It certainly has had a big impact.
Now, think about it. Most young technology companies raise money knowing that in a couple of years they're going to have to raise more. They raise multiple rounds of venture capital, starting with the angel rounds and going through to the expansion rounds, so they know they're going to run out of money and will have to go for more. And what the dollar has done is that it has taken their two years of runway and turned it into 18 months of runway, or one year of runway. From the beginning, they knew they were facing that problem—but it has been very, very significant.
I guess the other other point is that ultimately, the demand for most types of innovative technology is very cyclical. In the Ottawa area, a lot of the technology companies make telecom equipment, so it winds up that their customers are Bell South and Verizon, the big telecom companies, whose capital spending is very, very cyclical. They spent a fortune on new technology around the year 2000, and they've spent less and less ever since.
So that is just a business cycle, which everyone in tech knows we have to bear, and that's why we know it's a high-risk and hopefully high-return asset class.