Jack Dorsey wasn’t our only visitor from Silicon Valley last week; Katherine Barr, a general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, was also here at the Communitech Hub.
Barr has spent most of the last decade as a venture capitalist, investing in consumer and business web and mobile products. This year Barr was named co-chair of the C100, which is a non-profit organization helping Canadian technology companies make connections in Silicon Valley. Barr is also involved with 500 Startups, Samasource and Startup2Startup.
I was able to find her in one of our boardrooms before she started to catch up on e-mail after a full day of engagements.
Q – How and why did you become a venture capitalist?
A – I worked on the operating side for quite a number of years, more than a decade, and I always thought that I was just going to run my own company at some point.
I took on a variety of different roles: marketing, product development, negotiations and deal-making, just so that I could get exposure to different areas of a business and how it all runs, ultimately to enable me to run my own company well.
An opportunity came up from a previous job as a negotiator, where I was on the road travelling all the time and I loved the work, but I just needed to get off the road.
I couldn’t travel that much any more; it was literally all the time.
A previous professor of mine from Stanford said, “Well, you should just go talk to the guys at Mohr Davidow.”
I was looking at a variety of different operating roles at the time and hadn’t really thought of much about venture capital, but it just ended up working out from an interest and a timing perspective.
Here I am seven years later.
Q – What’s it like being a woman in this industry?
A – I have always worked in industries with a lot of men and I very rarely think of about it as woman-and-man kind of thing.
I really try to view things as, if I’m an operator, be the best operator possible; if I’m an investor, be the best investor possible. I really don’t tend to look at it through the lens of being a woman investor. That’s really how I’ve tried to look at it and that’s just the most constructive, productive way to look at it.
Q – What brings you here today?
A – I have a number of different hats on today.
First of all, as a Canadian, I got to a point in my life where I wanted to start to give back.
I always used think that giving back meant that I had to do something completely and totally different than my day job; reading books for the Red Cross, or whatever that may be. I then realized that in fact probably the greatest value I could add is probably doing things that are aligned with my day-to-day job. I just generally want to be able to give back to the Canadian technology ecosystem.
The second is that I was elected earlier this year to be co-chair of C100, the Canadian technology ex-pat group in Silicon Valley. I come with that hat on because Communitech has been a great partner of C100.
Just want to be here on the ground and see what’s going on, finger on the pulse, be as helpful as I can to the entrepreneurs that I met today.
The third hat is as a general partner at Mohr Davidow. We’re a large technology venture firm in Silicon Valley, and it’s really important for us to be deeply connected into all the major technology hubs around North America. This is clearly one of them. I’m here as a potential future investor of some of the companies.
Q – What’s hot and what’s getting funded?
A – I think generally there is a lot of interest around enterprise SAAS companies. So, the reinvention of business processes, generally. Those types of companies that profile a company are tending to perform really well in the public markets. That’s certainly an area of interest to a lot of the venture investors in Silicon Valley these days.
There is a sort of trend in advertising technology generally, towards more automated bidding systems. On the consumer side, there is a lot of energy around the internet of things and connected devices and quantified self. Those areas generally are really interesting right now, so it will be interesting to see how that all plays out as well.
Q – What’s the perception of Waterloo from Silicon Valley?
A – From what I hear from people, I think there is generally greater visibility for not just Waterloo, but Canada overall; what the technology companies and the entrepreneurs have been able to accomplish; some of the exits lately with Radian6 and Eloqua for example; HootSuite with their big round of funding; there’s Shopify with what they are building.
I think there is just greater awareness overall of the Canadian technology entrepreneurs, and Waterloo clearly is a leader in the technologists and the entrepreneurs that come out of here.
I think compared to five years ago there’s just a greater awareness, and with C100 we’re certainly trying to raise that awareness.
