Staircase Ventures is a venture capital firm focusing on seed-stage investments in Canadian tech companies.

Staircase Ventures

Staircase Ventures leads seed-stage rounds into Canada’s highest potential tech companies with unparalleled dedication to accelerating founders’ development and performance.

Staircase offers a 5-pillar Founder Development Platform – a comprehensive offering to advance founders’ personal development and successful leadership of their ventures. 

With the 5-pillar Founder Development Platform, Staircase Ventures founders have access to:  

1.	CEO coaching: An experienced, one-on-one executive coach to support them with their personal development objectives.

2.	Peer support groups: Confidential, facilitated, stage- and function-appropriate peer groups with other founders across North America. 

3.	Health & wellness program: A dedicated Cleveland Clinic Canada health coach to help them enhance their physical and mental health. 

4.	Personal financial advisor: An experienced financial advisor who specializes in supporting early-stage tech founders.

5.	Family stipend: A cash stipend to cover unexpected childcare, elder support, or other family needs. 

In addition, each founder receives carry in the fund so that when the fund does well, all founder benefit.

Staircase Ventures is managed by Janet Bannister, a veteran of the Canadian tech industry with deep experience as a founder, operator, and investor.  Founders also benefit from a set of Advisors, each of whom have launched and scaled $1B+ businesses.

Our Managing Partner, Janet Bannister, and Alik Sokolov, the CEO of Sibli (a Staircase Ventures portfolio company) spoke today with Federico M. Berruti at the Toronto McKinsey & Company office.  They spoke about how AI will transform businesses, how Sibli helps asset managers make better investment decisions, and the changing venture capital landscape.

Our Managing Partner, Janet Bannister, spoke at the Canadian Club Toronto last week about how a vibrant tech sector can increase Canada's economic tech resilience and what we need to accelerate the growth of Canada's tech sector. 

Janet spoke about the benefits of building a tech company in Canada (strong tech talent; access to global markets; stable, democratic, welcoming society). She also spoke about the importance of rapidly growing our country's tech sector given that tech and AI will be the driving force behind increasing productivity in the foreseeable future. Yet the recently announced capital gains increase is leading to a rapid increase in the number of Canadians vowing to build their tech businesses outside of Canada.

Read our latest Advisor Series blog post with Staircase Ventures Advisor Ahmed Khaishgi.  Ahmed was the co-founder and CEO of SquareTrade, growing it to be one of the world’s largest consumer electronics warranty companies, with over 150 million policies, before exiting to Allstate in 2020 for $1.4 billion.

In this interview with Robbie Marks, Ahmed talks about the founder journey, raising capital, execution, and leadership.  Some wisdom he shares:

"I think many CEOs don’t spend enough time understanding the metrics and how the machine works. Nor do they spend the time making sure everyone in the company also understands it."

"The first thing is to focus, focus, focus. Cutting out extraneous things is probably the greatest thing a CEO can do."

https://lnkd.in/ghJFdqwn

Janet Bannister, our Founder & Managing Partner, spoke with Nancy Harrison about what makes a great investor.  When asked what the top 1% of investors have in common, Janet responded:

- An intense desire to help founders be successful
- A deep care for founders 
- The ability to build trusted relationships that are the foundation of a successful partnership

Thanks to Canadian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association (CVCA) for filming this clip at #InvestCanada2024 in Montreal last week.

Last week, Staircase Ventures hosted a two-day offsite for our founders. Eight founders from our four portfolio companies attended. They shared best practices, talked about their challenges, and heard from terrific guest speakers who spoke about leadership, having tough conversations, managing stress, and optimizing health & wellness. Our shared carry model encourages our founders to support one other; this shown through as the desire from all founders to help one another by offering advice, contacts, and other help was remarkable. The highlight of the event was the Founder/LP cocktail reception, where our valued investors met our founders and learnt more about their businesses. It is wonderful to see such a vibrant, collaborative, motivated community around the Staircase Ventures  ecosystem.

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