Canada Needs a Peter Thiel
If you’ve spent any time around the burgeoning DemoCamp, CaseCamp, BarCamp, mesh, et al scene in Toronto, one thing becomes obvious: there’s a lot of hard-working entrepreneurs desperately seeking a little venture capital.
These are people who have ideas and/or online services - some of them interesting - but aren’t able to commit themselves full-time and take their start-ups to the next level without an investment from a VC or angels. We’re talking $250,000 to $500,000 - enough to hire a few employees to give it a real go for a year, maybe 18 months provided you’re smart and careful with your cash.
Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of this kind of money floating around even for the best ideas. It’s too bad because just a little VC love would go a long way in boosting Canada’s online landscape.
What Canada needs is Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and one of Facebook’s early investors. Or perhaps someone like Thiel, who has created a new fund that invests a little money (a few hundred thousand dollars) for a small stake (5% to 10%). For more, check out this story in the Wall St. Journal.
If you had a start-up fund with, let’s say, $50-million, you could easily finance 25 companies - provided you could syndicate your post-seed deals. While Thiel takes a hands-off approach, a smart start-up fund should probably offer value-added resources such as infrastructure, human resources, legal services, strategic advisors, etc. given there isn’t a large base of successful Canadian entrepreneurs who have been there and done that.
So where’s this money going to come from? Maybe someone like Research in Motion’s Jim Balsillie, a dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur. Or perhaps Jeff Skoll, who has been putting his eBay dollars into the film, and social entrepreneurship through his foundation. Or maybe a group of well-heeled entrepreneurs will get together to do something. (Note: Extreme Venture Partners launched earlier this month with a $10-million fund that will focus on $1-million investments.)
In any event, there’s a need that isn’t being met right now. Let’s hope 2008 sees something change.
Technorati Tags: Canada, puppy, Venture Capital
January 1st, 2008 at 4:24 pm
[...] Evans, formely editor at Maple Leaf 2.0, said Canada needs a Peter Thiel. This was his reaction to the Wall Street Journal piece where investor Peter Thiel, member of the [...]
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:15 am
Hey Mark,
Be interested to know what Paul Kedrosky thinks of your notion. http://paul.kedrosky.com/
January 2nd, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Canada would benefit a lot if we had something like the Y Combinator program down in the US. As you said, value-added services are very important, perhaps more important than the money itself.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:08 pm
[...] a debate brewing on the state of startup funding in [...]
January 8th, 2008 at 10:34 am
[...] a debate brewing on the state of startup funding in [...]
January 11th, 2008 at 1:50 am
[...] relevant blog posts come bubbling up that are in line with our thinking. As the last year closed, Mark Evans figures we needs a Peter Thiel in Canada. David Crow batted that back, asking if money was really all we are lacking here in [...]