Readit NewsOne involved an argument with the prospective investor over the share price. In their view it had to be between 20 and 50 cents. They didn't care about the valuation, or typical investment terms, only the share price.
Another invited us to an IPO party for another company they invested in (TSX if I remember correctly). At this party we learned that the company that IPO'd had less than 100k revenue (and huge losses). They were out of business within 3 years.
I guess it is hard for old dogs to learn new tricks... They made their millions off pump and dumps in VSE days and just didn't stop playing those games even long after the exchange shut down.
There is an easier to find Vancouver-centric investor group that behaves as a you describe. Many of these investors didn’t come up as tech founders. I was advised not to waste time with them, so I don't know if there are some gems in the rough there or not.
Then there is a quieter group that got their capital from building serious tech businesses. This group spends more time connecting outside Vancouver – Bay Area mostly, but also Toronto and globally. These folks do write early-stage cheques and can be very helpful advisors, but they're not full-time angels who are spending time on deal flow. They're mostly focused on building their next thing, so it’s more difficult to earn their attention.
So yes there are questionable actors, but there are also very legit folks doing great work, and it’s possible to go to an event or dinner party that only really has one or the other. Hope that’s helpful to any other founders building in Vancouver!
What happened to Allen here sucks. I've messaged the team so we can dig into this specific case. More generally, we know that Slides needs to be bulletproof when presenting, and nothing less than that is acceptable.
As an FYI, we _do_ use Figma Slides internally for pretty much everything, from internal meetings to major events. As a PM I use it every week, and our internal feedback channel for Slides is super active with folks like me requesting improvements. Figma is also a pretty unique place, where it's more likely our senior leadership request quality improvements than chase for deadlines - we know how critical the user experience is. We don't always get it right, but when we don't we're committed to fixing it.
gpt-4o: speed 3/5
gpt-4.5-preview: speed 3/5
gpt-3.5-turbo: speed 2/5
1. You can't get output from the supervisor, other than the binary enforcement action of shutting you down (it can't leak its instructions)
2. The supervisor can judge the conversation on the merits of the most recent turns, since it doesn't need to produce a response that respects the full history (you can't lead the supervisor step by step into the wilderness)
3. LLMs, like humans, are generally better at judging good output than generating good output