Building a $100M Chocolate Empire (Part 1)

This 5 year old company is crushing incumbents in an ancient $140B industry

Reasons why I launched a Youtube Channel

1. Sharing more ideas with the world on the world’s biggest media platform.

2. There is a lot of amazing Youtube content on startups, VC, ideas, hustle culture and entrepreneurship, My First Million, All in, Gary Tan and Justin Khan.. I still think the entrepreneurship podcast space on youtube is just beginning and isn’t overly saturated yet because hitting the upload button is scary as hell and techies, including myself are mostly introverts. Why not right…?

3. I wanted to use video in a way that allowed me to expressively create visual investment memos. While I am not actually investing in most of the companies I showcase on my channel, I write, edit and produce the videos similarly to how I would write an internal investment memo and do due diligence on a company. This not only helps me hone my skills as a VC trying to pick winners, but it also gives me the freedom to use my visual mind to think through problem and opportunities in multi-dimensional ways and connect to an audience that also might be more visual thinkers like me.

4. I’m 8 years into my VC career and am starting to get a little comfortable. I’ve screened thousands of companies, led or co led 14 different investments and sit on many boards. Don’t get me wrong, there are always challenges and things to learn in my VC job and juggling a bunch of different investments in different categories can be an awesome challenge, but I can say for the most part I have a decent lay of the land and wanted to put my hands on something that forced me to get out of my comfort zone and learn new skills. I chat with entrepreneurs every day as part of my profession so bringing it into video format was a very natural evolution for me.

5. I want the rest of the world to get a better showcase of the companies we are creating right here in Canada. Silicon Valley and NYC have their own media engine for startups, Canada has a ways to go still. Betakit and the Logic do great jobs and I wanted to compliment them with a video format. While I will not be exclusively focused on Canada I will try my best to cover as many of the stories here that are exciting. I live here, raise my kids here and want to be a valuable member of the community here so it’s a small contribution on my part.

6. My kids’ generation are growing up on Mr Beast, Dude Perfect and Mark Rober. Just think where these kids will hit search first to learn about entrepreneurship. I think the current formats out there are awesome, but might not be designed in a way to help the next generation learn in a way that is aligned with how they have been consuming content.

How I plan on measuring success

1. 100 videos/shorts published in the next 18 months.

2. CTR of over 10%

3. Video Retention of over 30%

Like and Subscribe

I always had disdain for those 2 words, so if you don’t want to 100% fine by me. That said if you like my mission then doing those 2 things will help accelerate it. I’m not overly focused on subscribers or views yet. I think those come if I create great content worth watching. In the early days I’m really focusing on learning what people want and how I can authentically deliver it to them in ways that compliment my reasons for doing this mentioned above.