CanCon Podcast Ep. 111: Why are there so few women in Canadian VC?

Ask the question, ‘why are there so few women in Canadian venture capital?’ and you’ll be inundated with a variety of answers. Ask the natural follow-up, ‘what’s the plan to get more women in Canadian VC?’ and the best you’re likely to get publicly is a polite referral to the first question.

But it is an important question to ask, especially when there is data supporting the idea that diversity begets diversity in Canadian tech. For the pragmatists (cynics?) out there, note that $400 million in upcoming VCCI funding is (vaguely) tied to addressing gender balance in Canadian VC.

Huda Idrees, founder of Toronto startup Dot Health, was the latest willing to publicly push for an answer (or perhaps an earnest response to the problem) on top of iNovia’s recent news of two new male GPs (the firm has no women partner equivalent). iNovia’s hiring practices aren’t the story here, but they sure were helpful in kicking off a firestorm of other useful topics of debate, such as: why VC is so different from the rest of tech; why VC might not actually be that different; the value of public button-pushing vs. Canadian disdain of public criticism; the difference between adding context and agenda pushing in news reporting; how to have a safe conversation about important things in 2018. Huda joins us this week to hash it all out.

In more frivolous matters, what happens when a company uses words that mean one thing to garner attention for something completely different? That’s what happened when Bunz announced a new cryptocurrency that is in no way a cryptocurrency. But hey, BTZ seems like a pretty cool points-rewards program, and as Erin says, all press is good press, right? ISO truth. Willing to trade podcast (#BNIB).

Join us as the CanCon crew – Erin Bury, Managing Director of Eighty-Eight; Rob Kenedi, General Manager of TWG New York; and Douglas Soltys, BetaKit Editor-in-Chief – launches its own cryptocurrency (and by cryptocurrency, we mean podcast episode).