Investing Together – Our Spring LP Meeting
May 30, 2018
On May 9th, PV hosted its Spring LP Meeting at McKinsey & Company’s Experience Studio. With 120 valued Investment Partners in attendance, a good increase from our September event, the assembly served as a physical representation of the theme of the morning: growth. Opportunity growth for investors and entrepreneurs within the Canadian tech ecosystem, and the growth of Plaza Ventures.
Our Moment In Time and the Golden Age of Innovation
Rob opened the presentation with a discussion around ‘investing at our moment in time’. Applied to investing in new companies at Series A and B, this means that our capital will be used for rapid growth of revenues and enterprise value. We typically have the opportunity to build relationships with management and watch company performance for a period of months or years before investing. The right moment in time to invest becomes evident when the company has deep data analysis supporting the decision to hire up its workforce in order to meet market demand and service its customers.
Our ‘moment in time’ thesis also applies to the Canadian tech ecosystem and private investors. It is clear that the Canadian innovation economy is in the early stages of growth and scale. Our tech scene is maturing, with more local companies reaching world-class status and repeat entrepreneurs having meaningful exits. Toronto added 22,500 new technology jobs in 2017, eclipsing New York and San Francisco with 17,000 combined. Canadian academic institutions continue to turn out more skilled engineering graduates than any other tech region, and our rich cultural landscape and commitment to diversity and inclusion attracts the best and brightest talent from around the globe. The local tech market is very hot and getting hotter.
Now is the moment in time for families to shift a larger portion of their investable assets into the Innovation Economy, specifically into private tech companies where 90%+ of wealth is created pre-IPO and remains uncorrelated to volatile public markets. We provide families with access to private growth-stage companies through our unique micro-fund model, where risk centers on a company’s ability to execute and scale, not on the technology itself. Please see our Philosophy page.
The Evolution of PV
Prior to concluding the presentation with a status update on our growing portfolio, Rob took a moment to discuss PV’s evolution. This past year has been a landmark year for our firm. With Fund IV investing its capital across 8 companies in Q4/Q1, PV was ranked amongst the most active independent VC’s in Canada by the CVCA, as well as the PwC MoneyTree report, and we plan to continue scaling up our investment activity throughout 2018. Our team grew to seven full-time employees and following our exit of SweetIQ, CEO Mo El-Barachi joined us as a Venture Advisor.
Our scaling efforts this year have also allowed for important moments of self-reflection. We have looked at ourselves critically, understanding our strengths, tuning our messaging, and coming out to market with a more refined brand platform and new website. The impetus for our rebranding initiative was to better express our people-centric ethos and to adjust our messaging to focus on entrepreneurs, as quality deal flow is our life’s blood. We care deeply about the entrepreneurial teams with whom we work, and have used our new website as an opportunity to more intimately profile our companies through content-rich pages highlighting the people, accomplishments, and stories behind each of our investments. We encourage you to explore our portfolio pages.
Following the presentation, we enjoyed another hour of networking with our Investment Partners before having our portfolio companies join us at McKinsey & Co. for our CEO RoundTable in the afternoon, and at a co-hosted dinner event with KKR Growth in the evening.
If you are interested in learning more about the rest of the day’s events, please read on via the following links:
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