The Hard Part Just Moves
As I noted last week, I attended the NACO (National Angel Capital Organization) Summit and moderated a couple of panels. NACO advocates for and galvanizes early stage funding in Canada.
We focused on the hot topics du jour. The investor panel with Green Sky Ventures, InterGen Capital, and Imbue Capital focused on the changing shape of capital markets. What stood out for me was the signal-to-noise problem created by the sheer volume of new startups, angels overpricing rounds negatively affecting their future returns, and the decision point around stalling at $3-7M ARR (or just revenue if it’s not recurring) and whether it’s worth seeking an exit or not.
The operator panel with #paid and Solink - both mature, venture backed companies - covered the other hot topics: AI eats features, price the outcome not the token, trust matters, and cleverness is not a moat. It's also worth noting I did poke them a bit because at this point decade-old startups are… incumbents? Disruptees? We don't have a word for the company that was scrappy six years ago and is now the one being undercut by AI-native competitors on weekends. We should. I nominate “mature startups”.
The one moment that made me laugh was when the investor panel converged, to my surprise, on the idea that services revenue is fine now, actually, as it gets you in to deliver outcomes and builds a relationship pure SaaS businesses can’t replicate. So we have come full circle. Angels should be investing in services companies. You heard it here first, and also in 2003.
Looping back to “what happens after you accept that not every company is venture-tracked and decide to go the other way”, at Startupfest I sat down with Mishel Wong, founder of BoPaq, a Montréal company replacing single-use takeout containers with reusable ones. Good business, real traction, doesn’t fit a VC bucket given reverse logistics, physical infrastructure, and behaviour change. Exactly the kind of company the ecosystem keeps quietly calling a failure for not unicorning. And she was super open and brutally honest - worth a listen since entrepreneurs don’t often share such raw details, especially mid-decision-making.
Mishel went the strategic acquisition route. The first deal fell apart at the altar. She described it like getting left at the wedding by someone who suddenly realized they didn’t actually want kids, even though kids had been the plan the whole time. The acquirer hadn’t fully reckoned with what taking on reverse logistics actually meant, and walked once reality set in. She moved into due diligence with a second partner, going in with a sharper rule: surface the ugliest operational realities first, on purpose, before anyone gets emotionally committed. They've since closed the deal.
That’s the part worth sitting with. The alternative paths get pitched as the calmer option. They’re not. The hard part just moves. It moves from “can I raise the next round” to “does the operational reality of my business survive contact with a partner’s spreadsheet.” Most founders aren’t trained for that conversation. Most acquirers aren’t either.