StartupNorth is a community of Canadian technology entrepreneurs and investors. It all started rather innocently at the Imperial Library, where Jevon and I decided to setup a blog about local startups - it then grew into a community of thousands of entrepreneurs, join the network: www.facebook.com/groups/startupnorth/

Acquired by Snyk

Acquired by Microsoft

GoInstant was founded with the vision of making the shared web a reality. The company launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in late 2011. Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) acquired GoInstant in 2012.

Captual developed from an open source project incubated at the University of Toronto. Our company was acquired in 2011 by Desire2Learn (TSE: DTOL), a leading learning management platform. The product enables educational institutions around the world to stream, capture, and publish lectures at 1/10 the cost of traditional approaches. I spun out the open source project from UofT, secured angel financing, focused the product roadmap, improved operations, and ultimately as a board member facilitated the exit.

Throughout graduate school I was mentored by Dan Rua at Inflexion. Two interesting portfolio companies I worked on were CallMiner, a leader in enterprise speech analytics (also backed by Sigma Partners, InterSouth Partners, In-Q-Tel) and WiDeFi, a fabless semiconductor company focused on WLAN range extension (acquired by Qualcomm).

I helped diligence venture investments for this syndicate. Portfolio companies include: Axogen (nerve regeneration technology) now publicly traded as AXGN, Prioria (Micro Air Vehicles with military and commercial applications), and Clinipace (SaaS clinical trial platform). We did pass on an investment in a Cachaça (Brazilian rum) manufacturer (the consensus was the spirit tasted like seaweed) that turned out to be a hit - can't win them all!

While an undergraduate student at the University of Florida I had the privilege of helping researchers commercialize their inventions across a broad spectrum of industries from nerve repair (patent number: 7,851,447) to a chaotic computing module (patent number: 7,096,437), fixed-film anaerobic digestion (patent number: 6,811,701), and even 'gatorade for pigs' (patent number: 5,089,477).