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<h1 style="text-align: center;">SUMMARY - Boris Wertz - Silicon Valley contrarian</h1>
<h2>[WHAT]</h2>
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<li>] by Jim Sutherland @bcbusiness.ca - profile of Vancouver based VC Boris Wertz and his take on the Vancouver startup scene</li>
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<h2>[WHY]</h2>
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<li>]&nbsp;</li>
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<h2>[WHERE]</h2>
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<li>] READ THE FULL ARTICLE</li>
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<li>]&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bcbusiness.ca/tech-science/boris-wertz-silicon-valley-contrarian" target="_blank">http://www.bcbusiness.ca/tech-science/boris-wertz-silicon-valley-contrarian</a></li>
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<h2>[WHEN]</h2>
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<li>] 2016-04-26</li>
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<h2>[EXAMPLE]</h2>
Here, there&rsquo;s a little bit of everything and not enough of anything. &ldquo;Creating a tech company is very hard, and most of them fail,&rdquo; says Wertz. &ldquo;You need lots of shots at the wall to actually create one.&rdquo;
Wertz, after selling the company(online book seller) he founded to abe books in Victoria,BC worked at abe books until 2008, which then sold to amazon for 90m, 5m for wertz
2008 - 2012 - angel investor
5 angel investments (very early-stage investments, often sub-$100,000) were Unbounce, social publisher Wattpad, crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, educational network Edmodo and online bespoke suit marketer Indochino. Wertz tallied six lucrative exits while gaining a reputation as an active investor who functioned as a trusted partner that could be leaned upon by first-time entrepreneurs with limited experience.
2012 - current VC version one ventures
But only a couple of the 20 companies invested in by the 2012 fund&mdash;which has been returning an impressive 50 per cent annually to its investors&mdash;originated in B.C. (although each&mdash;Clio, which produces practice management software for small law firms, and Talentbuddy, recently sold to San Francisco-based Udemy&mdash;proved to be winners). Today, Wertz says that none of the $35 million raised for a second fund in 2014 has gone to a B.C. company.
a director of industry association DigiBC and he helped found GrowLab (subsequently merged with Toronto-based Highline), which operates an accelerator program to help startups get up to speed.&nbsp;
He&rsquo;s passionate about the need to transform the provincial economy from one dependent on extracting resources to one based on innovation, entrepreneurship and human capital. But he has reservations about Vancouver&rsquo;s tech ecosystem&mdash;and, in any case, he doesn&rsquo;t believe that a fund like his should have a geographical orientation.&nbsp;
machine learning and artificial intelligence, and another involves drones&mdash;all fields that are largely foreign to the local tech scene, which, in general, says Wertz, &ldquo;lacks technical depth.&rdquo;&nbsp;
&nbsp;&ldquo;First of all, it takes longer to raise the money. It starts scaling but has a really tough time hiring senior execs. You lose time and quality. Ultimately you have a soft outcome: you sell too early, you don&rsquo;t make it that big, and so the entrepreneur doesn&rsquo;t have the money to invest back in. Or the investors don&rsquo;t really get the returns.&rdquo;
True, the seven per cent or so of provincial GDP that tech accounts for is only average by Canadian standards and lags well behind most other advanced economies. But the B.C. industry has been showing respectably rapid annual revenue growth (in the five per cent range) and is definitely moving up in the ranks of Canadian provinces&mdash;still well behind Ontario but gaining on Quebec as a home for tech jobs and companies. Some of this is due to the recent arrival in Vancouver of several multi-nationals, but startups also deserve some of the credit.
BC netting a disproportionate share of Canadian venture capital, netting $450 million or 20 per cent of the national total in 2015,&nbsp;
Ian Crosby, CEO and co-founder of current tenant Bench Accounting (a 2015 &ldquo;30 Under 30&rdquo; winner in BCBusiness), brings some perspective in that his company briefly based itself out of New York City before moving back to Vancouver, where three of its co-founders are from. &ldquo;It was incrementally harder when we moved to Vancouver,&rdquo; he agrees, due to the problem of raising money. &ldquo;But if you can survive the seed stage, it&rsquo;s not that much more difficult,&rdquo; he continues, because by then a company has something to show, and venture capitalists will take a look regardless of where they&rsquo;re based.&nbsp;
Vancouver even has advantages over an equivalent in an overheated locale like New York or Silicon Valley in that it&rsquo;s easier to recruit and retain talent&mdash;even senior talent
Unbounce&rsquo;s Rick Perrault has a similar analysis, allowing that &ldquo;mentorship and experienced money&rdquo; may be lacking to some degree, but that finding talent isn&rsquo;t a problem and there are otherwise few obstacles to running an SaaS startup like his out of Vancouver.
Jeff Booth, co-founder and CEO of BuildDirect Technologies. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s up to the entrepreneurs to go against the grain to create the outsized wins that will bring the ecosystem and the capital here&rdquo;&mdash;outsized wins that are on the threshold of happening, he adds
The key to greening our tech ecosystem, he thinks, lies mostly in developing or attracting more and better talent, and he suggests three ways of doing that. In the long term, he says,]&nbsp;we need to rework the school system, &ldquo;to inspire kids to become entrepreneurs or pursue tech-oriented careers.&rdquo; On a medium-term level, he&rsquo;d like to see ]&nbsp;our universities become more creatively responsive to what&rsquo;s going on. He cites the way that the University of Toronto&rsquo;s Creative Destruction Lab, with which he&rsquo;s involved, helps students scale up their own companies, whereas UBC (the equivalent, to the extent that there is one) has students developing fictional business plans. Finally, he says, in the short term, ]&nbsp;foreign talent could fill some of the holes, but barriers within the immigration system keep too many of them out.&nbsp;
still lots to do, but Wertz remains hopeful&mdash;and he has kind words for the provincial government&rsquo;s apparent conversion to the idea that R&amp;D, as much as LNG, is the key to the future, with its recent announcements of a <a href="/view/article?id=4843" target="_blank">$100-million venture capital fund</a> and a tech strategy involving education, talent development, business promotion and other elements.
<h2>[HOW-TO]</h2>
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<li>] fail fast</li>
<ol>
<li>] quick failure - gain important lessons giving you a better shot at success the next time around</li>
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<li>] dont focus on sales -&nbsp;</li>
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<li>] simple product that provides value to single user within large org, ] price low enough to expense on personal cc, ] built in viral loop that creates network effects</li>
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<li>] dont focus your board meetings on the past</li>
<ol>
<li>]&nbsp;by the time of the last slide is presented, there is little time left for meaningul strategic discussion.&nbsp;</li>
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<li>] dont listen to advice -&nbsp;</li>
<ol>
<li>] the best advice from the best people is crucial, when weeding ] stick to your core values, ] have a strategic clear vision ] listen to people who listen to you, ] change and expand your advisors as you grow, ] trust your gut&nbsp;</li>
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<h2>[REFERENCE]</h2>
<ol>
<li>[2015-01-dd]&nbsp;<a href="/view/person?id=315" target="_blank">Wertz, Boris</a> - profile, contact, media</li>
<li>[2016-05-02] SRC = r/vancouver - Boris Wertz, one of BC and Canada's most prolific tech venture capitalists, has a grim outlook for Vancouver's tech sector -&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/4hcr9f/boris_wertz_one_of_bc_and_canadas_most_prolific/?ref=search_posts" target="_blank">comments</a>&nbsp;(136)&nbsp;</li>
<li>[2016-05-11] <a href="/view/task?id=6147" target="_blank">CREATE-article#</a> 5103 - (this)</li>
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<h1 style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;</h1>

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