Jeffery:
Why don’t we start off and I know you’ve got some very exciting stories. You’ve shared a lot of good things about how you’ve done, what you’ve done, but maybe you can give us a little intro on Bernie. What’s all about Bernie, where’d you come from, which you’re yeah — what kind of moved you down this path of investment, what was your career like?

Bernie:
Sure. So I’ll take it back to the beginning. So I’m originally from around the area here. You know after chapter one of my career after school, I got into a venture at a pretty early stage of my career. So this is down when I was in New York City, ended up joining what became in essence an organized family office, with a particular interest in early stage investing and supporting entrepreneurs. So really that was year 2000 with the emergence of internet let’s call it 1.0, kind of the media side of you know what the internet could become. And spent about 10 years doing early stage investing that was with that group in New York called carrot capital. In 2004 I moved up to Montreal, joined a firm now known as I know Inovia Capital so also during an early stage investing companies across Canada and the US and early stage primarily in IT. After spending about 10 years on the investment side at a pretty young age, just felt that inner need to kind of sit on the other side of the table and try to become an entrepreneur. And so I moved back to Toronto and work with a couple of co-founders and we created a company that was called Pure Energies and this was a company that helps homeowners find good solar offerings for the households. We ended up growing that into becoming you know one of the leading solar provider in the province of Ontario and then acquired a company that was based in San Francisco, and then ran another company that was down headquartered out of there, where we also helped up homeowners across 13 states in the US, all fine deal good solar solutions for the rooftops. Had a really you know kind of like the real roller coaster ride of what I would say is like initial exuberance and success with crushing, you know crashing down of realities, as we went through our tough period. But over the course of that you know, raised you know an amount of venture financing so I went through that route with institutional VC’s, venture debt financing and culminated into getting on the radar of a large public company and ended up becoming a strategic acquisitions for them. So I spent some time doing the merger, and integration of our company at that point was about 200 employees into an organization that was many times larger than us, that itself was a short chapter which was kind of interesting to go through and kind of is like a classical Harvard Business case on what happens with startups they get absorbed into larger organizations. And then you know since that time have had the chance to spend some time you know paying it forward and helping out entrepreneurs in some cases have done it as an investor often it’s like as what we call an active investor, or you know an advisor as well but also you know had the opportunity to help out organizations like Mars the Mars Discovery District. And currently and helping as a coach with the group which is associated with the we charity which is the we social impact accelerator. A new accelerator that is designed to help accelerate the performance and success of startup companies that have a social impact lens to them.

Jeffery:
That’s amazing. So I like the fact that you said you tried, I think you pretty much succeeded in running an entrepreneurial business. I’m not sure how much effort was the try part, I think the try might have been for the first few days and then you took it off and turned into to an amazing business so that sounds like an awesome journey from venture capitalists to entrepreneur to coach venture capitalists again so it sounds like a full rounded investment studio there and I think that’s brilliant. So you kind of went through all these streams and you started off on the other side of investing first before he went into a business have and felt the urge to give back so what was the real driver that got you into this? Even when you were doing it back in New York, what did you really like about it? What made you really think, man I gotta stay in this space, I’m never leaving I love this.

Bernie:
You know I’ve probably, a little bit, was a product of the time. You know in the early 2000s well 1999-2000, it was really you know this exuberance that was in the air -Internet 1.0. But it was kind of like a story of possibilities, we’re starting to hear about this new kind of layer that’s coming out which is gonna kind of make information free for all. You know remove kind of some of the barriers to access education information, contents, new forms of contents — there was so much excitement and you know someone that’s 23 years old — you feed off of that. And I probably helped kind of like set the tone just for the next you know 20-some odd years of that followed that and that was where the initial catalyst was. You know in terms of like my entry and foray into the entrepreneurial world.

Jeffery:
Oh that’s brilliant. When you are going through this stage and getting into it did you have a mentor? Did you have somebody that you kind of looked up to? Or somebody that kind of helped coached you through this, because, again, you’re in a whole new space, you said you’re young, you got this new internet thing you’re like this stuff’s amazing — did someone kind of help you work your way through that because that’s your capital is completely different then than it was 20 years before it and then it is even today?

Bernie:
Sadly no. I would have tried to find one, I think. The state of the market in the industry is it’s very different, much more evolved now than it was 20 some odd years ago or 20 years ago. I think you know I was in the New York market at that time — there was a handful of venture firms that were out there, but the amount of content that was being produced — they can find now the number of stories that you know were being transferred and handed down that didn’t really exist. I mean there was a lot of activity that’s happening around Silicon Valley, you know in California, but that still was its own region. In New York you know a Silicon Alley and it was had its own crew of companies that were kind of coming out for that time period. So a lot of it was trial of experiments, trial and error. That’s how we kind of like stumbled and worked our way through it. You know they often say that you know to be in the venture industry, it’s like I think they say it’s like a four or five hundred thousand dollar cost and the reason being is that your first couple of deals that you end up doing, they all kind of like blow up because it takes a couple of mistakes you know before you have some sense of what you’re actually doing. yeah

Jeffery:
No I can see that. I’ve made a few mistakes in my time, so I’m not even sure they’re mistakes. I think it’s all part of the —

Bernie:
The learning experiences, yeah. It’s all about learning right, your whole goal is that you’re trying to help move other businesses to go forward and your job is to kind of coach, utilize assets or financial assets to move something forward, so you’re kind of all working together to move this ship forward and sometimes the ship’s too early, sometimes the ship doesn’t have the right material and they don’t weather the storm. So it’s a learning process. And it happens maybe too often that you can’t weather the storm but I think you get better at figuring out what tactic ways can get you through some of these and and a lot of it’s probably getting a lot more people involved in what you’re doing than just obviously a small group trying to help float a lot of boats right.

Bernie:
Mm-hmm, yeah. I mean venture is a very kind of interesting asset class. In stage you know there’s so much uncertainty at the early stages of things. Look it’s hard enough in life to predict 24 hours out as opposed to 5 to 10 years out. So there’s a lot of fuzziness right there’s a lot of things that aren’t clear ahead of a company, and you know I’m sure we’ll get to it later on but you know it kind of like boils down to you know what are some of the key success factors that I’ve probably learned at least in my belief during the course of investing at different stages. And you know from the early stage side that’s why so much of it you hear that comes down to like you know you’re betting on the jockey not the horse. You’re betting on the people, you’re betting on the team because they’re the ones that are going on the adventure and they’ll probably make you know the same source on the stage and they’re gonna stumble a few times so it’s just are they going to be the ones that are quick enough to realize it quickly and can pivot and change course you know when needed. So you know different features I’m sure if you spoke to ten different investors you get many different answers on on their kind of take towards how they