Mark Mitchell, Alberta chapter president at Valhalla Private Capital, principal and director at Red Thread Ventures and managing partner at Weave VC, has claimed that “Spidey-senses” are one of the most important traits for investors within a saturated startup ecosystem.
Discussing “how to invest in early stage companies in Western Canada” with
Tyler Chisholm, host and founder of
Collisions YYC on episode 168 of the
Current & Critical
podcast, Mark began: “When I first started [investing] I was hesitant in being super candid, but I was also learning a lot of different mechanics of how to look for signals or pattern matching.
“A lot of investing at an early stage involves recognizing some of those signals and developing the Spidey-sense of ‘okay, I need to dig deeper into this one’”, he continued, “because there's just so many deals.”
With this in mind, Mark claimed that the best approach to addressing companies who fail to meet this pattern recognition - which has been hailed by Valhalla CEO and chairman Randy Stewart Thompson as the company’s
“secret tool” - is to give them “actionable” feedback.
“If I'm actually listening to a pitch and I have the opportunity to comment, I will always try my best to give super candid, actionable feedback instead of saying ‘oh, your deal sucks.’”
Coincidentally, this isn’t the first time a
Spiderman
reference has made its way onto the Valhalla Private Capital blog.
The plot of
Spiderman
has previously been mentioned in ‘Harry Potter and the Hero’s Journey narrative in pitching to investors’, as well as ‘Ask An Expert: Enter The Metaverse’, which makes reference to 2018 film
Enter The Spider-Verse.
On a previous episode of the Current & Critical podcast,
Randy Stewart Thompson – chairman and CEO of Valhalla Private Capital, managing director of
Old Kent Road Financial and co-owner of Peterborough United Football Club – outlined how not to become Silicon Valley.
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