In 2023, York University’s Schulich School of Business launched a new certificate program for Canadian technology startup upskilling called the Schulich Venture Academy (SVA).
While the business school had been supporting startups for years through Schulich Startups, SVA co-creator Cherry Rose Tan said many of its portfolio companies were still struggling to access the mentorship and training they needed to scale their businesses.
“A lot of what these founders were asking for was, ‘Hey, can we learn from somebody who’s been there and done that?’” Tan told BetaKit in an interview.
“[SVA has] become really the upskilling tool that we’ve been missing in the ecosystem for a long time.”
After identifying a gap in the market, Tan and co-creator Chris Carder teamed up with Schulich Startups and the school’s continuing education arm to build SVA. Since then, SVA has served more than 200 tech founders and professionals through three sold-out cohorts of courses led by experienced Canadian operators whose experience spans startup and scaleup talent, operations, finance, and venture capital.
SVA graduates tell BetaKit they have appreciated the practicality of the courses, the opportunities to learn from experienced Canadian tech leaders, and the sense of community that Schulich has cultivated around the program.
At an event in downtown Toronto last week, SVA alumni, instructors, organizers, and partners gathered to celebrate the third cohort’s graduation. SVA leaders outlined the program’s progress to date and shared a preview of its plans. The goal is to launch three new courses by 2029, three sector-specific clusters (including artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and cleantech), and double down on community support.
Earlier this year, SVA secured more than $3 million CAD from the Government of Canada via FedDev Ontario to help make that happen. FedDev Ontario and SVA expect that nearly 500 businesses and 1,000 individuals will benefit from this expansion.
SVA offers six-week courses with live, virtual instruction that are based on the instructors’ journeys and insights. Students get credentials and complete capstone projects they can bring back to their organizations. Ontario participants can access these programs for $500 apiece thanks to FedDev Ontario, and SVA offers scholarships to residents outside of Ontario.
Tan said Schulich wants to lead when it comes to innovation and entrepreneurship, and noted that Schulich Startups, SVA, and Schulich’s tech MBA further this mission. She views SVA as a way to provide scaleup education to people in and beyond the Schulich community.
Blade Air co-founder and CEO Aedan Fida joined SVA’s first venture talent course because he recognized he needed to grow in order to expand his business. “I was going to be the biggest bottleneck for the organization if I didn’t level myself up,” he told BetaKit in an interview.
“Where I felt I really had a knowledge gap was people management,” Fida said. He noted that this led him to take SVA’s first venture talent course, which was taught by TouchBistro chief people officer and former OMERS Ventures head of talent Jenny do Forno. “Jenny’s class changed my life,” Fida said.
He said the course has had a “transformational impact” on how he manages employees, and intends to ensure other Blade Air leaders take other SVA courses.
Q2 vice-president of service delivery and former Sensibill COO Izabella Gabowicz, who teaches SVA’s venture operations course, said at the event she wishes something like SVA existed earlier in her tech career, given the difficulty of building a tech startup.
“Basically, you’re throwing parts of a plane off of a cliff and trying to assemble it before it lands and hits the ground, and there’s not really courseware for that—until [SVA],” Gabowicz said.
“[SVA has] become really the upskilling tool that we’ve been missing in the ecosystem for a long time,” YSpace director of entrepreneurship and innovation David Kwok argued to BetaKit in an interview. “You don’t really get trained in school on how to do this.”
SVA is currently recruiting for its fourth cohort, which kicks off in October and will include a new venture sales course led by Sellit9 co-founder and CEO Josh Guttman. Guttman also worked in sales leadership roles at Altrio, Lane, and Top Hat.
“I think it could have changed the trajectory of my career, and I’m excited to hopefully change the trajectory of other people’s careers, who are either aspiring sales leaders in venture or who are founders who don’t necessarily have the same pedigree, and help them to just move faster,” Guttman told BetaKit in an interview.
Tan said figuring out how to distill instructors’ years of experience into a digestible, practical course that students could take and come out “with wins” was a challenge that took SVA some time to figure out. But she now believes that it has a repeatable model and a good idea of what works and what does not that it can build upon.
She sees room for SVA to grow by layering on additional courses that cover more aspects of building and scaling a tech company, and said SVA has “a bigger vision” for how it wants to support alumni through events and asynchronous community-building.
“We’re really grateful for all the support … and we’re excited to see SVA scale in the next few years,” Tan said.
All images courtesy Schulich Venture Academy. Photos by Epic11media.