Since leaving Wattpad, I have been investing my energy into Toronto’s tech ecosystem in order to help tech startups grow. In the past four years, I have evolved from a serial entrepreneur to an angel investor as I noticed that there is a gap in the venture capital ecosystem here in Canada. We have a lot of great investors but we lack a venture fund that is actually co-founded by entrepreneurs and product creators who have genuine Internet company success.
If we take a closer look at Silicon Valley, they have built a powerful ecosystem, which allowed them to create various successful Internet companies in the past decade like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and more. Silicon Valley is able to invest their own capital back into the market and recycle the experience and knowledge back into their ecosystem. This structure allows them to invest their own secret sauces back into the ecosystem for success.
While the tech ecosystem in Canada is thriving, we still lack massive scale, homegrown Internet companies. As Wattpad was growing over the years, I was very lucky to have a hand in growing tens of thousands of users into tens of millions of users. I have a wealth of unique experience, which is exactly why I have been aiming to get involved and help the Canadian tech economy grow with Two Small Fish Ventures.
Two Small Fish Ventures was originally created as a passion project to help other entrepreneurs build the next big thing by leveraging our experience in building large-scale Internet companies. In order to make these dreams a reality, we invest in early-stage tech companies that we believe in and work to nurture them into global technology giants. A big part of creating a successful Internet scale company is by having a strong network effect. Network effect happens when your product increases in value the more people use it. Companies like Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. have all built their moat using network effect but very few people have built successful network effect companies in Canada. It’s my mission to change this by sharing the knowledge I have gained from successfully engineering Wattpad’s strong network effect. At Two Small Fish Ventures, the search for network effect drives our investment strategy.
Today, I am happy to announce that I have my first close of $9 million dollars for Fund II. I could not have gotten here without help and I am eternally grateful to have the support of my limited partners (LPs) in the fund, which includes high net worth individuals, family offices and institutional investors. What’s special about this fund is that it is also backed by a group of talented and knowledgeable entrepreneurs who are actively building technology products and companies in Canada. We call this our Creator Circle and it is a key element of every single investment we make. When TSFV invests in a company, all these creators are part of the team because the success of the company directly affects their investment. They have skin in the game.
My goal is not to simply share capital with the companies we invest in but rather to provide access to our mini-ecosystem of like-minded, entrepreneurial people who are recycling their invaluable expertise into the next generation of business. Our only intention here at Two Small Fish Ventures is to support other entrepreneurs in their quest to build a massive Internet company through our collective knowledge, opening up our networks and nurturing these small fish into big whales. We love to dream big with these entrepreneurs!
The target goal for this fund is $15 million. I am currently working toward my second close and looking forward to working with talented product creators and entrepreneurs. Together, we will build a successful and booming ecosystem and transform the Canadian tech space. I’m looking forward to the future!
