Matthew He of Brightspark Ventures on Who Are These Investors

Welcome to Who Are These Investors, This episode features Matthew He of Brightspark Ventures one of the oldest VC in Canada. Listen to this rapid fire interview where you get to know just who are these investors. Full transcript below Links: Brightspark Ventures WebsiteBrightspark Ventures on TwitterBrightspark Ventures on YoutubeBrightspark Ventures on LinkedInMatthew He on TwitterMatthew He on LinkedIn —— Who Are These Startups PodcastStartup Talk Podcast Register for Startup and Entrepreneur Events here TorontoStarts Entrepreneur and Startup Community Angel Investor List Venture Capital List Join us on Reddit TorontoStarts YouTube Channel Starting A Business in Ontario: A Resources Guide For Entrepreneurs, Startups, and Scaleups Startup Pricing Strategies The Startup List Monthly Entrepreneur & Startup Investor Speed Dating Join us for Startup Pitch Battle Matthew He of Brightspark Ventures on Who Are These Investors Transcript (Automated) The Startup Coach: Welcome to Who Are These Investors podcast shorts featuring interviews with investors in Canadian startups. Welcome to who are these investors? I am the startup coach. Founder of Toronto starts one of the largest startup communities in Canada. And with me today is Matthew. He of Brightspark ventures. Welcome Matt. Matthew He of Brightspark Ventures: Thanks for having me, Craig pleasure to be here.  The Startup Coach: It's great to have you. Can you start off by telling us about Brightspark ventures?  Matthew He of Brightspark Ventures: We were founded in 1999. We like to say we are one of Canada's oldest VCs. If not the oldest, we manage $400 million, uh, assets under management. We variable team 12 people in total five investors. We operate all across coast to coast. We invested pretty much in every region of. And we focus on seed and series a investments for us as a VC firm. What we like to say is we really have innovation at heart. We practice what we preach. And the 23 years that we've been running, we've done everything from being an early VC fund model to running incubators and founding companies, yourselves that we've all sold successfully. And in the last 10 years, what we've really done is democratize access to VC assets. In addition to running our traditional fund model on the democratized access to VC assets is we are offering high net worth investors. Angel investors, the opportunity to invest alongside us in venture class deals. So we would source an opportunity. We would structure a SPV around that opportunity, a deal by deal basis and open it up to our network of 5,000 plus individual investors to say, Hey, we're investing in this great venture backable company and you can read them and we'll check in this. And it allows you to gain exposure to an asset class that was previously closed off to a lot of people who weren't LPs or in other institutional funds. The Startup Coach: What do you look for when investing through an SPV? Matthew He of Brightspark Ventures: When we first started the model, we really approached it as if you would, with a traditional fund, just a deal that we would do as a partnership, except we would open up the capital to be raised for individual investors on that deal alone. Today, that model has evolved a little bit where we also have a traditional institutional fund. We would invest out of that fund as a lead check and then allocate an additional 25 to 33% on top of that for our individual investors and an SPV.  The Startup Coach: As a VC, what is the stage you invest and the average size of investment?  Matthew He of Brightspark Ventures: So we focus on seed and. We really like to say our sweet spot is the pre series a when a company has some traction, wants to get that money to get to that full large series a and grow even quicker. And that means that for every first checks are averaged around 2.5 to 3.5 million.