Five Takeaways for Social Entrepreneurs at Elevate Festival 2024
The SVZ team was on the ground for the perennial Toronto startup gathering's sixth annual event
By: Jake Hamilton
October 10th, 2024
Last week, Elevate Festival (external link) returned to Toronto for another 3 days of insight, networking, and dialogue around innovation at Toronto’s Meridian Hall and St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. Our full team attended this year’s festival, and we’ve collected some of our major takeaways here!
VCs are looking for a marriage, not a date
A number of the speakers at Elevate this year pointed to a future that diverts from the “move fast and break things” ethos that has dominated startup culture for at least the last two decades. In the Day 3 Panel Deep Tech Dollars: How VCs Identify and Invest in Cutting-Edge Innovations, panellists from the venture capital sphere noted a prioritisation of longer-term, high potential plays. “The average relationship between an entrepreneur and a VC is 11 years; that’s longer than a typical marriage”, shared one panellist, who added that their fund actively turned away deals that could balloon in a few years in favour of slower, longer-term deals that have a higher ceiling down the road.
Femtech offers much potential for entrepreneurs
Rachel Bartholomew, founder of smart pelvic health rehab system Hyivy Health (external link) , offered a standout talk on Day 3. Rachel discussed the unfortunate truth that a large number of women’s health problems have not yet been addressed by technology, due to the historically male-dominated nature of medicine and deep tech. She touched on how this presents a strong opportunity for women founders, an opening consulting firm McKinsey has referred to as (external link) a “trillion dollar opportunity to help.”
Is AI the new Crypto?
If our team had a dollar for every time we heard the term Artificial Intelligence at Elevate 2024, we’d probably be able to start a social impact fund of our own. AI was far and away the hottest buzzword of the conference, with AI focused sessions ranging from the social capabilities of LLMs to the future of robotic decision making. Whether or not Gen-AI is a bubble remains a debate, with pro-AI speakers doing their best to assure watching VCs that it will continue to see its current exponential growth. On our end, we’d like to see more of a focus on what Hugo LaRochelle of Google Deepmind (external link) brought to the table in his Purpose-Driven AI Innovation Keynote: an emphasis on both responsibility and AI’s impact capabilities.
@VCs: Pick up the cold call
In a particularly insightful panel, Funding Fundamentals: Insider Tips from Investors, Elevate assembled a number of partners from various funds to discuss what it takes to find capital for a growing venture. When the conversation turned to social impact, Althea Wishloff, a General Partner at groundbreaking Indigenous capital firm Raven Capital (external link) , noted that while a majority of funds now speak at length about their desire to empower impact ventures, the conditions required to do so are being disregarded.
Althea pointed to the fact that “warm inbound”, ie. ventures seeking capital that have an established connection at the fund, still account for a wide majority of funded ventures in the startup ecosystem. As impact ventures are more likely to be started by underrepresented founders lacking a plentiful network, Althea noted, historical VC ignorance to “cold inbound” has prevented growth for impact ventures.
This point resounded strongly in the room: the other two panel members, representing more traditional capital sources, acknowledged that they had each seeded no ventures who’s relationship to the fund began as cold outreach.
You have to “choose to be insane”
Ali Asaria (external link) , Co-Founder of Tulip, Well.ca, and Transformer Lab (and most importantly to me, the developer of the Blackberry Brick Breaker game) left us with a strong, resonant takeaway in the panel A Business Leaders Guide to Canada’s Productivity Problem. “If you decide to start a business from scratch”, said Ali, “you’re basically making a decision to do something insane, but do it anyway. Choose to be insane”.
We loved hearing a speaker on a platform as big as the Elevate mainstage comment on the unique challenge and absurdity that is creating something new. Entrepreneurs, especially social entrepreneurs, are better off for understanding that in many ways they are at the bottom of an incredible mountain, but every step makes it more worth it.
Thank you to Elevate for having us, and for continuing to support the Toronto entrepreneurial community. We’ll see you next year!
