Transcript — Entrepreneurial capital with Chris Arsenault, Managing Partner @ iNovia Capital

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On this week’s show, we spoke with Chris Arsenault, Managing Partner @ iNovia Capital. Chris is a senior executive with over 20 years of general management experience in high technology industries, with extensive experience in business development, strategic planning, sales, marketing and communications. Chris is the cofounder, President & CEO of iNovia Capital, a Venture Capital firm launched in 2007 with now over a half a billion under management.

Chris currently serves as a director on the boards of AppDirect, LightSpeed Retail, Poka, SnapTravel, Well.ca, and until recently Luxury Retreats (acquired by Airbnb). Chris is an active board member of Réseau Capital, and a proud Charter Member of Silicon Valley based C100.

On the show, we spoke about:

• How he launched iNovia more than 10 years
• The role of mentorship in his career
• The most important characteristic in an entrepreneur
• What it takes to build a successful VC firm (brand, team and vision)
• How crypto fits into the larger trend of decentralization
• If you have time, check out Chris’ thesis on optionality.

Chris is a legend in the Canadian venture capital landscape. I always walk away inspired after talking with him. I hope that you enjoy the conversation!

Nectarios: Chris, thanks for being on the show. I appreciate your taking the time. I realize you have a very busy schedule, so it’s very much appreciated, to just take the time to sit down and chat in your new offices. I don’t think I’ve visited your offices since you guys moved there. It’s pretty cool actually. The whole space around what La Caisse de Dépot has done here, it’s neat. The first question would be a personal one. I know you’ve spoken about this, but how have mentors helped you in your career?

Chris: When I built my first company back in the mid-90s, which was a software company, we started touching the Internet in the early, early days, I had no mentors. That story basically launched me into what I’m doing today. From an entrepreneur perspective, it is basically my biggest success, but also my biggest failure. When I’m backing entrepreneurs today, they look a lot like what I was when I was in my early twenties.

The big difference today is that the same type of entrepreneurs actually have mentors early on in their careers. I didn’t and that’s why my biggest personal success is also my biggest failure, because I could’ve done so much better. Today, I have a mentor and I had multiple mentors since early 2000s. It has served me well and it’s also serving portfolio companies well. We highly recommend coaching and mentoring to all of our CEOs and executive teams. This is something that you cannot go wrong.

Nectarios: How do you feel that being an entrepreneur has helped you be an investor? You mentioned mentorship. I’m guessing that’s a part of it. Do you feel that it’s a prerequisite today if you want to be a good investor that you’ve been on the other side of the table?

Chris: I’m biased, so my answer is yes, but at the same time, just look at the numbers. Venture returns in the 1990s and early 2000s do not compare with the venture returns over the last 5 to 10 years. What is different today is that most of the funds that have been created are all entrepreneurial driven or operator lead. The old model of Silicon Valley was having investors that have financial backgrounds and everything else. You can have a mix in the team and the mix is very important.

Having people that actually understand the stress, the opportunities, the challenges, the risk, when they’re investing in a company changes the whole relationship that is built between the investor and the entrepreneur. An entrepreneur has the choice of choosing which type of investor they want to bring into the company because it is a marriage. Interestingly enough, if I just look at the average marriage in Quebec, it’s shorter in real life, then the number of years you will be in a relationship with your investor.

Choosing the right investor means choosing an investor that understands what you’re going through, what you’re going to go through and, also, your business. If you have an investor on the other side of the table and he’s basically trying to learn more than bring you value, even into due diligence phase before actually committing to invest, that’s not the type of investors that you want. You want an investor that actually understands what you’re going through and most importantly, what you’re going to go through. Therefore, they can bring insights and relationships that otherwise the investor would not be able to.

Nectarios: You mentioned having good success and failures in your twenties. What would you have liked to have known back then that you would’ve maybe done differently?

Chris: It’s just that if you don’t have the right investors and if you don’t have a mentor, there’s only so much that you know. So the first challenge is realizing what you don’t know. You need to be so, so high on self-confidence to attract capital, to attract talent, to actually build a business from scratch that you kind of lose yourself in the process. Having that type of mentorship and having that type of senior advice around a table from your investors allows you to first understand what you don’t know and second how not to panic when something pops up. For example, there’s a crisis. You just lost your top VP of sales to a competitor. You just lost a big contract, the technology’s not working, there is a big shift in the industry.

Not panicking is rule number one and sadly most people panic. Why? Because they’ve never been through it before. If you have people around you that have been through this type of stress, then guess what? You can deal with the situation much better. If your competition doesn’t have that, then guess what? You’re ahead of your competition as well because they’re going to be going through the same things as you are.

Nectarios: You mentioned in the past your own way to handle stress is that you do meditation. Is that something that you advise your founders to do or is there other ways that you would advise them to cope with an immense pressure that they’re under?

Chris: Coping with pressure is different depending on the people. Meditation for me is by far the best tool that I’ve found over the last few decades and it’s been less than a decade actually. This is something that, is new for me for maybe five, six years now and is paying off big time. Do I recommend it to all of our entrepreneurs and other people? Absolutely. I recommend it to my friends and I got my kids involved. For other people it’s going to be sports. Other people it’s going to be gym, other people it’s going to be just realizing that there is a balance between your ability to focus, drive and give a hundred percent of yourself and the ability to recuperate.

Once you realize as an entrepreneur that it’s not the amount of work that makes a difference. It’s how you go by it. Working smart outweighs all the time working hard. So when you’re able to have both then guess what, you’re above the crowd.

Recognizing that is definitely a challenge that you try to identify in the entrepreneurs that you back to see if that’s a problem and make sure that it’s being addressed upfront and sometimes it’s going to be the life balance, personal life, family life, professional life, sometimes just your work ethics in terms of how you’re working and other times it’s just going to be adding meditation or sports or just going to the gym on a regular basis.

In all cases you have to recognize that you have to manage that stress and you have to be able to recuperate. If you don’t recuperate, like any other athlete in the world, you will hit a wall.

Nectarios: That’s very good feedback. I wrestled with this as well on my end and I have tried meditation. I find sports have worked better for me. I want to go back to the inception of iNovia, talk about the firm that you’ve built over the past decade. Maybe a simple question. What led you to starting the fund?

Chris: iNovia is the outcome of a few years in the investment side of the business. I joined Charles Sirois and his ecosystem of companies and investments, right before 2000 and stayed for a few years and from there helped launch a university accelerator fund called MSBi. iNovia is the outcome of the years of experience as an entrepreneur, attracting funding, failing and succeeding and also the years as an investor, part of the Sirois family, creating spin-offs, investing in companies and starting a fund from scratch which was the accelerator fund.

Basically taking all of the learning and saying, OK, if we were to build a venture capital fund that supports entrepreneurs that will build the next billion dollar company, what would it look like? Well, it should look like X, Y, and Z. X was actually attracting talent for an entrepreneur, which for a business, is extremely important. Same thing for a fund. Then, building a brand in order to attract the best deal flow is important as much as it is for a company in order to attract your customer base, scaling your business and growing over time. Finally, having a long-term vision over one or two decades is extremely important for an entrepreneur, same thing for a VC fund.

The iNovia brand, the iNovia team, everything was built according to those three rules if you want. I had the opportunity of having met François Gauvin, who’s partner and CFO here, that helped launch iNovia when he was, before that, at Bell Canada, Teleglobe and then Le Fond FTQ. Then I met up with Sean Abbott, in the earlier days as well. When it was time to actually launch iNovia, Sean, who’s based out west, who is a co-inventor of the USB key, was an angel investor and was a great mentor for the entrepreneurs that he had been backing. He was just a natural fit. The chemistry was there. That chemistry, that quality of talent is what kick-started what is now iNovia and this is back in 2007, we’re on our eleventh year now.

Nectarios: Has the original vision changed or shifted somewhat or how has it grown?

Chris: No, the vision was to build a top-tier VC that would be part of the first half of the top quartile, which at that time in 2007 was 100% California-based. How do we build this type of firm being headquartered in Canada? Then it was a question of can we attract capital, can we attract talent? Can we attract the entrepreneurs that have the ambition of building these types of companies in Canada, outside of Canada?

We have a mixed strategy where we’re a North American early stage fund, but at the same time we’ll be there in the later stage rounds as well. We’re not a seed stage investor that puts in X number of dollars and puts dollars in more than fewer companies and just hope for the best. At the end of the day, we’re there at every step. When JP Morgan put $110,000,000 in App Direct, we were in the closing documents. We participated in that round. I’m still a board member on that company. When Lightspeed did the transaction with La Caisse de Depot, we were part of structuring that transaction. We are still on the board helping the company go to the next phase. We’re from the early days to what will be eventually an exit. Sometimes the exit happens sooner and other times it’s a long path. We’re long-term thinker.

The vision of the fund, the vision of our relationship with entrepreneurs and how we help build what will become multi-billion dollar companies , with a big S, has not changed. The landscape has evolved. The ambition behind the entrepreneurs that we’re backing has been increasing. The competitiveness of Canadian entrepreneurs on the global landscape has more than 10X. The markets are collaborating with our vision. Even though we are sticking to our vision from 11 years ago, and we’re adding capital and we’re able to lead $40,000,000 rounds. We couldn’t do that in 2008, but today we can because we have the attractiveness power of bringing in LPs and other investors into our companies on the terms and conditions that we’re setting with the entrepreneurs.

We’ve evolved obviously, but we kept the same vision and the markets have been collaborating with us and the entrepreneurs are just amazing. If it wasn’t for the calibre of people that we’re able to attract in our portfolio, we would be nowhere near achieving that vision. Right now, 10 years into it, we’re in a pretty good shape.

Nectarios: It’s very admirable that the vision has stayed the same, but your impact has been significant. I could attest to that, having seen it in this market, you spoke of the 10X and it’s truly something that iNovia really personify. What do you feel is the most important character trait when it comes to the entrepreneurs that you are looking for? Because you said that’s the most important aspect. It’s the people. So what is that key ingredient you feel or a mix of ingredients?

Chris: That is definitely a mix because, the entrepreneur that we’re looking for, beyond making sure that we have chemistry with the entrepreneur and that there’s a level of trust and transparency between his or her vision and her way of executing on that division and our understanding of it, making sure that that work. That’s just people, right? It’s just connecting properly. But what we’re looking for is an entrepreneur, that has a vision, clearly understand what’s under her, control, clearly understands what’s not under her control. The reason why she understands that is because she has a very strong founder market fit. Therefore, there’s a level of experience and depth of why and what they’re building matters. Why they can succeed is because they have a vision of it, right? A lot of people lack vision and a lot of people lack execution behind a vision, of course, but vision is not just having an idea.

Having a dream is like painting a picture in the future of what it’s going to look like, and then adapting with the changes that are not under your control. If you’re painting a picture that every single small retail store in the world should be agile and should be able to provide any type of product or service in their sector to any customer online or offline, you need to paint that customer in the future. You need to look to see or imagine how that customer is going to be interacting with the product. How the engagement is going to be. Going into the details of a painted picture is hard and when you have a real vision, you can actually paint it. Once you painted it, you can adapt your strategy as an entrepreneur and your product or service in order to constantly evolve towards achieving that vision.

Nectarios: Something I find interesting is the parts of the vision that stay solid. The thing that the future that you’ve painted, but then the way to get there adapts and you have to be agile. How do you coach your entrepreneurs? How do you feel the best entrepreneurs adapt to that? When do they stick to their guns and when do they change their opinion?

Chris: You change your opinion because there are new factors, there are new elements that were unknown that are now known and you have to change. It’s more of an ability. It’s not something that we’re teaching to entrepreneurs. We’re basically looking for entrepreneurs that have that ability, that ability of having a vision and believing really hard in it so that, they’re putting all of the passion, the effort, attracting the best talent, understanding what they have to do at which stages in order to get there, but smart enough to adapt. I think that’s where we lose a lot of entrepreneurs is when they do pivot one, pivot two, pivot three, there is no vision behind it. They’re just good people trying and trying and trying and trying. For me it’s not about trying, it’s about figuring out what you know and what you don’t know and focus on what you control and adapt when you have new information

Nectarios: In terms of what iNovia looks for in companies. What’s your investment thesis? Is it based on a specific set of technologies, markets? How do you approach your portfolio?

Chris: Well, you know, we’re deep into the future of work, we’re deep into software differentiated hardware. We’re looking at new verticals that are considered unsexy in the market, like transportation and manufacturing. Why we are looking at it, it is because we actually think that data from machine learning or AI, mobility from a device to the connectivity front is changing the way people can deploy their product, be more efficient or increase their sales.

This is happening across the board in all sectors and we should be smart enough to identify the sectors that haven’t been disrupted, yet that are huge, that we should be going after. We’re not into just the apps or just doing something small. We’re more into platform plays into infrastructure plays. If you think of what App Direct has built over the years or what Vidyard is building in the video space, or what Clearpath robotics is doing in the driverless vehicles. These are sectors that are huge, that are disrupting multiple markets and we’re betting on that platform play and we’re betting that the teams are going to constantly evolve in order to address the changes in the market at the same time.

We still do consumers. Luxury Retreats was a consumer play. Well.ca is a consumer play. SnapTravel is one that we did recently that’s also a new consumer play. We’re doing it from a unique perspective where we understand the travel space pretty well. What does Busbud and SnapTravel have that nobody else has in terms of not only their vision but how their vision of the user experience is different. They’re trying to change the experience, the same way Luxury Retreats was trying to change your luxury experience as a consumer. What differentiates them from a technical perspective that gives them a leg up on anybody else that wants to do it tomorrow morning or any of the incumbents when they don’t have the choice of acquiring or building from scratch. What does a Busbud or a SnapTravel have that will make that larger established company think twice before going head to head with one of these two companies.

We put out a lot of effort into building our thesis in different sectors, but also, how things are evolving from an AI or machine learning perspective. It’s been a big buzz over the last, two years, while wait a minute on a practical basis, what does it mean? Well, it means that you have applied AI where companies are founded from scratch on a new statistical approach to the software that they’re building. Ross Technologies in the legal space is definitely one of the companies that we backed, that took that approach. There’s also the AI infused companies which started with a platform three, five, seven years ago and now are continuing to scale, but the amount of data that they have access to, the streams of data from their customers or from other sources, they should be able to grow even faster or better because of machine learning.

That’s something that’s interesting for us. For us it’s not a question of, you know, trying to own AI. It’s a question of making sure we have access to the talent in AI, that we have access to the expertise or knowledge that we can soundboard with and that we can make sure that the entrepreneurs that are or will be AI infused also have that access. Of course there’s going to be the new companies that are just redefining, like back in the Internet days when you saw the first few e-commerce companies, they were defining a new brave new world. We’re seeing the same thing and we’re trying to leverage those relationships.

Nectarios: If I can summarize, it sounds like at a macro level there are two areas. One, how technology has fundamentally disrupted the value chain and you are looking at how that has impacted specific industries. You’re trying to be and you’re trying to invest in the underlying infrastructure behind it, the platforms, and then from the consumer side, it’s what companies have figured out how to get closer to the customer and being able to provide unique value. With that framework, how do you then set priorities for iNovia? How do you say, OK, this is what we’re going to focus on for the next 12 months?

Chris: Our priorities constantly change, but they’re focused on the portfolio. At the end of the day, as a venture capital fund, we succeed if our entrepreneurs succeed. We have to be able to attract the best deal flow, but let’s not forget that we are an early stage fund right now. An early-stage investment means that we do a lot of startups or a lot of young companies. Early stage is a phase and value creation come with scale.

How do we help, beyond putting in capital in our portfolio companies, to help them grow? It’s all about growth and that growth comes, with the ability to attract the capital that is needed, but also to attract the talent that is needed and talent is something that we built a whole practice on, where we actually have a playbook on talent and people. We have Salima that’s heading talent, we’re starting to post a bit more content related to, how to manage growth, manage and pull together the best talent possible in the company at different stages. She’s releasing another blog soon related to exit preparedness from an HR perspective because, exit preparedness is part of a process as well. What does it mean from a talent base and what does it mean from your HR base?

We’re building different playbooks, talent being a key one and growth being another one. Growth being from a SaaS and metrics perspective. In SaaS, there are magic numbers. What does the magic number mean? There’s your LTV, there’s your CAC, but there’s… wait a minute, wait a minute. How do we help guide our companies that were maybe five, 10, 20 people when we first invested, but they are now 200, 500 or 600 people and make sure that as they grow, they understand what key metrics really matter for them and how they compare to the industry?

Part of the value that we bring to a portfolio company is hopefully our understanding of their business and their industry and the ability to attract talent and attract the type of people that can provide a sound boarding for them to make better decisions. Be it, understanding what metrics matter at different stages or how the whole market has evolved and now it’s less of a technology play and it’s more of a market grab.

For example, your Blue Ocean opportunity, that was great with your strategy over the last year, is now literally a Red Ocean and everybody’s under cutting everybody because too many players in the industry are dying or will die. You want to be the one backing the entrepreneur that won’t die, that will succeed. How do you help the entrepreneur get through that? It’s not a question of sitting back and saying, oh my God, now it’s a Red Ocean, the margins are being cut. No, no, this is a cycle. A Red Ocean is never permanent, a Red Ocean means that there’s a few that will come up strong and there’s a lot that will die or fold. You want to be the one providing the support to the company that will come out strong.

Nectarios: I think this is a great segue to talk about the industry and how you look at it. You mentioned how iNovia thinks about venture capital and the offer that you give to your companies. How do you see the future of venture, specifically when it comes to a provider of capital versus a provider of services? We’re seeing some famous platform VCs in that space. As a second-part question, we’re also seeing the rise of these quant VCs like Correlation Ventures or Social Capital that are much more data driven in their approach. How do you see that unfolding?

Chris: Everybody has a unique model and that’s what’s great with ventures. If you look at the top tier VCs, each fund is different. You’ll have one top tier VC fund that has a $400,000,000 in capital time after time, $400,000,000 early stage fund with a $1,000,000,000 top up funding for growth. It’s a model. You have certain investors that will be investing on pure, data analysis. They’re going to be looking at, only at the financials and the metrics and make decisions based not on management, not on the sector and everything else, just on the pure data and take bets and basically put a lot of money. That works if that’s a hundred percent your model.

There are other funds that will overcapitalize companies. By overcapitalizing them, they give them a heads up. They have more capital than the competition, therefore, they can attract the best talent as they have the resources for it. They can be more aggressive and start the Red Ocean instead of being forced into it.

There are other people that basically will staff up and provide talent, like Andreessen Horowitz has like 50 or 70 people on staff just providing UI, UX and software engineering. Everybody has their different model and what’s important to notice between the top tier and second tier in terms of returns for VCs is that the second tiers are trying to be like somebody else. They’re trying to copy somebody else’s model. Same thing for companies. By the way, there’s a nice correlation between performance of a fund and performance of a company. When you’re a copycat versus when you’re original. Very, very different returns.

We, iNovia, we own our stuff, we are not a Silicon Valley fund. We are not a Quebec fund. We are an operator led venture capital fund with deep expertise in how to build companies from scratch to growth and we provide to the entrepreneurs that we back the insights, but also the support to get through the hard phases. When we look at a company, of course, we look at the data, of course, we look at the size of the market and if the market is growing or shrinking. Of course, we compare them to the top companies that we’ve seen elsewhere in North America.

Of course we evaluate the talent base and, of course, we look at the quality of the founders and the vision behind it. We want to be part of their story. If we’re going to be part of their story, we better understand it, but we also recognize that we’re not the ones operating the company and we’re not the ones facing the unknown time after time, week after week, quarter after quarter, the changes in the market, the changes in politics, the changes in economics or the shifts in technology platforms.

What we do know is that we have access to the knowledge that we don’t have. The knowledge that we have, we use it to be the best possible soundboard to these entrepreneurs. Getting through the tough times, it’s a rollercoaster and guess what, even though it feels bad and it hurts right now, it’s going to go back up. It’s just a question of addressing the challenges and prioritizing properly and understanding what you know and what you don’t know. We have our own model.

Nectarios: I really liked the analogy between a VC performance versus other company’s performance. I find that a very interesting corollary. What do you think’s happening in this space that no one is talking about right now? There’s obviously everyone’s talking about AI, everyone’s talking about cryptocurrencies.

Chris: Nobody’s talking about the fact that we just lived through one year with Trump plus a pre-year for the elections. Nobody’s talking about what the other countries will do now. We just went through one year of a very different political type of management in the US and the US remains the biggest partner to the world and the centre of a lot of innovation. We’re not talking about what candidates are going to do going forward, how they are going to change their own policies, how it is going to affect business, how it is going to affect the economy, how different countries in Asia are going to act and react mid to long-term. Forget about reaction and just look, Trump tweets something and media picks up on it and what it really means in one to three years from now.

We’ve been on a 10-year positive cycle, since the crash in 2008/2009, which started picking back up in 2010 and we’re in 2018 now. We’re on the longest positive growth economic cycle in the history that we’ve been tracking over the last 50–60 years. So what does it mean? Does it mean it’s going to crash next year? Does it mean it’s going to crash in 2020? Does it mean that we just changed the whole cycles and it doesn’t crash anymore the same way?

There’s a lot of underlying deep impact. Things that we do not control as VCs, that our entrepreneurs don’t control, but that we have to be aware of in order to be able to adjust, because when they’re going to happen they’re going to happen fast and that means it will cause actions and reactions with regards to how you’re growing your company, how you’re raising funds, the valuations, the multiples, the burn rate. It will have huge impacts. That’s on my mind, definitely and we’re having conversations. That’s something that I don’t hear enough people really talk about. Everybody is just stuck on the surface instead of understanding the net net impact. The impact is not in the short term, it’s in two years, three years, five years from now. So what does it mean?

Nectarios: It’s a very good point that we’re living through this long cycle and right now capital’s cheap. Everyone seems to be able to raise capital pretty easily. But I find for you, if there is, if and when there is, the next correction, it will probably be easier for your job, in the sense of the real entrepreneurs are going to stick around and there’ll be a lot fewer pretenders, in terms of people trying to start companies.

Chris: Yeah and I think it’s important to pace. Venture, real venture, is a 40, 50-year marathon. If you don’t pace yourself, you’ll hit a wall, you’ll burn out, you’ll crash and you know, you’re going to hit every possible scenario between now and 40 or 50 years from now. So stay calm, pace yourself. It’s always a good time to invest when you’re backing amazing people. Always.

Nectar: Talk about one shiny object. What do you guys think about cryptotokens and is, iNovia considering looking at the space at all.

Chris: We came up with our thesis on decentralization, which is a bit broader than just cryptotokens. Tod wrote that piece. He followed up on additional parts to that piece and he’s coming up with something additional soon. Decentralization is more impactful on a global front, it actually impacts how products are being delivered, how people are engaging, and it’s inclusive of crypto, in the sense that it’s decentralization and that’s the whole purpose behind blockchain.

It’s just that we’re not yet big fans of the currency itself, so be it a token or bitcoin or other. We’re more interested in the platform plays, in how products and services are being delivered and how companies, people, consumers or bots are actually interacting with this type of decentralization. Yes, it’s something that we’ve been digging in deep. We’re just not part of the, the currency side of it. We’re dealing with Canadian dollars, US dollars and when we sell to an Asian company, we exchange the currency and that’s about it.

What I find interesting on the ICO front is more of a new version of what a loyalty program looks like. If you think of, you know, what Air Miles or Aeroplan or any other loyalty program looks like when it’s multi-service, multi-product, multi-communities, how do you manage the transfers in between? How do you manage, the value that’s being built from a community front as well as the value being built from a use front? Think of the Canadian Tire dollars, right? That was the first token out there. It was called Canadian Tire dollars and it still exists and they are digital now. You can actually have your Canadian Tire digital tokens and it forces you not to use your credit card because it reduces the costs of transaction. There’s a purpose, it’s just that right now there’s a lot of confusion and a lot of hype behind.

Nectarios: I want to go back now full circle and ask you a more general question about how you’ve seen the investing landscape change and evolve. Like what you said back in the early days, you weren’t able to lead a $40M round. How do you see the space evolve with Canadian and US investors and also notably the rise of La Caisse de Dépot, acting almost like the Softbank of Quebec to some extent?

Chris: La Caisse is playing a key role that I think many other institutions are going to follow, be it Canadian ones or foreign ones. La Caisse like any other large institution have capital to deploy and that capital is being deployed today slightly differently than how it was deployed 10 or 20 years ago. It has to generate returns because it has the responsibility of generating the best returns and managing the risk, but there’s also the opportunity of playing a key role in the private markets and generate substantial value, and not take the level of risk that could have been considered for the same type of investment 10 years ago. I do think La Caisse strategy is a great strategy and many others will be copying it, for sure. La Caisse strategy, though, follows a change that already occurred in the markets.

Across Canada, if you look at the leading funds today, they are now operator lead, entrepreneur lead, but it’s the same thing for the funds out of New York and the revivals of VC funds out of Boston and it’s been the case for decades in the Valley. Turn to London and to Paris and they’re also changing.

Capital right now is way more entrepreneurial than it’s ever been and, I think that’s a very good thing, it’s creating value at different levels and at different stages. It’s basically fuelling what is becoming a broader ecosystem of companies. When you think of the high-growth companies today, you don’t just think Silicon Valley anymore. Guess what? Fifteen years ago it was only Silicon Valley. It’s not anymore and it’s in Europe, it’s in Asia, it’s in Canada. These changes are important for the economy, when I’m thinking of my older days, for our pension funds, but also for us as VCs because we’re playing in that field right now.

Nectarios: Chris, it has been an inspiring talk. I always feel like I learn so much every time I talk to you. One more final question, where can people find out more about yourself or about iNovia, if they want to stay in touch?

Chris: www.inovia.vc. Pretty easy. Our emails are our first name at inovia.vc. Very easy to access. If somebody can’t access us, then it’s probably somebody that we don’t want to talk to because they’re not entrepreneurial enough to find us. If they can’t find us or contact us through a warm introduction, that’s also a problem because we’re looking for people that are savvy enough that knows how to interact with their customers, with the talent, with their investors. Hopefully, it’s not just cold emails and cold calls, it’s actually warm introduction. That’s how you can reach.

Nectarios: Great advice. Thank you so much.

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