IPOs: 2018 May

A couple of Financial Services and Banking IPOs last month with a slow compound annual growth rate, six Medical and BioTech companies and one rapid E-Commerce and Games Platform.  Software remains one of the fastest ways to liquidity.  Civil Engineering and Construction takes the longest to get to a liquidity event if we look from the point-of-view of IPOs last month.

Organization Name Categories IPO Date Valuation at IPO Years CAGR
GreenSky Consumer Lending, Credit, Financial Services 18-05-24 $4,350,000,000 12.4 6.0
Huya.com E-Commerce, Online Games, Video Games 18-05-11 $2,418,000,000 4.4 142.1
ASLAN Pharmaceuticals Biotechnology, Medical, Pharmaceutical 18-05-04 $1,120,000,000 8.3 12.2
Origin Bank Banking 18-05-08 $748,000,000 6.4 24.9
UNITY Biotechnology Biotechnology, Health Care, Medical 18-05-02 $712,000,000 9.3 8.9
Construction Partners Civil Engineering, Construction 18-05-04 $609,000,000 17.3 3.2
Evelo Biosciences Biotechnology, Medical, Therapeutics 18-05-09 $509,000,000 3.4 394.8
Inspire Medical Systems Biotechnology, Health Care, Medical Device, Therapeutics 18-05-03 $323,000,000 11.3 5.6
Iterum Therapeutics Medical, Pharmaceutical, Therapeutics 18-05-24 $181,000,000 3.4 270.8
Voluntis Health Care, ICT, Medical Device, Software 18-05-30 $120,000,000 17.4 2.9

Investments: 2018 May

Our list of notable bite-sized funding rounds under $4 million to Canadian Companies.

Quebec startups handed Ontario’s ass to them on a plater in May, more deals and larger deal flow for each.  Quebec deal flow value was twice as big as Ontario’s.  BC beat Ontario in the number of deals in May as well as total amounts.

Startup City Raise Investor Sample
Dash MD Toronto $250,000 LCIN
Bereda Training Halifax $250,000 Creative Destruction Lab
Tonit Kelona CA$400,000 VA Angels
LocoNoco Vancouver $500,000 Victory Square
Paper Interactive Calgary $550,000 James Lochrie
Certn Victoria A$975,000 iNovia +3
Aspect Biosystems Victoria $1,000,000 Genome-BC
C2RO Cloud Robotics Montreal $1,100,000 Tandem Launch
Avrij Analytics Fredricton $1,200,000 NB Innovation Foundation
Gamelynx Kitchener $1,200,000 Ycombinator
NorthOne Montreal CA$2,000,000 Tom Williams + 2
Motion Gestures Waterloo $1,650,000 China Canada Angel Alliance
Dooly Vancouver $2,000,000 Scaleup Ventures
Unito Montreal $2,000,000 Mistral Venture Partners
motorleaf Montreal $2,850,000 Radical Growth

Acquisitions: 2018 May

We’re back to the standard Canadian Acquisition pattern: IT and Enterprise Software.

Interestingly Indeed made another acquisition this month to add to their acquisition of Workopolis last month.  We dropped to 26 acquisitions this month from last month’s 39, and March’s 33.  This basic acquisition pattern follows last year bringing us to the summer doldrums.

Acquired Buyer Day Industry
GreenOwl Mobile IBI Group 18 Automotive
Newfoundland Capital Stingray 2 Broadcasting
JemPak Henkel 10 Chemicals
Richform Construction Supply Co. Construction Supply Group 29 Construction
Shepherd Gourmet Dairy Saputo Inc. 23 Consumer Goods
Symbility Health TELUS Health 8 Employee Benefits
TGO Consulting SHEA Business Solutions 29 Enterprise Software
ResponseTek ESW Capital 23 Enterprise Software
CRMfusion Validity 2 Enterprise Software
Programming Research (PRQA) Perforce Software 2 Enterprise Software
OANDA Corporation CVC Capital Partners 2 Finance
TranQool Inc HumanaCare 8 Health Care
Innovative Records Systems Corp. Access Information Management 17 IS
QuickMobile Cvent 1 IS
Infront Consulting Group Green House Data 31 IT
Xacte PetalMD 29 IT
Union Solutions Claranet 1 IT
Facilite Informatique CGI 16 IT
Cimetrix Solutions Javelin Technologies 7 Manufacturing
Groupe Serdy Groupe TVA 1 Media
UX Data Sciences Corp. ChroMedX Corp. 9 Medical Devices
URZ Energy Azarga Uranium 7 Mineral
AurKa Pharma Eli Lilly 14 Pharmaceuticals
BrandProtect PhishLabs 11 Public Relations
Resume.com Indeed 25 Saas
Dreamwater Products Canada Inc. Harvest One Cannabis Inc. 3 Therapeutics

Acquisitions: 2018 April

It seems that Canadian Marijuana startups became interesting for acquirers all at once, followed by cloud infrastructure and advertising.  The Marijuana startups were quiet for most of the year and then 4 were acquired in April. Notable is that Workopolis was acquired by the parent of Indeed.  This will make a very limited choice for posting jobs in the Canadian marketplace. Sysomos, a community analytics company in Toronto was acquired by Meltwater, and will most likely remain autonomous for the time being.  April saw 39 acquisitions compared to March’s 33, and February’s 31. Similar pattern to last year where April had the increased acquisition numbers.

Acquired Buyer Category
Brad Inc. Ogilvy & Mather Advertising
Spector & Co Blue Point Capital Partners Advertising
Rainforest Digital Jan Kelley Advertising Advertising
Chalk & Wire Learning Assessment Campus Labs Analytics
Sysomos Meltwater Analytics
Espro Regal Ware, Inc. Appliances
GIGX Subscribe Technologies Blockchain
CryptoGlobal Hyperblock Technologies Corp. Blockchain
WSB Titan GMS Inc Building Materials
SoilVision Systems Bentley Systems Civil Engineering
Backbone Datavault eStruxture Data Centers Cloud Infrastructure
Concordis Solutions Bulletproof InfoTech Cloud Infrastructure
Mitel Networks Corporation Searchlight Capital Partners Cloud Infrastructure
Adoxio KPMG CRM
Egyde KPMG Cyber Security
VendorBase Procurify E-Commerce
Standard Nutrition La Coop Farming
Amenity Health Care Rubicon Pharmacies Health Care
echangedemaison.com GuestToGuest Hospitality
Workopolis Recruit Holdings Internet
Friend Management Systems Western Equipment Dealers Association Management Consulting
WeedMD Hiku Brands Marijuana
WILL Cannabis Group GrowForce Marijuana
Canveda MPX Bioceutical Marijuana
Dosecann Inc. Cannabis Wheaton Income. Marijuana
Alabama Graphite Corp Westwater Resources Mining
Spartan Energy Corp. Vermilion Energy Oil & Gas
Aveda Transportation and Energy Services Daseke Oil & Gas
Nordion – Medical Isotope BWX Technologies Pharmaceutical Isotopes
Corozon Platform VANC Pharmaceuticals Pharmacy Software
Alcor Commercial Realty Avison Young Real Estate
Presidia Security Consulting ADGA Group Consultants Risk Management
Insight Group Mantis Informatics Software
Entero Quorum Business Solution Software
Kronos Technologies EquiSoft Software Development
Athletica Sport Systems Fulcrum Capital Partners Sports

Angel Profile: Elia Mazzawi

Q: Tell us a bit about your angel/investing history.

I immigrated to Canada in 1999 to attend the University of Toronto. It took a lot of hard work and sacrifice on my parents part to invest in me to come here and earn a degree. At university, I was sharing an apartment with two of my classmates. One of whom was living frugally and inspired me to live frugally and save money for investing.
By the time the 4 years at university were done, my housemate, I and a 3rd classmate put all the money we had, and the money we didn’t have together for downpayment to buy our first rental property. From then we continued on an aggressive growth path, I remember after closing the second property being so fully invested, that all I had was a ziplock bag of change that was just enough to pay for the bus to go to my day job.
Since that day in 2003, I have been buying, developing and leasing real estate. First as a side gig, later as a full-time job, and now I have workers helping me run it so I can focus on acquisitions and development.

Q: Do you have an investment philosophy?

I prefer tried and proven models, being an early adopter of a proven model has the best risk/reward. Not a big fan of being first.

Q: What’s your cheque size?

$ 10,000

Q: Why do you invest?

I am a fan of technology, there is little time to do everything you want to do, build every idea you think is good yourself. Investing let’s you be a part of it without the time commitment a founder needs to put in.

Q: What motto or paradigm would you like to share as a piece of “elevator advice” for founders?

If you are a founder, you must live, breath and love your company. You wake up and go to sleep thinking about it. It is the most important thing in your life. Grit, hard work, perseverance, ambition, and relentlessness. That is how companies are founded.
You have to know your space, every player, know the market and know your numbers.

Events: May-June 2018

The following is our list of important events to attend in the next 45 days.  All events are listed by calendar date in the calendar below.


May 16 – Idea Jam @ Schulich / York University – Pitches, and Angels

May 22 – Cannabis Startups Shark Tank @ The Factory Theatre – Pitches, and Angels

May 23 – Angel Investment Event @ Old King West Hotel – Pitches, and Angels

May 30 – First Look Angel Meeting @ 12th floor Mississauga City Hall – Pitches, and Angels

June 18 – Valhalla Basecamp @ TBD – Hacking, Pitches, and Angels

June 22 – Techstars Weekend @ DMZ/Ryerson – Hacking, Pitches, and Angels


Angel Investors of Ontario was kind enough to share this infographic with us for their May 23 Event:

 

@TheMIN.ca – 2018 April

We’ve moved away from the Listserver we had running on a private machine in the basement of SFU in BC.  This will be the first issue run with 24-bit-colour graphics and web-links that actually work using the MailChimp platform.  I’m sure we’re all excited that this guy who was once on the cutting edge of tech, a 14-year-old turning Steve Wozniak’s boards into software on the Atari platform, finally got around to joining the 21st century!  Past issues ‘may’ become available on TheMin.ca if wonder-boy can format them again! Plus, we will be more compliant with anti-spam legislation. No more “unsubscribe/subscribe” emails being sent repetitively by new members to all members.

Our team at TheMIN.ca watches HBO’s Silicon Valley on Sundays and then we come back with nods of “how true, how true”.  One thing I have noticed is how rough (sexist, racist, derogatory) some of the dialogue is and have trouble remembering if that’s how it was when we did it.  But then a few stories come to mind. We had a great algorithm writer from Korea in one of the companies I worked at in San Mateo, who wrote most and optimized all of our assembly code.  The engineering team lead nicknamed him “Fuji”! Not only was it racist it wasn’t even close to being culturally correct. Working for that bully wasn’t super fun for me either. He disappeared from the map and I never met him again. I did, however, meet up with Hyon at another company and he was a different man – talkative and friendly.  We spoke only once about our former boss and he told me what I used to be called, and though I felt kind of bad, I was relieved I could look Hyon in the eyes as an equal. “So what,” you say. Well, in the next few months we’re going to build a scorecard for something I call ‘destructive bullying’. It’s a way that founders and start-up staff can quiz themselves and see if there is a destructive element in the company, with some ideas on remedies.  If you’ve seen this type of behavior in your workplace, or you’ve seen it and solved it, please drop me a few sentences on what and how to aao@themin.ca.  I’ll explain the qualifier once we build the questionnaire!

Going back to the First Round 2015 post about the top 10 findings of successful startups, the number 7 reason for success in a startup is that a technical co-founder is essential in enterprise companies, but a hindrance in consumer-facing companies.  That seems counterintuitive, because:

  • Sergey Brin and Larry Page were tech guys who founded Google (0/1).
  • Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay had a computer science degree (0/2).
  • Michael Dell was a biology major drop out from University of Texas (1/3).
  • Jeff Bezos graduated from Princeton with a degree in Electrical Engineering (1/4).
  • Branson is a high-school dropout (2/5).
  • Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard although he was one of the programmers (2/6).
  • Steve Jobs attended an acid cloud at Reed College but no one would consider him the technical one (3/7).
  • Robert L. Johnson had a degree in social studies and another in public affairs before starting Black Entertainment Television (4/8).
  • George Lucas graduated in film production from USC (5/9).
  • Muhammad Yunus had a BA in Economics (6/10).

So this doesn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule as 4 of the top 10 founders I have listed here were actually very technical founders.  Next month we’ll look at number 6. Some successful investments could reflect the importance of some hidden variable. Venture capital is largely an exercise in intuition and pattern matching. This sort of data doesn’t substitute for judgment, but to the extent that it can help investors identify things that track with success, data can inform those judgments.

Email last week from a subscriber: “Why don’t you cover more non-mainstream start-ups.  Mississauga has a lot of other communities.” When we find them we’ll put them in or let us know where to search.

The newsletter is looking for someone or a group of people to interview Angels who can relate their first investment and what they learned.  We’d like it to be a regularly occurring part of the newsletter.

Please send us your ideas for a Pitch-Day in the late Summer or early Fall.  The earlier vision of using the foyer of the Living Arts Centre for the day means we need to schedule ahead, so odds are good we will use the City Facilities at the Hershey Centre, The City Hall Rooftop or the Small Arms Building.

More ideas for discussion: a couple of founding members want this Newsletter to turn into a full-fledged magazine, and having it move to MailChimp with graphics is the first step in that.  The newsletter membership needs to grow for us to attract some advertising revenue or we need to charge a membership fee for the information gathered to get some more staff. Let’s remember that we’re all volunteers here and we’ve been at it for 14 issues!

And for the last time Sal, we are not going to have a Buy-Sell-Swap section for office equipment … or missed connections!

Finally, we usually don’t do much in terms of meetings from May to August, but James has asked that we have an organizational meeting in the Summer to plan out our Trade Show attendance for next year.  Andrew will send out a doodle at the end of the month.

Bootstrapping when Conventional Funding is Denied

Today was the day you hoped for as an entrepreneur, the day the investors make the final decision and agree to fund your small business. Except it didn’t quite go as planned, the meeting ended, doors closed and your small business was left without any funding. Small businesses face several struggles in their beginning stages, costs being one of them, the other is receiving funding from a bank. On average small businesses have an 80% chance of being rejected according to the Federal Reserve. It’s as high as 95% as reported by the CFIB in Canada.  This results in the back-and-forth of weighing out growth opportunities, auditing finances according to ‘importance’, all while trying to keep your business afloat.

Generating profit is challenging enough for new businesses, and receiving funding is one way to counteract the pressure and costs of doing business. Starting a business without funding? What is the alternative to the traditional loan option? Bootstrapping.

Instead of relying on investments to fund your business, you figure it out on your own by pulling together all of your expertise and resources, and you make it work. It seems thrilling and risky, you are the one pulling together the funds little by little and reinvesting in your business until it becomes self-sustaining.

 

Critical First Steps to Remember

Step one:

Make a list of what you think you need, and think long and hard about it. Then compare it to a list of all of your start-up costs. Do you really need that brand new desktop setup, or will a year used one suffice? There are some items and aspects of a business which require a larger budget, no questions asked, but there are several ways to downsize. Be frugal with your money, and also with your ‘things’. Negotiating will become your best partner, so please, think again when that idea of redecorating your home-office pops into your head.

Step two:

Find and network with like-minded people, and businesses. Approach people who might be able to provide some advice or quick tips which you might be able to quickly adapt to your business. The least that will come out of it is that you will have a meaningful conversation with someone who now knows about your business. Increasing brand awareness isn’t a task that you always need to plan for. Are you scrolling through social media and see a business page which entices you from a content and business perspective? Contact them, send them a little message and ask if they have the time for a quick casual chat. You might even find someone to team up with as a partnership, or on a contractual basis.

Step three:

Give yourself a large helping hand and take a free online Digital Marketing course. This will save you a large chunk of your budget as marketing costs can get expensive.  Luckily for you, I’ve done some initial research to save you some precious time, and will cover inventive ways to earn money which allow the most flexibility and innovation.

 

4 Inventive Ways to Bootstrap

1. Get Crowdfunding

With Crowdfunding, you have complete control of the content and marketing which you want to push. Crowdfunding is a type of micro-finance which does not require any payment from the business. However, you are more reliant on the general public to donate funds and monetary support for your business which can be just as risky. A popular website for crowdfunding a project or business is through Kickstarter.

2. Customer-based marketing

Marketing is the multi-faceted aspect of any business, which can either increase your leads or keep you at a stand-still. With marketing, you have to have a crystal clear of your target demographic, but in case you forgot, you are the founder and already have this noted in your business plan. Use social media to your advantage and get your message out there, engage with other influencers and businesses. By doing this yourself you have full control of your brand image, have direct contact with potential customers and save a ton of cash. Depending on the business and with enough exposure, there is also a chance to earn money through collaborations with complementary businesses or influencers.

3. Become a Coach

As a small business owner, the majority of your time is eaten up trying to accomplish both small and large tasks. Time is money, right? So whether you are just starting out, or just made it past your first-year mark, why not offer some guidance? Entrepreneurs and small business owners wear multiple hats, chances are you have more strengths in only a few aspects of business, rather than all. Get an intern who’s specialty is in an aspect which isn’t exactly your strongest suit. This will cut down some of the workload on the small tasks which eat away at your time.

4. Share your skills

As stated above, small business owners get their hands into everything, if you didn’t know how to do something before, you learned how. You have some valuable skills which others are dying to get a grip on. Sell them! Take a little of that spare time you have (since you hired that intern from above) and offer your services to others. It won’t take up too much time, and you can earn a little extra income. To keep things simple, create a guidebook and all you have to do is find the right platforms to sell your skills on (Thumbtack, Skillshare, Udemy) and you’re all set.

***

Bootstrapping requires resourcefulness and detailed planning. If successful, a business is able to thinly stretch funds while strategically cutting costs and attaining a competitive edge. In my opinion, this is something female entrepreneurs have taken seriously and have been successful with. Women-owned businesses account for 51% of the firms in the United States, 39% of which are privately held.  Statscan confirms that in Canada, 47% of all small-medium enterprises are fully or partly owned by women. Data from the Women’s Business Ownership survey states that almost all (99.9%) of the women-owned businesses are considered small businesses. These women entrepreneurs are able to contribute over $2 trillion USD in sales, so look to your female business entrepreneurs for some inspiration. The most crucial aspect of bootstrapping a business? You have to remain creative and determined, it isn’t an easy task but it can be done.


August Moone is a forward-thinking female entrepreneur from Colorado, she has eagerly bootstrapped all of her businesses and now advises startups and places small Angel rounds in them. August is technical, clever and has a profound knowledge of modern business solutions. Being such a dynamic entrepreneur, she is able to launch and lead large-scale projects and meet business goals with her dedicated action plans. Contact August Here – augustmoon5280@gmail.com.

Estimating the Size of a Market and a Realistic 3-Year Revenue Ramp

Scenario: a startup comes to you with a turnkey solution for auto mechanics to manage their email, website, service bookings, advertising, and customer relationship.  After talking to their customer they claim that the shop owners are interested in paying $40 a month for this service. How many customers are there for this service in Ontario?

Starting off we’d look at the value offered by the start-up.  At $40 a month, that’s about the spend on office coffee so this value entry point doesn’t limit the market much and we can discard this information as limiting market access.  If the service cost $4000 a month, that tier would limit the number of buyers and we’d need to understand more of the auto mechanic vertical and their revenues and costs in depth.

The second question we ask is how mature is the understanding of the buyer?  Does a buyer know the value they get with the purchase? Or do they see it as a necessary evil?  Are their early adopters in the field? Does it give mechanics a competitive advantage? Do mechanics already have this service and will they switch?  These questions matter when doing a market size assessment because they put all the buyers in segments (a ready to buy segment, a ready to switch segment, a segment willing to learn, and an avoid segment).  Clearly the avoid and the willing to learn don’t really count as the market right now. So we build up a profile of the two segments next: the willingness to buy segment has reviewed the costs and the value and are convinced they want to do this, and a ready to switch segment already has this functionality but the value is better and they will switch.  We make a guess: small firms with 4 or 5 employees will likely switch or buy once every two years, bigger firms may want some education but their cycle may take longer as they unwind things with their current provider.

The last question is how much of this big number can our startup address.  How will it reach out to these owners and make the pitch, what incentives will they offer?  How effectively will they convert the segments into actual sales? This is not as tough as it seems.  If the startup has one sales representative and takes one week to get 50 leads, send out emails, make phone calls or personal visits, then by the end of the week they have 4 customers agreeing to a sales pitch, and 1 of those ends up buying.  So a simple value is that out of 50 prospects 1 will buy every week.

Now let’s put this all together.

Market SIze Steps Market Size
We go to Industry Canada and identify all the registered businesses in the 8111 industry group code for Automotive Repair and Maintenance in Ontario.  This number is usually smaller than the actual number of operating businesses, but that’s what you want for a conservative estimate.

https://www.ic.gc.ca/app/scr/app/cis/businesses-entreprises/8111

8537
Employers in Ontario with 1-4 employees 5321
Likely buyers (50%) 2660
Charging each one $40 a month makes the market size $1,276,800.00

 

3-Year Revenue Ramp Steps Revenue Penetration
Reachable with one sales representative (4 x 1 a week) 4 per month
Total buyers with one sales representative after one year (12 x 4 a month) 48 buyers
Monthly Revenue after one year (48 buyers x $40 per month) $1,920 / month
End of year revenue considering 48 weeks of sales (first month 4 customers, second month 8 customers, then 12, etc.) $12,480 / 1st Year
End of year revenue by adding 4 customers a month second year $35,520 / 2nd Year
End of year revenue by adding 4 customers a month third year $58,560 / 3rd Year

 

So at the end of the 3rd year, the startup is addressing 4.6% of the market and has about $59,000 in revenue.  After you go through this exercise you can compare to your own business experience and give guidance or conditional financing to the startup to improve the results of the bottom up 3-Year Revenue Ramp.  In this specific example, I would want them to either close more deals in one week or increase the price of a closed deal so that a sales rep will be producing enough to cover their own salary and the salary of the other team members producing the product.  There might be some sense in hiring more salespeople, but the business model seems weak enough that it needs to be improved before hiring more people to sell using it.

By doubling the price of the service, and doubling the weekly number of closed deals you get to $50K, $142K, $243K for the next three year ends respectively.  And giving you about 9% of the market after 3 years. This kind of business model could then be multiplied by adding more sales people and ramping sooner.

 

Profile: Tripsi

TheMIN Staff: Tripsi is a platform currently targeted at the educational group tour organizer (a teacher or parent).  Staff have been in this situation and can see the benefits of booking, confirming and collecting money from children and families on the trip.  None of this functionality exists on the competitive travel sites at this time.  Here are some answers that Tripsi gave us last month.

 

Why can’t people use existing platforms?

Priceline sends you to a phone number and a “please call us message” when you chose more than 3 rooms to book.  Expedia has a similar message when you want to book a large number of rooms or have more than 6 people travel at once.  Our goal is to get you the answer without having to make you go through a confirmation process.  Expedia does not qualify you it basically assumes a certain amount of risk with every buyer and limits the type of buying to increase success.  We move into an area where we need to pre-qualify buyers by signing on school boards. There is also no travel based procurement solution targeted at $150 billion educational overnight travel market.

 

Explain who your target customer segments are and who the main persona is in each segment

Tripsi platform focuses on group travel, in particular for our initial market, we have targeted Educational Overnight Travel. Tripsi does this by making it simple and easy for School Boards to manage the information flows required for their approval and procurement processes including insurance standardization and risk mitigation.

 

Describe how the company will acquire customers

Tripsi plans to target School Boards, which will advise, recommend and ultimately require teachers and vendors to utilize the tripsi platform for Educational Overnight Travel procurement and organization. For School Boards that haven’t adopted tripsi, individual teachers and principals will be targeted and then the resulting information and details used to show their school board the value of tripsi.

 

How long does it take to get a lead through the sales funnel to become a buyer?

It takes less than 60 minutes for a teacher to request a quote and from 3-12 days for a teacher to get a response to be able to book a trip.  Teachers can access the platform right now, but we plan to get more teachers on the system by approaching school boards (3-6 month endorsement process).  Then helping the boards disseminate training and usage information (1-6 weeks depending on the number of teachers).

 

What barriers do you see for competitors?

The selling cycle is long (9-12 months), and we started developing the platform 18 months ago.  We’re developing our relationship with the top boards who want to buy and support Canadian.  Online travel sites want you to buy and go away. We develop a longer-term relationship with the buyer and the tour seller that is not interesting for companies like Priceline and Expedia.  We are exploring benefits to tour sellers as a lead generation platform that does not exist on the major platforms, and making relationships with insurance providers, fundraising partners, and payment processing platforms in the educational space.

 

How can interested people reach you?

https://www.mytripsi.com/ or Co-founder John Galbraith john@mytripsi.com.

 


We have extended interviews and coverage on Tripsi, please contact Tripsi or angels@themin.ca for information.  Some membership is beginning the interview process for a seed round, please contact aao@themin.ca if you would like to join the cartel.