means for the Vancouver tech community
  20. New investment: Empire Avenue, the world’s first influence stock market
  21. Why Demand Media (and similar models) will succeed
  22. Market stage: stop developing features, focus on activating and retaining users
  23. Job opportunities in our portfolio
  24. How to build online communities?
  25. Where is social gaming headed? Thoughts from attending CasualConnect
  26. What kind of company can you build outside of the Valley?
  27. How to react to product problems (hint: not like Apple)
  28. 4 key points to address in your startup pitch
  29. What startups can learn from the most successful soccer teams
  30. I will blog more and you should do so, too!
  31. Build your own (site-specific) social graph
  32. Is the “Third Wave” here or is this just another step in the Internet’s evolution?
  33. Building a company on top of an existing platform – yes, no, maybe?
  34. Display advertising will get more complex before it will get simpler
  35. Google getting into the people search business in a bigger way?
  36. Great job opportunities in our portfolio
  37. Looking for the Mark MacLeod (aka StartupCFO) of Vancouver
  38. Why New York will challenge the Valley for Consumer Internet supremacy
  39. W Media Ventures today. W Media Ventures tomorrow.
  40. Joining BootUp Labs as an investor and director – Vancouver needs an accelerator!
  41. New opportunities in e-commerce
  42. Video interview with Andrew Warner of Mixergy about…
  43. We need more angel investors in the Pacific Northwest
  44. Wanted: Entrepreneur-in-Residence for 2010

2009 29

  1. What are your predictions for consumer Internet in 2010? Here are my top 5.
  2. Search? Social media? Implicit user behavior? Differentiating good from bad content.
  3. New opportunities in marketplaces for creative services
  4. The challenge for Canadian VC’s
  5. How the government can help build the tech sector
  6. The new focus on content production at scale: quantity versus quality
  7. How to take your company international
  8. What I learned this week: Yahoo’s failed leader, characteristics of great teams
  9. What I learned this week: Facebook apps, testing resources, carpe diem
  10. Why I am excited about the online apparel and fashion vertical
  11. Launching Social Crowd Ventures and its first application Justbought.it
  12. Thoughts on the “studio-ization” of the application business
  13. Yapta: first investment in Seattle, third in the travel space
  14. PinchMedia – first investment in the mobile space
  15. The power of social media or “How Michael got a job through commenting on a blog”
  16. Take-aways from the ThinkEquity conference
  17. Thoughts on current opportunities in consumer Internet
  18. Acton Capital makes its first investment
  19. New investment: Find and book special hotels through Escapio.com
  20. Mystery: where does Yahoo’s search traffic go to?
  21. Google versus Facebook?
  22. TeamPages closes second round of financing
  23. Time to focus more on content aggregation than content creation?
  24. New investment: Tynt traces how people engage with your content
  25. We are all Predictably Irrational
  26. New investment: brain games with Fitbrains
  27. Video from Office Hours event last week
  28. Murdoch: The Man Who Owns the News
  29. First Round Capital coming to Vancouver on Jan 15

2008 23

  1. Time for a review of 2008
  2. Nice article in this week’s BIV about W Media and Nexopia
  3. Why these tough times are good for Canadian Internet start-ups
  4. Calling all India and China entrepreneurs
  5. Techvibes – another successful (re)launch!
  6. Amazon acquires AbeBooks
  7. Relaunch time
  8. I love these t-shirts!
  9. German start-up scene – copycats or innovators, enough or not enough VC money?
  10. Canada’s largest Internet start-ups
  11. Attending NextMedia 2008 in Banff
  12. Burda Digital Ventures turns into Acton Capital Partners
  13. More on 1800-Got-Junk’s company culture – “The Painted Picture of 2008”
  14. Building a great company culture – how hard can it be?
  15. New investment: Indochino brings tailor-made suits from China to you
  16. Carrie & Danielle – a social media company focused on authentic living
  17. Joining the Communicate.com board
  18. TED 2008 – and thoughts on how TED became a worldwide media platform
  19. Suite101 goes international, launches German site
  20. Nexopia: a new investment and a new (additional) job
  21. Impressions from DLD
  22. Vancouver gets an incubator
  23. Vancouver is becoming a Web 2.0 hotspot

2007 1

  1. Launch of W Media Ventures website