Jeffery:
Welcome everybody. Today we are — I should check the number of course — but I believe this is somewhere in the range of say 30 to 50 people we’ve interviewed. I don’t remember the number but i think what’s exciting about this is that today we’re with Sydney Wong and she’s going to be fantastic. She has a lot of great insight and that she’s a new investor which makes things even more exciting because she’ll have a whole different perspective of what’s going on in this early stage world so without further ado I’d like to introduce Sydney. And Sydney maybe you can give us a little bit of a background on yourself where you’ve come from the things that you’ve done and one thing about you that nobody else will know.

Sydney:
Great. So my name is Sydney and well I’ll tell you how it got kind of got started in this industry and then I’ll go into something that no one else will know. So a few years ago when I was working in marketing and tech, i was invited by a friend of mine down in San Francisco who said if I was very very serious about learning more about startup and tech then I needed to move down to the valley. So within that conversation I bought a plane ticket within 10 days and I moved down there and i moved in with him. I felt like that was an invitation. And then I was there for several months trying to find my own place trying to get anybody to accept my Canadian credit report which I didn’t know was that different from an American one. I felt like it should have been way easier than it was. So I went through a lot of ups and downs but most importantly I met a lot of really great startup founders. And that’s when I felt that great passion to want to help in this industry. I felt that this was a very unique time, and very unique industry where this is the kind of thing where people look for innovation on a daily basis and yet the industry in itself has not been innovated for many generations and this was the right time to do it. So I came back to Canada because the IRS was very polite to explain to me that my visa was up. And so i moved back to Canada and then I started VenturX, and it’s a platform that helps startups with their metrics and their analytics in order to get the best chances for funding. And then this year in 2020 as Jeff mentioned, we have launched our new angel arm Venture Capital and we are starting to close our first investment. Ao it’s been a very exciting journey from start to finish and yeah so now we have both the platform for startups as well as the investment arm for angel investments. We write about 25 paychecks as early stage investors and it’s really exciting to to get to do that. One thing that I think that a lot of people didn’t know about me is that I lived in a lot of very interesting places. One of the places is it’s been 19 years since I last traveled back to Hong Kong in China which I went to last year. And it was so incredibly different. A few things that really stood out for me from my trip there was that I was living with family so that was great, i do speak the language which is helpful, and i was there to actually do a conference. Well it is in English but it would have been very impressive if they asked me to do it in Chinese for Hong Kong fintech week. And yeah so a few things that really stood out to me was how incredible it was to see Hong Kong kind of come onto the scene the way that they did in the last hundred years when you know British was occupying it and everything and the relationship with Hong Kong and China I must say don’t want to get too much into the political scene but as an outsider it was definitely very interesting to see. One thing that I didn’t tell a lot of people mostly because I’m probably afraid to was that I was doing a lot of business calls, people kept asking me how the protests were and if i was safe, and if I was okay. When I was in China and I was answering like everything’s fine, this was just small talk right.. Clients are being nice, investors are being nice, they’re just asking to make sure you’re okay. The wi-fi would drop and it would scare the living like hell out of me because the wi-fi would drop so i felt like I was immediately being monitored and that fear went on for several months while i was there. So that is something that I didn’t tell a lot of people mainly because I’m not sure if I’m being monitored now. I’m usually not a superstitious person.

Jeffery:
So was it the whole internet that was dropping like down on the city street or just your internet connection?

Sydney:
Mine. Just mine. Everyone else seemed to be fine. I couldn’t confirm that for sure though.

Jeffery:
Oh okay yeah I guess it could be anything, you never know. Well Hong Kong is a bit different from from China so that who knows who is blocking who. But there was talks i think that this was pretty common that they were dropping networks and causing as long as the information wasn’t getting out they wanted to prevent those types of things right…

Sydney:
So yeah so i think they were like picking up key words and and things like that.

Jeffery:
No exactly. Well i guess that’s exciting and I’ve had a few friends that have shared the same sort of issue in Hong Kong. Mostly they’re from there as well so they’re in in different stages of not so much in the startup world, so they weren’t sharing too much about that. But still fascinating I’m a huge kong fan. It’s in my was and still might be in my top three countries in the world to live and visit. I’m just a big fan of how organized and structured the country is.
For the amount of people that live there and i’ve probably been there a dozen times and it’s every year it just seems to keep growing bigger and better and faster so it’s a pretty fascinating country for sure.

Sydney:
Absolutely. Yeah every time we go visit it’s it’s a lot more different than when our auntie from Hong Kong comes to visit Canada and she’s like oh you guys are — yes things have been the same but I’m not lost. I’m like all right great —

Jeffery:
(Inaudible) We were on the production side but it’s different when like in other countries and well in the Hong Kong or in mostly in China where you control your your dollar and everything else. you control a lot of pieces you can make things move a lot faster so.

Sydney:
For sure yeah

Jeffery:
So you mentioned before that your background was in marketing, can you give a a better idea to the audience on kind of where that fits in and how this shapes your philosophy around what you’re investing in or how you’re approaching your investments?

Sydney:
Yeah absolutely. So it’s really funny that when i graduated from university, I graduated from my masters, the jobs that were available in marketing because I happened to graduate at a the last recession, so that wasn’t ideal either. It was it was funny because the jobs that were available in marketing were very highly in either oil or tech. And so that’s kind of why I went into tech in the first place because they were hiring like crazy, these industries were growing like crazy. And then now we are seeing it in a very similar way that you know the market is going up and down like crazy but there are certain industries that really are leading the way tech still being one of them right. And the way that we are marketing in tech these days are very aggressive and competitive and it’s a very different realm