Rob Kenedi once again has a coffee with Adam Epstein, founder of Tab, a restaurant payment and reservation system, recently acquired by Velocity. Rob and Adam chat about the difficulty raising capital in the Valley, managing interest from potential acquirers, and figuring out how to sell your startup and all the complications therein.

Rob Kenedi sits down again with with Michael Katchen, founder of Wealthsimple, an automated investment manager for consumers. Rob and Michael discuss building trust with your customer in a trust-based business, scaling a company when you get a rapid $30 million Series A, and how to combat sizeable competitors in the financial industry.

In the revisited series of #smallrooms, Rob reconnects with the startup to see what's happened since the last episode (typically a year later). For the full narrative, check out the previous episode with Michael pre-Series A and their explosive growth from February of 2015.

DISCLOSURE: Wealthsimple is currently a client of TWG, where Rob serves as Entrepreneur in Residence.

Rob Kenedi speaks with Michael Van, founder of Four Walls, a startup that enables consumers and small businesses to buy fully furnished rooms with one click on the web. Michael and Rob discuss Four Walls' experience in an pre-accelerator, Techstars Startup Next, starting down a consumer path to get to market but why going after small and medium sized businesses made more sense, and their decision not to raise capital at all.

Rob Kenedi talks to Adam Rabie, a big data fintech platform that uses machine learning to sort and filter the news to help investors make better decisions. Adam and Rob chat about finding the need for his startup while working at a corporate job, finding his first investor, figuring out when to actually ship your first product, and his take on freshly looking for funding in what may be a down market.

Rob Kenedi has a coffee with Roger Chabra of Rho Canada Ventures, an entrepreneur turned investor who discusses his views on investing in Canada versus the Valley, what value a VC adds to the startup and how to pick one and candid insight regarding how his team considers working with seed and early stage technology companies.

Rob Kenedi speaks with Vitaly Pecherskiy of StackAdapt, a branded content native advertising platform. Fresh of their Series A, Vitaly explains how the team bootstrapped their way to finding a product, getting a $1 million seed followed shortly thereafter by a $1 million Series A and balancing HR as product-market fit is being discovered.

OpenChannel by #smallrooms

In this episode, the first #smallrooms Investor Edition, Rob Kenedi sits down with Nicole Verkindt, founder of the OMX and angel investor via CBC's Next Gen Den, a tech-focused version of Dragon's Den. Nicole reflects on being an early stage angel investor after being a founder, how she navigates hundreds of pitches on TV and what happens behind the scenes, and how that has affected her investment thesis.

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Trulioo by #smallrooms