I was just reading about Simple Ventures. They are a Toronto-based venture builder that has raised $15 million to help create 25 high-growth companies headquartered in Canada by 2030. Some of their investors include TD Innovation Partners, Sun Life, Sobeys, and Harley Finkelstein (President of Shopify).

Now, I'm not a venture capital expert, but this seems to me like a relatively small amount. (They plan to raise another $5 million by the end of the year.) So I would encourage more institutions and rich people to step up with their wallets, because you have to applaud their mission:

“We are coming together to issue a call to action - bring Canadian talent home,” said Rachel Zimmer, exited founder and Co-Founder and CEO of Simple Ventures. “This funding will allow us to build great Canadian Headquartered companies. Now is a crucial time to join our mission to put fire in the Canadian engine.”

Canada still has 100,000 fewer entrepreneurs than it did 20 years ago, despite the population increasing by over 10 million during the same period. At the same time, nearly one-third of Canadian immigrant entrepreneurs move to the U.S., citing limited support for scaling businesses at home. Simple Ventures tackles this problem by sourcing new company ideas, validating them, and pairing them with Canadian leaders to co-create ventures.

There's absolutely no shortage of smart, ambitious, and entrepreneurial Canadians. Where we need to improve is in commercializing and scaling our ideas. And it's crucial we do this as quickly as possible because there are powerful compounding benefits to entrepreneurship.

When a new company scales, it creates jobs, wealth, and knowledge. These ingredients can, and usually are, used to start a growing subset of even bigger companies. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson once referred to this as The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs.

If you study Silicon Valley, what you see is something that looks like a forest where trees grow tall, produce seeds that drop and start new trees, and eventually the older trees mature and stop growing or worse, die of disease and rot, but the new trees grow up even taller and stronger.

If you drill down a bit deeper, you see that the founders, investors and early employees generate a tremendous amount of wealth from these big successes. The later employees don't make as much wealth but they do learn a ton and make enough money that they don't need to work for someone else and so they strike out on their own and are often funded by the folks who made the big money in the prior startup. That's how the seed drops from the tree and starts a new tree growing. This continues on and on and on.

When you think of startups and entrepreneurship in this way, you start to see just how important it is for us to keep growing our forests, instead of chopping down our trees and shipping them to the US. This is an exercise in city and nation building. And so I wish the team at Simple Ventures nothing but success.

LFG, Canada. If you're working on something and would like to pitch SV, click here.

One way you could oversimplify the Canadian economy is to say that it revolves around three things: natural resources, real estate, and high immigration. (You can tell me I’m wrong in the comments below.) More recently, we’ve also been touting the growing number of tech workers in our cities. But in some ways this is a bit of a vanity metric. 

I think of it in terms of two different categories of workers. There are tech workers that are the result of foreign companies opening satellite offices to take advantage of the weak Canadian dollar and our more enlightened immigration policies. And there are tech workers that are the result of Canadian-based companies innovating, growing, and needing more talent. Think Shopify.

The former situation is not at all bad, but a lot of the value is going to accrue outside of the country. Whereas in the latter situation, we get to be the principal recipients and we get all of the positive externalities associated with innovation and entrepreneurship. One of these is a powerful compounding effect. Successful startups tend to beget even more new companies. 

So even though I work in and benefit from one of the three things that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I believe that we need to be much better at encouraging a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in Canada. We’ve become too complacent.

This is a critically important topic that we don’t seem to be talking about nearly enough. So I plan to do more of that here on the blog.

I was picking up food the other night on Bloor Street (via Uber Eats) and the lineup of delivery drivers outside of the restaurant was at least ten people deep when we arrived. While we were waiting, another handful of drivers pulled over to quickly pickup their deliveries. This is what is happening in our cities right now, especially here in Toronto while we live through another stay-at-home order. And the numbers certainly reflect it.

Last month in March, Uber's delivery business (which is separate from the company's mobility business) recorded a 150% year-over-year increase in annualized gross bookings. The company's run-rate as of March is now $52 billion. To put this number into perspective, the company's mobility business also had its best ever month in March with an annualized gross bookings run-rate of $30 billion.

Delivery > mobility right now. Makes sense.

To further put this into perspective, total restaurant spending across the entirety of the United States was $670 billion in 2019 (figure from Benedict Evans). So Uber Eats has quickly become a meaningful part of how we eat. I obviously believe that people are dying to get out and eat at restaurants again, but these figures are still interesting nonetheless.

It's also interesting to think about the above trendline from a broader logistics perspective. Alongside the rise in Uber Eats, we are seeing a wave of capital move toward "rapid delivery apps." These are platforms that allow meals, groceries, and other stuff to be delivered, in some cases, almost right away, which aligns with where I think consumers are moving. Rather than making lists and doing weekly shops, it's now about just-in-time delivery.

It's arguably a lazier way of going about things, but water will always find the path of least resistance.

Many, or perhaps most, of these platforms have adopted an asset light approach. Instacart, which partners with existing grocers, would fall into this category. Their model revolves around gig workers going into existing stores, picking orders directly from the shelves, and then delivering those orders. And it is what Blair Welch was getting at in his recent RENX interview when he reasoned that grocery shopping is still being done, almost exclusively, at local stores.

This approach is enough for Instacart to be valued at nearly $40 billion, according to the Financial Times. So something seems to be working.