About Us

Empowering Visionaries

At Good News Ventures, we back passionate and true grit founders as they develop their ideas into actual businesses. We admire those who embrace risk and uncertainty and are not afraid to break with convention.

We are an industry agnostic, pre-seed/seed stage ICT venture capital fund based in Toronto, Canada. Our team focuses on startups based in North America or serving the North American market with interesting business models including SaaS, enterprise/SMB, B2B/B2B2C, and crypto. We invest in companies in all software categories including AI/ML, IoT, infrastructure, blockchain and quantum computing.

We focus on 3 key areas: Why You, Why Now and Why This.

Questions We Ask

Why You?

The ‘Why You’ question focuses on the experience and capabilities of the founders. Your experience, vision, passion, and expertise determines how far you can take this venture. Steve Jobs once said, “We are here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise why are we here.” We at GNV look for founders who have the courage and genius to really make a difference. 

Here are a few things we highlight:

  • Strong vision: Are you thinking differently than all your competitors? 

  • Ability to Execute: Experience and ideas can only take you so far. On the other side, do you have the determination to execute the genius idea that was formed in your head? Can you make thoughts come to reality? Do you have the hustle to grow the company quickly?

  • Always Learning: Think about the following: fail fast, learn from mistakes, pivot to something new if the old doesn’t work. Every stage of the startup journey requires a new set of skills. The One Most Adaptable to Change is the One that Survives - Charles Darwin.

  • Founder Market Fit: Do you think you have the expertise in what you are doing?

Why Now?

Timing matters, on multiple levels, you have to be in the right market, at the right time, with the right team. The market is always fluid and changing. Countless startups fail not because they don’t have ambitious founders or great ideas, but because they were too early or too late.  At Good News Ventures we like to ask every entrepreneur why they think that it’s the right time to launch what they do. Especially if they are not the first mover in a market.

What do we look for exactly? 

  • Market Size: Is your TAM big enough for your business to scale to a unicorn? 

  • Market Nature: Are you looking at a new market that just emerged? Is there a rapid expansion in the current market? Does this market allow many products to succeed?

  • Technological Innovation: Is there a new technology that enables your business to be possible? For example, broadband helped Netflix, Smartphones (maps, payments) helped Uber. 

Why This?

The entrepreneurial space is all about innovative problem solving. After identifying a problem, many companies propose different solutions, some better than others. For instance, Taxis have been around for a century as a major public transit before Uber entered the market. However, Uber introduced a better ride sharing solution to the public that eventually took over its competitors. At GNV, we look for the next Uber - a solution to a problem that’s better, easier, and cheaper than all other existing solutions. 

A few questions to consider: 

  • How is your solution better than all your competitors? 

  • What’s your competitive advantage?