Episode 24 – Matt Cohen (Ripple Ventures)

In this studio session we sit down with Matt Cohen, the Managing Partner of Ripple Ventures which is a Toronto based early stage venture fund focused on B2B software. Ripple takes a hands-on approach to enabling the success of the companies which they invest in and Matt explains not only why its important to him but also how Ripple has created a platform that helps their portfolio through providing space, access to health benefits, unique networking and educational experiences and more. Matt also introduces the Ripple Fellowship - a program they've developed to educate the next generation of venture capitalists and startup founders alike. [expand title="Podcast Transcript"] Qasim Virjee 0:04 I'm Qasim, the founder of start welling for this, the 24th episode of our podcast, we're in studio with Matt Cohen, one of the co founders of ripple ventures. So why ripple ventures? Yeah, so Matt Cohen 0:17 I, I started ripple ventures really just on my own. After I made my first angel investment in 2012, and a company called turnstile, which I helped start with a couple friends, which was really just my first experience in the early stage tech startup scene. And what I saw through that experience was that a small amount of capital large for me, but a small amount of capital in the grand scheme of things, had such profound impacts on people's lives, the people that ended up working there, the people that ended up moving to San Francisco after the company got acquired by Yelp, and watching the ripples of that first investment spread throughout so many people's lives. And the impact it had was quite profound on me, and I just had this thing about the ripple effect, the ripple effect, always coming back in my mind. And so I decided that if I was ever going to start a fund, I wanted to have it called ripple. And I will say, Yeah, I did just acquire ripple ventures.com, the domain name and for some reason that feels really Qasim Virjee 1:15 who had that, who was was it a squatter? It fell by from an auction. Matt Cohen 1:19 Yeah, bought it through an auction actually didn't even know was for sale, one of our portfolio companies sent me a message like, hey, ripple, calm or ripple, ventures.com is available, you should buy it, oh my god, it's gonna cost me like hundreds of 1000s of dollars. And it was definitely not it was quite cheap. And we just put a bid in and we bought it. So now we own.com and.ca. And it feels like it's come full circle. Qasim Virjee 1:39 Fantastic. Wow, we're done the podcast that's over. So no, I like that idea of kind of thinking larger than just the capital injection being the focus and ROI, you know, as a fund operator, I think, well, I guess let's, let's jump into that. I won't preload this, I'll just say, you know, life as an operator of a fund, a fund that, yes, has ventures in it, you know, as a quote unquote, VC fund, but it's very personal, from what I understand. Sure. Tell us a little bit about the personality of your fund, and how it extends into the relationships that you've forged with the investi companies. Sure. Matt Cohen 2:14 So when I started the fund in early 2018, I had the idea that I didn't want to just invest in companies like an angel, I wanted to work alongside my company's because I thought that that was the best way for me to learn how to become a better investor and operator, but also give my companies the best chances of success. And so in order to execute on that, I actually partnered up with my partner now, who is Michael Garbe, who is also a former operator himself had run his own tech business for almost 20 years, he had about 100 employees, 50 million sales exited it to a US public company. So he had been through the operator experience as well. And I felt that at the early stage VC w