Imran Saleh

I had a great conversation with Evan M. about my career and entrepreneurial journey, including getting into the venture capital industry and why I founded Staircase Ventures with a unique philosophy and approach. Some quotes: "We benefit in Canada from terrific technical talent. In addition, we are seeing more repeat entrepreneurs and more experienced start-up leaders than we did 5 to 10 years ago... The other thing is that US investors want to invest in Canada. Ten years ago, US investors were reluctant to invest in Canadian companies and if they did, it would be on the condition that they move to the Valley. That is no longer the case." "I started my own fund not for the sake of starting my own fund, but because I wanted to devote my time to working with entrepreneurs and to serving them, helping them to build impactful companies. I had some ideas about how venture could be done differently and I wanted to put those ideas into action. That is what led me to start Staircase Ventures... There's three unique aspects of Staircase Ventures. The first is our founder development platform which is designed to help accelerate founders' development and help them perform their best every day." "Life is long and how you treat people and how you perform really, really matters in the long run. Life is not a short-term game; it is what you do and how you show up, day-after-day, over a period of many years that will determine your future." Listen here: https://lnkd.in/gpHprCt8

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Who better to talk about Shopify's trajectory and future than Benjamin Lang • OLY.? In our 50th podcast episode, I had an extremely interesting conversation with Benjamin about a lot of awesome topics that are close to my heart, and I can't be more excited about what's happening in the Shopify ecosystem. For example: • B2B features • From only online commerce to commerce in the more broad sense of the word • The focus on TCO • Customer centricity I'm very grateful I had the chance to talk to Benjamin, and I hope we can do it again some time in the near future as things are moving so fast. Thanks a lot for your time and effort Benjamin! #deardigital #shopify #podcast

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🚀 How Crowdlinker Helped Honeybee Benefits Get Acquired by Green Shield Canada 🚀 In just two years, Honeybee Benefits transformed from a startup with only a dozen customers to a thriving platform managing thousands of lives. With the help of Crowdlinker, they refined their messaging, revamped their web presence, and streamlined their go-to-market strategy, which led to rapid growth and, ultimately, an acquisition by Green Shield Canada. Jason Dea, Senior Director of Product and Marketing at Honeybee Benefits, shares the impact of working with Crowdlinker and how strategic partnerships can drive incredible results. Curious how your startup could achieve the same? Watch the full story and see how Crowdlinker helped pave the way for success. #businessgrowth #digitalstrategy #startuplife #acquisition #growthstrategy https://lnkd.in/d6t82ghF

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My 7-year journey via Maple VC with Clay. Thanks Josh Scott at BetaKit for covering the story. I was first introduced to Kareem Amin through a fellow Canadian expat and now Maple founder, Michael Hershfield of Accrue Savings. They first met working at Sailthru in NYC where Kareem sold his first company. In 2016, Kareem started to tinker on new ideas with his cofounder Nicolae Rusan and I was fortunate to meet them at this time. This happened to align with me establishing Maple 1 in November 2016 on the simple thesis of backing Canadians building in America. We noticed that Canadian expats, who graduate from Canadian universities, go on to build some of the biggest companies in tech – Uber, Slack, Instacart, Notion, Faire, Databricks, Cloudflare, Roblox and most recently, OpenAI. Kareem and Nicolae seemed to match this pattern as two graduates from McGill University building in the US. In 2017, they landed on a very clear mission to make programming accessible to all. They painted a picture of replacing the black terminal that developers use, with a spreadsheet that is connected to the internet which could allow non-developers to automate work. What we saw immediately that gave us conviction was a very big ambition (making programming accessible to all) with a unique insight (using a spreadsheet) via a new method of no-code tooling. This reminded us of the early days at Uber: The promise to deliver you anything (big ambition) by starting with a black car that takes you from point A to point B (unique insight) via your phone (new method). We first committed to investing in Clay in Jan 2017 before the company had a lead. In June 2017, we were thrilled to learn that First Round Capital was going to lead their Seed. Sequoia Capital led the Series A in June 2019, which was surprising, since we had no revenue and were still figuring things out. However, the low-code no-code category was starting to take off. Then, they spent the next 3 years figuring out where to focus. During this phase it was fascinating to witness the many disbelievers. We had folks tell us that we should mark this investment to $0. In late 2021, they decided to narrowly focus on automating sales and this turned out to be the big unlock. Varun Anand joined as a cofounder leading their GTM efforts. The timing played out beautifully with new LLMs that we could use to automate growth in a way that hadn’t been done before. Clay relaunched in Feb 2022 with $0 in revenue and has not looked back since. We 10x’d two years in a row, all organically, achieving 100k users, 2500+ customers, and 11k people exchanging ideas in our Slack community. Maple has tripled down since the Seed through the Series B which was just led by Meritech Capital. We have a strong feeling that Clay has a real shot at realizing that vision they first shared with us 7 years ago.

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Some more thoughts on why we think SecondShop.com is one of the more ambitious investments we've made.

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If you're a Canadian entrepreneur, investor, or founder then this past week has made it painfully clear that when it comes to innovation and economic recovery the calvary won't be coming and is in fact running in the opposite direction. The federal government and associated regional innovation support agencies (ie Invest Ottawa) are failing to look at solutions aimed at effectively addressing an overall decrease in entrepreneurship and economic activity across the nation and it is now on us, as resilient Canadian entrepreneurs, to empower those who can bring the most value to the table if we are to strive for the quickest path forward towards economic recovery and helping the average Canadian family better their quality of life. I am proud to announce that RHA Ventures Inc. has answered that call 👏 In the face of rising costs for domestic businesses in Canada and competition from abroad, RHA Ventures, an Ontario-based venture capital firm specializing in cutting-edge technologies, announced today its investment in Real Life Robotics, a Waterloo-based company designing real robots for real businesses. This investment marks a significant milestone in the development of Real Life Robotics and underscores RHA Ventures' commitment to supporting true, tried, and tested founders and Ontario’s growing startup ecosystem despite an overall decrease in entrepreneurship across the rest of Canada. “Real robots, real people, and real-world challenges are what differentiate RLR as a technology company. We could not be more thrilled to have RHA Ventures, a group of experienced founders and problem solvers, on board as strategic advisors and investors as we help elevate Ontario globally as a home for first-in-class robotics and automation technology - empowering businesses with transformative robotics solutions that unlock new levels of efficiency, reliability, and scalability,” - Cameron Waite, CEO of Real Life Robotics. The numbers clearly show that the cost of getting involved in a business or launching a new product is too high for the average inexperienced Canadian and our economy has slowed in growth accordingly. On a macro level, we are placing too high an importance on new founders in a down market when we should be rewarding and doubling down on our true, tried and tested investors, founders and legacy businesses who have shown they are willing to take the risk. Thank you, Brian Foster and the rest of the team at RHA Ventures Inc. for taking this first step of the journey with us 🙏 https://lnkd.in/gSr5TP48

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𝐋𝐞𝐭’𝐬 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐤 𝐀𝐈 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐄𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲—𝐀 𝐏𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐚𝐜𝐡 There’s been a lot of buzz lately among founders and entrepreneurs about AI driving efficiency. I've had some incredible conversations with folks at Shopify, Lemonade, and a few other companies over the last few quarters, and I wanted to share something we’ve been working on at Yotpo—something very practical that shows real progress and that most companies can implement. This isn’t about AI in our product lines but rather how we’re using AI to drive efficiency within our operations. To give you some context, we have several initiatives across departments aimed at giving our people superpowers, and we even founded a dedicated team under Dan's leadership to focus on this. We’ve made some solid progress, but our latest internal release is particularly exciting. Yotpo UGC runs roughly 6,000+ QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews) a year. For those unfamiliar, a QBR is where our CSMs prepare a full analysis of an account, map out opportunities for improvement, and present it to the brand to optimize their UGC program. As you can imagine, preparing these decks takes a lot of time and requires a deep understanding of both the brand and its UGC strategy. After analyzing the process, we found that the average CSM spends 2-3 hours preparing for each QBR! So, Dan partnered with Katie and the team to tackle this. Their solution? The QBR AI model. With just a click of a button, the AI dives into the account, benchmarks it against our entire database, and provides the most quality insights, recommendations, and a status update for the merchant. I’ve seen a few of the QBR decks generated by this AI, and honestly, I was blown away. 𝐖𝐞’𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐂𝐒𝐌𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 12,000 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬 𝐚 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫 while improving the quality of the insights we provide. If you’re in B2B, I highly recommend looking into building your own QBR AI to save time and boost quality. If you have any questions or want to discuss this further, drop a comment or send me a message. Let’s keep the conversation going.

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Does BC Tech have it right? Next week I'll be on stage with an amazing line up of leaders at the BetaKit Town Hall: Vancouver. From my conversations so far, some clear differences have emerged from the vibes of the Toronto tech sector. -Unequivocal in their belief that BC is where they want to live, and so no question about keeping their companies there. -Just as sick as everyone else with trying to sell in Canada, but seemingly much more at peace with straight to US sales approach. -Stymied in raising in Canada, much more likely to extoll the virtues of bootstrapping and to have avoided the pitfalls of irrational growth -Influenced by their natural surroundings and research communities, more focused on high impact verticals on life science and climate tech, and more likely to raise the potential of tech to address big challenges like forest fires -More likely to praise provincial government programs for getting things right (although quick to shred SR&ED) Not all rosy, to be sure, but some low key BC rizz I'm looking forward to hearing more about.

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Are you a B2B software startup founder at the very start? Then you have to meet this early-stage investor! This week's findfunding.vc spotlight is on Dominic Lau from Ripple Ventures. He: 🇨🇦 Is Vancouver and Toronto based 🎣 Loves to fish 🎶 Founded the RippleX Fellowship - a platform to help underrepresented founders access mentorship, intros, and the tools to get from idea to revenue to funding Amongst founders, Dominic and his team at Ripple Ventures, including Matt Cohen, are known for being hands-on partners who open valuable networks, navigate challenges together, and assist in closing crucial revenue and funding deals. Make sure to: ✉️ Pitch him at [email protected] 👀 Look into the RippleX Fellowship - they take 10 companies 2x a year through the Founder Fellowship program and also back companies through the Fellow Fund For more, check out our funder spotlight card below along with Ripple Ventures' profile on findfunding.vc (link in comments).

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Looking forward to sharing GenAI insights in a conversation between investors and operators. See you at Invest!

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OOOOOOOO CAANADA! LAST CHANCE TO SUBMIT FOR CANADA'S TOP COMPANIES. This is the largest coverage on Canada's tech, startups, and scale ups featuring some of the most innovative companies in the country: foundersbeta.com/canada 🇨🇦🚀

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🚨 VENTURE CAPITAL DATA ALERT 🚨 📈 Last week my team and I celebrated the publication of the first ever report outlining, in great detail, the current state of seed investing in Canada! The report is JAM-PACKED with data & insights and will be released annually. 🕵‍♂️ All visualizations are interactive as well so I recommend clicking around for deeper insights! 💪 Big shoutout to Ankush, Jon & Izadella from the Canadian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association (CVCA) team for all of their work in making this report happen!! Link in the comments below 👇 . Let me know what you think and what we can include in future releases to make this report even better!

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We just had a record breaking month, and we are not slowing down at Maple. We've just sent out an email to our entire user base, committing to some major product launches in May. At Maple, we pride ourselves on shipping great features, at a high velocity, for the families who use us. So here is what we have cooking: - A new calendar integration. Finally, Microsoft Outlook will be available in Maple. -A significant overhaul is coming to how people will use Maple, taking a year of feedback and delivering on making Maple easier to get in and out of your favorite tools. -Introducing new customizations, including cover photos on your folders. -AND we have made Maple Plus free to use for 7 days before committing to a monthly or annual cost!!!! To kick off May, we are rolling out our first investment to bring your family up front and center. This is both a healthy reminder of who you are doing all this hard work for, and it makes a far more pleasant experience for our tablet users- who now can benefit from Maple being a collage of family photos when it is just resting on your countertop. A modern take on your family photos sitting on your fridge. You are going to love these updates.

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Shopify showed the world that simplifying something complex can generate $8B in annual revenue. Here’s how I’m bringing that lesson to the company I co-founded: When Shopify started, they were turned down by almost all VCs - The market was deemed way too small.    What those VCs missed - Shopify was creating its own market. The VCs didn’t see this because they were only looking at existing markets. Now, Shopify is closing in on $8B annual revenue. “Market sizing gets much larger as friction is removed.” Tobi Lütke, co-founder and CEO of Shopify. Because taking something complex, making it simple, and inviting new players into the e-commerce space. Expanding the market size… This is essentially what we’re trying to do with private market investing at Stableton. Private companies that have reached the growth equity or pre-IPO phase are typically fast-growing, well-funded, often profitable and can provide strong returns to investors. The problem: It is out of reach for most investors, including banks and wealth managers. And even here, most of them typically only participate in primary funding rounds. The only way to invest is by participating in secondary transactions, which are complex deals many investors are unaware of. We’re taking this complex problem and making it simple. We’ve built a portfolio of the Top 20 pre-IPO tech companies by making 50-100 secondary transactions per year. As the go-to partner for pre-IPO investing, we can enable financial firms and their end clients to participate and subscribe to this portfolio, much like an ETF. This way, they get exposure to some of the most attractive private assets without ever engaging in a single secondary trade. From complex to simple. Want to learn more? Check out Stableton’s Navigator newsletter for the latest investing trends and insights: https://lnkd.in/eBE5GxAK #secondaries #innovation #growthequity

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For the past two weeks, I've been on the road, traveling across Canada and the US, giving talks on the intersection of AI and biotech. On a philosophical level, I feel fortunate to work in a field that is transforming biology from a specialized craft into a standardized engineering discipline. This shift is incredibly exciting. Just as mathematics revolutionized physics by uncovering nature's rules, AI and machine learning are now deconstructing biology into an engineering science. On a professional level, computational techniques are becoming central to biotech and healthcare startups, enabling close collaboration with domain experts. This transformation compels us to rethink resources, cloud infrastructure, access models, business models, and care paradigms. It's an exhilarating time for innovation and change. On a personal level, I’ve been overwhelmed by the large, diverse crowds of professionals attending my talks. They range from recent graduates from top-tier universities to mid-career and senior professionals from various technical and social backgrounds, all seriously considering careers in this space. Yes, there is hype. It takes effort to discern which companies are genuinely substantive. However, we have made significant progress, often led by quieter yet impactful startups. Yes, data silos are a problem. However, we are seeing leaders from government, academia, industry, and the private sector work together to unlock that access in an ethical and safe way to support advances. Stay tuned for some exciting news I'll be sharing soon :) #synbio #bioengineering #compbio #startups #biotech #venturecapital #artificalintelligence #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Innovation #AICommunity #StartupEcosystem

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Toronto Startup Guide for Founders. Thank you Yoran Beisher and Michael Liu for pulling this map together and for keeping it up to date 🙌 #CommunityBuilders Now, who can do this and update the old Montreal Startup Guide for Founders?

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Klaviyo is just an email tool for the Shopify ecosystem, right? Q2 earnings definitely tell a different story, and the company is quickly solidifying itself as a true fast-scaling public SaaS Co with a ton of room to run. The TLDR - stock was up 31% yesterday. Nuff said Quick Metrics Summary 🔢 Revenue of $222M ( ⬆ 35% YoY) Gross Margin: 79% (⬆ 4% since S1) - I'm shocked to see this holding so strong with increasing prevalence of SMS amongst the customer base which is an inherently lower margin product. Management sited less reliance on 3rd party technology as they roll their own solutions in email servers etc. Net Dollar Retention: 112% - continues to trend down, but they explain it away because of a big pricing shift they did in 2022 that has rolled out of the data Customers over $50k in ARR: 2,386 (⬆ 64% YoY) - hands down the most exciting thing about this business looking forward. They continue to crush their move up-market and are closing true enterprise customers like Samsonite. They also had a really interesting ancedote in the call about a grocery retailer they moved from a homegrown system onto Klaviyo. These are the type markets you don't think about but could be huge growth opps moving forward. Free Cash Flow Margin: 14% - generating significant cash and $700m+ on the balance sheet is very impressive Rule of 40: 50% ⭐ - continuing to trend down but still very healthy balance of both growth and profitability. Product and Strategy 🗺 It's always interesting to watch messaging oscilate quarter over quarter - a few quarters ago it was all Klaviyo One and CDP. Now, that emphasis is a bit more subdued and they're doing more story telling on what actual value/actions those products can drive. With a strong launch in France, they've proven internationalizing the product can lead to rapid growth in a market so I expect to see a lot more of that moving forward. Klaviyo is actually a really logical platform to leverage AI, and it seems like they're doing a lot of it across their product suite which is cool. Looking Forward 🔭 Klaviyo raised guidance on both revenue and profit and believe they'll continue to perform well in international markets as well as deepening penetration across CDP, SMS, and Reviews. It's been a wild rollercoaster for Klaviyo bouncing between $21-$39 over the last year since IPO, but I think as they continue to show the market they can reliably forecast and grow their business, that volatility should level out. #saas #earningsseason

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It was great to see Ada get a shoutout in a recent Financial Post article on generative AI's impact on customer service, where they interviewed Wealthsimple's Head of LLMs, Sam Talasila. Sam explained how in the first few months of the year, Ada's AI Agent handled roughly 80,000 client questions monthly, while human customer support agents handled another 80,000 on their own. The outcome for Wealthsimple? A 10-point increase in customer satisfaction scores. But he also pointed out something else: their AI Agent allows them to focus more of their human agents’ time on high-value interactions where they can get to know their clients better. The other unseen advantage — companies can now collect quality data on every interaction and analyze it to make meaningful changes. Sam noted that they're using insights gained from their AI Agent's customer interactions to continuously refine their systems, and that this has also directly led to new products. Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, the AI chair at Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, summed this up nicely in the article: Generative AI's potential is to “integrate a lot of information about a potential customer and be able to make predictions about what might be appealing or useful for them.” Here's the article if you're interested in reading more: https://lnkd.in/evHjgSBj

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Cyrus Radfar is a builder at heart. He's also a founder, operator, and advisor, having founded 3 companies, held executive product roles, and advised startups, technical leaders, and VCs. He was most recently the Chief Product Officer at Rollbar, where he lead product and engineering teams and oversaw the culture, strategy, vision, and execution of Rollbar's products and engineering. Cyrus & I had a great conversation last week, and we’ll release the full episode soon. In the meantime, this is a great clip where Cyrus talks about why pricing & packaging is so often under-leveraged by startups. Cyrus said a number of things I found really thought-provoking in this interview: 1/ “Pricing & packaging is core to the customer experience, but it's probably not core to your product innovation. Engineers don't build payments or auth, they buy it off the shelf. Same should be true for pricing & packaging." 2/ "Procurement has a massive & under-realized impact on culture. Buy the products that align with the culture you want." When Cyrus & his partner aren't spending time raising two young kids, he's advising engineering and product leaders and consulting with a number of companies ranging from startups to enterprises. #pricing #packaging #b2bsaas

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