2018 – present
Maple Leaf Angels
Friends told me for years that I should get into angel investing, so this was a long time coming. Reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book “Antifragile” gave me the kick I needed. He has a spectacular theory about managing financial risk called the Barbell Investment Strategy. Essentially, in your portfolio, you want to have lots of zero risk, no middle risk, and some super high risk – like a barbell with all the weight at the extremes. This is totally different from the usual approach of using market index funds (all middle risk). To get started with angel investing (the super high risk part), I joined Maple Leaf Angels. MLA is one of the prominent angel investment groups in Canada and it’s been a great education and hell of a ride. As of May 2020, I’ve invested in six startups and I serve on the Investment Review Committee for MLA.