Startup Talk The Canadian Startup Podcast
INVRS on The Startup Talk Podcast
Talking with Jennifer Cameron CEO and CFO on INVRS The All-In-One Collaborative Investment Research Platform about building the platform, doing investment research, driving user growth, Equity Crowdfunding, and so much more.
Other Great Podcasts:
Join us monthly for Startup Investor Drinks
Register for Startup and Entrepreneur Events here
TorontoStarts Entrepreneur and Startup Community
Starting A Business in Ontario: A Resources Guide For Entrepreneurs, Startups, and Scaleups
Monthly Entrepreneur & Startup Investor Speed Dating
Join us for Startup Pitch Battle
INVRS on The Startup Talk Podcast Automated Transcript
Mon, 8/29 9:22AM • 41:10
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, INVRS, investing, research, startup, started, build, platform, investor, dividends, company, investment, portfolio, work, toronto, tools, data, grew, analysis, retail investor
SPEAKERS
Announcer, The Startup Coach, Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Announcer
Direct from the sixth world renowned Canada’s largest city, with Canada’s biggest thinkers, visionaries and hustlers. This is startup talk featuring the founders, funders, innovators and community leaders who’ve led Canada’s startup ecosystem right here in Toronto. You’ll hear the challenges, the failures, the successes, Toronto StartUp podcast gives you the full story direct from the entrepreneurs and influencers who’ve made a difference. Now, the host of startup talk, the founder of TorontoStarts this startup coach.
The Startup Coach
Welcome back to startup talk. I’m your host and startup coach, founder of Toronto Star. It’s one of the largest startup communities in Canada. And with me today is Jennifer Cameron, the CEO and CFO of INVRS the all in one investment research platform. Welcome, Jennifer.
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Thank you very much, Greg. It’s a pleasure to be here.
The Startup Coach
Let’s start off with you telling us about INVRS.
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
That would be my pleasure INVRS is a modern social and collaborative investment research platform. The problem that we are solving is that right now 60% of young people get investing advice from social media, and social media thrives on emotional reaction, whether it is polarizing opinions, or amplifying anxieties. Heightened emotionality, like the fear of missing out just leads to bad decisions. Studies have proved that success in investing comes from having a consistent strategy, doing your due diligence, and knowing yourself. So we know that we are the right solution to solve this problem. Because we work with people’s natural desire to connect and collaborate with one another. We have a social media style feed seamlessly integrated with all of the data and tools that you could want to do good investment research. And we allow our users to collaborate. And we believe that collaboration, especially in investment research should go far beyond just a conversation on our platform. People can share not only ideas, but tools, research data, they can share their portfolio, they can work together on investment analyses. And yeah, so that’s kind of is the story of what we are doing right now. And we are a Live platform, we have over 4500 people on it right now.
The Startup Coach
We’re gonna get into a lot more about INVRS in a bit. But I’d like to start off with who you were growing up. Were you a handful for your poor parents. Were you studious? Were you into music, sports socializing? Who was young Jennifer?
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Well, young Jennifer, in school, I think I was a mix of being studious, but also being rebellious. And the rebellion kind of changed as I grew up, I think when I was younger public school age, it was more about testing boundaries. And I did get sent to the principal’s office a lot growing up, I kind of grew out of that when I got to high school, and in my things change, you kind of develop respect for your teachers and all of that. But you know, I mean, I grew up in the 80s. And we could describe growing up in the 80s. It’s sort of like benign neglect. You know, kids kind of just did their thing. And I, me and my friends, we certainly did our thing. And we had tons and tons of fun. And we got to tons of trouble. And I think if my parents knew half of what we were up to their hair would have turned gray. But all that being said, I was still pretty studious person. I liked learning. And I was also in a certain respect kind of compliant. Like my parents told me that I should study math and science in order to get into a university or a good university or whatever they said. So I did, and I, you know, that was fine. I didn’t care. I mean, I liked math. I liked science. Yeah. So I was rebellious to start. As I kind of grew up, I I became more respectful of my elders, but kind of pushed that rebellious stuff towards, you know, partying and having a great time.
The Startup Coach
Well, at what point did you switch and think maybe I want to run my own business.
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
I think the seeds that were in, in me from a really early stage, like my grandfather, had a business my father had a business. I used to go to my grandfather’s shop and fiddle around with the business stuff. I wasn’t pretending I was like, running the company or anything like that, but I liked, you know, messing around in there. And kind of like the energy that it was, you know, there’s a lot of people it was kind of a kind of a mechanical shop. And so there’s spokes in the back doing mechanical work, and there’s folks in the front doing administration, and then I guess my first entrepreneurial for a was in high school, me and a good friend. We designed a logo and then silkscreen it on T shirts, and then sold them in at. They were like band shirts and we would sell them at the concert. Another little story that I could share about my interest in entrepreneur entrepreneurism was. So after graduating from university, I got a job on Bay Street and I worked for a few years there and, and then wanted to travel. So I quit and traveled for about nine months. And as I traveled, I would work a lot. So I would often clean or, like just cleaning, I would clean and then the hostel that I was working on. I also worked as well. But anyway, I was kind of traveling through New Zealand and I was running out of money. And the place that I was staying at had a lot of British people sitting there. So I went to a local local bakery, and I got the stuff that I needed to make scones. And I would bake a bunch of scones and I put them on the counter under plastic containers, these scones $1, I go away and come back and all the scones would be gone, and there’d be money in place of it. And so I did that a few times and got the money I needed to kind of move on to the next place. So yeah, just a couple stories of being an entrepreneur. And actually, I’ve worked in startups besides INVRS. After I finished traveling, I’ve actually lived in Vancouver and worked for a startup there. And then me and some of the other folks who are working there, we left that place, and was one of the co founders of a company that I mentioned, had a really successful exit it was sold to PayPal for $400 million, which is just mind blowing. Yeah. So. So yeah, that was that was cool.
The Startup Coach
What made you tackle investing research as a problem? Did you wake up one morning and say, you know, I really think I want to do this breakfast table discussion is that you know, you you have this problem? How did this whole idea come about?
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Nifty question. And there’s kind of two parts to answering it. Back in the day, back in the 90s, when I was working on bass treats, the Internet was becoming a lot more popular. And I remember just towards the end of my tenure working there, I was just thinking about how much you could do with investing and being online. So that was just the seed that got planted. Fast forward, many, many years later, I was working on my accounting designation. And there was a course that was about do accounting statements matter, you know, you’re going in, you’re getting this designation and doesn’t matter. Anyways, the measure that the yardstick on whether or not it measures it mattered is Can people make decisions based on this stuff, it looks at a couple of interesting models that I never come across before these were developed in academia and, you know, rigorously tested, they were they were publicly published and peer reviewed, and all this sort of thing. And basically, they did demonstrate that these complicated models did generate better returns, or alpha, I guess you could say. So I was really intrigued because of my investing background. And I started to try and build these up myself. You know, I went to the library and got copies of the original thesis, I guess, or article and started reading on how to rebuild these and then started to put it into Excel and get all of the information from financial statements. And I realized that it’s so time consuming, just getting the data, it’s impossible. It doesn’t matter how good these models are, you can’t do this. It’s just way too time consuming. So it looked for software that would help me and there was nothing in my, I guess I was telling my husband about it. He’s a, he’s a software engineer, and he said, well build something for you. And that was the that was the germ of the idea that started in verse it was originally about being able to build models. That’s what we started working on. And I guess, at the end of the day, there was maybe a market of one for that, which was me. So we needed to either try something else or close up shop, because, you know, we were getting expensive data, I went to my I went out to my network and said, we’re looking for a business development person. And somebody put the proposal I put up put together a one page proposal, somebody put the one page proposal in front of somebody, and he went out to his network and got his two friends. And they came back to us, you know, so we’re interested in this. And we had a conversation, they put together this wonderful proposal. I mean, I was blown away about a new direction for the companies. These these are three guys recent graduates from McMaster super smart. And yeah, we love to their ideas and their energy and yeah, so that happened at the end of 2020 and over 21, we built the MVP of INVRS. And we launched at the beginning of this year.
The Startup Coach
I listened to a couple investment podcasts, and I hear people talk about, you know, at the coffee shop about, you know, what they’re investing in? And why, how much research does the average person do before investing? Is it a lot? Or is it you know, somebody tells them something, and they run home and invest? I’m really curious as to what level it is. People actually do their due diligence.
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
That’s a tough question to answer, because I think there’s just so much variety, some people will just, you know, grab that hot tip without doing any background research. And then there’s other DIY investors who, like they’re brilliant, and they do a lot of research. And they’re, they’re extremely well organized, and very knowledgeable. So there’s that. But then there’s also people do different kinds of research, some people like to do technical analysis, and some people do fundamental and some people are into factors. So there’s just such a wide range of what people do, we want to help people who like want to do more than just run home with the hot tip, we want to help them do a sanity check, at the very least with it. And we also want to help the person who does that super thorough research, and while at the same time supporting like the broad broad range of how people do research. So our MVP with INVRS covers covers the waterfront we’ve got we’ve got technical analysis tools, we’ve got lots of data we cover Canada and the US, we’ve got stocks, we’ve got funds, we have lots of fundamental data, we’ve met metrics, but we know that there’s all this variety and how people how people work. So we’re going to, we are not going to start we are building the little modules. So people can build out the exact platform that works for them, the way that we are going to monetize this is exactly that. So if somebody likes somebody like me likes to build models, they would want to purchase the party members or get a subscription to the party members that lets them build models. If somebody else wants to do options, they can get the data for their options. If somebody wants to, or somebody likes to dive into the filings, we have access to the filings. So that’s our vision, do you understand that everybody’s different in their journey, and we want to help support whatever that journey is? Hope that answers your question.
The Startup Coach
I mean, I still think we don’t know, on average what people do from a research point of view, but it is the whole gambit, as you as you’ve said, so but the answers the range.
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Well, another way to maybe look at this is, are a lot of people investing is a hobby, just like fishing is a hobby or, you know, knitting or crocheting, and people tend to put quite a lot of energy into their hobbies, although I don’t have the exact stats of like, if you averaged out the, you know, all the all the DIY investors wherever they land. I do know that because of the passion that people have for investing, I would tend to think that they’re landing more on, you know, kind of doing the research that they can
The Startup Coach
I look at the analysis when talking heads on TV and says this, this this, and I understand that, you know, if you’re looking at MSNBC, or some of these that, you know, they’re motivated to promote or demote stocks in one direction or another? How do I find real information? And what kind of information is available in your tool? And how do I collaborate with others? Maybe I’m a little there’s too much questions in there. But
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
well, I’ll talk about the tools and the the data that we’ve got, and then I’ll talk about how we collaborate. And then anything that you want to kind of dig more into, will go into it. So data, we have near real time data, which means it’s 15 minutes delayed. We cover stocks bonds, in Canada and the US, we do have the ability or we do have a an agreement with our data supplier to have real time data, which we would offer to people on on an ad hoc basis, because not everybody needs as for the tools to sorry, that was price information. As for the tools we have, which is also kind of tied into data. We have financial statements, information, five years of income statement, cash flow statement, balance sheet, all kinds of metrics. And when I say metrics, I mean ratios. Basically just having a single number like you know, revenue Use this is actually not very useful at all that number only becomes useful when you start looking at it over time, which would be called horizontal analysis compared to other ratios. So that revenue makes up or sorry that the profit makes up so much of the revenue type thing. And that’s that’s called vertical analysis. So we have the financial information as well, in our application, we have the ability to compare stocks, so I could look at 10 companies in the same in the same industry, and I can start to see how they compare to one another. Is one undervalued, is one overvalued, does one have better dividends? Does it have better cash does it have, we can start to see how they compare to their peers, which is another important way to do analysis. That’s actually one thing that I like to do. That’s the way I like to analyze things I like to kind of look for best of breed, you know, if I’m looking for, let’s say, like a big pharma stock, I like to look at a bunch and find the elements, I like to look at a number of elements and find the best one of a group. That’s how I like to do things. Other people like to do things differently. We have the ability, our INVRS, you can look to see what analysts are saying about a stock, are they buy, hold or sell? Do they have a? What is their price forecast over what period of time? So we’ve got that information as well, we’ve got what the insiders of the company are doing? Are they buying it? Are they selling it, we’ve got lots and lots of dividend information, how regular has the company been going and been giving out dividends, have they been raising their dividends, we have a stock screener, so you know, put in different criteria of a stock that you’re looking for, and you can get back a group. And then you can use that group and start to do deeper analysis on the ones that look good to you. So data tools, and how people collaborate together, we have a social media style feed on this feed, people can share any of the data and tools that’s in our platform, they can take a snapshot of a comparison chart they’ve created, they could take a snapshot of a technical analysis chart that they’ve created a person reading it can can open it up and take a look at the information that they’re sharing, they can read the analysis, the person is done. And they can ask questions, and then the author can in turn, respond to it. People can also collaborate by working together, you know, a couple of people could say we’re going to work on this kind of analysis, you’re going to do that part, you’re gonna do that part, people can also ask the community for help on something. Does anybody? Is anybody here a uranium bug? Can you provide a couple of a couple of your best companies so I could do a bit of my own research? That’s, that’s, that’s direct the direction that we’re taking collaboration, people actually being able to work and share tools share data, share analysis.
The Startup Coach
So you’ve mentioned the social media feed. Can you tell me a little bit about how it works? Is it? Do I follow certain stocks? And certain companies? Do I follow certain industries? Do I follow certain research analysts who like what is in my feed?
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
When you sign up to INVRS, you can you can follow sort of our top 12 analysts, but then the investment categories that you’re interested in fed through the feed the investment styles that you’re interested in. So an example of that is if I, if I am interested in technology, and consumer discretionary or technical analysis, all the little bits and pieces that I’m that I’m interested in, I can indicate an even if I’m not following a particular person, if someone writes an article, or creates a note on that, and they’ve tagged it, those same tags, it will flow through my feed. And then you know, I like what they do, I can start to follow him or her. So we decided on the social, the social media style feed, because people are familiar with it. It does present a continuous supply of different research to somebody and sort of lets people start to build out the chain of research that they’re interested in. So if let’s say I see a healthcare article that I’m interested in, I can go and see what else that person has written and see other pieces of work that she’s done and, you know, start following her. Or perhaps she started a group. They also have groups so people can join groups that focus on topics that they’re interested in dividend investing or growth investing or certain stocks or
The Startup Coach
the platform itself is free for anybody to join and start doing research.
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
That’s correct.
The Startup Coach
Yeah. Can you tell me about your business model and I’m sure Part of that is I’ve seen where people can go on there and actually make money by having people subscribe to them is that I’m not exactly sure how that work. Could you explain how I as a creator can go and make money on your platform?
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Absolutely. So I’ll start with the business model, because that will feed into the other question that you asked. So we have four streams of revenue that we’re working on building out right now. The first is the ad hoc sales that I touched upon. Like I said, we provide a ton of free data and tools, but then as people want to sort of fine tune their research process, they can, they can, you know, add on the pieces that they want. So ad hoc sales. The second piece is around our creators strategy. There’s lots of people who create videos, or they write articles, they do analysis, and they put online so the creator, the creator, economy is about people taking their passion, and putting it out there sometimes monetize sometimes not. But a lot of people, especially in investing are interested in monetizing their ideas. So INVRS becomes a place where they can find an audience build a following and then monetize their work. Because INVRS is so flexible. A creator could monetize in a number of ways right now, it’s fairly limited, a creator could could write, and then they could put their work on one of the writing platforms that are out there, they could work on YouTube and collect advertising revenue. But on INVRS, they can do more than that they can certainly write and they could certainly put gated access to their videos, but they can also share access to their portfolio, they could share access to their trade, they could create an education program that they could sell through INVRS, there’s really a lot of flexibility for a creator to work on INVRS and our business model around that is just a take rate, we would take five to 15% of what the Creator earns, we also believe that there’s a big opportunity for investor relations firms, or departments, I should say, to connect with retail investors, a lot of investor relations strategy is based around their institutional holding holders, investors, excuse me, and that there’s a big opportunity to connect the retail investors. So down the road, as the platform grows, we believe that there will be an opportunity for an investment research firm to create a group, the XYZ official group where they can build loyalty offer perks, to the people who either own their stock or are considering on their stock. And then the fourth revenue stream that we see is advertising or promotion. And we see that primarily with the groups that are already on the platform. So a creator who wants to get in front of more people would promote in his his great new article that he’s worked on, or an investor relations firm might advertise a, an event that they’re hosting in their group. And yeah, so I think that probably hopefully, answer the question about how a creator makes money on the platform. They, they they can monetize their work. It’s a short answer.
The Startup Coach
Can you define two things for me? The Do It Yourself investor and the retail investor?
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
A Do It Yourself investor is a retail investor and do it and do it yourself. investor is somebody who does their own research and makes their own investing decisions. A retail investor can include a do it yourself investor, but it also may be somebody who has their money managed for them. So retail investor is someone like URI who are saving money and investing for some future event. Our kids education, retirement, that’s that sort of thing. The other side of that is an institutional investor. And that could be a pension fund, or mutual fund, who are who are buying on a on a much, much, much, much, much larger scale.
I think you said you had over 4500 investors on
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
your planet, I guess users Yes.
The Startup Coach
Startups always talk about hustle. What are you doing to get traction and build? How do you get that 4500? And how are you building on it?
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Wow, great question. Well, as we were working on building up the technology, we use a lot of research on what is the best way to attract people. So we came up with this strategy. But I think when you are building a startup you have to be comfortable in experimenting and you have to be ready to change tactics on a dime. Because my observation is that different strategies will work for a while, and then they’ll stop, or they get too expensive and become less effective. So the first one of the best ways that we found was initially was was working with influencers. And that was, that was excellent for a while, and then it got kind of expensive. So and we were at the same time that was getting kind of expensive. We were finding that Google Ads was working amazing for us. So we shifted out of the influencer advertising, and we moved to Google ads, where the market crashed, you know, a few months ago, those Google Ads didn’t work. So well, they got extremely expensive. So yeah, it’s just kind of shifting around trying different things.
The Startup Coach
Yeah, there’s an old adage, I like to quote, nothing fails, like success. And you know, you can’t, you know, one thing works for you to keep doing that thing. Assuming that it’s going to be continued to be successful. You know, you’re gonna wake up one day and find your you have an empty boat. Yeah.
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Yeah. No, you have to keep, yeah, to keep trying new things. Or another thing that we’ve been doing is an affiliate program. And that’s been pretty good. And we like, we like the idea. You know, we like the idea of rewarding the people that are helping them grow the platform. But you know, what, what we started with starts to lose its luster. So you have to kind of tweak it again. Yeah, it’s just lots and lots of iterations, lots of lots of experimentation.
The Startup Coach
What is your funding situation? Are you bootstrapped? Are you precede?
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
We are currently working on a seed round for the fall, the funding thus far has been Bootstrap, friends and family. But I am also, you know, honored to say that the BBC is an investor in this as well, and that we have the support of of the NRC. But yet, so what we’ve been pouring lots of energy over the summer is preparing for our fall launch, or excuse me, our fall race, which is going to be kind of a combination of angel investments, plus equity crowdfunding, which I think is very exciting. That’s that’s equity crowdfunding is in the background.
The Startup Coach
Sounds pretty exciting.
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Equity, crowdfunding opens up a new asset class for Canadians, I think it’s I think it’s fantastic. It’s private equity. Basically, private equity is an asset class, it previously was really only available to wealthy folks. And it’s a good class, it has very good returns, it is generally speaking, quite uncorrelated with the rest of your portfolio. And it has some very nice tax benefits as well. So we’re very excited to be participating in raising money via this means because I believe it’s, it’s, it’s great for Canada, it’s great for Canadians.
The Startup Coach
Yeah, we are big fans of equity, crowdfunding and a bunch of new rules. And now a startup can raise up to $1.5 million a year via equity crowdfunding. And now I think across eight provinces used to be only one province you could raise from now I think they combined the rules, as across multiple provinces don’t quote me talk to an expert on that, as to which provinces are still I think Quebec is still out about all the same rules, but it’s definitely an interesting way to go. And we work with a nice crowd funding comm.
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
We’re working with Equivesto.
The Startup Coach
Yeah, they’re fantastic. We love that COVID So good. They’re the best. They’ve been part of our community, even before they launched a platform, mentoring and helping our startups. They help us with everything. They’ve been great community advisors, and I’ve seen so many people raise on their platform successfully. And not only that, but with dividends and with very large returns on their investments fairly quickly. So it’s an interesting way to go, especially now that it’s open for people like you and me to invest in early stage.
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Absolutely. No, I think it’s so exciting, that this is available and Equivesto has been amazing to work with they are so dedicated to to making your basic success. So yeah, we’re very pleased with our choice to go with them.
The Startup Coach
So now I’m going to throw you a complete curveball. When is your platform going to start incorporating information around equity crowdfunding companies?
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Oh, golly, what a what an amazing what an amazing idea, huh? I don’t know, is the short answer. I would need to think about and think about the strategy around that.
The Startup Coach
I think there’s a Gonna be a huge demand? Absolutely. Absolutely lack of information and research. I just thought, hey, since we’re talking about it
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Well, I mean, yeah, definitely, um, as part of our fall race strategy, like the first part is about educating people on this fabulous new equity class they can invest in. So yeah. And we’ll probably put some information through our feed, as well. But yeah, what you’re talking about is is another is a is a big step. And I love that idea.
The Startup Coach
I don’t know how complicated it is, but it’s just a thought. And I think, based on everything I’m seeing, it’s going to be a big demand at some point,
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
definitely, definitely.
The Startup Coach
I’d like to try to share both success and failure. So there’s a chance that someone listening won’t make the same mistake, can you share a time where you made the wrong startup? Pivot or the wrong idea?
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
That’s an amazing question. And, you know, I could give, I could give a polished, you know, gloss over the, the gory details, but I’m not gonna do that. And I’m gonna actually kind of deep down, take a deep breath and tell you the real story of failure. Silicon Valley kinda likes to, they’re almost what’s the word I’m looking for? They’re almost flippant, about, like failure to fail fast. But the real failure failure is, like, horribly, horribly painful and scary. So my story is like, when I started that, or when I helped co found the company that I did that did end up having a really successful exit. I was I was fairly young. I was in my late 20s, when we started, I’d never really experienced any failure before. Like, I went to university and I got to university, I was hard to get my first job on Bay Street, but I persevered. And I got it. And I got other education around working on Bay Street, so never really experienced. And I traveled and traveled around the world by myself and stuff like that. So I felt, and I was Yeah, and kind of, you know, invincible. You know, you do when you when you’re young, and perhaps Perhaps is a bit of hubris, there was also some bad luck, we started that company in 2000, just as the.com implosion happened, sort of what happened was, I was successful, I was the first year I was the company’s first CEO, and I was successful in putting together this great team. And, you know, we got some early wins, you raise, you know, half a million of seed funding, and, you know, we’re firing on all cylinders with our technology, we got a patent. So it was like, everything was going great. And then in the cold, when from up from, from San Francisco, kind of blew in, and people did not want to talk to you anymore. And, and there was kind of a lot of harshness, and I would have a meeting with somebody, and I never met them before. And they were like, really unpleasant. And it really kind of threw me for a loop. And I lost a lot of confidence. It was difficult. And the company meant a lot to me. But unfortunately, well, I had to sit down as the CEO. And it just, it was just, it was just really tough, tough times. And when we added myself and I’m a persistent person, I think that’s my natural state. I left, I felt like I just couldn’t, I couldn’t offer anything of value anymore. So I love but I always really strongly believed in the company, and wanted the best for them, and believed in them. So I guess I guess what I’m trying to say is, the startup game is a young person’s game. I think it’s important to, to stay humble. Not to let those those early wins go to your head. Yeah, I guess that would that would be my, that would be my advice.
The Startup Coach
I’ve talked to many founders, that everything changes when you take us VC money, everything changes. And people come to me and talking to us. You know, I hear it about everything changes, but I didn’t, I wasn’t prepared for it. And I think, you know, people should talk to other founders to understand what they’re getting themselves into. Especially when you’re taking us money from big VC firms talk about how I talked to past founders, how they were treated, what happened and make sure it’s the right fit for you. I just, you know, some of those experiences are horrible, horrible experience. Yeah. And you know, it just happens and if you can avoid them by talking to someone else who’s been there before you can say okay, this may not be the place for me, then definitely have those conversations. Thank you for sharing that.
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
My pleasure.
What is your favorite book either for entrepreneurs or for investors?
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Investing, investing would have to be Benjamin Graham’s the Intelligent Investor. Such good, good common sense. I have gotten lots of value from other ones too. Most recently, I just listened to the little book of sideways markets. I read a few books by Masters of the Universe, and I found them to be more about almost like sales vehicles, so I don’t really recommend those. As for my favorite book on entrepreneurism, it’s actually a novel. Do you want to see if you can guess what it is? I’ll give you some clues. And, okay. This is a story about a young woman and her whole world gets swept away because of the Civil War and she’s on the cusp of losing everything. And she builds a she gets into business and she she builds a sawmill. Okay, well, I’ll give you another clue. This is a this book was turned into a massive movie, and it came out in 1939, along with the Wizard of Oz. It’s frankly, Scarlet. I don’t give a damn Yes, you’re right. Yeah.
Go with the word. Sorry. I
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
read that one when I was a teenager. And yeah, Scarlets, Scarlet saw grit and determination did make an impression on me.
The Startup Coach
And I’m gonna throw you another curveball. Here’s just because podcast and we’re on a podcast, what investor podcast Do you listen to?
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
I listened to tip, the investors podcast, I listened to you. I listened to there’s a there’s a marketing one by a gentleman named Anatoly, I listened to him. That’s kind of it. Sometimes they’ll dabble into other ones. But
The Startup Coach
do you have any tips for founders since you’ve been through it successful and otherwise, and doing it again and doing it again? What are your tips for founders?
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Build a good team put in people that are smarter you? That almost sounds like a trope. But yeah, having people who are smarter than us is great. Stay humble, conserve your cash. It goes faster than you can imagine. Keep an eye on your competitors. But don’t get over obsessed with them don’t waste emotional energy on them. Yeah, I think I think I’ll just leave it at that seems to be my.
The Startup Coach
So I understand you got some new stuff coming out soon. So what’s next for you, and INVRSs,
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
we are all close to being to launching this wonderful portfolio portfolio tool. It’s kind of the last of our MVP, we’re just doing some final testing on that we have a very cool cash flow forecaster, which we’re working on, which will be coming out soon. And this will be will will hook up their portfolios, and then they’ll be able to see with our cash flow forecaster, they’ll be able to see a forecast of their cash flows into the future. So we’ll, we’ll look we’ll analyze their portfolio. And we’ll look at the dividends, and the bonds and ETFs all of the the pieces that they have in their portfolio will give them a visual representation of, of what we believe their cash flow is going to be each month and how much of that is safe or more assured and how much is kind of risky. So we have some, some companies are really solid on giving dividends and they they they never miss them, they they raise them on a regular basis as well. Some are more erratic. So anyway, so it’s a great cash flow forecast that we’re going to be rolling out, we have a another calendar tool that we will be starting working on and that will again a more another personalized tool, which I think are kind of fun. For people, all of the events that pertain to their portfolio will be on a calendar. And they can also add other things that are important to them. Like maybe somebody’s doing webinars, something like that they can add these other things that are of interest to them in their investing journey. We are rolling out a ton of other tools, filings, more data on individual companies and investing return calculators well, not a cash flow but like trend calculator, but actually it includes both the price and what dividends were earned sort of like a retrospective type view. Yeah, so lots of new tools coming out. Monetization for creators is another thing that’s coming soon.
The Startup Coach
If people are interested and they want to find out more about INVRS where do they go?
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
w w w dot i n vrs.com You can read about us or I just invite you just to sign up. It’s free. I’ve got a ton of great stuff there. ton of great tools So all very, very easy to use very intuitive, very clean design, modern design feed where you can see an investment research that other people have put in, you can pop in your own questions, offer your own insights. So in bursts.com,
The Startup Coach
I’ll have those links into the show notes and any links of the stuff you talked about in the show notes. I really appreciate you take the time, Jennifer, to be a part of startup talk.
Jennifer Cameron of INVRS
Thank you very, very, very much, Craig for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
Announcer
This has been startup talk Toronto StartUp podcast. For more exclusive content, the episode vault and to be part of TorontoStarts community, visit TorontoStarts.com. Get your name on the newsletter mailing list, and check out our upcoming events. For more episodes subscribe now, and please recognize the time and work behind the scenes put into connecting you with the biggest visionaries entrepreneurs and innovators in Toronto by leaving a five star review. Join us for more next episode from Toronto’s most active entrepreneur and startup community on startup doc
Visit Podcast Website
RSS Podcast Feed
Subscribe
Share
Add to MyCast