After the Christmas break, everyone starts taking elective courses so the class breaks up and we're no longer all together all the time. My focus is on entrepreneurship and new ventures so my elective choices are geared toward that.
Financing New Ventures was co-lectured by Elspeth Murray and Andrew Waitman. The course is about how venture capital companies work, pool money together, and set up their deal flow.
The course is a prerequisite for the Tricolour Venture Fund which is also offered as a project course as part of the MBA curriculum. It's like a real life Dragon's Den where we get to evaluate start up companies and decide if the fund is going to invest in them in return for an equity stake in the company.
Andrew Waitman taught most of the course. He was a key part of Celtic House, a VC company in the Ottawa area that financed some successful technology companies over the past 10 years. He's got some great knowledge of the industry and some great insights in what it takes to make a new venture successful. He's not an academic type, speaks frankly, and tells it like it is. He had a column for a while in which he wrote about different topics with the VC and entrepreneurship realm. You can read some of it here.
As part of the course, three entrepreneurs were brought in to talk to us and we were given the opportunity to ask some detailed questions about their business and what it took for them to be successful. Really interesting.
Damian Lamb started Genesys Capital with a partner because they saw an opportunity to tap into the life sciences research in Canada and turn some of the ideas into viable businesses. He was another very frank speaker and gave us some real insights into how VC companies get started, function, and make money for themselves and their funders.
Wael Mohamed started a network security company called 3rd Brigade and gave us some good knowledge about what it really takes to get a new venture off the ground. One key learning I took was about how to simplify your idea and show your due diligence to make it easy for investors to understand what your talking about. He showed us his initial pitch presentation and it was very simple, clear, and concise. Really neat.
Paul Vallee was an entrepreneur at an early age and actually started a business when he was still an undergrad. After 3 or 4 new ventures, he became successful with the Pythian Group, a database monitoring and management company. Andrew Waitman is now CEO of Pythian. They just revamped their website and there's a video with both of them on the home page.
Rob Ford also came to talk to us about term sheets, the legal documents that accompany VC financing deals. Nice guy...he had some interesting stuff to say about the legal side of things and how deals are structured to protect the VC companies.
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