engineering

EE Has Always Been Cool

A few weeks ago, we hosted our Legends of Semiconductor dinner, bringing together some of the people who helped build Canada’s semiconductor industry and the next generation of founders and engineers.

One of the legends was Professor Emeritus Adel Sedra, former Dean of Engineering at the University of Waterloo. For many electrical engineering students, Sedra needs no introduction. Microelectronic Circuits, the textbook he co-authored with the late Kenneth Smith, has shaped generations of electrical engineers and, by some estimates, has been used by 75% of electrical engineering students around the world.

At the dinner, the conversation turned to the textbook and which edition each of us had used. Mine was the second edition.

There was only one problem: I had lost my copy.

I was privileged not only to learn from Sedra’s textbook, but also to be one of the students in his classroom when he was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Toronto. That second edition was the textbook I used as his student more than 30 years ago.

I suspect I lost it during one of our moves. I looked again after the dinner, but couldn’t find it. So I did the next best thing. I found a used copy of the second edition. Same edition, probably similar age, definitely not my copy. I bought it anyway.

This time, I wanted Professor Sedra to autograph it. So I brought the book to Waterloo, where Sedra was meeting with EE students at Williams Cafe. I crashed the party and hijacked their meeting for a few minutes to get my textbook signed.

While I was there, I started chatting with the students and sharing some of my experience as an electrical engineer. One student asked whether I thought EE was getting the spotlight again, after software had taken centre stage for the past couple of decades.

I told them EE is cool again!

Think about what is happening with AI. Everyone talks about the models. But underneath them are GPUs, memory, networking, semiconductors and an enormous amount of computing hardware. All of that hardware needs electricity. Lots of electricity. The entire AI stack, from the chips doing the computation to the power infrastructure keeping data centres running, is bringing electrical engineering back to centre stage.

Sedra immediately corrected me: “EE has always been cool!”

The whole table had a good laugh. And, of course, he was right.

The technologies may be different, but many of the fundamentals are the same. More importantly, so is the way of thinking.

I may never find my original textbook, but I now have the same second edition on my bookshelf again.

This time, signed by my professor!

The Underwater FishCam Livestream That Brought Our Family Together

Two weeks ago, I shared a short note about a fun side project I could only work on at the cottage.

I can now pull back the curtain: it is my underwater livestreaming FishCam. At first glance, it sounds simple: put an underwater camera in the lake and livestream it to YouTube.

Well, not quite.

I deliberately designed the system with a constraint. Instead of putting a powerful computer beside the camera, I chose a tiny, low-powered computer at the cottage to do the minimum, while my “data centre”—an old iMac at my Toronto home—does the heavy lifting.

Why?

For those of us who spend most of our time building in the cloud, abundant compute, memory, bandwidth, and reliable networking are easy to take for granted. Constraints are a forcing function. Running a live HD video stream on a resource-constrained edge device forced me to rethink almost every design decision.

Building at the edge presents a different set of technical challenges.
Who would have thought that streaming HD video could overwhelm the Raspberry Pi’s Wi-Fi subsystem and crash it? Those crashes then corrupted the microSD card, causing even more crashes.

Or that keeping a Raspberry Pi consuming roughly two watts—less power than many LED light bulbs—streaming smoothly would require tuning memory, processing power, and bandwidth?

Given those constraints, today is the first day the entire system has run for more than 24 hours without crashing. I’ll write a separate post about these technical challenges, all relevant to my professional world. As the world moves toward Physical AI, these constraints are important. We cannot assume abundant compute, high-speed networks, low latency, or unlimited power will always be available.

Imagine the vision system of an untethered robot operating at home, on a farm, underwater, or in space. The edge has very different constraints from the cloud.

Ironically, the biggest surprise was not technical. It was how much fun the project created for our family and friends.

The underwater camera has a built-in LED light that turns on after dark. It attracts mayfly nymphs and other small aquatic organisms, which in turn attract fish. Nighttime quickly became the most exciting time to watch.
One evening, some of us were at the cottage with friends, some were in Toronto, and some were travelling overseas. We all watched the same YouTube livestream together.

My mom, who turns 80 next year, and I held our phones up to the TV, waiting for a big fish to swim by.

When one appeared, we both burst with joy and shouted, “Wow, here is a big one!”

It felt like a modern version of fishing.

This is version 1.0. Fish detection, species identification, and other features are coming.


Sometimes the best way to understand where technology is going is to build something completely unnecessary.

More to come. Here is the live YouTube stream from the cottage.

P.S. Don’t forget to come back after dark. We have a party down there every night!

Legends of Semiconductors 2026

It is that time of the year again: our annual Legends of Semiconductors dinner, hosted as always at our home. This year, we were treated to an omakase prepared by private chef Cho San.

This year, 17 engineers gathered around the table. We all have one thing in common. We either studied semiconductors as electrical engineers, built our careers in the semiconductor industry, or, as was true for most of us, both.

In one way or another, silicon brought us together.

For one evening every year, we celebrate not just an industry, but a lineage.

We have one tradition that never changes. Instead of introducing ourselves by our companies or job titles, everyone starts by sharing which edition of Sedra & Smith they studied from.

Benny Lau and Lee Lau were zero edition. They learned directly from Professor Adel Sedra’s class notes before those notes became a world-class textbook used by generations of electrical engineers. Martin Snelgrove completed his PhD under Professor Sedra and later became his colleague. Professor Tony Chan Carusone, another former student, co-authored the eighth edition and is now writing the ninth with Vincent Gaudet. I am second edition and had the privilege of being one of Professor Sedra’s students.

Looking around the table, it struck me that much of the story of Canada’s semiconductor industry can almost be told through one professor, one textbook, and several generations of students.

This year, Professor Sedra joined us as our guest of honour again.

We were also joined by Benny Lau and Lee Lau, co-founders of ATI. Long before GPUs became one of the world’s most strategic technologies, ATI pioneered the graphics chip industry and became the world’s largest graphics chip company. Sorry, NVIDIA, but before ATI was acquired by AMD nearly 20 years ago, ATI was bigger and better!

Even today, many of AMD’s GPUs continue to come from Toronto.

ATI’s influence was visible all around the table. In addition to Benny and Lee, Eva Lau, Jim Seto (CEO of ePIC), Hugh Chow (CEO of ventureLAB), and Amy Lau (now at Hepzibah AI) all worked at ATI. Six of the 17 people around the table were ATI alumni. ATI’s fingerprints are everywhere in Canada’s semiconductor ecosystem.

The next generation of Canadian semiconductor companies was equally well represented.

We had Professor Tony Chan Carusone, former CTO of Alphawave, before its acquisition by Qualcomm for US$2.4 billion.

We also had Nish Sinnadurai, Senior Vice President of Core Software and General Manager, and Val Manohararajah, Chief Product Architect of Cerebras. Cerebras needs no introduction and recently completed one of the biggest technology IPOs in the world this year.

Around the table were also Martin Snelgrove and Raymond Chik of Hepzibah AI, Gem Shoute of Zinite, Niraj Mathur of Blumind, and Professor Joyce Poon of Axiomatic AI. Together, the group spanned multiple generations of Canadian leadership in semiconductors, AI computing, photonics, and other advanced computing systems.

What makes this dinner special is not only who is around the table. It is the conversations that become possible when this particular group comes together.

We talked about the convergence of hardware and software as AI dissolves the traditional boundary between the two. We also discussed why the next bottleneck in AI is all about data movement, not simply computation. Moving data between memory and processors, across chips, and throughout entire systems often consumes more time and energy than the computation itself. Addressing this bottleneck will require innovation across the entire computing stack.

And, of course, we heard insider stories from decades of building the semiconductor industry, including never-before-publicly-shared conversations with TSMC founder Morris Chang. These were not simply historical anecdotes. They offered firsthand lessons on building world-class technology companies, forging enduring partnerships, and navigating industry shifts.

These are conversations that could only happen around this table.

Every year, I leave this dinner with the same feeling.

Canada has been producing world-class semiconductor talent and companies for decades. The people around this table have built category-defining companies, trained generations of engineers, and are now creating the next wave of breakthrough technologies.

The future of semiconductors is being written around the world. Canada has already written some remarkable chapters, and judging by the people around this table, many more are still to come.

In fact, some of the world’s best next-generation semiconductor companies are already being built in research labs and startups across Canada. We are seeing it firsthand. Most people simply have not heard of them yet.

Two Small Fish Ventures is already backing some of these companies and will continue to support the best founders at the earliest stages. We are working hard to ensure that this remarkable Canadian semiconductor lineage not only continues, but becomes even stronger.

Stop Supplying. Start Owning.

Canada has a paradox that I have been talking about for a long time.

We are home to most of the world’s AI godfathers. We have Nobel Prize winners, world-class researchers, and some of the most respected engineering schools on the planet. Those institutions attract exceptional students from around the world. And in turn, Canada trains some of the best engineering talent anywhere.

Yet an increasing number of those graduates — now approaching 80% — leave after convocation.

With them go the startups they might have built, the economic value they might have created, and the wealth that could have stayed here. We all know the largest and most valuable companies are technology companies, and they are based in the United States. Many of them were co-founded or led by Canadians.

It is a story of could have been, would have been, and should have been.

I was recently invited to speak at the Deans of Engineering Conference in Winnipeg. I want to share the core of what I said, because I think this conversation matters well beyond that room.

The root cause is not what most people think

The easy explanations are talent, capital, and policy. We hear them constantly. They are not wrong, but they are not the root cause.

The root cause is a mindset.

Clearly, we do not have a shortage of ambition or ability. One fundamental issue stands out — yet very few people talk about it, let alone address it. We have collectively learned to think like suppliers, not owners.

Without the owner mindset, we unintentionally and subconsciously optimize for producing great talent for other countries, rather than building a stake in where that talent goes and what it creates.

This is the supplier mindset made visible.

Let me illustrate with a banana

I use a banana analogy in my talks because it makes the concept concrete.

If you put money and a banana in front of a monkey, the monkey takes the banana. It does not know that money can buy many bananas. That insight comes from Jack Ma, who used this analogy to compare the mindset of someone who grabs a job versus someone who builds a company.

Jobs are bananas. They are real, they matter, and they feed people. A banana feeds you once. Cash feeds you many times.

But the lessons go further.

A banana tree is better than a banana because it can feed you forever. Ownership compounds; wages do not. A banana farm is better than a tree — because participation as a supplier is not enough; ownership of the platform is the real prize. And a store is better than a farm, because the store owns the customer relationship and captures the value that flows through the entire chain.

This is the progression from employee thinking to owner thinking. From banana to store. From grabbing to owning.

Canada has been grabbing bananas

Let me make this concrete with two examples — one personal, one national.

The Wattpad calculation. When Wattpad was acquired for US$660 million, the headline was a Canadian success story. And in many ways, it was. But here is the number nobody talks about. By the time of the acquisition, roughly half of the company was owned by Canadians. When the deal closed, about US$330 million in economic value left the country — because we had raised capital from outside Canada to build it.

Wattpad’s annual payroll was roughly US$30 million. Not small. But compared to the acquisition price, it is a fraction. Ownership creates far more value than employment. Jobs matter. Entrepreneurship matters. But nothing compares to owning world-class companies.

The auto industry analogy. Many people say Canada has a strong auto industry. We do not. We have a strong auto supplier industry. That is not the same thing. Our auto suppliers — collectively — are worth a fraction of GM, Ford, or Toyota. They build the factories, employ the workers, and take on the operational risk. When the EV transition stalled, the suppliers’ brand new facilities went quiet. When the majors slowed production, the layoffs rippled through.

The supplier bears the downside. The owner captures the upside and sets the rules.

And when the Canadian government went to attract EV investment, what did we do? We signed deals to become suppliers again — subsidized by Canadian taxpayers, while the ownership, brand, and margin stayed elsewhere. We took the risk but not the profit.

This is the supplier mindset at a national scale.

The question nobody asks clearly enough

Here is the hinge question: what does winning actually look like?

The supplier mindset and the owner mindset do not just lead to different outcomes. They lead to completely different definitions of winning.

If you are a supplier, sending your best researchers to OpenAI is a win. You produced world-class talent. Mission accomplished. That belongs in the annual report.

If you are an owner, that is a loss. You invested in that person for years, and you ended up owning nothing. The outcome looks identical from the outside — a brilliant Canadian thriving on the world stage — but the two mindsets score it completely differently.

Until we agree on what winning actually means, we will keep celebrating losses as victories.

Where the mindset gets formed

Here is what I have come to believe: the supplier mindset is not learned on the job. It is learned in school.

The mental model a student builds about what success looks like — a FAANG job offer, a US grad school acceptance, a signing bonus from a company they can brag about — is set before they ever enter the workforce.

In the US, building a unicorn startup is Plan A. Getting a job at Google is Plan B. In Canada, getting a job at Google — or going to the US — is Plan A. Building a startup, let alone a unicorn, is often not even in the equation.

That quote is from a world-class Canadian AI scientist who is now at a US company. It landed hard when I first heard it, because it is accurate.

The deans are the front line

I said something direct to the room in Winnipeg that I want to say here too.

The founders of most of Canada’s future tech giants are sitting in engineering classrooms right now. The deans who lead those schools are the single most underleveraged force in Canada’s innovation economy.

Here is why this is also in the deans’ own interest. If their students build world-class companies and keep them here, those companies will forever be associated with that school. That is a legacy that compounds for decades. The next crop of students is inspired by the tech giants that exist. Right now, leading universities outside of Canada are winning that recruitment battle — not because their engineering programs are better, but because the companies their graduates built are more visible, more celebrated, and more aspirational.

Think about OpenAI. It was co-founded by a University of Toronto alumnus. Most people associate it with Silicon Valley.

That association is not fixed. It is a choice, made one graduating class at a time.

This is not only about encouraging entrepreneurship

I want to be precise here, because there is a version of this argument that deans hear all the time and that I think misses the point.

Many engineering schools already encourage entrepreneurship. Hackathons. Incubators. Pitch competitions. These are necessary. But they do not define what success looks like. And in a strange way, encouraging entrepreneurship is still a supplier mindset — we are producing entrepreneurs for the ecosystem and hoping something sticks.

The real call to action is different. It is to start and scale world-class companies here in Canada.

That is a higher bar. A different ambition. A fundamentally different culture to build. It means celebrating the founder who builds a billion-dollar Canadian company with the same institutional pride as the researcher who wins a Nobel Prize. It means changing what the school defines as a win — not only placements, publications, and patents, but also companies that stay, scale, and own their category.

The window is now

I have saved the most important point for last.

We lost Game 1. Canada invented modern AI. The most important AI companies are almost all based in the US. That window has closed.

But Game 2 is underway. Quantum computing. Robotics. Physical AI. Space. Advanced manufacturing. Smart energy. Just to name a few. Canada has deep roots in all of these — world-class labs, exceptional researchers, and early-stage companies that are genuinely competitive.

Here is what is different about Game 2: you cannot pack up a quantum computing facility or a robotics lab and move it to San Francisco. Unlike software, the physical infrastructure is sticky. The talent clusters around it. The companies that emerge will be rooted where the labs are.

And the ground-level signal I am seeing is genuinely encouraging. I have never met more professors and researchers who want to start companies — and who want to do it in Canada. That is new. That is meaningful.

The conditions are finally aligned to address the root problem, not just the symptoms. But the only trophy that ultimately matters is homegrown, world-class companies. And we can only win Game 2 — and ultimately the championship — if we build the owner mindset now, starting with the people who shape how the next generation of engineers think about what success looks like.

Addressing the supplier mindset and turning it into an owner mindset can create the domino effect that turns Canada’s bragging rights into lasting economic wins.

That is the game we can win.

A Day at Ontario Tech University

I spent a full day at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa a few weeks ago. It was my first time on campus, despite it being just over a 40-minute drive from Toronto, where I live. I arrived curious and left with a clearer picture of what they’re building.

Ontario Tech is still a relatively young university, just over two decades old. What’s less well known—and something I didn’t fully appreciate before the visit—is how quickly it has grown in that time, now serving around 14,000 students, and how deliberately it has established itself as a research university rather than simply a teaching-focused institution.

That research orientation shows up not just in output, but in where the university has chosen to build depth—areas that sit close to real systems and real constraints.

This came through clearly in conversations with Prof. Peter Lewis, Canada Research Chair in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, whose work focuses on trustworthy and ethical AI. The university has launched Canada’s first School of Ethical AI, alongside the Mindful AI Research Institute, and the work here is grounded in how AI systems behave once deployed—how humans interact with them, and how unintended consequences are identified and managed.

Energy is another area where Ontario Tech has built serious capability. The university is home to Canada’s only accredited undergraduate Nuclear Engineering program, which is ranked third in North America and designated as an IAEA Collaborating Centre. In discussions with Prof. Hossam Gaber, the emphasis was on smart energy systems, where software, sensing, and control systems are developed alongside the physical energy infrastructure they operate within.

I also spent time with Prof. Haoxiang Lang, whose work in robotics, automotive systems, and advanced mobility sits at the intersection of computation and the physical world.

That work is closely tied to the Automotive Centre of Excellence, which includes a climatic wind tunnel described as one of the largest and most sophisticated of its kind in the world. The facility enables full-scale testing under extreme environmental conditions—from arctic cold to desert heat—and supports research that needs to be validated under real operating constraints.

I can’t possibly mention all the conversations I had over the course of the day—it was a full schedule—but I also spent time with Dean Hossam Kishawy and Dr. Osman Hamid, discussing how research, entrepreneurship, and industry engagement fit together at Ontario Tech.

The day also included time at Brilliant Catalyst, the university’s innovation hub, speaking with students and founders about entrepreneurship. I had the opportunity to give a keynote on entrepreneurship, and the visit ended with the pitch competition, where I handed the cheque to the winning team—a small moment that underscored how early many technical journeys begin.

Ontario Tech may be young, but it is already operating with the structure and discipline of a mature research institution, while retaining the adaptability of a newer one.

Thank you to Sunny Chen and the Ontario Tech team for the time, access, and thoughtful conversations throughout the day.

P.S. If you enjoyed this blog post, please take a minute to like, comment, subscribe and share. Thank you for reading!

This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given.

Portfolio Highlight: Axiomatic

Last year we invested in Axiomatic AI. Their mission is to bring verifiable and trustworthy AI into science and engineering, enabling innovation in areas where rigour and reliability are essential. At the core of this is Mission 10×30: achieving a tenfold improvement in scientific and engineering productivity by 2030.

The company was founded by top researchers and professors from MIT, the University of Toronto, and ICFO in Barcelona, bringing deep expertise in physics, computer science, and engineering.

Since our investment, the team has been heads down executing. Now they’ve shared their first public release: Axiomatic Operators.

What They’ve Released

Axiomatic Operators are MCP servers that run directly in your IDE, connecting with systems like Claude Code and Cursor. The suite includes:

  • AxEquationExplorer
  • AxModelFitter
  • AxPhotonicsPreview
  • AxDocumentParser
  • AxPlotToData
  • AxDocumentAnnotator

Why is this important?

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at languages (as their name suggests) but struggle with logic. That’s why AI can write poetry but often has trouble with math — LLMs mainly rely on pattern matching rather than reasoning.

This is where Axiomatic steps in. Their approach combines advances in reinforcement learning, LLMs, and world models to create AI that is not just fluent but also capable of reasoning with the rigour required in science and engineering.

What’s Next

This first release marks an important step in turning their mission into practical, usable tools. In the coming weeks, the team will share more technical material — including white papers, demo videos, GitHub repositories, and case studies — while continuing to work closely with early access partners.

Find out more on GitHub, including demos, case studies, and everything else you need to make your work days less annoying and more productive: Axiomatic AI GitHub

We’re excited to see their progress. If you’re in science or engineering, we encourage you to give the Axiomatic Operators suite a try: Axiomatic AI.

P.S. If you enjoyed this blog post, please take a minute to like, comment, subscribe and share. Thank you for reading!

This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given.

Legends of Semiconductors: The Only Dinner Where the Edition Number Matters

At most dinners, introductions start with your name and maybe what you do.

At this one, we began with:
“Second edition.”
“Fourth edition.”

Why? Because this was our “School of Fish – Legends of Semiconductors” dinner, hosted at our home, where your relationship with the Sedra & Smith textbook was the common thread.
(I’m second edition, if you’re wondering.)

We were incredibly honoured to have Dr. Adel Sedra, former Dean of Engineering at the University of Waterloo, join us. Recently appointed to the Order of Canada, Dr. Sedra is a towering figure in the world of electrical engineering. Since 1982, his textbook has taught more than three-quarters of the world’s electrical engineers. It is hard to find someone in the field who has not studied from it. I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate, not just to have learned from his book, but to have been his student more than 30 years ago at the University of Toronto. Few have had the privilege of learning directly from a legend.

We were equally honoured to host Benny Lau, co-founder of ATI Technologies, whose legacy lives on in AMD’s GPUs to this day. AMD acquired ATI for $5.4 billion nearly 20 years ago, still one of the largest tech acquisitions in Canadian history. When Eva worked at ATI, she had the chance to work closely with Benny. His presence brought our conversation full circle, from classroom to commercialization. Adding even more depth to the evening, Benny was also once a student of Dr. Sedra. Two generations of engineers at the same table, both shaped by the same teacher.

From left to right: Benny Lau, Eva Lau, Ljubisa Bajic

This evening was also a chance to reconnect with those who shaped my own journey. Martin Snelgrove and Raymond Chik, my professor and TA respectively, were both there and are now serial entrepreneurs. They are also co-founders of Hepzibah, a Two Small Fish portfolio company. (I still can’t help but sometimes call him Professor Snelgrove.) Xerxes Wania, another one of my TAs from back in the day, went on to build and exit two semiconductor companies and added his voice to the conversation.

From left to right: Xerxes Wania, Dr. Adel Sedra, Allen Lau, Martin Snelgrove, Raymond Chik

We were also joined by Ljubisa Bajic, former CEO of TensTorrent and now CEO of Taalas, who also spent part of his career at ATI, further adding to the thread that connected many of us. Chris Yip, Dean of Engineering at the University of Toronto, and Deepa Kundur, current Chair of U of T’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering—continuing the legacy of leadership that Dr. Sedra once held in that position—also attended. Professor Tony Chan Carusone, now also CTO of Alphawave Semi and coauthor of the Sedra & Smith textbook starting with the 8th edition, brought both academic and commercial perspectives to the table.

From the TSF portfolio side, we were thrilled to have Professor Doug Barlage of the University of Alberta and Professor Chris Eliasmith of the University of Waterloo, co-founders of Zinite and ABR, respectively.

And of course, our partner Dr. Albert Chen joined us. He is a graduate of Waterloo Engineering and knows a thing or two about semiconductors himself.

Semiconductors brought us together that night.
Textbook and tapeout were what we talked about, and we all loved them.

P.S. If you enjoyed this blog post, please take a minute to like, comment, subscribe and share. Thank you for reading!

This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given.

Wattpad Was My Regular Season. TSF Is My Playoff Hockey

When entrepreneurs exit their companies, it is supposed to be a victory lap. But in reality, many find themselves in an unexpected emotional vacuum. More often than you might think, I hear variations of the same quiet confession:

“It should have been the best time of my life. But I felt lost after the exit. I lost my purpose.”

After running Wattpad for 15 years, I understand this all too well. It is like training for and running a marathon for over a decade, only to stop cold the day after the finish line. No more rhythm. No more momentum. No next mile.

Do I Miss Operating

Unsurprisingly, people often ask me:

“Do you like being a VC?”

“Do you miss operating?”

My honest answer is yes and yes

(but I get my fix without being a CEO — see below).

Being a founder and CEO was deeply challenging and also immensely rewarding. It is a role that demands a decade-long commitment to building one and only one thing. And while I loved my time as CEO, I did not feel the need to do it again. Once in a lifetime was enough. I have started three companies. A fourth would have felt repetitive.

What I missed most was not the title or the responsibility. It was the people. The team. The day-to-day collaboration with nearly 300 passionate employees when I stepped down. That sense of shared mission — of solving hard problems together — was what truly filled my cup.

Back in the Trenches in a Different Role

Now at Two Small Fish Ventures as an operating partner, I work with founders across our portfolio. I am no longer the operator inside the company, but I get to be their sounding board — helping them tackle some of the biggest challenges they face.

Let’s be honest: they call me especially when they believe I am the only one who can help them. Their words, not mine. And there have been plenty of those occasions.

That gives me the same hit of adrenaline I used to get from operating. At my core, I love solving hard problems. That part of me did not go away after my exit. I just found a new arena for it — and it is a perfect replacement.

A Playground for a Science Nerd

What people may not realize is that the deep tech VC job is drastically different from a “normal” VC job. As a deep tech VC, I am constantly stretched and go deep — technically, intellectually, and creatively. It forces me to stay sharp, push my boundaries, and reconnect with my roots as a curious, wide-eyed science nerd.

There is something magical about working with founders at the bleeding edge of innovation. I get to dive into breakthrough technologies, understand how they work, and figure out how to turn them into usable and scalable products. It feels like being a kid in a candy store — except the candy is semiconductors, control systems, power electronics, quantum, and other domains in the next frontier of computing.

How could I not love that?

Ironically, I had less time to indulge this curiosity when I was a CEO. Now I can geek out and help shape the future at the same time. It is a net positive to me.

You Do Not Have to Love It All

Of course, every job — including CEO and VC — has its less glamorous parts. Whether you are a founder or a VC, there will always be administrative tasks and responsibilities you would rather skip.

But I have learned not to resent them. As I often say:

“You do not need to love every task. You just need to be curious enough to find the interesting angles in anything.”

Those tasks are the cost of admission to being a deep tech VC. A small price to pay to do the work I love — supporting incredible entrepreneurs as they bring transformative ideas to life, and finding joy in doing so. And knowing what I know now, I do not think I would enjoy being a “normal” VC. I cannot speak for others, but for me, this is the only kind of venture work that truly energizes and fulfills me.

A New Season. A New Purpose.

So yes, being a VC brings me as much joy — and arguably even more fulfillment (and I am surprised that I am saying this) — than being a CEO. I feel incredibly lucky. And I am all in.

It feels like all my past experience has prepared me for what I do today. I often describe this phase of my life this way:

Wattpad was my regular season. TSF is my playoff hockey.

It is faster. It is grittier. The stakes feel higher. Not because I am building one company, but because I am helping many shape the future.

P.S. Go Oilers!!

Investing in Fibra: Revolutionizing Women’s Health with Smart Underwear

At Two Small Fish Ventures, we love backing founders who are not only transforming user behaviour but also unlocking new and impactful value. That’s why we’re excited to announce our investment in Fibra, a pioneering company redefining wearable technology to improve women’s health. We are proud to be the lead investor in this round, and I will be joining as a board observer. 

The Vision Behind Fibra

Fibra is developing smart underwear embedded with proprietory textile-based sensors for seamless, non-invasive monitoring of previously untapped vital biomarkers. Their innovative technology provides continuous, accurate health insights—all within the comfort of everyday clothing. Learning from user data, it then provides personalized insights, helping women track, plan, and optimize their reproductive health with ease. This AI-driven approach enhances the precision and effectiveness of health monitoring, empowering users with actionable information tailored to their unique needs. 

Fibra has already collected millions of data points with its product, further strengthening its AI capabilities and improving the accuracy of its health insights. While Fibra’s initial focus is female fertility tracking, its platform has the potential to expand into broader areas of women’s health, including pregnancy detection/monitoring, menopause, detection of STDs and cervical cancer and many more, fundamentally transforming how we monitor and understand our bodies.

Perfect Founder-Market Fit

Fibra was founded by Parnian Majd, an exceptional leader in biomedical innovation. She holds a Master of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from TMU. Her achievements have been widely recognized, including being an EY Women in Tech Award recipient, a Rogers Women Empowerment Award finalist for Innovation, and more.

We are thrilled to support Parnian and the Fibra team as they push the boundaries of AI-driven smart textiles and health monitoring. We are entering a golden age of deep-tech innovation and software-hardware convergence—a space we are excited to champion at Two Small Fish Ventures.

Stay tuned as Fibra advances its mission to empower women through cutting-edge health technology.

This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given.

Celebrating the Unintended but Obvious Impact of Wattpad on International Women’s Day

It’s been almost three years since I stepped aside from my role as CEO of Wattpad, yet I’m still amazed by the reactions I get when I bump into people who have been part of the Wattpad story. The impact continues to surface in unexpected and inspiring ways frequently.

Wattpad has always been a platform built on storytelling for all ages and genders. That being said, our core demographic—roughly 50% of our users—has been teenage girls. Young women have always played a pivotal role in the Wattpad community.

Next year, Wattpad will turn 20 (!)—a milestone that feels both surreal and deeply rewarding. When we started in 2006, we couldn’t have imagined the journey ahead. But one thing is certain: our early users have grown up, and many of them are now in their 20s and 30s, making their mark on the world in remarkable ways.

A perfect example: at our recent masterclass at the University of Toronto, I ran into Nour. A decade ago, she was pulling all-nighters reading on Wattpad. Today, she’s an Engineering Science student at the University of Toronto, specializing in machine intelligence. Her story is not unique. Over the years, I’ve met countless female Wattpad users who are now scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs, building startups and pushing boundaries in STEM fields.

This is incredibly fulfilling. Many of them have told me that they looked up to Wattpad and our journey as a source of inspiration. The idea that something we built has played even a small role in shaping their ambitions is humbling.

Now, as an investor at Two Small Fish, I’m excited about the prospect of supporting these entrepreneurs in the next stage of their journey. Some of these Wattpad users will go on to build the next great startups, and it would be incredible to be part of their success, just as they were part of Wattpad’s.

On this International Women’s Day, I want to celebrate this unintended but, in hindsight, obvious outcome: a generation of young women who grew up on Wattpad are now stepping into leadership roles in tech and beyond. They are the next wave of innovators, creators, and entrepreneurs, and I can’t wait to see what they build next.

P.S. This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given.

Masterclass Series: Complete Redesign That Actually Works

Sonos replaced its CEO last week. The company faced significant backlash after launching a redesigned app earlier last year that was plagued by bugs, missing features, and connectivity issues, frustrating customers and tarnishing its reputation. This also led to layoffs, poor sales, and a significant drop in stock price.

While I usually don’t comment on companies I’m not involved with, as a long-time Sonos user, I was very frustrated that the alarm feature I had been relying on to wake me up in the morning for well over a decade disappeared overnight. There were other issues, too.

Throughout my career, I have worked on numerous redesign projects. A fiasco like this is totally avoidable. Today, I am sharing a couple of internal blog posts I wrote for my team (when I was Wattpad’s CEO) about this topic. Of course, these are just examples of the general framework I used. In practice, there are many specific details in each redesign that I helped guide the team through, as frameworks like this are like a hammer. Even the best hammer in the world is still just a hammer. The devil is in the details of how you use it.

These internal blog posts are just some of the hammers and drills in my toolbox that I use to help our portfolio CEOs navigate trade-offs and move fast without breaking things.

Happy reading through a sample of my collection of half a million words!

Note: These two posts have been mildly edited to improve readability.

Blog Post #1 – Subject: Feature Backward Compatibility

I have gone through major technology platform redesigns many times in my career. One problem that arises every single time is backward compatibility.

The reason is easy to understand: users can interact with complex products (such as Wattpad) in a million different ways. There is no way the engineering team could anticipate all the permutations.

There are two common ways to solve this problem. First, run an extensive beta program. This is what big companies like Apple and Microsoft do when they update their operating systems. This approach is also a great way to push some of the responsibility to their app developers. Even with virtually unlimited resources, crowdsourcing from app developers is still a far better approach. However, running an extensive beta program takes a lot of time and resources. Most companies can’t afford to do that.

The other approach is to roll out the changes progressively and incrementally. It is very tempting to make all the big changes at once, roll them out in one shot, and roll the dice. However, I am almost certain that it will backfire. Not only is it a frustrating experience for both users and engineers, but it also makes the project schedule much less predictable and, in most cases, causes the project to take much longer than anticipated.

Next year, when we focus on our redesign to reduce tech debt, don’t forget to set aside some time budget for these edge conditions that are so easily overlooked. Also, think about how we can roll out the changes more incrementally to minimize the negative impact on our users.

Blog Post #2 – Subject: The Reversibility and Consequentiality Framework

The other day, I spoke to the CEO of another consumer internet company. In terms of the scale of its user base, this company is much smaller than Wattpad, but we are still talking about millions of users here.

Like us, this company has been around for over a decade. Not surprisingly, technical debt has been an ongoing concern. A few years ago, the team decided to completely redesign its platform from the ground up. The redesign was a multi-year effort, and the team finally pulled back the curtain a year ago. While it is working fine now, this CEO told me that it took a few months before they fixed all the issues and reimplemented all the “missing” features because many of their users were using the product in “interesting” ways that the new version did not support.

These problems are fairly common when redesigning a new system from the ground up. In practice, it is simply impossible to take all the permutations into account, no matter how carefully you plan. However, if we mess things up, our user base is so large that it might negatively impact (or ruin!) 100 million people’s lives in the worst-case scenario.

On the flip side, over-planning could burn through a lot of unnecessary cycles.

One way or another, we should not let these challenges deter us from moving forward or even slow us down because there are many ways to mitigate potential problems. In principle, ensuring that the rollout is reversible and inconsequential is key.

The former is easy to understand: Can we roll back when things go wrong? Do we have a kill switch when updating our mobile apps? These are best practices that we have already been using.

However, at times, these best practices might not be possible. Can we reduce the consequentiality when rolling out? If the iOS app were completely redesigned, could we do it in smaller chunks, parallel-run the new and old versions at the same time, or try the new version on 0.1% of our users first? If not, could we roll out the new app in a small country first?

Again, our objective is not to avoid any problem at all costs. Our objective is to minimize (but not eliminate) the negative impact when things go wrong—not if things go wrong. Although Wattpad going dark for 100 million people for an extended period of time is not acceptable, in the spirit of speed, it is perfectly okay if we have ways to hit reverse or reduce the impact to only a small percentage of our users. These are not rocket science, but they do require a bit more thoughtfulness because our user base is so large that we can’t simply roll the dice.

P.S. This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given.

Celebrating a Legendary Educator

I was fortunate to not only learn from his textbook but also to be a student in his class. Few have the privilege of learning directly from a legend, and I consider myself incredibly lucky to have been in the right place at the right time—more than 30 years ago—to benefit from his lectures.

Who am I talking about? Professor Adel Sedra.

I wanted to take a moment to congratulate Professor Sedra on the recognition of his incredible legacy with the launch of a new permanent exhibit at the University of Toronto. His textbook, Microelectronic Circuits, co-authored with the late Professor Kenneth C. Smith, has been a cornerstone of engineering education for decades. To date, it has gone through eight editions (with Professor Tony Chan Carusone also part of the editorial team), sold more than a million copies, and been translated into nearly a dozen languages.

Here’s a fact I only recently discovered: it’s estimated that over three-quarters of electrical engineers in the world since 1982 have studied this book—yes, 75%!—widely known as “Sedra/Smith” after its authors.

“When they first sat down in 1982 to create the first draft, I don’t think either of the two co-authors fully realized that it would become the gold standard in the field,” said Christopher Yip, Dean of U of T Engineering.

As a professor, Professor Sedra was simply unparalleled in the field of microelectronics. His passion for teaching was evident, and his exams? They were tough—though I like to think I did alright! 😉

Watching this video gave me goosebumps.

As a 20-year-old at the time, I didn’t fully comprehend or appreciate that I was sitting in a classroom with a legendary professor, studying one of the earlier editions of what would become a truly iconic textbook.

Professor Sedra’s contributions to engineering education and his impact on generations of students are unmatched. This exhibit is a fitting tribute to a man who shaped how the world learns about microelectronics.

You can read more about this celebration of his legacy here: U of T Engineering News.

P.S. This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given.