Growth Times

Karen Mazurkewich, Financial Post, in an interesting article on Monday entitled “The new uber-angels” comparing the VC-fund approaches of Ontario and Quebec, declares on the Ontario Venture Capital Fund that “What Ontario didn’t — or couldn’t — predict was the lack of potential co-investors for these funds.”

Karen, I would invite you and Ontario’s decision-makers to step up your due diligence and review Growth Times’s August 4th, 2009 blog post entitled “Who Will Match Ontario’s $250M Emerging Technologies Matching Fund?”……………..

Really, was it that hard to anticipate? Ontario could have predicted this, but there were political and financial forces at play and incompetence at the top. Let me guess that the persons in charge will actually get rewarded with more assignments and rewards for their mistakes, while the rest of us in the private sector get to work harder to actually make innovation happen.

[Addition to the post following subsequent inputs I received: the setup of the Ontario Venture Capital Fund remains such that Business Angels can barely play. The restrictions pretty much rule it out ($1MM min investment, full net worth disclosure, etc.). They should reduce the barriers for Angels to participate, given they are one of the few true sources of capital these days.]

As a rule, I am starting to realize that the public institutions in this province, and that includes a lot of the nonprofit hubs, are not quite designed to really encourage innovation. Except in rare cases, they are designed to grab taxpayer’s money and redistribute it to their supporters based on loyalty, not performance.

One thing Ontario and Canada really needs to get urgently, is that smart regulation has much more leverage than direct intervention. If Ontario really wants investments, it should work to repel section 116 to get American capital flowing here.

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• Provinces’ approaches to VC funds differ (financialpost.com)
• OVCF Sends Out the Love to ILR (ricksegal.typepad.com)
• Who Will Match Ontario’s $250M Emerging Technologies Matching Fund? (torevenue.com)

Canadian entrepreneurs, Fund Due diligence, Financial Post, Financial Services, innovation, Investment, Karen Mazurkewich, Ontario, venture capital