Jeffery:
Welcome everybody! We’re at — it is I think Wednesday four o’clock — and we’re interviewing and talking with Rob Douglas and I’m very excited to sit down with Rob. I’ve been working with Rob for a couple years, I’ve learned a lot from rob just in all of the meetings that we’ve been part of through GTAN and their analysis of startups so it’s been a really great experience but Rob, maybe i can turn it over to you. Love to get an introduction on yourself, a little bit about your background kind of where you’ve come from to where you are today. And some of the things that you are working on now. And then one thing about you that nobody would know. Because I always like to kind of get that one little nugget that no one will know about you and then i can use that next time I’m trying to hit you up for money. And I’ll be like —

Rob:
Yeah for sure.

Jeffery:
Both of us can hold our breath for four minutes underwater that’s amazing so that’s kind of the direction I like to go. So yeah fire take it away.

Rob:
Well thank you very much. It’s an honor to be here today, Jeffrey. And yes we’ve had a relationship over the last couple of years, even longer than that I think at GTAN. In terms of who i am, I’m probably described best as a recovering accountant. I’m a chartered accountant by trade but have never practiced as such if you want a tax return done i don’t think you want to ask me to do it. It will not be done well probably. My interest in in accounting though really came from my desire to be in business. And in business for myself. And I wanted a business education. And i i couldn’t see a better way to get one than to actually work at an accounting firm as an auditor, I worked for what was Pricewaterhouse, now PricewaterhouseCoopers. So that’s where i got my ticket and honed my interest in working with small businesses or businesses in general. After that, I had an opportunity to move into a totally different career which was becoming a stock broker and I did that for the firm that is now The Royal Securities or Royal Bank. And that was an interesting exercise, I thought I was going to be able to provide people with expert advice on how they should be investing in and filling their portfolios. What I discovered was that when you work for a firm that has an inventory of stocks and bonds that you’re there to sell their stuff not to provide advice necessarily on what’s a good portfolio. And and I don’t mean to demean what is done by representatives these days. But anyway i moved on after that to work as a comptroller in a public company and out of that I had an opportunity to actually buy a small division of that company that was for sale. That got me started and that was in the distribution business actually. It was in the fabric distribution business. Small business that employed only 15 people. But it was a business that sold products across Canada and that really got my feet wet in dealing with all aspects of running a small business. Whether it’s HR matters, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s production, all of those things became part of my my mantra and I’ve carried on since that time buying and selling small businesses and providing that kind of holistic input to running them and managing them. The last company which I owned and managed on my own I sold in 1996. That was a company that was involved in human resource outsourcing and it was fortunate that enough capital came out of that exit that I was able to become an angel investor. That led me into working with a partner by the name of Carl Furtado. He and i started a business together doing capital formation for early-stage companies, and that was in 1998. We did that for about a decade and we were approached in 2008 by the national angel capital organization, I think it was called national angel organization actually at that time, but we were approached by them because of our experience in capital formation with early stage companies to put together a not-for-profit angel network in the Waterloo region. So Rob puts up his hand and says sure okay, I will be seconded from our company which is called and still is Rose View Capital to run GTAN, Golden Triangle Angel Network. So i have spent now 11 years at GTAN building it from no investments, no members, no office, no telephone, no anything to a fairly successful venture that has through its members over 90 invested companies, our members have spent about 40 million dollars of their own capital to invest in those early stage companies, and we’ve been able to attract because of that additional capital to our leveraged extra capital so the impact has been 85 million dollars or so into early stage companies many of them located in the Waterloo region. So Jeffrey as you know i have recently stepped back from my leadership role at GTAN and going back to my roots at Rose View Capital. Where we’re forging some new paths not only will we do or would we be able to do capital formation but we’re focusing more now on working with foreign nationals, business people from foreign jurisdictions who want to come to Canada and have no idea how to do it and I’m surprised how many people coming from India or the orient or Iran, Brazil you name it, say i’m an experienced business person but I have no idea how to do business in Canada. so we’re building a business or at least a part of Roseview capital that will appeal to companies and people that want to come here and build, acquire, scale or expand companies in Canada. So that’s kind of a snapshot of who I am and where we go from here.

Jeffery:
Amazing. Well congratulations to all of that because there was a lot of firsts in there and i think that’s super commendable. So quite amazing and just hearing that back in 98 you were one of the earlier investors in companies, i think that’s very exciting. It’s not in a bunch of the interviews we’ve done in the past we’ve had different people from Silicon Valley that were the first people in silicon valley to make investments and that blows my mind away. But that’s silicon valley so it’s obviously the portal to the investment community but being able to be one of the starters in the Canadian side of things that’s huge because so —

Rob:
Thank you for that.

Jeffery:
It’s pretty interesting. No that’s awesome and you’ve recorded lots of great numbers and the thing that you mentioned that really kind of piques my interest and the reason why i was excited to chat more about with you in this dialogue was that you kind of focused on the thing to me which is the biggest part of anything that has to go on in a company, and that’s finance. And there’s this big fear of finance when it comes to early stage companies. Qe don’t tend to put as much emphasis on the financial side of it because it’s early stage, yet it’s pretty important. So we do look at obviously everything in business and i think now that you’re when you’re working on the foreign nationals and bringing them in, i think there’s also a play there that still has to deal with the finance side. And i’d like to kind of explore more on your experiences on that finance side because obviously you’ve generated 90 mil or 40 million into 90 companies. You guys have really done a great significant effort into growing small business. Not only through Rosco Capital but through the angel networks and so on. What do you think is the big fear when it comes to early stage companies looking at finance? Is it just lack of understanding of the books and the knowledge of the business? Inexperience? Or what do you think is something that the startups can look at changing to be stronger and more suited when they’re starting their companies?

Rob:
Well I think the the operative word there is inexperience. Most early stage companies that you and I would see at a GTAN selection meeting tend to be technology-based companies, an I.T play of some sort, and these are technologically strong entrepreneurs but accounting and governance and all those kinds of things are not what they are used to. So i come at things from sort of a different perspective that yes in the early days of Rose View capital, my role in dealing with early stage companies was to assess what was their financial presentation usually within their business plan and to provide some input and advice on how it might best be presented in order to appeal to investors. But above and beyond that, it had to make some sense. And still i see entrepreneurs who think that they’re going to just turn the world upside down and money’s gonna roll in the door the moment that they introduce a product to the marketplace. And as you would know it takes much longer to introduce a product, it costs much more money to introduce a product. So typically the financial plan that you see in an early stage business company is not strong and needs to be tempered and it usually suggests to an entrepreneur that all of a sudden money they thought they were going to have, they’re not going to have in any hurry and that some financing is going to be required to actually help them launch and accelerate the process which is where we get into dealing with angel investors. So there’s a big reality check i think that most entrepreneurs need to go through and an understanding that most early stage companies ar