Savior Joseph | On board participation, de-risking investments and deal flow creation.
Meet Savior Joseph — President and Member of the Board of Directors for Breathing Green Solutions (BGS) Inc., one of Canada’s top premium cannabis licensed producers. Savior is a marketing and corporate leader and an early-stage startup investor. He is a born and raised Newfoundlander (🇨🇦) and currently lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
In our latest virtual ‘Ask-Me-Anything’ session, Savior shares his insights into increasing diversity at board-level, breaking into startup investing and his advice for new BIPOC startup investors.
Here are some of out top takeaways from our conversation with Savior:
Get underrepresented groups on boards
- At a board-level you impact diversity in a much bigger way than a peer to peer discussion.
- If a policy is agreed to at board-level, there’s no saying no to that. Accountability is ensured — a policy gets evaluated quarterly/monthly and decisions get made based on that performance.
- That is why it’s so critical to bring leaders from underrepresented communities onto the board.
- It’s morally the right thing to do, and it’s proven that companies make more money when they have diversity at the decision making table.
Advice for BIPOC leaders
- If you’re not ready to write a cheque but have significant experience in your industry, advising and board participation is another way to participate in and influence the process of innovation.
- Sometimes as hard as it may be to put yourself out there when no one looks like you, you have to persevere.
How to create deal flow
- Growing your network is key.
- Expertise in your field can connect you to all kinds of startups around the world.
- You can invest anywhere in the world based on your expertise and what you bring to the table. Your unique perspective included.
How to grow your network:
- Participate in your local startup ecosystem. Ask for intros.
- Get active on Linkedin: a powerful tool for growing your network that transcends borders.
- Create a LinkedIn elevator pitch for invites. You’ll get more people accepting your invites, and you can start to build your network that way.
- Seek advice from your network when you need to.
Footnotes:
- If it’s important to you, you can communicate to your network that you are looking to invest in a founder(s) from specific communities or backgrounds. Harlem Capital is a great example of a fund with a focus on diverse founders — info here.
Focus your preliminary research into companies
- Where the company is along their journey — pre-seed, seed, series A, B C?
- If you can get in early with a company that you really believe in, you’re going to have an advantage because you are investing at a lower valuation.
- Where are they trying to go? What is the goal of the founder?
- Industry research and evaluation is important here. This can be time consuming if you are looking at new or complex industries.
- Usually, to get a quicker return you need to look at high growth companies which are more volatile and higher risk.
De-risk your investment by investing with others
- For most early stage companies there is no profitability, just the promise of what the future will bring. This makes it inherently risky.
- You can de-risk your investment by investing with others you trust.
- This is important because you may lose money, or at the very least your money is not coming out for a while. It could be up to 10 years+ until IPO or acquisition.
- Investing with others also gives you leverage and gets you access to great deals.
Want these insights in your inbox? Our mailing list is a good place to start. We won’t spam your inbox; our monthly newsletter is designed to provide low-touch, high-impact content for new and aspiring investors on the rise.
Get in the loop: https://www.myfuturecapital.com/newsletter-sign-up