Making Things Out Of Nothing

If you love figure skating, you would know that Patrick Chan is the most decorated male figure skater in Canadian history. He once explained why having too many (in his words, four) quadruple jumps in a long program would diminish the quality of figure skating. Setting up a quadruple jump requires so much set up. He said, “So what’s happening, and what you’re going to end up seeing is just people moseying down the ice and setting up for a quad. So four times, that’s already two-and-a-half minutes of the long program taken up.” This also means that it leaves much less time to show off intricate footwork in other routines. 

Have you ever feel this way with your work? We spent so much time on just getting ready to do the work than actually doing the work!

Let me give you a few examples. To arrange a 30-minute meeting, it may take a few email cycles over the course of a few days to find the time that works for everyone and book a room that’s available. To prepare a board meeting, you have to look up the previous meeting minutes, gather the latest stats from a few different people to put together a board deck. To solicit a business meeting with someone in another city, in addition to booking the flights a lot of prep work is required to look up the information about the company and the person you are about to meet.

For some fortune people, they may have administrative assistants to help with these tasks. In many cases, we have to DIY. Though these are all important tasks, they are delegatable and menial tasks, which could be and should be done by a machine rather than a human.

I can totally imagine in the future every employee can have their own automated assistant so that they can focus on tasks that only humans can do.

So, when I met with Roy Pereira, CEO and co-founder of Zoom.ai recently, I totally get his mission. In his own words:

Zoom.ai mission is to give everyone in the company their own automated assistant so that they can focus on their higher-value job duties.

At the moment, Zoom.ai can handle tasks such as meeting scheduling, meeting preparedness, introductions to people you want to meet, travel logistics, and more through a simple chat interface.

But this is just the beginning. Through machine learning, Zoom.ai can become smarter and smarter over time and can take on even more. The number of tasks that can be automated is infinite. Most importantly, as Zoom.ai becomes the fabric of the company, it can provide bird’s-eye view and insights about the company that it couldn’t possibly gather before.

Today, we are very privileged to become an investor in Canadian Innovation Awards New Startup of the Year winner Zoom.ai as part of its $3.1 million seed extension funding round led by Evolution Equity Partners with backing from Betaworks, BDC, Good News Ventures and North Spring Capital. Look forward to supporting the Zoom.ai team on this journey.

Before moving to the City of Toronto from the suburb, I have a dear friend who had helped me with numerous home maintenance jobs in the last decades. He remodelled my kitchen, furnished my basement and pretty much did all the odd jobs whenever I needed a handyman. Let me put it this way, my old house had his fingerprints all over.

But since our move to Toronto a few years ago, he could no longer help me. He works mostly in the suburbs. Getting into the city to help me with small jobs is no longer cost effective for him. Since then it has always been a painful experience when it comes to home maintenance, especially when my house is more than 80 years old! Honestly, I can go on and on about all the tiny and yet very annoying maintenance issues I had to deal with in the last few years, and I can certainly tell you a few funny and yet frustrating stories when I was facing some disastrous home maintenance crisis.

So when I had the opportunity to meet with Ryan Shupak, CEO and co-founder of Jiffy, I can certainly see the need of Jiffy in large cities such as Toronto. Unlike in the suburbs and small towns when people tend to know who to call for home maintenance, in the cities finding a home maintenance professional and scheduling an appointment could be quite daunting. At the same time, home maintenance professionals are spending a lot of money on advertising and virtual assistants to make sure their sales funnel is large enough. And yet, they still have to deal with many back-office issues such as scheduling, billings or simply calling back the potential sale prospects.

Jiffy is not only a marketplace to connect home maintenance professionals with people who need their help, but it also is a productivity platform for them. Jiffy marries the network effect of a marketplace and the efficiency of their productivity tools to create a very unique opportunity for home maintenance professionals to transform the way they conduct business while giving the power to consumers to connect with them.

Today, I am so glad to announce that we have joined Ryan in his startup journey as an investor in Jiffy, along with Golden Venture Partners and Hedgewood. Look forward to transforming the home maintenance experience with the Jiffy team!

When it comes to shopping, I am very sure that I am a “pro”. I always do my shopping during the sale seasons. I always look for discount codes. Not only do I look for saving opportunities, but I also look for rewards. Therefore, I usually have credit cards that collect points, and I participate in many loyalty programs - from frequent-flyer miles to the ramen reward card offered by my favourite ramen joint. I am a proven use case of a consumer who spends money diligently.

But when it comes to redeeming the rewards, the experience could be rather frustrating. I usually have to accumulate tens of thousands of points before I can redeem a decent coffee maker through my credit cards. When it comes to redeeming travel rewards, that is even worse. Blackout period or peak season requires extra points, which essentially makes the effort of collecting points not worth it.

We have known Derrick Fung, CEO and founder of Drop, for many years. So when he was about to start Drop a couple of years ago, I was fascinated by its value proposition. He envisioned Drop to be the new reward and loyalty program that any millennial will ever need. It brings value to the millennials through their day-to-day spending. In their words, Drop “is designed to fit into any lifestyle — anyone can earn rewards, even if they don’t use a credit card.”

Drop allows consumers to link their debit and/or credit cards to the platform and through their day-to-day purchase activities, they will earn many relevant rewards offered by the merchants and marketers on the Drop network.  

It is a very bold value proposition and a huge undertaking for a startup, and yet Drop is on its way to reinventing the loyalty industry.

In the last couple of years, Derrick has turned this great idea into a great company. Today, more than 1 million members earn rewards at their favourite stores every day. Drop has created a 3-sided network of these three parties through their daily natural engagement on the platform. It is certainly a rising financial technology platform that is transforming the relationship amongst merchants, marketers, and consumers.

Today, we are very privileged to become an investor in Drop, along with NEA, Sierra Ventures, Portag3 Ventures, and other investors as part of its US$21 million dollar round. Look forward to supporting Derrick and his team on this journey.

Did you know that other than being an angel investor, I have another full-time job? Yup, I am the Chief Operations Officer of the Lau’s residence. I am in charge of the inventory of all household supplies. I am also in charge of the weekly grocery purchase and any emergency purchase during the week. Other than making sure all supplies are purchased and delivered to our house using the Just-in-time Scheduling Methodology (sorry for this jargon, after all, I am an industrial engineer). Of course, I also have to make sure all purchases are considered as “High Quality, Low Price”.

I am sure all household-COOs would agree with me that the job has not been an easy one. Because of one mistake in the purchase order could result in a young kid crying “no more cookies? Wwaaahhhh …”

Imagine what it is like for the folks in the foodservice industry? What if the chef needs cilantro for his Vietnamese pho, but the order of cilantro turns out to be parsley? Or when coffee shops run out of lactose-free milk and can only offer Almond milk or Soy milk as alternatives?

Therefore, when Saif Altimimi, CEO and co-founder of ChefHero, was raising a round of fundings, I was very interested to learn more about the business.

In a nutshell, ChefHero is a platform that streamlines the procurement process in the foodservice industry. So far, there are more than 300 companies that have trusted their procurement process with ChefHero and the number is growing rapidly. By curating and aggregating both the supply and demand side in the foodservice procurement process, ChefHero is leveraging the collective power of both sides of the equation. Along with its very intuitive and well designed mobile app, ChefHero is well positioned to reinvent the procurement process to make it far more efficient. Chefs can easily shop and purchase all their supplies at the best possible price with the quality they would like on any device at any time.

First of all, huge congrats to the SkipTheDishes team! Food delivery giant JUST EAT just acquired the rocket ship SkipTheDishes! It’s hard to believe that only 18 months ago Two Small Fish Ventures invested in SkipTheDishes. Although it is bittersweet to see SkipTheDishes exits our portfolio so quickly, no doubt this acquisition is a big win for everyone involves.

1. Big win for people living in mid-sized cities and suburbs.

SkipTheDishes squarely focuses on - and only focuses on - mid-sized cities. It is very smart strategy as half the population in North America resides outside of metropolitans and yet most of the food delivery companies ignore these markets. Why? Almost all the other food delivery companies are based in big cities and that’s the market they understand. On the other hand, SkipTheDishes is based in Winnipeg, whose population is only 730,000. It is counter-intuitive but that’s exactly why SkipTheDishes succeeded - it truly understands the market that it serves better than anyone else. It gives SkipTheDishes the unfair advantage. With this acquisition, the now-on-steroid SkipTheDishes can expand into other mid-sized cities more rapidly. More people can now benefit from the time saving and convenience of having food being delivered to them at affordable prices. This is life changing for millions of people.

2. Big win for SkipTheDishes and JUST EAT

With hundreds of employees already serving many markets in the US and Canada, SkipTheDishes is well on its way to build a world class independent company. The only thing that is stopping SkipTheDishes from growing even faster is its own capacity. By partnering with food delivery giant JUST EAT, SkipTheDishes can fulfill its vision much sooner than it possibly can as an independent company. Equally importantly, JUST EAT can now leverage SkipTheDishes’ secret sauce and expand into markets where it couldn’t before. Clearly a win-win.

3. Big win for the Winnipeg and Canadian startup ecosystem

Last but not least, the acquisition is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of the next chapter of an amazing story. Already one of biggest fish in a small but growing pond, SkipTheDishes will continue to play the leader role in Winnipeg’s startup scene. We always believe that anyone can build a tech company anywhere these days. With this acquisition, more capital, knowledge and talents will be recycled. The bar has been raised. The virtuous cycle has begun.

Once again huge congrats to the SkipTheDishes team. Thanks Josh, Andrew and their colleagues for letting us sit on the front row seats. It was fun to watch them ride this rocket ship. Look forward to seeing many more rocket ships from team Canada!