I remember receiving a briefing note that talked about where we were going to start positioning SDTC, which was in a high-risk area. We basically looked at all of what I call the "silos", whether it was the type of research that's required for technology, or whatever.
You said you were a corporate banker. As you know, when you start doing start-ups, you're really looking at the capital costs, you're looking at the tangible assets, like a factory. In Saskatchewan it would be $200 million for a canola crushing plant. What entrepreneur has that? Basically, you're looking at banks, you're looking at investors, whatever it may be. We recognized we had to be even on top of that tier. When we started talking about the types of loans, or the types of grants, soft loans, whatever they may be, we knew we had to be the point of these issues surrounding the new way in which we had to help fund and support start-ups or scaling up.
I would say to you that the rigour was there, because in many ways when you see how some of the projects that were starting up then moved to scale up, it told me that we were really graduating. We were putting bets on companies that really were saying what they were going to do.