How to Build a Venture Market... in Quebec

Part 2 - History of Quebec’s VC Ecosystem: 2003-2008

Apologies for the slowdown in posts; I’ve had a broken wrist - which ended up requiring some surgery - one of the issues of being on the wrong side of forty.

Here's a quick recap of why I’m spending so much time on this: This is the second (of what looks like three parts) of a critical moment in the history of the Quebec Tech/Venture ecosystem. A few reasons I think this is pertinent: Quebec’s Tech ecosystem today was created during this period, and it is relatively forgotten—most of today’s decision-makers are unaware of the details. You can trace almost a direct line from this time and work to what eventually would be the VCAP (Venture Capital Action Plan) in 2012/13. If anyone plans to discuss our industry's future and the wider ecosystem, this history is meant to set a broad idea of what happened, when and why - with some interpretation. It’s also just plain interesting.

So, as discussed last time (in Part 1), Quebec burned through billions in venture capital with little to show for it. The market was almost performative with lots of investment, but a few companies were with venture money from outside the province. Meanwhile, with billions of less venture capital from the government, Ontario outperformed and dominated the market in Canada. This all lead to a reckoning for Quebec in the post-dot-com crash:

By 2003, there was no escaping that reality.:

Over the period from 1993 to 2002, the Quebec government injected $ 4.6 billion in risk capital to finance businesses. Almost 80 percent of that amount was injected between 1998 and 2002 at the height of the PQ's interventionist policies. "The heavy losses they [government-owned venture capital corporations] have recorded have placed additional strain on Quebec public finances.

Why the sudden recognition that this might be a bad idea? New ideas are usually from new people…  there has been a change of government. The above quote pokes at the previous (PQ) government’s administration. 

Any new government will find that the previous administration was subpar, and the incoming Liberals were no different. But like all elections, the Provincial election of 2003 was about many things, but two things concern this story. One of the main complaints by the Liberals during the elections was that PQ had been “too interventionist,” while the provincial government was also running too many fiscal deficits—both issues—and the subsequent Liberal win would impact the Venture Ecosystem. 

The Charest Liberals entered office, and one of the first things (within a month) they did was remove the leaders of Quebec’s central investment funds, whose work was the main subject of my last post. The new premier Charest:

fired the top executives of two significant government investment funds, saying he was determined to make government intervention "the exception to the rule, not the rule."

He argued that Quebec should join the Canadian mainstream and abandon the policy of economic nationalism that has characterized provincial governments since the 1960s.

"We are going to do here what has been done everywhere else in Canada. We are coming very late . . . to this exercise," Mr. Charest said after a cabinet meeting.

Previously, I pointed out that everyone in Quebec seems to have amnesia about how much venture capital was available locally in the pre-2004 period... In particular, I used this quote:

“Twenty years ago, there needed to be more venture capital in Quebec, recalls Mr. Leroux.  "There was no structured ecosystem. Apart from angel investors, companies that needed capital to innovate had no one to turn to.”

That quote came from Investissement Quebec (IQ)’s website. But, with some license, I didn’t use the full quote (en anglais). Here it is:

 "There was no structured ecosystem. Apart from angel investors, companies that needed capital to innovate had no one to turn to. It was only in 2003, following the publication of the Brunet report, which aimed to examine the role of the Quebec government in venture capital, that things began to evolve."¹ 

Publishing a report sounds innocuous. People publish reports every day, so why was this one so important? And why is it being discussed decades later?

The Brunet report would signal a pivot point around Quebec's Tech ecosystem. There is a before and after, which is why the amnesia from the time before the report is so interesting. It is as if there was no ecosystem before, and if there was, it is tainted as being from “before”. ²

So,  if you were in the Quebec VC ecosystem in that ‘before’ time, you know about and lived through a massive change; if you arrived sometime after, say, post-2012, you probably had no idea there was a report that brought about important changes; you see the ecosystem it built as having grown somewhat organically. As we will see, this was all part of the plan. 

So, in all fairness to Benoit (whose quote I used) over at IQ, he's 100% correct that the Brunet report was where things began to evolve in Quebec.  

But while everyone (including me) talks about a “Brunet” report as a famous (forgotten) pivot point- it was/is part of a series of reports, "The Brunet report"³ along with a follow-up report named "Government Interventions in Venture Capital: The Case of Quebec"(2004) written by the Council of Science and Technology⁴ recommending a series of reforms and changes to Quebec's involvement in Venture.⁵ Other meetings, letters, hearings, data releases, blog posts, and discussion papers also all took place in the same period…  

This work and the main ‘Brunet’ report are the most essential documents for the Quebec tech ecosystem in a generation. Twenty years later, they are still being discussed. (like in this post)

But as no one reads reports (then or now) - let me TLDR the most critical recommendations and points (for this discussion). Numerous other tangential recommendations were discussed, but these were the most important when looking from this vantage point of hindsight (IMHO).  As it is (unsurprisingly) all in French, I have translated the essential takeaways (and not in the same order as in the report)⁶:

1. "One approach would be to convince local informal investors (angels) to invest in the new enterprise. These angels exist in diverse regions and would be able to advise and mentor the new entrepreneur by sitting on the board of directors."⁷[5]

2. "The second recommendation concerns the establishment of a government fund of funds to support technological enterprises in the startup, expansion, and development phases. The government would allocate $200 million to this fund over three years."⁸

3. "The government should withdraw from certain phases of funding directly, but it is unlikely that private venture capital firms will agree to cover the seed and startup phases, which are very risky."⁹

4. "Encourage universities to emphasize commercializing public research spin-off companies." 

They also had a few warnings and many learnings, such as: 

“Heavy government involvement in the Quebec market has led many investors to pursue goals in addition to profitability, mainly job creation and economic development. This approach flies in the face of normal market rules. It makes private and foreign investors more hesitant and tight-fisted, which is natural because they prefer experienced fund managers whose goal is to achieve returns.”

And that: 

"the venture capital market in Quebec is dominated by government-supported players. These players often have objectives other than pure profitability, making them less selective than private venture capital firms. This dominance can crowd out private Canadian and Quebec venture capital firms because government-supported players offer more favourable financing conditions to entrepreneurs." 

You might think these quotes would be applicable today... You might think that, but I’ll refrain from commenting.

But let me list some of the key goals the report recommends in easier-to-understand words; they recommended:

1. Angel networks

1. A profit-driven fund of funds (i.e., a big LP) for venture capital funds to focus on in Quebec.

2. An arms-length early-stage fund system anchored by government money because they are very risky. 

3. Commercialize the Quebec University’s R&D Or, as we might say, en Anglais - tech transfer. 

This report was released in late November 2003 (it was discussed and accepted by a government committee in early 2004). So, let’s examine how they handled the issues they identified. 

Angels

The report called for more angels in the early stage. But how do you “find angels”? By giving them Tax credits (or subsidizing their investment). However, to coordinate this with the broader goals of the Brunet report, the government centralized the angel organizations. 

To encourage Angels, Reseau Capital (Quebec's more forceful answer to the CVCA) incubated and ultimately spun out Anges Quebec. They announced the organization in 2006 and held its first conference in 2007.  Its first Chairperson, Richard Bruno, gave this quote:

"The most difficult problem during the first 18 to 24 months of a business is to obtain not only the necessary financing but also the experience of business people who have gone through this successfully.” 

Which sounds as though he was responding to the Brunet Report. Because, in some ways, this was a direct response. From the report: 

One approach would be to convince local informal investors (angels) to invest in the new enterprise. These angels exist in diverse regions and would be able to advise and mentor the new entrepreneur by sitting on the board of directors.

And 

Angel investors are much rarer in Canada than in the United States to support the seed stage of technological products.

The Anges Quebec Website gives a nuanced, history of how they came to be - with no mention of the report or Reseau Capital - but a mention of those who took up the goal on this: 

"In 2007, Quebec businessman Richard Bruno returned to Montreal after several years in Chicago, where he discovered the concept of “angel groups,” networks of high-net-worth individuals who invest capital in promising startups with high growth potential. While the concept was very popular in the U.S., Richard Bruno was surprised to learn that it did not yet exist in Quebec. So he said to himself, why not here? He then took it upon himself to recruit three former business partners whom he knew were passionate about entrepreneurship and investment: Louis Saint-Jacques, Nathalie Beauregard and Martin Duchaîne. Together, they set to work creating an organization that, one year later, would become Anges Québec."

All of this is true, but the impetus for this initiative was a Brunet report goal several years earlier. As you can see from the screenshot from their original website, this was initiated within Reseau Capital and discussed there a year earlier.  

As an economic history of this period characterized it: <quote>

Anges Québec received millions in public subsidies between 2008 and 2015 but, in contrast with Ontario where more than a dozen regional angel groups operate in parallel, it was set up as a peak organization, centralizing and coordinating angel investment in Quebec. Government support thus had a clear economic purpose: unlike most VCs, angels typically invest in high-risk, seed or start-up stage ventures, adopting a “hands-on” approach and providing mentoring services to investees.

This centralized mission isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Anges Quebec has been uniquely successful in its 18-year existence. In 2012, the government augmented it with a sidecar fund that leverages the angels’ work to supply more capital directly to their early pre-seed and seed funding projects.

A Fund of Funds

The Brunet report called for creating a Fund of Funds centred around a $200M commitment from the government, which is a lot in aggregate but only a little if you consider it over the period it is meant to be deployed.  

Here is some quick math for the non-VC readers. Most VC funds have a lifespan of between 10 and 12 years, so if we take that 200M and spread it out evenly over the 10 years, that's 20M a year— so it’s not a substantial yearly commitment. If you think of that going into actual venture funds and you plan on doing, perhaps, ten or so, the average commitment would be $2M a year per fund. Not a lot. So you look to make that contribution and encourage others to join up. But before you do that, you must get that $200M out the front door. 

The government slowly rolled this out, as $200M is still a lot of money, hoping to ensure it would arrive with other commitments. It committed to the Fund of Funds plan four times without seemingly doing anything with it: after the report in 2004, in the 2005 budget discussion (without the number), again in 2007, and at a provincial financial committee in 2008. It was also discussed yearly at the Quebec Venture Conference but seemingly stalled. 

One primary reason was the small thing of 'politics'; without going into crazy details, the Brunet report was released under a Liberal government, who then lost their majority in 2007 and 2008 re-won their majority.¹⁰

Unsurprisingly, the Quebec tech and VC market leaders wondered where this money was. The government wanted co-investors and kept gaining or losing them over the period in question. Supposedly, CPP was verbally committed pre-2005, but ultimately, this died when the foreign investment rules changed in late 2005. (You can read all about that here.) 

So what can make a Quebec government move fast?

Watching the Ontario Government get something done.  In April 2008, the Ontario government decided to launch the Ontario Venture Capital Fund, a $200M fund, as they looked to solve the lack of pension support in their province. This reminded Quebec that they had also committed to a fund, but not to be outdone; they went much, much bigger - as they announced in the winter of 2009:

The Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec, the Quebec Federation of Labour's Solidarity Fund and the provincial government have joined forces to create Teralys Capital, which will invest in more than a dozen private funds that support companies in the life sciences, information technology, energy and clean technology sectors, starting next month. 

The Caisse and the Solidarity Fund are supplying $250 million apiece; Investissement Quebec is providing $200 million. Teralys will also be looking to attract private investors, like pension funds, to pump another $125 million into its "fund of funds," among North America's largest of its kind.

That $825M(!), using the math I explained earlier, it is about $82.5M a year in VC dollars or around $10M into each fund...  2009 was, of course, right in the middle of what kids today call "the Great Recession" or those of us who lived through it called, Hell. 

And Teralys was born in the middle of this mess, so raising that last $125M was almost impossible. 

But it was run by Jacques Bernier, who, until Teralys was launched, was a strategic advisor to the FTQ Solidarity Fund, which he joined in 2004 as Senior Vice President of ICT Venture Investments. So Bernier was a VC with an in-depth knowledge of the Quebec venture capital sector.  

His co-founder at Teralys was a guy named Eric Legault. Who was Eric? Éric was responsible for the venture capital Fund of funds program at the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. He was an experienced funds manager and, before CDPQ got out of direct investments, was also a direct tech investor in their direct team—i.e., another VC and LP. 

So, together, the two major non-government LPs of Teralys sent the two trusted stars of their VC units to run the largest fund-of-funds group in Canada, which was also using Quebec government money. They were a safe pair of hands for the vast commitments from Quebec. This signalled that Quebec would give their money to those they could trust, who had track records, and people they knew. 

Quick sidetrack: One afternoon, as I sat at a cafe with another Quebec VC friend, Jacques Bernier, crossed in rush hour traffic to join us for a 5 à 7. At the last second, he was nearly hit by a motorcycle cutting through traffic. My Quebec VC friend said, "That motorcyclist could have ended the Quebec Venture ecosystem in under a second.” 

How very true. 

Importing Excellence

I mentioned earlier that CDPQ stopped directly investing in tech in 2004—right after the Brunet report came out. The report called for them (and the other significant investment funds) to leave the sector, and they did so happily…

That doesn’t seem happy, but here is a quote from a newspaper interview a few years later, in late 2005¹¹:

The chief executive officer of the Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec said yesterday that a strategic shift he made two years ago has started to pay dividends. More venture capital is available for Quebec companies seeking to get off the ground.

In 2003, the Caisse announced it would get out of the business of directly providing venture capital(seed money or early financing) to start-ups.

Instead, the giant pension investment fund would act as a catalyst, placing its money with venturecapital specialists and co- investing with them. It dismantled its own venture-capital operation, raising more than a few eyebrows.

"I had three good reasons to do so," Rousseau said in an interview yesterday.

"Our costs were too high, we weren't making money in that business, and we were competing against Quebec firms already in the venture-capital market."

Two years later, he sees tangible results. He told the North American Venture Capital Summit in Quebec City yesterday that a number of U.S. and Canadian partners have come into Montreal to invest with the Caisse.

"We wanted to ensure that big international investors put Quebec back on their radar screens. They've done that."

The numbers from the time show that he was wrong. There was less venture capital available, and the article started with this telling setup:

Bright, young entrepreneurs in the Montreal area are usually starved for the same thing: investor capital.

But Henri-Paul Rousseau believes the outlook will be much brighter for them down the road.

Of course, this (2005) was two years after CDPQ left (2003) the local market. It is hard to square how the head of CDPQ see’s more venture capital in a market, and how the numbers and entreprenurs show different. But as this post (and the next) show it’s always a long road for founders (and sometimes funders) before people notice an issue..

It was becoming increasingly clear that Quebec needed specialized fund managers for different stages and sectors of the tech ecosystem. The large Labour-Sponsored, Government (IQ), or pension-led (CDPQ) funds were not staffed for those early start-up entrepreneurial risk profiles. As I showed in part one, they could not integrate the ecosystem into the broader North American Venture flows. 

 This was a crucial issue.  

There were very few fund managers locally in Quebec that could point to a consistent ability to promote their deals outside of the province. In 2004/05, few had experience building seed funds that raised a second fund and rarely a third fund.. we call this "franchising," meaning building more substantial funds in series (i.e. Fund 1 and Fund 2, etc... ) as funds grow and build, they create network effects for their portfolio companies (deal flow), and their track record helps them to get better at promoting the portfolio for follow-on rounds to other venture colleagues in different geographies (like California) outside the province. 

These are table stakes today, but if we’re talking about the problems in Quebec during this period, only three independent funds focused on seed, or Series A in Quebec were on a Fund 2 or 3.

So, how do you build an experienced local VC industry that is plugged into international funds relatively quickly? 

Quebec Inc. decided to graft experience into the local Quebec market. CDPQ and some others began investing in funds outside of Quebec and 'encouraging' them to set up shop in Montreal.  

Or, as CDPQ said in the 2007 Annual report (screenshot):

When they said 'active in Quebec,' they meant willing to open a 'local office.' From the same report:

In addition, the Caisse has encouraged two major U.S. funds to set up shop in Montréal: Proquest Investments and Vantage Point Venture Partners. 

But there were many others, like Celtic House, Rho Canada, Garage Ventures Canada, Emerald Technology Ventures, and Propulsion Ventures, which all opened offices in Montreal or created local funds but were predominantly NY, Valley, European, Toronto, or Ottawa-based.  

JLA Ventures, which became Blackberry Venture Partners (now Relay Ventures), also opened a Montreal office with this in mind, where my current business Partner, David Dufresne, worked as an associate during this period.  

This joint venture-type VC system was an expensive but solid way to build local expertise and network effects outside Montreal. 

As CDPQ (and others) shut down their direct investments during this period, the people with experience went elsewhere. The best example is Sophie Forest, who joined Brightspark and opened their Quebec office the job on her first day? Raising their Fund 2. She'd been a direct investor for years at CDPQ, and fortuitously, they were also an LP in the 1st fund. 

This skill transfer into the local ecosystem paid dividends but was a long-term game.

Rebuilding the Seed Industry

So what about homegrown Venture firms?

As pointed out in the last post, there was a robust and active seed market—led by many local GPs. But by 2006, only $51.4M went to all Seed investments in ALL of Canada, while the broader early stage sector of sub-$5M (which in this period would have been Series A) investments only accounted for just under $200M Canada-wide. The great Canadian Venture Nuclear Winter was underway.  

This is what happens after every boom and bust cycle in Venture Capital, particularly in Canada. Seed investments are usually disproportionately affected. The Brunet report was not unaware of this truth. It called for the government to support the seed stage, contrary to its advice to exit all the other stages. As it said: 

"The government should withdraw from certain phases of funding directly, but it is unlikely that private venture capital firms will agree to cover the seed and startup phases, which are very risky."

Remember that the government change occurred in March of 2003, and the first of the reports came out in late 2003. During this period, the Quebec Fundraising market for GP’s effectively froze. As everyone knew, the government was about to implement a massive change. After the Brunet report, all the quasi-government actors, who ordinarily invested in the Seed funds, exited the market – thinking the government would step in. Because that’s what the report had recommended they do, and the government “accepted the report”…  meanwhile, seed funds suddenly found no LPs.

Let’s pause here and admire the problem the report created... 

I urge you to think of this as if you’re a bureaucrat in the Quebec Provincial Government… because the report said the Government should invest in the riskiest part of the venture market. But if you’ve been paying attention:

• The new government just fired many of the LP leaders who invested in seed because they had lost a lot of money by, you know … investing in seed—as they’d been told to by the previous government. 

• Your new government leaders commissioned a report that you (i.e., the government and/or bureaucrats) should directly invest in the seed stage, as it is the riskiest sector. 

• You (Mr or Mme bureaucrat) did not take this job in government to take risks. That’s mostly what you try to avoid—because you don’t want to be blamed for losing any of that money.

• Now you have to invest in the Seed stage, but how can you invest in Seed - but not take too much risk… 

Based on the above, the government found itself in a predicament.

In the end, the solution to the problem was solved by (broadly speaking) a firm named FIER Partner. As they described themselves (on their now-defunct website):

FIER Partners is thus an active contributor to the mission of FIER (Fonds d'intervention économique régional or regional economic intervention funds) program, which is designed to increase the amount of venture capital available in every region of Quebec as quickly as possible. FIER Partners is one of three components of the Regional Economic Intervention Fund (FIER) set up by the Québec government. It is a limited partnership with initial capitalization of $180 million is provided by IQ FIER, a subsidiary of Investissement Québec, for an amount of $90 million, and by three tax-advantaged funds: the Fonds de solidarité FTQ ($50 million), Capital régional et coopératif Desjardins ($25 million) and Fondaction, the Fonds de développement de la CSN pour la coopération et l'emploi ($15 million).

The government didn’t disguise it; this was a mission for economic development (of the Seed ecosystem). But to reduce government exposure, the government goal was:

Quote:

FIER Partners is to invest one dollar for every two dollars invested by the private sector. 

If you think this was convoluted, I’d agree. You had a report saying the private sector wouldn’t invest in this stage, and then, as a government, you turned off funding in that stage for almost three years. (2003-2006)

When you return to market, you require that all funds raise private funds of two dollars for every one of the government dollars you invest. The chicken or egg problem then arrives; should the government commit to these funds first and be a catalyst or last?

We know the answer if you don’t want to look bad.

Last. 

How last? By investing in funds that had already been closed. Throughout 2006, they announced investments into local funds that had closed months and sometimes even years earlier. 

For example, remember Brightspark, which Sophie joined after she left CDPQ? Sophie began raising money for Brightspark Fund 2 in early 2004 and had its first close in January 2005. Then Brightspark got a cheque from FIER in mid-2006, nearly 18 months later… 

FIER started investing in 2006, nearly 3 years after the Liberal government paused its involvement in the seed industry. This means there was an almost two-and-a-half-year gap in local LP investing in seed funds after telling all the usual local LP partners that they should exit the market in 2003. (!) The Provincial Government thought they could get away with this as several venture firms funded previously were still investing out of funds that had been closed. But in reality, as the quarters and then years dragged on, it became increasingly challenging to syndicate a deal with local partners, and as future posts will show, the rest of Canada had no VC funding either. Quebec’s ecosystem started to wither, and numerous locally based GPs exited the market after failing to raise funds. Meanwhile, funds from out of the province were getting funding… it was a pretty big turnabout for the ecosystem.

But this led to a new problem for FIER. 

By the time they started investing, so many GPs had exited the market or failed to raise as they’d lost their traditional LPs that FIER found themselves with fewer funds to invest in. As a former CDPQ LP in Quebec who retired shared with me: 

The government kept thinking the problem in Quebec was, as you pointed out in that post, in the linkages and follow-on - in what we’d call the growth stage. However, they viewed Seed as risky and didn’t want to invest there. They hoped angels could handle it themselves. It created a massive gap in the seed market, with all these funds at A and B that couldn’t find the deals as no one was in the earlier stage. It became critical for the market in 2007 or 8…

With Quebec's leaders now very gun-shy about Seed, between 2001 and 2006, no new or first-time Seed funds were successfully closed and established for software investments in the province (that I can find). The seed funds that got funding from outside the province were corporate funds (ID capital) or local funds from U.S.-based partners (Garage Tech Ventures, Rho Canada, etc.). 

So what do you do when everyone knows there is a problem with the local Seed market and you don’t want to invest in a brand new Seed Fund?  You create your own…

And also helpfully tossed out the “$2 of private for every $1 of government money” rule. 

You can’t make this stuff up…

From BDC and FIER, there was a brand-new local seed fund: $100M for Quebec. 

“Wait,” you might say, “isn’t BDC a government fund?”

Well, don’t ask that question.

Today, my friends at BDC are still managing the Go Capital fund (18 years later). 

So, as the government delayed, numerous GPs gave up and closed down in Quebec.

The FIER solution to the lack of early-stage funds was to create a fund with BDC…  almost as if pretending the Brunet report never existed—they’d made a new government fund for Seed.

Outside of Software, FIER did back funds that got their start, thanks to their backing. CTI Life Sciences comes to mind, but it was a slim market in the post-dot-com car crash. 

Quebec lost a generation of its emerging venture managers as they waited for a “safe bet” to get them to return to the seed category. 

It took Quebec’s tech leadership until 2009 to correct this mess. In 2009, the Quebec Government announced in its budget a new $100M seed allocation; it re-upped that commitment in 2016. Quebec learned another lesson from this period: If they wanted a robust seed market, they needed to be an anchor and commit to it consistently. 

So, where was the next generation of Quebec’s seed managers being built? 

It is in an unlikely place, which we will explore in Part 3... 

1. FULL Quote: “Il y a 20 ans, il existait bien peu de chose en capital investissement au Québec, rappelle M. Leroux. «Il n’y avait pas d’écosystème structuré. À part les anges investisseurs, les entreprises qui avaient besoin de capitaux pour innover n’avaient personne vers qui se tourner. Ce n’est qu’en 2003, à la suite de la publication du rapport Brunet, qui visait à examiner le rôle de l’État québécois dans le capital de risque, que les choses ont commencé à évoluer.”

2. One interesting example of this in other history is around the colour Blue - as it never ‘existed’ in history: https://lethbridgenewsnow.com/2021/02/09/the-curious-case-of-the-missing-color-blue/

3. "Report of the Working Group on the Role of the Quebec State in Venture Capital."- 2003

4. Conseil de la science et de la technologie

5. Reseau Capital also held several working meetings, of which I can find only traces of their outcomes or discussion briefs online. A few participants shared what little they had. However, these were all discussed and reviewed with multiple consultations from early to mid-2003 into the summer of 2004. They were accepted almost entirely as a framework by the fall of 2004. 

6. I’m not covering the history of IQ, SGF, tax policies, regional economic funds or the broad deep dive of matching programs… it's just not pertinent and confuses the narrative.

7. “Une approche serait de convaincre des investisseurs informels (anges) locaux d'investir dans la nouvelle entreprise. Il en existe dans les régions ressources. Ces anges seraient en mesure de conseiller et de parrainer le nouvel entrepreneur en siégeant sur le CA”[brunet, 56]

8.  La deuxième recommandation a trait à la mise en place d'un Fonds de fonds gouvernemental qui permettrait de soutenir les entreprises technologiques dans les phases de démarrage, d'expansion et de développement. Le gouvernement doterait ce Fonds de 200 M$ sur trois ans." (brunet, page 62)

9. D'une part, tous les experts consultés confirment que les SCR privées ne voudront pas couvrir la phase d'amorçage. Même la situation en phase de démarrage n'est pas simple. Les sociétés Innovatech investissent un pourcentage élevé de leur financement dans le démarrage d'entreprises technologiques, un secteur encore à haut risque. Or, c'est précisément leur rôle d'assumer des risques élevés que les acteurs privés sont moins disposés à prendre et de servir de pépinières d'entreprises."} (brunet, page 45)

10. I have discussed this with numerous players in the ecosystem from this period, and this commitment should not be confused with the FIER initiative that I’ll be discussing separately. Both numbers seem to get people confused today—but not at the time. They were not the same commitment and were discussed independently in 2006 at a Reseau event.

11. More venture capital targets Quebec: [Final Edition] HADEKEL, PETER.  The Gazette; Montreal, Que.. 30 Nov 2005: B1