Always Look On The Bright Side of Life…
Hi everyone. Using Jedi mind tricks, James Smith and I have managed to convince the folks at Startup Ottawa that we would be good additions to the blogging team. This is our inaugural post so for those of you who do not know us, we are partners at LaBarge Weinstein, a business law firm with offices in Ottawa and Waterloo and a particular focus on serving the high tech community. That said, we promise that we will try not to sound like lawyers (we like to think we are pretty good at hiding it). We would love to hear feedback on what you think of our posts so please feel free to leave a comment or contact either of us directly. Now, without further ado…
How about some good news for a change? Keeping in line with the many articles and blog posts I have been reading lately, I thought I would focus on some good news. But I thought I would shift my focus a little bit from the common “how to make the best of a terrible situation” theme and, instead, serve up some items of what I think are standalone genuine good news. I have been keeping an eye out for this kind of stuff recently and have come up with an admittedly random top 5. My plan is to dole out the good news one item at a time (we can’t have anyone getting too excited all at once ) so please stay tuned. In the meantime, I invite readers to post comments sharing their own good news.
Bright Side of Life #1: There is still money out there looking for great ideas –The economic downturn of the last year or so is just the latest blow to investment following the shrinking of venture capital over the last couple years. Having said that, there are still quite a few pots of money available in Canada for deployment to the right companies. Examples of active money include – Blackberry Partners Fund ($150M), Business Development Bank of Canada and Wellington Financial Fund III ($150M) (Wellington has a great blog by the way). Even the Ontario Government is spending time and money flogging old and new programs in an attempt to help fill the funding void. There are more sources and they all tend to put out “open for business” announcements so they are not hard to find.
Stay tuned for more…
By James Smith
Mark MacLeod on January 23rd, 2009
Is BDC really doing new equity deals? Haven;t heard of anything. And Wellington is venture debt fund.
I would add Growthworks to the list. They have done some new deals.
Shane McLean on January 23rd, 2009
BDC has been active but I have seen more debt than equity. Debt is the trend even among more traditional VCs who are getting all the bells and whistles that used to come with Pref Shares while sitting in secured debt. I have been seeing fewer and fewer true equity deals over the past couple years.
Zashkaser on August 5th, 2009
Nice site. go to my favorites. TNx