1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alireza Rahnema of 7 Gate Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How are people thinking about this unicorn versus non-unicorn versus niches? How is the Canadian investment in general thinking about this?

Alireza Rahnema: I’ve work about this when it comes to different scene between startup the ecosystem. I’ve spent half of my time here and half of my time down San Francisco. When it comes to talent, there’s no shortage of talent in Canada with its very strong education system and extremely strong technical focus.

Like you mentioned yourself, a lot of immigrant talents are moving to Canada. These immigrants and graduates generally have a very strong entrepreneurial spirit and want to create something that lasts. The challenge in the ecosystem is the mentality of venture investments. Canadian colonies are generally quite dependent on commodity as a strong source of capital.

That being said, we still see a growth of investment activity in pre-seed and seed stage investment that allows the number of companies that are being founded here to grow. More and more startups are taking shape every day. We have a strong connection with the Silicon Valley venture capitalists. We’ve done co-investments with many of them.

We find that there’s a value to be had to take advantage of those low valuations in the early stage, help them grow to a stage where the Valley would make sense for them, help raise that way. They’re happy to take a closer at it and that’s where we come in.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have anything that you would like to add as message to the entrepreneurs who are looking at you as potential investor?

Alireza Rahnema: I have between 30 and 50 emails a day. Reaching out to an investor is very good. Again, not everybody has the luxury of warm intros, but calling is great. One thing that is a pet peeve of ours are features that are five pages long in an email. We discourage founders to send a pitch that contains their life’s work.

They need to be concise. They need to attract the attention of an investor in the first paragraph. This can be done by stating what problem you are solving, how you are solving it, and why you and only you can solve that problem. I’d be happy to share some of the very concise pitches that we got.

Sramana Mitra: This is not going to be a huge problem in the 1Mby1M community. We go over everything with people and coach them for months before we send to investors. We always have people introduced through us and they will be very concise pitchers.

Alireza Rahnema: You know very well what I’m talking about.

Sramana Mitra: I know very well what you’re talking about. Terrific! We look forward to doing some work together with you. Thank you for sharing your vision and your activities. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alireza Rahnema of 7 Gate Ventures
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