Jeffery: Welcome to the Supporters Fund. Ask an investor. I’m your host, Jeffery Potvin. Let’s please welcome Moien Giashi, Ph.D., senior investment associate at Green Sky Capital, as our investor for today. Welcome, all. It’s a real pleasure having you join us today.

Moien: Thanks for having me. Very, very happy to be part of the fun.

Jeffery: I love it. Well, we’re excited to talk to you because there’s a few cool things that you bring to this table outside of being a global traveler. But and, of course, including where you’ve had your schooling and all these great things, but you’re also in this chemical space, which I’ve always been highly fascinate with, because the whole world is in and out against this whole chemical side of things, especially when everybody is going green. And I think you obviously have done a lot in this space. So it really brings a lot of better understanding. I think we’ll get to the whole market side and then we’ll dive in, of course, what’s going on in the startup world. But the way we love to start our show is that we want to learn a bit more about yourself. So maybe you can talk about your schooling days from U of T to the startups and and the companies that you work with today. And then one thing about you that nobody would know.

Moien: Yeah, absolutely. So I guess going back in time, I did my undergrad in Iran and then in a polymer engineering. I think the idea that I had when I was 18 was that the world is made of materials and that could be material engineering could change the world. And that’s why I started actually studying. And it was it was obviously very fascinating to me. Immigrated to Canada in 2013, immigrated specifically her school, so came to University of Alberta at Edmonton, and all of a sudden there was a temperature change that was that was massive. And I did my master’s in chemical engineering, but my focus was obviously oil and gas is is what funds University of Alberta. And a lot of research. But my focus was on tailings ponds and environmental impact of oil extraction in Alberta. That was a very interesting topic for me. Just because there’s massive, massive amount of land in northern Alberta that is captured by these telling ponds is just sitting there and nobody knows what to do with it. I think hopefully now after like ten, 15 years of research, people have better ideas about these tailing ponds and they’re trying to come up with solutions. I’m seeing a lot of startups, secret technologies that are thinking of actually getting rid of it, extracting the water, extracting minerals, etc.. So that’s it’s becoming interesting. Move to Toronto in 2015 to do a deal was in love with what scientist wanted to become a professor all in. And so I was like, I should do a PhD. But then I wanted to go back to my metal roots. So I started working again on materials. My focus was 3D printing. Used to work with a lot of biomaterials, materials that are extracted from from plants or from nature. And my material of choice was cellulose. I was I was directly working with a lot of fellows trying to use them in 3D printing. And it’s it’s great that like we have in Canada, there is the forestry industry is actually massive. So there’s there’s a ton of wood waste that can be extracted and used to sell those and then also sell those can be uses as a material choice. So yeah, I did that as a PhD, but then I was fascinated with a lot of the research that I was doing. But kind of what was bothering me a lot was the fact that we do a lot of research. Government puts in a lot of money into our research, but then what happens after that? Like it, it just dies and it’s like I have publications, they’re scientific, but nobody sees it. Like Jeffrey is ever seen by my publication. He doesn’t know what I do, doesn’t know what is the application of what I do. It’s just because it is sitting there, Nobody’s seeing it other than other scientists who are just using it for the sake of science. And I that was kind of the driver for me to step outside academia. I was I was looking into a lot of the patterns that University Toronto is producing. My my supervisor specifically was producing. I was like, I should do something to help commercialize all of these. All of that research that is that is happening. And I was kind of that was kind of the starting point for me, like can I actually support commercialization of science? And then as I dig deeper, I learn more about an institute at the University of Chronicle Creative Destruction Lab, which is which is now actually more of a global institution. And right after my PhD, I started working there as a as a venture manager. So I was directly working with a lot of technology companies, helping them with commercialization, fundraising, growth, etc.. That was kind of my transition to more of a business side as as opposed to just being a scientist and a researcher. So I did that for a year. I worked at an a medical device and then and then joined Green Sky Capital, which now we call it Great Sky Ventures, joined us as an associate. We actually started to invest in B2B Canadian companies, but one of the great things about creating Sky is that we do also invest in a lot of deeper technology solutions and solutions that are IP backed. There is there’s a lot of research behind it. And that was that was kind of my niche and that was something that I love, like trying to help commercialize science, trying to help commercialize deeper technology solutions. And yeah, that’s, that’s what I’m doing right now, leading the tech investment that that’s creating Sky, trying to, whenever I have time, trying to mentor and help startup companies in a deeper tech or R&D for tech, just trying to help them commercialize their solutions. So that’s been, I guess, the journey. It’s I’ve been in Canada for ten years. Exactly. Came in 2013. And I guess one thing that nobody knows about me is that I like cooking. I don’t know if it’s boring or not if other people said the same thing, but cooking is definitely something that I like a lot. I don’t get a lot of time to cook. You now as as I used to, but I definitely love to find the time to to cook. I love to have a beautiful kitchen and with a lot of appliances, that’s that’s definitely a dream. And pizza oven specifically is what I love. But but that’s that’s what I do that others don’t know about me.

Jeffery: It’s just that’s awesome. And know cooking is is a great skill. It’s refined, detail oriented, all those good things. Right. So I love it. So awesome. Well, we’re going to kind of go back a few steps because when you were talking about and one thing that really kind of stands out along the things I’ve watched on the videos and different things that you’ve written, is that commercialization on the science side? Yeah, I like that you really define that. This is something that you were trying to work on. Now is there are some past experiences where you did try to take some of your own material and try and drive that into a business? And and what was the outcome from that?

Moien: I guess that is the other thing that people don’t know about me because it’s not on the left hand side. Yeah, I that that’s actually how it started. Like we, we had new material classes. The mature classes could be used for 3D printing, especially for 3D printing up by a logical element. So you could collect 3D print and something that looks like an organ, and then you could take this and try to like, like add drugs to it. Tried to test, put a lot of drugs and see what would happen. So it would call them organoids. And you can actually you can actually mimic how an organ would behave in response to a specific drug, for example. So that was kind of the idea that I wanted to commercialize with my supervisor. But but I guess I dropped the idea or like I dropped the the effort to commercialize it. And one of the reasons was that I realized that the market size is not very large. And the folks that are going to be the purchasers of this technology are going to be other researchers. And I, I thought that it’s not actually very large, but in in hindsight, I think five years later today, if seen a 3D printing company that is that does a lot of the bio printing, this stuff has has closed a massive deal and I’ve and I’m seeing a lot of like smaller shops that are producing these new materials for research purposes as well as other biological applications. So it could be a successful business. I still think it it wouldn’t have been a massively scalable startup and that’s why I did it. I just I decided not to pursue it because it’s I thought it’s not going to going to fly and become very big. But, but yeah, that’s, that’s the other challenge, probably off the science side like we did the science for the sake of science, but I didn’t do the science with the objective or idea of commercialization in mind to begin with. Like we didn’t do the science to solve a specific problem. We were just exploring and discovering.

Jeffery: Well, it’s interesting that that experience actually defined where you went next in your journey. And if you take that portion of what you did, how much it’s probably driven, how you can operate today and work with startups and how you can kind of lead them because you took the time to take a technology, figure out, can I turn this and put this into a product? And as you work through that process, you also look earlier on, can I commercialize this and can I scale this? And you mentioned, you know, scalable startup. Was this scalable? And five years ago it didn’t look scalable. So you kind of reverted, said, okay, this isn’t going to work. Can you maybe define what made you determine this new startup sort of have doubted for five years, maybe seven years, and then decided, okay, this is a working or they couldn’t raise any more funds. They chose not to at that time, after wasting five years to not realize that they couldn’t get any more money or scale. So what was the determining factor for you at that point? Because I think that’s pretty crucial insight that you had such an early on to say, wait, this isn’t something that’s going to be $1,000,000,000 company. I’m going to pause on this and go a different direction.

Moien: I think I just went back to the fundamental and try to really map out the markets like we had a bunch of, let’s say, other research labs reaching out to us, trying to buy this material, which is which is always a great side, like you have a bias. But then I, I was like more pessimistic than that. I’d like I wanted to see something bigger. I wanted to see a better indication. I wanted to see maybe an industrial partner or ready to like, do a pilot or I wanted to see if an industrial partner could at least take this and scale it to a larger scale. And and really what happened was that I basically tried to like, map out what is the market sides like, How how much can I sell, what would be the revenue of this company, let’s say the first three or four or five years just in my head like obviously, you know, financial projection is amazing, but it never comes to reality. But then I realized that okay, with a realistic kind of projection is not something that is a scale. It’s going to be something that yeah, it’s going to be a business. Probably successful days can get to like half a million revenue. But but, but then what I had as the core of the technology wouldn’t be, wouldn’t be something that is a scalable just because of the nature of the customers, the nature of the customers remaining as, let’s say, academics who want this material, who wants this technology to be able to do more research that I found as a as a small market. It’s like one of the things that you ask startups to kind of give us is what is the size of your market right now? I mean, like there are different things that people say, like some people want to see $1,000,000,000, some people want to see ten tens of billions of dollars. But essentially what it comes down to is that if your market size is larger, the probability of you hitting the right spot is obviously higher. If you have a more niche market, each market is five, ten, 15, $20 million and not hundreds of millions of dollars. You might be able to actually capture this market, but the probability of success is just lower compared to when you have $1,000,000,000 market.

Jeffery: So when you’re looking at it, it sounds like what is the real obtainable market? So there’s kind of like pie in the sky. As you mentioned financially, we’ve got estimates all the time that are really overexaggerated, even if they’re looked at as being here’s my humble way of sharing numbers. But when you’re when you’re looking at what’s actually the obtainable market. So is there a refined moment where you say, okay, you know what, they’re out of $500 million market. There’s only two real players in this market. There’s such an opportunity. There’s big demand. There’s there’s a lot to grab off the table here. This is something that we need to jump into.

Moien: Yeah, that’s that was definitely what I was looking to, to see if I can actually find. And it wasn’t convinced that I can find that. And I can tell you that right now, actually, five years after, there are a lot of startups trying to like kind of sell the same idea that, okay, I can give you an ORGANOID and you can you can test drugs on edge. You can see if it’s compatible with your drugs and do all the toxicity genomics, whatever stuff you want to do. But then the problem is that all of these smaller players are also academics who decided to commercialize this, which is great. All of them might be successful small businesses that generates revenue and create jobs. But I would argue that they’re not a startup, they’re not massively scalable businesses that can capture a large market size.

Jeffery: And to refine that one step further, what do you see as being a not specific a company, but what you see is something that is scalable? Like what is scalable mean in your eyes? Is it, you know, 100 million in five years? Is it product in hand? Like what makes a better scalable companies for you guys to say, yeah, this makes sense or for yourself that makes sense that we should dive into this or at least start supporting this tech when it’s early on in year one or two.

Moien: Yeah, I think definitely seeing a specific market size rate. Yes. If you if you go deep and look at the obtainable market, is it actually $100 million attainable market at least? I know people try to map out their their time and they’re like, this is a $3 Billion market. Everybody breezes every day. This is a huge market for us. Let’s produce oxygen. But but that we’ve looked at deeper look at the obtainable market like if you actually map out all the customers and if you were to build a sales funnel, can you actually build a sales funnel with which if I give you $20 million, you can go out and at least generate like $100 million of revenue, you know, in a matter of a couple of years. And going back to financial projections, people send us a projection. The first year is X amount, second years, three X, the third year is five X and so on. And they try to show that hockey stick or or I guess the bottom side of the scare. But what is, what is interesting is that what they first of all, none of them really hit that number. It’s just like the scaling is not that easy, but at least having the potential to a scale having to be able to disrupt the market through a scaling quickly is something that you’re looking at. And it it comes from the market potential, It comes from the technology itself. Obviously, it comes from the team itself. But but I think it is definitely a combination. But if you want to just focus on the size of the market, a rough, attainable market, if you had enough of like all the money in the world and money was not a problem, could you actually get to $100 million in a matter of a couple of years?

Jeffery: I think that’s probably where I find and see a lot of people in this market when they’re building it is that they’re not building off having market fit. They’re building off dreams. And when they’re building off these dreams, they’re very scalable. Of course, in your mind we can scale anything, but they’re not realizing what the effort is that goes beside inside of this. So if you’re going to do 100 million, does that mean you have a team of a thousand? Is they’re going to or 100 and in order to get that scalable movement going, have you created a flywheel where that process is just so quick? You know, and we had companies over the years that have failed and we asked them, you know, what was what would you do different in your next company? And I think a lot of them had different versions of things that they would do differently. And again, lots of different comments behind it. But one of them, which always stood out to me, was that they never found that commercialized flywheel, which was the printing press of how that revenue just keeps regenerating itself. What were you doing that allowed for your business to find that niche, as you mentioned, and then just cookie cutter that process so that instead of having a six month closed, you have a one week closed or a one day closed. And how do you keep revolving that number down? And I guess if you’re looking at the scientific side, you know who you’re selling into and you know that academia will take maybe longer for them to process, understand and approve and agree, which could mean that this could be an eight month closed from the start of that pitch. That means that you have to have quite a few irons in the fire in order to keep that repetitively going. I mean, can you take it from eight months down to four, down to two, down to one? And if that’s not feasible, it’s always going to be eight months. Then you really have to have a big pipeline in order to cover that off to make this business scalable at any point in time. So I think scalability comes with speed and that’s always a tough factor to battle.

Moien: And I would just add that scalability is not the same as a scaling at any cost like you have a scalable business or potentially a scalable business. But if you go crazy and you double the headcount every year and like doubled the burn or tripled the burn to double the sales, that is an undesirable event.

Jeffery: I think you’re seeing that a lot in the markets today where you’re having a lot of corrections, where companies who have been throwing money at sales are realizing that when they cut back their team, they lose half their sales and they start to falter because as one of paraphrasing, you know, you’re either the painkiller or you’re the the vitamin. And it’s better to be the painkiller than the nice to have. And I think a lot of businesses are realizing that that when markets get tough, people cut certain pieces of their of their expense. So are you going to be part of that model or are you going to be removed because you’re not really of value to the company? And I think sometimes you really do have to take that scalability side and decide if this is scalable. Is this something that will always be needed in this company and can we grow within that client that we have?

Moien: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think what what kind of resonated with me is, is also if you are the pain killer trying to be the better, faster, cheaper painkiller versus to be another generic painkiller that can differentiate is is also something that would help you build a more sustainable business. But I mean, what I want to caveat to this whole conversation here is that a successful a success is not building a startup. You can also build a small business. You can generate revenue, you can create jobs and be a successful person and have good salaries. And that is still very, very valuable. A huge portion of the economy is built by small businesses. Not everybody should be a startup.

Jeffery: I love it. Well-said. Completely agree with that. So now you take this learning that you’ve built off, you know, trying to build out this first model of your business, and then you started to work and help a lot of these other groups, accelerators, incubators, obviously, in the venture firm side. So you did have a lot of interaction with founders and startups and helping them kind of better see that this business that they’re building is possible to be scalable. And not every business, as you said, is going to have those capabilities to be scalable. And the other thing that kind of really dives into what you’ve been doing is that you’re a part of a lot of board observer sides. And what I wanted to learn more about, because I think I get a lot of these questions, one, people have a fear of putting boards to other founders. And then secondarily, a lot of them don’t understand what an observer role is and how it supports the business and what the reasoning behind them are. So you tend to find you’re sharing both sides. Can you give us an idea of how these boards are set up or how you participate in an observer role? Because I think this is not only key for you in how you’re developing an eventual, but it’s also key for founders to understand that there’s a lot of value you can gain from an observer role inside of your board.

Moien: Yeah, no, absolutely. So I guess historically when you started to grow your business, you get at a point that you want to put together a board. This, this, this has nothing to do with having an investor just grow a business. And then I guess traditionally you IPO and now you must have a board, etc., etc.. So that has been traditionally how it used to be. Now let’s say startups are the group that you’re focusing on. Do you start? They probably raise it. Chris Brown Some of them don’t start having a board at a PC just because they have a couple of angels. It’s just the founders. But then once they raise their first serious since the talk show around, let’s say their seed round, they start putting together a board and and usually the composition of the board is it’s like one or two investors, one or two of the executives, and it could be one person from outside this composition. It can obviously change. It could be a three person board at the beginning or a 5% board at the beginning. Obviously, I think it’s it’s more valuable to have fewer board members at the beginning. I’ve seen companies that have eight board members and the value of the company is at 6 million. That is obviously a relatively correct flag. And the reason for that is that this company, for example, was spun out of the hospital. There was so one person from the board of the hospital that they joined as a board member. One person was an investor. One person was the original founder of the company, one person. And then and then you add these and then it becomes eight people. Obviously, at such a small scale of a company that you’re at, if you have eight board members that you’re just basically not being able to do anything because you have to respond to eight people. And so I put together eight people, two to make any decision. So that’s that’s a red flag, what I’ve seen. But imagine you have like a standard three four person board at the beginning. One of the things that people mix up is that, let’s say if you’re an investor and you are on a board, your role is to protect your investment. But that is completely false. As a as an investor who is on the board, your role is to protect the shareholders and what the success of the company to maximize the profit or earnings or whatever the objective is for the shareholders of the company. So there are obviously sometimes conflicts of interest. People have to declare that. They have to make sure that the shareholders gain is utmost apparent compared to their own investment. That’s that’s one. But then, yeah, as you mentioned, there’s there could be a lot of benefits from your board. Your board members could be folks that have a lot of experience in certain things. Your board member could have 30 years of M&A experience or a board member could have many years experience as a CFO or could be a specifically like a technical person. And stuff that you share in your board meetings could be related to your cybersecurity stuff, risks that are associated with your business. And as you grow, you might have a specific communities like a compensation committee so it can grow and expand into different communities and groups that subgroups and different types of conversations. But with the idea of helping the CEO, helping the executive team and the ultimate objective of helping the company grow and thrive for for the benefit of shareholders. So that’s the objective. But obviously we have to make sure conflict of interests is always, as has always got everyone’s mind, just like they talk about their their conflicts, they make sure that they put shareholder and in front of everybody else, etc., etc.. So these are two things that also have to be there. But then the role of board observers. So those are folks that come in, they could come in from the investor side or they could come in just as an advisor. They don’t have a board voting rights, so they wouldn’t be able to want to do anything specific about the company. But obviously they can observe the board, they can give advice to the CEO. But based on the conversation that has happened, they specifically could have also different types of expertise that are skill sets. But I guess one of the things is that then they are not liable the same way that the actual board members are. They’re just observing. They can talk, they can give feedback, but they can’t vote. And as a result they don’t have they don’t have the liability makes it easier for advisors to join and sit on a board and be able to give feedback, let’s say back to the founder or back to anybody else who was on the board without the liability or the challenges that are that are legally binding.

Jeffery: I love it. That’s a great description of how the board and how it interacts with the CEO and the rest of the founding team and of course, the team. But also I love how you tied in a few of these pieces around. It really is offsetting the skillset of the CEO. They’re looking for people that would represent the business. And as you said, this isn’t about protecting their own interests. And I think there’s a real shortcoming here is that people that go on boards feel that their goal in everything is to be the CEO of their own entity, to make sure they don’t lose their shares or lose their value while pushing their own directive. And that happens at all levels of of board. And it’s really an unfortunate piece because you need to be unbiased. You need to come in with a goal that you’re representing all of the shareholders in that company.

Moien: Yeah, this is obviously a much, much longer conversation. I tried to squeeze a bunch of things that might not have been a straight line up for end of thoughts. But but yes, yes, you’re right. It’s it should be valuable. It should be to the benefit of the executive team. It should be to the benefit of shareholders. And I think founders should be more educated about what the board can do for them and the responsibilities of the board, because it’s not just the board coming in, sitting there trying to interrogate the CEO, but also to see you’re going in prepared and ready to ask questions and ask for help and ask for support.

Jeffery: And it’s interesting when you say the interrogation part, because I think that’s the fear of the founders is that when they have this board, they feel like, this is this is terrible. I don’t want this. I like making my own calls. I don’t need anybody’s help. But there really is a huge value to have a coordinated team. It’s supporting your every initiative, but also doing homework in the background and as you mentioned, doing a lot of research and coming up with viable information that can better offset the direction of the business and really help hone in on that strategy so that businesses do have a better trajectory forward to succeed.

Moien: Yeah, And I mean, one other thing that I would add is that board is responsible also to educate themselves about topics of the day. Like today, the conversation is around cybersecurity. You might be someone who has been a CFO for 40 years. You might not be educated enough about cybersecurity or you might have been a lawyer for 2025 years, but you may not be educated enough about topics around ESG. It’s your responsibility to either go learn about those topics or whenever the topic comes up, bring in an expert to help you and help the team solve the problem. And that could be, let’s say, an observer who comes in and who tries to actually support the the board as well as the founding team.

Jeffery: I love it. And when you’re working on these multiple observer roles, do you find that they’re utilizing the time correctly, that the board meetings are efficient, effective, or are they 6 hours long and you feel like you didn’t achieve anything at the end of it? Is there things that you would say, Hey, founders, when you’re putting a board together to keep these three things in mind, they’re going to be helpful for how you run and operate a board, but also how you utilize observers better in this process.

Moien: Yeah, I think it’s the job of the board members as well as the founders, to make the board meeting as useful as possible. One thing is that everybody who goes into the board meeting, they have to be ready. They have to have done their homework. So if if it’s a founder, they have to have distributed the board materials that week in advance. If it’s a board members, they have to have reviewed all the board materials. They everybody should know what is the question at hand? What is the biggest problem that they are going in to try to solve before going in so that they do their research, They have their notes prepped, they know who to call if if if the time comes. Obviously making making a board meeting more than 2 hours. I think it’s useless if there’s a specific conversation that ought to be done. And it doesn’t require everybody, their founder is going to have a separate meeting if if it’s let’s say it’s a conversation about their technology or tech stack. It’s not everybody on the board. More team need to know about how the technology development is going and what are the challenges with it. Maybe there’s a specific person who can help with the tech stack. So I think those are the things that can be handled outside the board meeting as well. I think overall having now like basically everybody been accustomed to using Zoom and virtual meetings that definitely have made everything much easier in terms of having words. People are scared of the hack, like investing in companies, for example, let’s say the UK and Europe, because if it comes for a board meeting, they had to fly and it would take a lot of time from them. Now everything is virtual, so it has made everything much easier.

Jeffery: It certainly has simplified things as well. And this is kind of a good Segway because it works into a recent article that you had created, which is mentors and the laws of diminishing returns, which I think was a great read because it really does help you better understand maybe what you’re trying to do as an outcome at the end, but how you get there and are the pieces that your mentors and coaches that you’re working with, will they help you get to that part? And I know you kind of steer them in that there’s some value. And I’ve read many articles, as I’m sure you have over the years, where they say, Well, coaches aren’t really worth it, mentors aren’t worth it. And then the other side, they’re say, No, they’re super valuable. You really need these. So maybe you can share a little bit more about what you wrote there, because this all kind of fits part and parcel to having a board is that the founders typically all have mentors and coaches as well. So really at the end of the day, you’ve got all of these people that are out there trying to throw advice at you, your boards tell you to do this, your coaches are telling you to do this, and you really got to figure out, man, what is the right way? I need to go with this. They know it’s my first time running a business or, you know, it’s my first time running a $100 million business. And there’s a lot of data coming at you and there’s got to be some decisions you have to make. But who do you follow? Is your advisor smarter than your coach? Is your coach smarter than your board? And maybe you can kind of share a little bit about that in how it worked with this diminishing return, which again, was really well done.

Moien: So I know I think the one thing that everybody should understand, including investors and founders, is that you’re just amazing at pattern recognition because investors who might see a thousand startups a year over that, let’s say they’re like, whatever, ten years of being an investor, you might see like five or ten startups closely getting somewhere, but they’re going bust or becoming like success stories. But what, what happens? And I think the challenge is that your brain loves to identify patterns and loves to push you to go through those patterns over and over. So you see your startup company as a as a mentor advisor. And then when I advise them and you’ve seen something before historically and you try to go to the founder and try to basically tell them this is what I think you should do, and what you’re suggesting is just based on the historical data that you and ultimately at the end of the day, because you’re amazing at pattern recognition, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be good at predicting the future. So nobody knows what is going to happen. But you might hear specific advice for a specific type of business, but then that might be a completely wrong advice just because that a specific type of business wouldn’t survive or scale or become a success story. What whatever you’ve seen in the past and and so this happens with like all the five coaches and advisors that you have. Each of them are coming to you at a different angle because they’ve seen different things in the past and, and like all of them might be wrong or all of them might be right. But the thing is that you can’t listen to every one of them at some point you are basically missing out on focusing on your sales by trying to satisfy or make make your advisors and coaches happy because you follow. Exactly what what they’re telling you. So I think my advice is, is that as a founder, investors have put their trust in you. These advisors want to help you. The idea is that all of these people believe in you to run this business. And I think you have to trust your gut to run the business the way that you think is going to going to work. At least if you fail, you know that it was you and you know what you did. And you can, of course, direct much quicker than listening to an advisor who told you to do X and you went to the text and you came back and you’re like, this didn’t work and you’re lost. I think I think trusting your gut, hearing everyone’s opinion is great. Hearing everybody’s expertise and experience is great. It helps you gather all that historical knowledge, but it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be the route to success If if you actually take their advice word by word and do it is great.

Jeffery: And if taking that in and kind of regurgitating it back is that, you know, maybe your gut is 70% of the solution, you know the market, you know what you’re doing, you’ve been doing it and the 30% is you gaining knowledge from everybody else and their historic pattern recognition, as you mentioned, I love that term for this, that you love how it’s organized. But at the end of the day, it’s just information maybe you’re jotting down on an Excel sheet all the different suggestions to your main problem. As you mentioned on the board, you have one main problem and a bunch of other ones. But what’s the biggest one you’re solving? And you take all of that information, you line it up and then you have to make a choice. Well, 70% of that choice will be your gut. 30% is going to be leaning towards the information you have. Now, would you recommend that throughout this entire version of this is that you have one go to person that you then take all this information and you bounce that off? You know, some could be your wife, your husband, your partner, or whatever it might be. And you say, here’s what I’ve come up with, here’s what my gut tells me. And you get their last critical feedback to make sure it validates your direction. Is there something like that? It’s not bias outside the network, not your coach, not your advisor, but somebody that just knows enough about what you’re doing. They can give you kind of that. I love that. Or no, maybe think of this like, is there somewhere else that you want to do that or just go with there with what you’ve put together and make the call?

Moien: I mean, I would I would say personally, I definitely have that one go to person who was outside this network. And I think it’s not that I talk to them and they give me feedback. It’s that I talk to them and I hear myself saying it. And that makes it more realistic for me. And I’m like, that’s actually it’s stupid. Now that they came out of my mouth. I think that’s that’s what you’re looking for. Like, obviously if you have a smart companion who can give you some feedback as well, that’s that’s amazing. But I think having someone to go to and try to like consolidate all of the things that you’ve heard and try to like, just like spell it out, that that really helps a lot.

Jeffery: That’s brilliant. I love that. It is. I think it lines up correctly because again, were inundated with so and so much information, so much reading that sometimes you just need to take a pause, take a breath and share that information to that one person that you can hear yourself talk and have them. You know, they can cue, they can agree. It almost sounds like you’re going to speak to a shrink. But at the of the day, they’re giving you enough of that direction that you can then start to set the stage and then go back with confidence to your board, to your coaches and say, here’s the direction we’ve taken and knowing that it’s coming from you, you now have the drive to support it versus the other side when you’re taking it from everybody else and you accept what they’ve said, now you’re becoming you’re falling behind the wheel, not driving, because you’ve lost that ability because you had to accept everybody else’s direction and you as the founder is just succumb to that instead of going with the information you have and making the choice that you think is going to drive that business.

Moien: Yes, it’s like Warren Buffett talking about investment that he says invest in what you love. It’s it’s basically put your effort in what you love and believe in because it’s going to take take some time until it comes to fruition. And if you don’t love it, you’re going to hate every every second of it.

Jeffery: That’s a good point. Awesome. Well, we’re going to transition now into a couple of more I will say a couple more quick questions and then we’re going to get into my favorite segment, which is the 62nd read. So the first question is, what’s the toughest lesson you’ve learned as an investor today?

Moien: I think it’s the fact that we try to think that we have collected enough information about an investment and we think that we know all the risks that are out there. But then the reality could be completely different than what I’ve seen is an example of a company that, let’s say all the investors think that they have to write down and all of a sudden becomes a massive success. And on the other hand, a company that everybody thinks is is becoming a massive success, but all of a sudden becomes a mediocre success or just completely face and not just at the moment of investment. Let’s say four years into that investment, you still think that this thing is becoming a massive success and all of a sudden things change and vice versa. And that has happened a lot for, I think, every investor. And I think that is a very humbling experience when you go through that and you realize we just don’t know much. We are trying to maximize the amount that we know and trying to capture all the risks, But there are stuff that you’re going to miss.

Jeffery: Completely agree with a little bit and okay, now maybe you can share a case study or a quick, insightful piece of what it takes to be an entrepreneur. You’ve been an entrepreneur yourself. You’ve you’ve worked with entrepreneurs. Is there a kind of a case study that uterus like this company was going to fail and they crushed it or they did this, but they should have done this, and this is just the way it takes to be an entrepreneur. I think there’s this glorified side that everybody that steps into entrepreneurship is going to crush it and sell their company for $1,000,000,000 in two years and walk away. But there is a lot of struggles and a lot of tough things that they go through. And maybe you can share a quick story on what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

Moien: I think I think one of the biggest traits to be a successful entrepreneur is patience and doing it for the love of what you’re doing and doing it for the love of the impact that you can have, not for the love of making the billion dollar exits or or succeeding in a night or two. So and I mean, that’s that’s one of the things that I personally don’t have a lot of is like, I’m not a patient person and I know it’s always very difficult for me to be patient. So it’s not easy to recommend to people be patient, and of course you are patient, but then success might just never come and you have maybe you’ve left a job that was paying a proper salary and are doing something that is very difficult. So I think a successful entrepreneur has a bit of craziness. It’s like a bit irrational or he or she is a bit irrational. They just they just believe that something will happen and believe from the bottom of their heart that something is going to change the world. And that’s why they make that irrational decision of leaving the money that can go to their pocket. Now from a corporate job and living with the hope of making a massive change. And so that would that would be my take on a successful entrepreneur being being a bit irrational.

Jeffery: Agreed that patience is a tough one for for entrepreneurs, and maybe they’ll grow that over time. But being having a fifth to fifth year and being able to take yourself to different levels to drive and to be successful, and I think those all are a big portion of what makes things work in the space and never giving up, but knowing when to give up at the same time as per your previous engagement. Okay, we’re going to jump right into 62nd Rant, so I’m going to give you 60 seconds. You can rant about anything that you think is doable. And I’m going to rebuttal once if I can, and then you’ll close it off from there. Ready to roll? Sure.

Moien: Yeah. Okay. I would. Yeah. So basically my problem is with pitch decks, and this is actually not a topic that people are unfamiliar with. Like everybody talks about how to better pitch the things that I hate about like sending a pitch deck. This could be a cult message or not, but if you send a pitch deck and you send it in PowerPoint, that really me nuts because it moves around and when I want to present it, it’s not as easy. If your PowerPoint or pitch that has a lot of animation. I mean, it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t solve my problem of understanding what you do in a couple of minutes. So I have to be patient with the animation. It is distracting me, but I have to make sure they focus on the diamond in the rough. I’ve seen pitch decks that seem to be have made, but Windows 98. So they make if if this is a successful business, you don’t need to spend on marketing, but at least you can build a better deck. Something that looks good. I know people talk about, this deck has a lot of text is that doesn’t have a lot of text, etc. That’s not the problem. The problem is that your deck looks terribly ugly and it could just be a bit pleasing for my eye to look at. If you’re using very bright blue is really hurting me and you’re using black text on the blue, which I can see and read that is painful. And you can just use a simple template. Make it easy for me to read and make it easy for me to understand. I think even.

Jeffery: Yeah, we’re calling it at that, but I gave you some extra seconds that my robot is to that is that. But I’m not a pitch deck builder. I’m here to just sell you on my business idea. Can’t you read through all of this fluff and bad structure and bad information? Can you not just find in there the information that tells you how great my company is? Can you not just look at the end result? Even if it is 35 pages long, can you not just find the answer and be like, I want to invest in me? Why can’t do all that work? I think that there is some. In order to find that diamond in the rough, you should have to do the work. That’s what the whole point of this is, is it not?

Moien: I think the pitch stack is like an a standardized exam. If you can’t if you can’t pass the standard basics and get into your city, it’s if you can make it proper that that that I can understand quickly I can’t trust you with your business and your judgment. That’s one, too. Is that I do have to look at I have to personally look at a thousand decks a year. And if every deck takes me half an hour, I just humanly can’t read all these decks in in all the business days that I have. So if you can if you can help me, please understand for business that a sure amount of time. That would be lovely.

Jeffery: I love it. Well, sure, 100%. Keep it short, keep it simple and be precise. You know, put in a couple of slides that really define the problem and how you make money. You know, 20% of your deck should be on the solution and the problem. And 80% should be on how you make money, make it easy for the investor, help them out, help them get through right to the end so they know what the best part of this is. The 35 page decks that’s probably 1980s. We don’t need those anymore. So make it clean and simple, right? But I love it. I can’t even not support it because I totally agree with you. The long decks of me figuring it out now. I love what you’re saying and I keep it short and just get to the point. Get to the point. Right. We’re going to jump into the rapid fire questions. So you’re going to pick one or the other. Obviously, coming from your role as being an investor, you choose which ones work best for you and we’ll go through those ready to roll.

Moien: Yeah.

Jeffery: All right. Founder, a co-founder who.

Moien: Co-Founded.

Jeffery: Unicorn or a four year ten X exit.

Moien: A four year ten X Exit.

Jeffery: Tech or, CPG.

Moien: Tech.

Jeffery: Nfts are web 3.0.

Moien: Web three point.

Jeffery: Blockchain Blockchain or A.I..

Moien: Difficult, ai

Jeffery: First time founder or second third time founder.

Moien: It’s breaking second time founder.

Jeffery: First Money In or series a.

Moien: Series A.

Jeffery: Angel or VC?

Moien: VC

Jeffery: Board Seat or Observer.

Moien: Observer.

Jeffery: Save or convertible note or

Moien: Convertible note

Jeffery: lead or follow.

Moien: Lead.

Jeffery: Favorite part of investing.

Moien: Talking to smart people.

Jeffery: Number of companies invested for your.

Moien: Eight.

Jeffery: Verticals or focus.

Moien: On health tech, industrial innovation enterprise B2B says.

Jeffery: Two qualities A startup needs to stand out to you.

Moien: Smart people differentiate IT Technology.

Jeffery: Okay. What is the piece of advice you give founders nine out of ten times?

Moien: You know your numbers.

Jeffery: Okay. Do you have a philosophy or rules that you stand behind?

Moien: I don’t like founders that come to us through a broker, but because a good CEO should be able to raise their own money. But we still look for diamonds in the rough.

Jeffery: Okay, who is your hero, mentor and why?

Moien: I don’t I don’t know if she knows. Sally Dobb is is a mentor at City of Toronto. She is my hero because she does ten things at the same time and she rocks at all of them. So she’s she’s amazing. I think that’s why she’s my guy here.

Jeffery: Okay. Love it.

Moien: I don’t think she knows it, but.

Jeffery: Well, we can send her this blurb so she’ll find that out real quick. How’s that? What is her biggest fear or phobia in business startup ecosystem?

Moien: Well, everybody trying to start a startup and trying to be $1,000,000,000 business.

Jeffery: What do you find you share to investors over and over.

Moien: Recently? It’s a tough market.

Jeffery: What is your worst investment? And you don’t have to name names, just maybe the process or something that happened.

Moien: An investment that I trusted, the technology I did not believe in. The CEO and I invested it because I believe that they have downside protection because of the IP.

Jeffery: That’s good. Do you have any other pods that you like to listen to or areas of interest that you can share?

Moien: I sometimes listen to deal all in five. I think everybody listens to that. It’s it’s a good one. Not agreed agreeing with everything they say but it’s good it’s fun.

Jeffery: That I personal questions where I miss their most famous person that pops in your mind.

00:52:05:21 – 00:52:07:13
Moien: Brad Pitt.

Jeffery: Nice first brand that pops in your mind.

Moien: Nike.

Jeffery: Booke or movie.

Moien: Book just like name in or.

Jeffery: No, no, no. Just either one.

Moien: Book.

Jeffery: Superman or Batman.

Moien: Batman

Jeffery: Fortune Cookie or Birthday cake.

Moien: Fortune cookie.

Jeffery: 5 minutes with Bezos or Oprah.

Moien: I mean, it’s Bezos.

Jeffery: Mountain or Beach.

Moien: Beach.

Jeffery: Bike or run

Moien: bike

Jeffery: Big Mac or Chicken McNuggets.

Moien: Big Mac.

Jeffery: Trophy or money.

Moien: Money.

Jeffery: Beer or wine.

Moien: Beer.

Jeffery: TED talk or book reading or.

Moien: Creating.

Jeffery: Tik Tok or Instagram.

Moien: I neither Instagram.

Jeffery: Facebook or LinkedIn.

Moien: Like the age of the.

Jeffery: Favorite movie. And what character would you play?

Moien: It’s Troy, Brad Pitt.

Jeffery: Brad Pitt, Troy. That’s a good flick. That’s good flick. Favorite book?

Moien: I think it’s it’s called Faking. Get It? That’s what’s what’s my favorite book? Don’t remember the author’s name, but she was a poker player.

Jeffery: Yes. Yes. Agreed. Very good book. Yes, She was a if I remember correctly, she came. I can read what it was. She was something else before I decided to go into poker and test everything out. She was she was a.

Moien: Psychology Ph.D. student. Yes.

Jeffery: And then she ended up going and testing her theory out on cards and end up becoming a card shark and loved it. Yeah, it’s fantastic.

Moien: My favorite sports team of Barcelona soccer team say.

Jeffery: I love it. I’ve seen them play multiple times. And in Barcelona, big fan. What is the meaning of success to you?

Moien: making change, making positive change.

Jeffery: What is your superpower?

Moien: Understanding technologies that I am not familiar with and explaining it to others very quickly.

Jeffery: I love it. Well, I found the same. You’re very easygoing, but you’re also very knowledgeable in a lot of spaces. So it’s very helpful to kind of navigate through things. And it’s got some great articles. So big fan. Love it. All right. Well, I’m going to say that this is the this is the last part or the last segment. We’re right at the end. And I want to thank you for joining us today, Mon. It’s been a real pleasure getting to dive into your self and the way you look and operate in the world. Fantastic journey. And please share with the audience how they can get connect with you. And the way we like to end our show is that we like to give you the last word. So anything that you want to share with founders or investors, I turn it over to you. But again, thank you very much for sharing everything.

Moien: Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, my legs in would be the best way to get connected. I think the most important thing is that we are at a time that is that is a bit tough. Comparing to two or three years ago. There has been a lot of investment in 2020, 2021 and there were a lot of companies well funded overfunded over capitalizing those years, a lot of companies over 2020 to try to try to extend their run. We try not to raise, but now we’re getting at a time that is that is tougher. There are fewer investors investing. It might be they might feel a lot of here, a lot of no’s. They might they might feel that they’re getting a block. I just think that they have to continue to believe in what they’re doing and try to stay positive and try to show good metrics that proves that they’re building a sustainable business. It is not the question of growth at all cost anymore. It’s the question of have you built or can you build sustainable business going forward?

Jeffery: I love it. Well supported. Well, and thank you again for some time today.

Moien: Awesome.

Jeffery: Okay. That was a great conversation with with Mo and some of the pieces that I kind of really stood out, I guess, is that, you know, have patience and when you’re building something, you know, really when you’re tying in board members or observer roles, advisor roles, culture coaches, make sure they offset and bring extra knowledge in. But just remember that no matter how you look at it, you have to learn from everybody. And if we use that 73, 70% of it’s gotten 30% of its information and tying those together. And then as you mentioned, you know, have that go to person where you can bounce that final ideas and close the loop and then make the decision and move forward. I think those are always going to be super valuable. And, you know, I can’t put enough emphasis on the fact that he talked about so much on that patient side. It makes a big difference. So you can really get a real clear view of what you’re trying to obtain. And then as he talked about the obtainable market, it really is important that when you’re doing the analysis and like his background, he’s a Ph.D. They do a lot of research, so they really want to know what they’re getting into right from the get go. So they’re researching the markets, are researching the size of market, what’s obtainable, what’s not obtainable, how fast can we get this? Is this business scalable? And, you know, describe a lot of how a business can be scalable or how it can’t and he took the approach where you know even in his own business when he started off and he saw that there wasn’t a scalable side to his model, that they had to step. And I think that’s very brilliant because he ended up not wasting five years trying to fight a market realized right at the beginning that there wasn’t a market, or at least the market built up for at that time. So lots of great knowledge there, a lot of great sharing. And I want to thank everybody for joining us today. So if you’ve enjoyed this conversation, feel free to share with your friends. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and please follow us on Spotify, Google and or Apple. Feel free to share an audio or video clip around the show. We may include it in one of our future podcasts. You can find us on all social platforms, including LinkedIn as supporters Fund your support and comments are truly appreciated. Please visit us at SUPPOERTERSFUND.COM or startup events at OPENPEOPLENETWORK.COM. Thank you and have a fantastic day.