Industry committee  Amen.

Industry committee  On top of the “amen”, teaching economics is absolutely right. And if we're looking at education, particularly in the grade schools, in the high schools, and of course in the universities, we have a situation in Canada where we focus our entrepreneurial efforts around the MBA prog

Industry committee  Absolutely. I would argue that we invest far too much in R and D. Our universities have become warehouses of innovation. The problem is that we can't get it out. Roughly speaking, about 2% of what is warehoused in universities is actually commercialized. We put very few dollars a

Industry committee  We agree, but there is a problem in terms of getting it out, particularly in getting it out of the universities. There's no standard with respect to who owns intellectual property. It's very difficult sometimes to get this, to commercialize this, because the universities say they

Industry committee  Very briefly, I think the role of government is not to try to pick sectors and solve all the problems. It is to incentivize those people who are already risking dollars and mentoring these companies. Government should never, in my understanding, be a substitute for encouraging se

Industry committee  In the very early stage, there are three forms of funding. The first is usually from the entrepreneur, who puts in cash, maximizes his credit cards, mortgages his house, and sells his kids for medical experiments. That's the first money in. That's skin in the game. Second are,

Industry committee  From an angel perspective, angels are investing right across the board in every sector, save for pharma, because pharma is a 10- to 12-year investment and $100 million. And it's binary: it's going to work or it's not going to work. That's not a place where angels tend to play. H

Industry committee  That's an excellent question. It's interesting that I'm leaving this meeting to go to speak in Montreal along with a group called Anges Québec, which is the newly formed angel group in Montreal. I'm speaking before 175 entrepreneurs in the province of Quebec about how to attract

Industry committee  I'll mention one of the interesting differences between VC returns and angel returns. Recognizing that we are both in a very high-risk space, we just conducted a survey in partnership with our angel organization in the U.S., the Angel Capital Association of America. We went out a

Industry committee  No angel group that I know of in this country would ask for 75% of the company in the early-stage financing or in any other tranche that angels may do.

Industry committee  Depending on whether there's going to be a follow-on VC round, in which angels are typically diluted, you're looking at probably something in the neighbourhood of between 20% and 30%, because we want to keep entrepreneurs motivated to show up. Over the last ten years that I have

Industry committee  Yes, Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. To the committee, thank you for including us in today's discussion. Today I'm going to actually split the presentation between Andy and me. So with that, what I would like to do today is explain the role of angel investors in Canada's com