Savior Joseph | On board participation, de-risking investments and deal flow creation.

3 min readAug 5, 2021

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.

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