BUS477

As I mentioned in class yesterday, I have been actively shaking the bushes to assemble a rockstar panel of professionals from the Vancouver angel and venture capital community to give you unbiased, real world feedback on your final pitches. The following people have offered to participate:

Dr. Ernie Love, former Dean of SFU Business, Chair, BC Ventures Society

Joe Timlin, VP Investments, Growthworks Capital Ltd.

Ben Yan, Angel Investor

Yaron Bazaz, President, Western Headquarters Capital

Note: Praveen Varshney, Varshney Capital and Danny Robinson, Managing Director, Bootup Labs Startup Accellerator were confirmed but did not attend.

Here are some more detailed bios:

Joe Timlin

Joe is a venture capitalist (VC), focused on early stage investments that leverage unique technologies as a key component of their long term differentiation strategy. He has done deals in the areas of enterprise software, fabless semiconductors, cleantech, networking/communications, social networks. He would NOT consider himself a technical expert in any of these application areas, so his focus is usually on team building, financing, and process maturation in a new investment.

Joe particularly enjoys being the first institutional money into a company so that he can play an active role in helping to build out the management team and the Board of Directors and pitching in to help with downstream financings. He syndicates a lot of initial rounds with Vancouver’s active angel community and benefit from their insights and operational expertise as we evaluate and invest in new companies. He spends a lot of time in the earliest stages of a company, when most fail, helping convert energy from potential to kinetic. This is the work he really enjoys: seeing something built where before there was nothing. (Geeks note: it appeals to the engineer in him!)

Joe is a Civil Engineer (1989 from Queen’s) and has an MBA (1998 from UBC). He spent 4 years with BDC’s Venture Capital group before joining GrowthWorks 7 years ago. In his old engineering life, he spent time building bridges and roads in Northern Ontario (waaaaay North) and did a stint in technical sales.

He has been a VC for 11 years, long enough to have seen the dotcom bubble bust and the current debt/liquidity crisis. This too shall pass, although not quickly. Joe has 2 kids: 4 and 7. The 7 year old, a girl, loves soccer, skiing and accessorizing, the 4 year old, a boy, loves doing things he has been told not to do and then lying about it.

Dr. Ernie Love

Dr. Ernie Love is the past Dean of the SFU School of Business, a former professor of management science and operations research and an internationally recognized scholar. Prior to entering academia, Ernie worked for several years as a chemical engineer for both Shell Oil and Union Carbide. Today, his academic research and consulting focus on statistical planning models for improving industrial productivity.

Ernie has a keen interest in innovation in the areas of high technology and entrepreneurialism and is a founding director of one of North America's largest technology business idea competitions, TELUS New Ventures BC. He is currently chairman of the board of the BC Ventures Society which operates the competition.

Outside of academia, Ernie has a keen interest in golf and thoroughly enjoys hosting SFU Business' annual golf tournament.

Yaron Bazaz

Yaron is a results-driven, technology-savvy entrepreneur & corporate financier with over 10 years of success within the international technology markets. Yaron has extensive experience in capital raising, corporate financing & due diligence Consultancy, business development, strategic planning, marketing and sales of technology solutions in North America, Europe and Israel. Prior to the founding of Western Headquarters, Mr. Bazaz served as business development, sales and marketing executive in several leading international Hi-Tech companies.

Yaron hold an MBA with honors from the Edinburgh Business School, Heriot Watt University and a Bachelor's degree with honors in Psychology from the Ben-Gurion University in Israel.

Ben Yan

Ben Yan has more than 35 years of extensive senior management experience with Fortune 100 companies at different operating levels at Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Abbot Laboratory. He has extensive experience in health care, forestry, financial services, distribution, equity financing, venture capital industry sectors.

Being an entrepreneur at heart, Ben co-founded GT Group Telecom that became a CLEC with fiber optic networks and corporate facilities serving the small and medium sized companies in Canada. Group Telecom exceeded CAN$225 million in annual revenues trading on the TSX 300 index and NASD exchanges at market cap valuation at $1.2 Billion in 2000. Group Telecom had since been acquired by Bell Canada. Ben Yan was the former President & CEO of Sino Fibre Communication Inc (a NASD listed company).Ben sat on several company boards, Cliniforte solution Inc (Electronic Medical Record), Intrahealth Canada Ltd, Brella Wireless Inc. Ben is alumni of UBC and SFU. He earned his MBA from SFU and B.Sc from UBC.