Long before I became a founder or venture capitalist, I spent a significant part of my academic life in the University of Toronto Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, thinking about signal processing: how do you recover meaningful information from an incredibly weak and noisy signal?
I thought I had left that world behind.
Decades later, through a combination of curiosity, experience, and more than a little serendipity, it brought me back.
One of the biggest bottlenecks in quantum computing isn’t just a physics problem. It’s also one of the hardest signal processing problems ever tackled. That is one of the reasons we at Two Small Fish Ventures are excited to lead Qubic’s seed round.
This investment also feels personal because it brings me back to the engineering problem that launched my career.
Thank you, Professor Elvino Sousa, for inspiring a fascination that, a few decades later, unexpectedly came full circle.
Where founders sleep at night has little to do with how great their companies can become.
Last week, Eva and I were in Berlin, spending time with two founders from the Two Small Fish Ventures portfolio and hosting a School of Fish dinner with researchers, engineers, and founders. From AI to neuromorphic computing, the trip reinforced why Berlin is one of the world’s great deep tech hubs—and why we continue to invest globally.
I am encouraged by Canada’s new AI for All strategy. It expands the conversation beyond research and talent to commercialization, IP retention, sovereignty, and supporting Canadian champions. To me, it reflects a broader and welcome shift from simply creating AI innovation to capturing more of the value created by that innovation.
Canada has scored a lot of goals in AI. We helped pioneer the field, trained world-class researchers, and built respected institutions. With AI for All, we should be able to score more.
But the question I keep coming back to is: what does winning look like?
Capital, talent, infrastructure, and commercialization are all important. They help us score goals. But scoring goals is not the objective. The objective is to win the championship.
My latest post explores why ownership may be the missing piece in Canada’s AI strategy — and why AI for All and ownership are more connected than they appear.
Software is not dead. It is about to be everywhere.
Earlier this year, GitHub COO Kyle Daigle said GitHub is now seeing 275M commits per week, versus about 1B commits in all of 2025. Annualized, that implies a pace of roughly 14.3B commits this year, or about 14x last year’s total.
It is not a perfect measure, but at GitHub’s scale, commits are a strong proxy for how much software is being created, updated, and shipped into the world.
The point is not whether the true number is 10x, 14x, or 20x.
The point is this: software creation is not slowing down. It is exploding.
When something foundational gets cheaper, demand does not go down. It usually goes up. We saw it with electricity. We saw it with computing. We saw it with connectivity.
Canada arguably invented modern AI. We trained the talent, helped build the science, and produced many of the key researchers, yet most of the important AI companies ended up being built and owned elsewhere. That was Game 1, and we lost it.
The good news is that Game 2 is now underway in quantum, robotics, physical AI, space, advanced manufacturing, and smart energy. Canada also has world-class scientists in all of these areas, but more importantly, these are not businesses that can be built anywhere with a few smart people and a laptop. They depend on specialized infrastructure, research labs, and ecosystems that are much harder to move.
That is why this moment is so interesting. For Canadian family offices, this is not just about national pride or supporting innovation close to home. It is a generational opportunity to back and own part of the next wave of world-class Canadian companies, right in our own backyard, before the rest of the market fully wakes up to what is forming.
I wrote about this in my latest op-ed piece for Canadian Family Offices. You can read it here.
As a founder, I attended many founder summits over the years. Now, as an investor, I am hosting our own.
Based on my own experience and from speaking with many founders I know, if I had to pick one thing that allows founders to get the most out of a founder summit, it is peer-to-peer learning, not celebrity speakers.
That is how we designed our Two Small Fish Founder Summit.
We wanted to create an interactive environment where founders could learn from other founders, not through generic advice, but through lived experience: what worked, what did not, what surprised them, and what they are still trying to figure out.
As a thesis-driven VC focused on deep tech, half the battle is won naturally.
Many of our founders come from similar technical backgrounds. They are building in adjacent areas, exploring similar frontiers, and facing similar company-building questions. More importantly, they have learnings that other founders in the room will find directly relevant because they are on a similar journey.
This is also where our own experiences make a difference. Our whole investment team comes from backgrounds similar to many of our founders. We have been engineers, operators, and company builders. We know how hard it is to turn technology into a product, a product into a company, and a company into something enduring.
We are not outsiders looking in. We have been there. We understand the company-building journey because we have lived it ourselves.
But relevant context is only part of it. For founders to share openly, they also need trust. We wanted to create a safe space for founders to ask hard questions, share what they have learned, and help each other out.
To make that possible, our team also shared some of our own painful war scars from building companies and working with founders over the years. Many of these are lessons we have never shared externally. But in a confidential setting, they became part of the conversation.
That is what makes the conversation different. It is focused enough to be relevant, and trusted enough to be honest.
For our Founder Summit, we also focused on unique topics that are particularly relevant and useful for founders coming from deep tech backgrounds. Building world-class companies requires more than great technology. It requires founders to keep building new muscles in many other areas.
We believe we delivered something uniquely Two Small Fish Ventures: focused, relevant, interactive, high-trust, and founder supportive for deep tech founders.
Thank you to all the founders who joined us, especially those who travelled from out of town.
Thank you to Matt Clancey, Program Director for COVE’s NATO DIANA Accelerator Program, for joining us as our guest speaker and leading such an informative session. As a veteran and also an engineer, Matt brought a perspective that was especially relevant to many of the founders in the room. COVE’s work is especially important at this moment.
