Ever wondered what it takes to turn a passion into a profitable powerhouse? Matt Wilson joins Voice Like a Lion to unravel the entrepreneurial enigma, sharing his transition from big brand beginnings to his own coffee roasting success story. Matt's captivating journey sheds light on the critical role of industry know-how and the tangible benefits of tapping into personal networks. With his seasoned insight, he underscores the necessity of domain expertise, not just as a nice-to-have, but as a cornerstone for building a venture that stands the test of time.
The path of entrepreneurship is strewn with both triumphs and trials. As we peel back the layers of startup life, Matt gets real about the sacrifices essential for growth—from the long hours that bleed into nights to the financial pressures that test one's resolve. Our conversation takes a turn to the personal, examining the motivations that fuel the entrepreneur's fire, alongside my own pearls of wisdom as an angel investor. Discover what makes an MVP stand out, how early customer feedback is more than gold dust, and why initial revenue streams are the lifeblood of a successful seed-stage investment.
But what happens when your startup begins to soar? This episode doesn't shy away from the hard truths, with lessons from PayPal's early tumults and the chilling reminder of FTX's downfall. Matt and I dissect the discipline needed to stay the course during rapid expansion, stressing the importance of keeping your eye firmly on the horizon—your team, your product, and your customers. So, if you're keen to learn how to weather the storms of startup growth and keen on understanding what it takes to capture an investor's interest, then this discussion is your guiding star to navigating the entrepreneurial universe with clarity and confidence.
Ever wondered what it takes to turn a passion into a profitable powerhouse? Matt Wilson joins Voice Like a Lion to unravel the entrepreneurial enigma, sharing his transition from big brand beginnings to his own coffee roasting success story. Matt's captivating journey sheds light on the critical role of industry know-how and the tangible benefits of tapping into personal networks. With his seasoned insight, he underscores the necessity of domain expertise, not just as a nice-to-have, but as a cornerstone for building a venture that stands the test of time.
The path of entrepreneurship is strewn with both triumphs and trials. As we peel back the layers of startup life, Matt gets real about the sacrifices essential for growth—from the long hours that bleed into nights to the financial pressures that test one's resolve. Our conversation takes a turn to the personal, examining the motivations that fuel the entrepreneur's fire, alongside my own pearls of wisdom as an angel investor. Discover what makes an MVP stand out, how early customer feedback is more than gold dust, and why initial revenue streams are the lifeblood of a successful seed-stage investment.
But what happens when your startup begins to soar? This episode doesn't shy away from the hard truths, with lessons from PayPal's early tumults and the chilling reminder of FTX's downfall. Matt and I dissect the discipline needed to stay the course during rapid expansion, stressing the importance of keeping your eye firmly on the horizon—your team, your product, and your customers. So, if you're keen to learn how to weather the storms of startup growth and keen on understanding what it takes to capture an investor's interest, then this discussion is your guiding star to navigating the entrepreneurial universe with clarity and confidence.
Hello everyone and welcome to Voice Like a Lion podcast. I'm your host, stephen Pemberton, and today we have someone who is shaping up to just be an incredible guest. I'm excited to be able to hear not only from his experiences, but also just from his knowledge, because he's been through so much, and you're going to be able to hear all about that here in just a minute. Today we have Matt Wilson. Matt is the founder and managing director at Allied Venture Partners, western Canada's largest angel syndicate. He began angel investing after successfully exiting his CPG startup in 2012. Since then, he's worked as a startup advisor, private angel investor and VC scout, having invested in over 100 companies. That is quite a bit, matt. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me, Stephen. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1:Let's go backwards before we go forward. What was the company that you?
Speaker 2:exited the company that I built. My Toronto company was a CPG company, so we actually specialized in wholesale coffee roasting, so, proud of that, I worked at Nestle. Obviously, everyone knows Nestle massive global company. My former business partner, he also worked at Nestle and then I also worked at Coca-Cola for a while, so we had that food and beverage experience. Then at the time in Toronto this was before the whole Fairtrade organic trend took off. All your options were either Starbucks, Tim Hortons or a couple small chains like Second Cup or something like that. For us it was like hey, we've got this really cool coffee that we're importing from South America. We can roast it here, we can package it, distribute it. It worked out incredibly well. We just leveraged our experience from working at larger companies and wedged ourselves into that Fairtrade organic market and made a pretty solid business out of it.
Speaker 1:Wow, I'm going to ask this question from someone I'm not even sure if I can continue this interview. If you worked at Coke, I used to work at Pepsi. When I used to work at Pepsi, I love to talk to people and help them understand why Pepsi was great for me. Stepping into e-commerce because I was in supply chain and logistics. What did you do at Nestle and Coke that prepared you for the coffee roasting industry?
Speaker 2:I was always a coffee enthusiast. I love my coffee, even as a hobby, evenings and weekends. My old partner, he, was into this too. We would buy our own raw beans, roast them, try different recipes, stuff like that. So we had the passion for it to begin with, just working at Nestle and Coke, seeing everything how it all worked from a distribution angle in terms of customers, from convenience stores to gas stations to restaurants, and just seeing the whole landscape how it all works, and then putting two and two together, being like hey, listen, we're already doing this stuff on our weekends.
Speaker 2:We love our Fairtrade niche coffee stuff and getting super nerded out into it. We start combining these two things together and it just evolved from there. And then you got to try and keep things on the down low while your bootstrapping your business in the early days while still working at your former employer. So we couldn't tell the Nestle people that we were also roasting essentially a competing product and trying to sell it by using some of our connections and stuff that we made through work. But yeah, it's just sort of combining the passion with the industry knowledge from working at the big players.
Speaker 1:That's really cool, because that's something I talk about quite a bit, either on this podcast or when, I guess, on other podcasts is especially nowadays I don't know if you've noticed this being an angel investor and working with startups is. I just feel like being an entrepreneur is the new thing, like everyone just wants to be a business owner. Everyone wants to say, oh yeah, I'm an entrepreneur, but most of the time people don't fully understand what that means. Like, for you, you are an entrepreneur first and then became an angel investor, but you had the skill sets already. Now you were just as you said. You were in Coca-Cola, you were in Nestle and you were able to see how the distribution went and you said, okay, we have this passion and we have some skills that we've learned and we have some connections. Let's leverage these two things.
Speaker 1:A lot of times there was a gentleman who I know really well and he texted me and he said, stephen, I want to make more money. And I said great, how much more money you want to make? He said I want to make $500 extra a month and I said amazing, he's a basically he's a mechanic who works on heavy equipment. And I said just go find some people in your local area who need work on their lawnmowers, who need work on some heavy equipment, and charge them. I said you've already got the skills. You know how to. You already have all the tools. You just go do it.
Speaker 1:He said well, I would rather just make a product online and sell it and then have somebody else fulfill it. For me it's like we all would, but unless you actually have the skills to distribute that thing, to actually get people to come see that, if you don't have skills in that marketplace, it's going to be very difficult. And that's why I love what you were just saying. And you already had the skills, and I think that that's important. Have you seen that to be important, especially with some of the startups that you've worked with, or some of the ones that you decided not to work with? It's like, do you already have the skills now that you're trying to raise funding?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no for sure, you're totally right. And I think too, like there's a bit of a. You know, we sort of sensationalized the whole. You know, 20-something year old founder in the hoodie dropping out of university and starting this billion dollar company and, yes, that happens very rarely. But, like, in reality, you know, most of the founders that we see and most of the successful founders, you know they've had a career previously. They've worked somewhere for five, 10, 15, maybe more years in a certain industry and they've accumulated that knowledge, they've built up a network and now, finally, they're just deciding to.
Speaker 2:You know, I gotta go out and scratch this itch. It's been under my skin for years now. I gotta see what I can do, because I don't wanna be sitting here when I'm 85 wondering, hey, should I have followed my passion and tried to start that company? Yeah, most of the founders we see are, they have that domain expertise, they come from that area, so that gives us a lot of confidence there. And then, yeah, they're not typically the 20 year old kid out of university, they're usually in their 30s or 40s, sometimes even their 50s as well, like, I think.
Speaker 2:If you look at the average age of a startup founder, I think it's like 40, 45 or 46. Like it's not the 20 year old Mark Zuckerberg that everyone likes to talk about, like that's just not the reality. So, yeah, you gotta have that domain expertise, I think, because, like, you don't know what you don't know. So I mean it can work in your favor. Sometimes, you know, you come into a legacy industry and you just look at things through a different lens, like Airbnb did, but a lot of times, like if you're building something more technical, you just need that expertise, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think even with, let's say, with Airbnb I don't really know their whole backstory, but even for you guys like for you guys doing the coffee roasting you were in the industry and you said, well, they're not doing this. So you were already in the industry, you already had the domain experience, like you were saying. You said, but they're not doing this thing and I know I already have a passion for it and if I do this thing, I can be successful with this, and I think that that's really important for people to distinguish when it comes to building skills. It's if you have a skill set and you try to get a new skill set. So, like my buddy who's the mechanic, he wants to go become an e-commerce entrepreneur and start selling products online. It's like, okay, how do you find the supplier? That's a skill. You're actually gonna have to build relationships with suppliers. How are you actually gonna get the product? Are they gonna drop ship it? Are you gonna hold it? What does that look like? How are you gonna get people to it? And what is it? Is it a storefront? Are you actually doing a brick and mortar? Are you having an online store? What does that look like?
Speaker 1:All those things take time and energy, or you either have to have the financial backing to just say you know what? I'm gonna pay another team. They're gonna go build all this for me, or you gotta pay to get the skills, or you gotta watch a lot of YouTube, or you gotta build a network. But all of that takes an extended amount of time and that's why I tell people who come to me and it's like Steven, I wanna quit my job. It's like, but what are you doing right now? It's like what can you learn right now?
Speaker 1:Most people think, well, I'm just getting a paycheck, but what can you really learn? What if you've got a couple more promotions? Cause, if you just wanna make more money, you could go get a couple more promotions, make the money you wanna make and not have the stress of everything being on you. But if you really have, like you said, if you have the itch and you're trying to say, well, if I'm 85 years old looking back, do I wish that I just would have taken the chance? If the answer is yes, then maybe you should jump out into the waters that you understand, instead of going from the Atlantic Ocean into the Antarctic. That's a huge difference. Maybe you should just swim in the pool that you've already accustomed to. And, yes, you can change pools, but, like you said, those are more rare, like those scenarios are more rare than it just being everyone and anyone can do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it doesn't have to be like you don't have to go all in overnight, right, like your mechanic buddy there, you could start as an evenings and weekends side gig, Like you know, set up your Squarespace website or something in a week.
Speaker 2:You don't have to spend a ton of money and just start testing and see, hey, if my goal is an extra 500 a month, okay, can I make 50 bucks this week? Or maybe make 50 bucks this month and then $100 next month and just sort of see how it goes and scale it up. And then ultimately you get to the point where it's like, okay, this could actually potentially be a full-time job here. And then you're at that sort of life decision point where do I quit and go all in and then really scale it up, or do I just keep it as a side gig or a, you know, a side hustle? So, yeah, start small and just sort of see how it goes and scale up. That's how we did the copy thing. I mean, we both kept our full-time jobs for the first like half a year when we were just getting started, because, yeah, we needed that income.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nothing. I mean, that's perfect advice and that's what I'm so thankful that you're saying that, just because I think that everyone wants to take the big swing right, I want to become Jeff Bezos. If I just work in my garage it's like, yeah, but Jeff Bezos had a really good career before he started Amazon. It wasn't as if he, like you said, he just left university, started something. He wasn't Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg started that in his dorm room. Most people are not Mark Zuckerberg. Let's just be honest. He's a 0.001% of people Him. You've got Jeff Bezos. You've got different. You got Elon Musk.
Speaker 1:You have all these people who have done massive things and if you look at their stories, they took massive risk Like Elon Musk took massive risk to get to where he is right now, and most people can't stomach that amount of risk. It's actually something interesting I talked to with a buddy of both of ours, which is Steve, and I would love your perspective on that. Most from what I've seen is people's risk tolerance kind of puts a cap on where their business is gonna go. I think most people who have a billion dollar business. They had to be willing to stomach the cycles because business is very secular. It'll go through cycles, it'll go through ups, it'll go through downs. So have you seen that with your investing career, where it's really been more on the founder to see how they are tolerant of the risk?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean we probably all seen. Like there's that chart online. It shows the stages of being a founder and it's like, awesome, this is great. And then it's like, oh, this sucks. And then it's awesome, this is great, oh, this sucks. And it's just this constant wave and cycle.
Speaker 2:And it's so true, and like everyone sort of thinks that, oh, the bigger you get, the more revenue and more customers, the less problems you're going to have, the easier it's going to get. And it's actually kind of the inverse, like the bigger you get, the more revenue and customers you're generating, the bigger the challenges ultimately become, right. Like look at what Coinbase has been going through the last couple of years with regards to regulation. Look at Airbnb. They were massive and then COVID happened. So like, holy crap, is this multi-billion dollar company now going to zero? Like the problems are they just amplify, right, the bigger you get. So you really need yeah, you need that risk tolerance in the beginning.
Speaker 2:But I think it's important to like eyes wide open, like know what you're getting into, just because, like you said earlier, being a founder it's not the financial freedom dream that everyone thinks it is.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm going to make more money, I'm going to drive the Lamborghini, I'm going to work in the country club hours and it's actually the opposite. Like all the founders that I know are working like 60, 70, 80 hours a week. You know they're not getting to see their kids as much as they'd like, they're missing the little league games and all that stuff and they're not taking vacations for sometimes years at a time. But they've got this underlying vision and passion that they just need to see happen in their lives. So that's what's driving them forward. And then at the end of the day, I mean it still might not work out right. So you're really risking everything. So I mean I have tons of empathy for anyone who's out there trying to start a business. I think a lot of people maybe they don't realize quite what they're getting into when they first start, but for those that are succeeding and making it work, like all the power to them because it is not easy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is. I wish somebody would have told me how hard it was before I got into business. I mean, I've been in business for four years now, but man, I just remember the first couple months of after quitting my corporate job and then Amazon shutting us down and all of a sudden we're 100K in debt and I went. What just happened? I can't go back and I don't know how we're going to move forward. And now I'm worse than broke because I can't pay this off. Now what am I supposed to do? I can't take care of my family and pay off this debt. And that was just in the beginning. I mean, that was right when I started and there's been so many more challenges along the way. But, like you said, it's like oh wow, this is awesome. Oh, that sucks. Oh OK, this is awesome. Oh, this sucks, yeah.
Speaker 1:But, it's, and that's why I think it is important, like you said, to just understand what are you getting into and why are you getting into it. Why is it important to you? And I think it was great Steve talked about it when he and I were on the show. He just talked about the difference between people who exit at a high number and people who exit at a lower number Is what's your number? Because for some people, like 36 million dollars, that'll change their life. That'll change their life, their kids' life, their great grandkids' life, forever.
Speaker 1:So why would they hold on and hope that it goes to a half a million or half a billion? Why would they hold on when they can just exit and they're good? And so tolerance looks different for each and every one of us and there's also an understanding of why you're getting into it. But that's what I would love for you to talk about a little bit here. So I went to you being an angel investor what are some of the things that you look for in startups and companies? Because if there are people there definitely are people on here who they are the startup founders, and they would love to hear what do you look for when you invest with somebody?
Speaker 2:with it and you, you've proven out that yeah, maybe there is something here. And now it's like, ok, this is interesting, we'll start pouring some, some fuel on the fire here, start scaling it up and see where we can get to. So, like, for me, I mean, I want to see someone who's built an MVP. They've got a handful of customers, maybe a little bit of revenue, and they've just sort of validated that initial market and that initial product market, product demand, right. So that's, that's that's my biggest thing at the pre seed and seed stage.
Speaker 1:There was a gentleman. He's here locally where I am and he sent me his pitch deck because he's going to go, he wants to start raising capital, and I said, okay, cool, send it to me. So I'm looking over it and he calls me up. He called me up Saturday. So last Saturday he calls me up. I was about to go to bed. He said hey, I want to just go through the pitch deck with you. So I'm looking at it and he goes what questions do you have? And I said I said I don't even have to get past your overview to ask you a question. I said how are you going to monetize? And he goes well, you know, if you go down to slide three, it talks about it. And I said okay, I'm on slide three. I still don't understand how you're going to monetize.
Speaker 1:I said because for him his product doesn't. It's supposed to help nonprofits, it's supposed to bring transparency to donations. That concept to me is interesting, but for me is okay. Are you a payment processor? So does that mean, if I send the payment through you, that it gives me clarity that it went to this nonprofit, that they put Jill in a hotel room and helped her get off the street. Is that the kind of clarity that I'm getting? What does that mean? And so how would you get paid off of that? Are you taking government grants? What does that mean? And for him, as he was saying, no, it's a for-profit, but we're going to be doing marketing and doing it in this way, kind of like a Netflix style thing, but we're going to be having transparency for these other nonprofits.
Speaker 1:And I go okay, but I still don't fully understand your MVP. And that's what I told him. Because what he wants to do is he wants to just take this to venture capitalists, to angel investors like yourself, and just raise capital. He wants to raise $200,000 at 10%. And I went that's a $2 million market cap. I said you don't have any customers yet. I said so where'd you get that number?
Speaker 1:And I said that's a giant number for somebody that hasn't. You haven't raised any capital. The business just started and you don't have an MVP. What's going on here? And he goes well, you know I'm going to be donating a part of that. And I said but just focus on the MVP, focus on how you're actually going to make money. I said, if you were to.
Speaker 1:I said you brought this to me and I'm telling you it's like these are my questions before you take it to anyone else and I said here's my most important question to you before you take this to anyone else. People are going to ask you this. They're going to ask you how invested are you? It's like right now you have a full-time job. You haven't put any of your own money into it. Why would people be willing to give you $200K at 10% when you haven't invested anything? And he went well, yeah, that is a good question. So I think that goes to your point. Why do you feel that people so like my buddy, why do you feel like people will have this great idea and just bring it to people like you and just say, hey, give me money, Instead of thinking about it on the short term, thinking, well, it didn't make sense, I don't even put my own money in this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, ideas are cheap. Everybody's got them right, like you know. I think execution is what really matters. Like can you actually execute on this idea? It's interesting too because, like I, once, like two years ago, I saw a pitch. I kid you not, the whole pitch was that he wanted a million dollars from investors so that he could take the next two years off of work and think about what idea and business he wanted to create, and I'm sitting in the audience and I'm just like is this for real?
Speaker 2:Like this is, and this was at a pitch event. So it was kind of frustrating for people in the room because you know they were vetted as part of the process. Okay, these are the 10 startups that are going to present. I don't know, maybe it was just the guy totally went you know 180 and did something that he didn't say that he would do on stage. But I mean I was just like come on, guys, like be serious here. Like everyone's got ideas.
Speaker 2:Everyone wants to sit around and think of ideas, but I mean, what can you execute? What can you show that you've done? I mean like if I have two companies that come into me and one is like hey, we need 200k to build this and we're going to get to these, these milestones, versus the other companies like hey, we've gotten to, we're doing $10,000 a month in revenue. This is what we bootstrap. We've got 57 customers or whatever in the last year. It's just myself and my buddy who's helping me part time and we're doing this on evenings and weekends. Like that's way more impressive to me and interesting than someone who's got a great idea and you know five years of future financial projections that you know hockey stick up to the right. I mean it's just yeah, show me what you've done, show me what you can execute, and then we can have a conversation about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that that is the key from people that have come to me. Even I'm not even in the same field as you. I could just imagine with how many pitches that you've heard and with how many founders as you talk to. But even Even those people who have come to me and said, hey, that's what I'm doing, it's that's always my question. So how have you helped? Even with the clients that we have, is I want to understand. If you're working with us, how are you going to be helping your clients? So you are our clients and we're building stuff for you, we're doing stuff for you. Work, insulting you, it's like. But how are you helping them? It's like, what is your price point of helping them? Who are they? What's your? What is your MVP? And some of these people have been in business a long time. So just understanding them, just like. Well, this is who we help, this is how we help them and this is the price. Great, and some people they're just like I have no idea. I have no idea who I'm helping and why I'm helping them. Or I just want to make Money, it's like. But we have to understand that first. Who are you helping? What kind of impact are you making? Because that's going to tell you kind of what the cap of your market space is, what kind of share can you can take up in the marketplace, because a lot of people they want to be. Of course, everyone wants to drive the Lamborghini and go to the beach and do all those things, so but you don't for the people who really did do that. You don't know what it took.
Speaker 1:There's a book I'm reading. It's a fantastic book. I've been recommending it to everyone. It's called the founders and it talks about all the founders from PayPal. And what's fantastic about that book is it just talks about exactly what you said earlier.
Speaker 1:When X comm the original X comm merged with Confinity which they were the ones who originally created PayPal, and they merged together, they had a half a mill or, yeah, half a million users just on eBay, not including anything else they were doing, and they just talked about how it was basically as if the building was On fire. At all times, the main person over customer service had 100,000 backlog emails of upset customers, people filing with the, the better business bureau that these people were frauds. All this stuff.
Speaker 1:It does not get easier as you get bigger. It gets much harder. There's much, even if it's not more complexity. It's just more complex because you have so many more transactions, so many more people, so many more moving pieces, and I think that that's just so fascinating, especially for you with the angel investing side, as you get to see this. So, as you've seen, as you've invested with founders, as they're kind of going up this, this ladder and growing and scaling, what are some of the things that you would suggest to a founder to kind of help them Quench those fires of customer service, of whatever it might be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, like for me, the biggest thing is just stay focused and grounded. Like you know, when you start you know your revenues going up, your valuations going up, the company starting to succeed it's easy to start getting distracted. I think, like when you look at the best founders even founders now like multi billion dollar companies like Dropbox, for example I mean you know they're they're so focused on their product, their customers and their team, right, like they're not getting distracted by, you know, flying all over the world to film festivals and, and you know, burning man and doing all this other stuff, having six or seven vacation homes and flying in private jets. I mean, just I love it when I just see founders staying focused, staying focused on that mission, not really deviating from that and not getting caught up in all the hype and the publicity of a company that's doing incredibly well. I mean that that happens all the time.
Speaker 2:I mean, look at, you know FTX is a great example recently. You know he was out there doing all these press tours, talking to politicians, flying all over the world, and you know it was all ruse underneath. But maybe if you go wind the clock clock all the way back, maybe if you just had a state focused on building a strong underlying fundamental business, you wouldn't have got deviated on all these different paths. I really don't know, I'm not inside his head but like not getting distracted like that, just staying focused, staying on the mission and Keeping the team and everyone aligned, rowing in the same direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's great advice. That is fantastic advice for any startups listening. Take that one and write. Make sure to write that one down because Even as you begin, especially when you begin to win, it's easy to stay focused when you have no wins because you're just like I'm just gonna keep grinding until we break through this wall.
Speaker 1:But once you break through the wall, that's when you need to keep focus when the money is flowing, when you do have the customers, when you do have the revenue, when you can, when you actually have a choice now you have a choice to go to your kids little lead game. But being able to stay focused, like you said, say focus on the customer, focused on the product, focus on the team that's even something I've seen working in bigger corporations, even with our own teams, with the, with the businesses we built, is if you stay focused on okay, what? How can we serve these customers the best we possibly can? Not everything's gonna be perfect. We can't make the user experience Perfect, but how can we get close? And then how can we treat them really well, no matter if they're just in there cussing us out every day?
Speaker 1:How can I say in my job, yeah go ahead.
Speaker 2:No, I was just gonna say, and that discipline is just so rare. Like you, look at, like some of the best founders, they're not out four or five days a week at social events or cocktail parties or conferences. Like they're in the office, they're working and, unless it's a question about team or product or customers, like everything else is just secondary noise, like they don't care about you know, the top 40, under 40, this or pitch competition that they're just like what can I do to serve my customers, build the best possible product and build the best possible team around me? And everything else is just noise. Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1:That's exactly what I was about to say, because for me, my biggest focus is focus on the team. Even when I was in corporate and I started going up the ladder as a manager, my focus was always the team. I was not focused on meeting a certain quota or hitting goals. I was like that's all secondary. If I focus on the team, if I take care of the team, the team will take care of me. They used to always be my motto. That still is my motto to this day, even in volunteer work.
Speaker 1:If I'm over a volunteer team which I'll be over one tomorrow, is when I go and volunteer. It's the same thing. I'm gonna take care of the team super well. My job I tell them this is your job is to love people well. And I said if any of the instructions I've given you gets in the way of you loving people well, I said then resort back to loving people well.
Speaker 1:And I said my number one job is to make sure that you feel sane. You feel hurt. I'm here for that, because I don't need to sit there and give you a 10 step process of exactly how I'm gonna take care of you If you know that my only job is to make sure that you guys are good, then you don't have to worry about it. But if I'm telling you, well, I've got to make sure that investment relations are good, I've got to make sure that our chief marketing officer is taking care of, I've got to make sure that my assistant is good, it's like, no, I'm focused on you. I'm focused on you right here, right now, and I think that that's amazing and that's what I'm hearing from you. When it comes to the angel investing side and investing in companies, is those people who just stay focused, those people who say I'm gonna make it happen, no matter if you're with me, if you're not with me. This thing is coming to life one way or the other Totally.
Speaker 2:And for a recent example, like we saw a lot of this happen in like 2021, with the whole NFT craze as a great example. We saw companies that were in totally unrelated businesses. Now, oh, we're gonna launch an NFT, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that, and I'm just like guys, like what are you doing here? Like, stay focused, this is not the core business. Yeah, it's fun, it's flashy, whatever NFTs everyone's talking about it on Twitter but like you know, it's just it's not. You know 5, 10, 20 year business plan. Like it's not the direction of the company.
Speaker 2:Like some of that stuff just drives me nuts because, like I'm a big hockey guy I used to, I was a professional hockey referee way back in the day and like just seeing the focus of professional athletes and how they train and how they stay disciplined throughout entire seasons, Like you, just you got to stay focused throughout the winning streak, the losing streaks. Like, stay core to the mission, Just keep executing, just avoid the distractions it's so easy to get distracted in today's world but yeah, like that core focus and discipline, it really comes down to all that.
Speaker 1:So what are some so for the startups listening, especially the startup founders. What kind of companies do you invest in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we invest predominantly in early stage software companies that are based either in Canada or the United States, so we'll look at anything. We're generally generalists but we don't do anything in the biotech or Medtech or HealthTech space. But we'll look at anything either on the enterprise software side, consumer software side. We love marketplaces, we love platforms, anything SaaS, apis, fintechs, aiml. I mean there's a lot of noise in AI right now, as I'm sure you're aware, but we'll still look at stuff in the AI space. But yeah, I mean, as long as the team and the company is executing here in North America, we'd love to take a look at it.
Speaker 1:And that's, and I love that. So I always ask you questions similar to this and I'm interested to hear your response to this is tell me a funny story about your angel investing career.
Speaker 2:Funny story. Oh, it's just well, I don't know how funny it is. Maybe it's kind of funny now. I guess I can look back. But about seven or eight years ago I had an opportunity to invest in Spotify and it was part of like a, like a secondary syndicate that was going in. I think it was part of the series B or C, like one of the earlier growth rounds, and I looked at it and I was like, oh, this is interesting. And Spotify wasn't even available in Canada yet at the time, but I was reading about it. I was like, oh, this sounds super cool, I can't wait for this platform to come to Canada. And but then at the time Apple Music was also starting and Jay-Z was starting title. So I was like, well, how are these little guys from Sweden gonna beat Jay-Z and Apple? Like these are two massive forces in the music industry and technology industry? Look, there's absolutely no way. But so I ended up passing on the investment. And then Spotify obviously, as we all know, went on to become the largest streaming platform, with hundreds of millions or billions of users, whatever it is. But yeah, I just kind of look back and laugh on that now because I was just so, so young and naive in my early angel days and didn't really realize that, hey, you know, you don't. It's not necessarily how much money you have behind you. It's like do you have a better product? Are you first to market? Do you have those exclusivity contracts and the licensing agreements in place? And the founders at Spotify I don't know if you've watched the, the docu series that they did on Spotify it's really, really interesting.
Speaker 2:It's like a six part episode. But yeah, no, just like these guys were just so tenacious and they were gonna make it happen in the world, regardless of Jay-Z or Apple or anyone else's deep pockets that were pushing against them. So, yeah, maybe that's. I laugh at it now, but yeah, it kind of hurts, I guess, because that would have been a nice little exit. Else was running a venture capital fund. Yeah, they go out and they raise money from different little partners. So I was just an individual LP, I threw a check into the fund and they had some other good, good companies in there as well and some good exits. But yeah, that we work on that. That kind of hurts, that stings, because it was just it was the darling, you know of startups for a little while there and that's another really good docu series If you haven't watched is the we work one we crashed, I believe it's called that.
Speaker 2:One is incredibly well done and another six or seven parts series. But yeah, I highly recommend anyone watch that one. That'll, that'll actually give you a really good feeling for what it's like to be a founder, Because I think in the first couple episodes they really they really depicted it well what it's like to be a founder, like they showed Adam Newman going around New York pitching a million investors, angels, like trying to sell his vision, trying to sell his idea, and everyone was turning him down and the guy was basically living on food stamps and you know, and then he finally caught a break. So I think that that they really they really embodied it well, what it means to be a first time founder, really grinding it out in the early days.
Speaker 1:I think that that's so fascinating. There's the people, the guy who created GoPro. He had another company and then he sold it and he pretty much he dumped everything into GoPro and GoPro really wasn't doing anything. So him and his wife lived out of a van selling seashells off the beach, like that's where they lived. And eventually GoPro took off and then it became a big company. But I just thought they're not, I just said they're not. Thought about that. It's like would I be willing to do that? Like, would I be willing to go through that kind of pain? Everyone sees the payoff, but are you willing to go through the pain before you get the payoff? Like, unfortunately for we work is they just went through the pain and got more pain in the end, but would they? You know it's like, are you willing to go through the pain?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, adam Newman cast out. He got like a couple hundred million, so he did all right.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, yeah, even now, like in our current portfolio, we have one founder. When he started his company he actually sold his house to bootstrap the company when he first started it. So I mean like this guy, he's all in man. I mean he's a former, he's a former Marine. So like he's a super intense, disciplined, focused guy. Anyways, I think anything he does in life he's going to be successful at. But yeah, just like stories like that, like living in the van, same type of thing, right, you put it all in the line for what you're, what you believe in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, matt, I love this conversation. I feel like I could just keep talking to you, but I want to respect your time as well. Thank you so much for joining me on the show and it was amazing. Thank you for being here, hey. Thanks for having me anytime and for everyone listening. We'll see you in the next episode.