This interview is with Rob Weber, Managing Partner at Great North Ventures.

Rob Weber, Managing Partner, Great North Ventures

Rob, can you tell us a bit about your journey to becoming an expert in venture capital, fundraising, and building successful teams? What sparked your interest in this field?

My career as a VC investor started after I had first scaled a successful startup. As a teenager in the late '90s, my twin brother and I began experimenting with web-publishing businesses. We eventually settled on a business we thought could scale, which was building a free consumer app business which originally was named Freeze.com in the spring of 2000.

We reached $30M in annual revenue and $5M in EBITDA by 2005. We had our first exit event in 2005 and started to make angel investments using our personal capital. The success of our angel investing led us to launch Great North Ventures in 2018 to bring more scale to our investing efforts.

From bootstrapping your own startup to working with numerous others, you've seen the entrepreneurial journey firsthand. Could you share a pivotal moment in your career that solidified your approach to venture capital and team building?

One of the first angel investments we made was in a startup called FieldNation. FieldNation launched a marketplace of contract IT professionals to work IT jobs. Most of our conversations with the founder, Mynul Khan, were centered around not so much strategic questions, but more so organizational challenges in how to build and grow the team. I've found that team building can end up being a very important factor in startup success. Many founders struggle with the transition to a professional manager to support their business as it scales.

You mentioned the importance of hiring people who are visibly enthusiastic about the business. How do you identify this trait in potential candidates during the interview process? What are some key indicators you look for?

You can usually tell when someone is really excited about your business in an interview. They lean forward in their chairs, and their facial expressions are very animated. You can also tell if they share insights that show they've thought deeply about your business.

You've emphasized the significance of aligning owners and employees through stock options and profit-sharing plans. In your experience, what's the most effective way to structure and communicate these plans to maximize employee buy-in and motivation?

For many employees, they don't really understand the potential value of stock options. If this is the case, it is worth taking the time to explain to them how stock options can work. Also, be clear about the long-term goals for the business.

Transparency and accountability are crucial for building trust within a team. What strategies have you found most successful for creating a culture of openness and shared responsibility, especially as a company grows and evolves?

Holding a monthly meeting where you go over financial results with your entire team for the prior month can be very useful. Also, you can create a wide range of dashboards highlighting, in real time (or near real time), business performance measures so your team knows how they are doing compared to your plans or goals. By sharing information about performance across your company, you empower your employees to make better decisions.

You advised founders to build relationships with VCs before actively seeking funding. What are some effective ways to connect with VCs and nurture these relationships organically without coming across as solely transaction-focused?

Creating an investor newsletter and emailing updates monthly or quarterly can be a great tool to build relationships. You can also make it a point to check-in with a prospective investor a couple of times during the year leading up to the round you would like them to participate in.

You mentioned that many VCs have already invested their committed capital. How can startups effectively identify and target VCs who are still actively deploying capital in the current market?

One way to know if a VC is actively deploying is to look at the calendar date for the last round of funding they participated in. If it was more than a year ago, you can be fairly confident they aren't actively deploying capital now.

You highlighted the importance of resourcefulness in founding teams. What are some specific examples of resourcefulness that have impressed you in the past, and how have these qualities translated into the company's success?

Some examples of resourcefulness - Hiring slowly. Most very efficient teams tend to keep a very high bar for the talent they hire, which makes hiring take longer than most other startups.