Q-News

April 2008

April-May Bring Plenty of Activity

Posted in Mike's Commentary

Plenty of interesting news this month so let's start off with the big item impacting the Canadian venture capital space. Kuddos to our friend Rick Segal at JLA for his role in the newly announced $150 million Blackberry Partners Fund. JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners will be working in collaboration to co-manage the fund targeted at companies in the mobile space. Looking to make investments in Canadian and global companies on any mobile platform, this fund represents an important step in the rebuilding of Canada’s venture sector. RIM and Thomson Reuters launched the fund which is intended to be both stage and balance sheet agnostic and should be an interesting competitor to Kleiner Perkins who recently announced the $100 million iFund established to fund iPhone applications.

On another note, I would like to congratulate Mark McQueen and the gang at Wellington Financial for being selected among the 10 favorite financial blogs for readers of the Report on Business. Personally, I think that Mark’s blog is one of the most insightful and informative blogs in Canada dealing with both the private and public investment sectors and would recommend that you check it out.

I would also like to congratulate Sean Wise, Rick Nathan and Robert Montgomery for organizing the very successful Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX). Being its first year, they have done a heck of a job in filling the space left by the Canadian Venture Forum and have established a legitimate venue for innovative Canadian companies to showcase their products to North American venture investors.

Dangletech was recently launched with the objective of becoming Canada’s largest community sponsored web site dedicated to the issues surrounding Canada’s technology sector. The impetus for the site came from the Stonewood Group and includes blogs and articles from well-known industry participants such as Suzie Dingwall Williams from Venture Law Associates, Andrew Waitman from Celtic House Venture Partners, Robert Hebert from Stonewood Group and many others including yours truly. It’s well worth the time to take a look and bookmark this site if you want to keep on top of issues and events impacting Canadian technology companies.

I would also like to point out that on May 21st and 22nd Mesh 2008 will be taking place at the MaRS Centre in Toronto. Billed as “Canada’s Web Conference,” this event is in its third year and has become a “must attend” for those interested in keeping abreast of developments in the Canadian and global web space. This year’s event looks to be another winner and merits a tip of the hat to organizers Mark Evans, Mathew Ingram, Mike McDerment, Rob Hyndman and Stuart MacDonald.

Finally, Jevon and Jonah at StartupNorth have introduced a great, free, community-based index of technology startups and investors in Canada. StartupIndex is a superb site that is being populated by the day with transactions and news from the Canadian private investment and startup community. Check out the site and do your part to ensure that this site becomes a great source of relevant and timely information.

I just wanted to end this month’s commentary on a humorous note with a Rick Segal blog post that could be filed under “the truth can be stranger than fiction.”

Sincerely,

Mike Middleton
Managing Director & Founder
Q1 Capital Partners


The Coolest Business Plan Ever

I'm reading a business plan that I received. 10 honking megabytes of brainwaves put to paper. 115 carefully crafted pages which gets me deep, really deep, into the mind of the entrepreneur. You are thinking to yourself, self, how could a simple business plan allow the VC to learn tons about me and my people.

Simple.

Make tons of changes to your document, pass it to your 'advisors' for advising, get back their edits, make more changes, save and send the document to me without accepting all changes and stripping out all the notes and comments.

Consider these choices tidbits left in the document:

  • "Segal used work for Microsoft so skip the name dropping, save it for the afternoon meeting, they are clueless about Redmond"o "When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them"
  • "I'd delete this section since we don't have these features on the roadmap and haven't figured out how to code this unless you believe the investors won't catch this"
  • Scratched out "Exchange sucks resources like a vampire in heat", replaced with "Exchange is resource intensive under certain scenarios"
  • Scratched out "Competitors are 10 years behind us and will never catch up", replaced with "There is competition out there"
  • "VCs are typically stupid when it comes to this section so be prepared for a dumb question blizzard"
  • Scratched out "Beta is in 6 months" replaced with "code is out there now"
Sweet, eh?

If you are so inclined, you might want to create what I call the "Yo! Are YOU DAMN SURE" macro for your copy of Word that checks a variety of things before you send it out the door.

I love this gig.

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