Real Ventures has announced two major hires to its investment team in an effort to “better support our portfolio companies and deepen our engagement with the startup ecosystem”, general partner John Stokes wrote said in a statement.
A few days ago, the Montreal-based firm announced that Facebook director of engineering Mike Shaver would be joining the firm as general partner and work out of the Toronto office. Over the past five years, Shaver led the development of Facebook Mobile. He also acted as a senior technology executive at Mozilla Corp and Zero Knowledge Systems Inc.
“Mike has known the founding partners of Real Ventures since its formative years. He has a phenomenal track record building product and engineering teams and scaling organizations,” Janet Bannister said in a blog post. “Mike has also built developer ecosystems and has a long-standing passion for mentoring early-stage entrepreneurs. So, when he recently decided to move back to Canada from Silicon Valley, it was only natural we would discuss the opportunity to join the Real Ventures team.”
The company also announced today that it was hiring Isaac Souweine has joined Real Ventures as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EiR) in Montreal.
Souweine spent six years in Montreal working Yahoo! and Pollenizer before arriving in Montreal in 2013. He acted as director of product management at Frank & Oak until April 2015, before taking on a position at as VP of product at Flatbook from June 2015 to July 2016. He is also at mentor at FounderFuel and the Founder Institute.
“The EIR role at Real is a transitional position, but we expect our EIR’s to have real impact, as measured against the service level we strive to provide to entrepreneurs and the startup ecosystem,” said Stokes. “Isaac is passionate about building great companies, supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs and making Canada a world-class startup ecosystem.”
