Today Thalmic Labs announced it’s amazing MYO device is now available for pre-order. Techcrunch highlights their Y-Combinator backing, which is only part of the story. A community is supporting this company from San Francisco to Waterloo to Toronto — like so many companies in Canada. That community has grown a lot over the last few years. I am really excited to continue to have a part in its growth. Over the last 6 months I have had a lot of fun in developing a part that had a key role to play with MYO, connecting them to world class talent in Canada that invested both time and money to accelerate their growth.
Enter the Creative Destruction Lab:
The Creative Destruction Lab at Rotman is a venture lab that leverages: the business school’s leading faculty and industry network; inventions and talent from the world-class, technology-oriented faculties at the University of Toronto such as Computer Science, Engineering, and the University Health Network; and, its location in the heart of Toronto – North America’s third largest financial centre and one of the world’s most culturally diverse cities, to achieve its mission.
What do we do for Thalmic (and 9 other ventures)?
“Thalmic quickly leveraged the Creative Destruction Lab and raised the majority of their seed capital from the Lab’s G7 (coaching and investor group) including some of Canada’s leading entrepreneurs like Daniel Debow, Senior Vice President of SalesForce.com, founder of Rypple and Rotman JD/MBA graduate, Tomi Poutanen, founder of Optimized Search Algorithms and Rotman MBA graduate, and Lee Lau, Director and Co-Founder of Alignvest Capital Management and founder of ATI, and their network,” says Rotman Prof. Ajay Agrawal, Peter Munk Professor of Entrepreneurship and Academic Director of the Creative Destruction Lab.
How we do this is by starting off with 18 ventures that were a mix of everything from software to hardware, many in life sciences, consumer, and B2B. From there the G7 (a board of amazing Canadian Entrepreneurs) set milestones for them and have them meet with our G7 every 6-7 weeks like any funded startup would to its Board of Directors. Each meeting at least one company must be cut. What we experienced so far is that four were cut at the first meet, three at the second, and then two at the third meeting. Then we added one. You will hear about them in the future I am sure.
Thalmic is cool (and early) example of what the lab is about, there will be others coming out over the next while. Over the last few months we have developed our program, tweaking here and there, while on a crazy steep learning curve. This is the start of something awesome and yes, we put the founders first. Another company is looking at funding options now and the message to them from us is that they decide what is best for them. If they don’t take the funding we will support them. No one should feel pressured to do anything but focus and create awesome companies.