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Entrepreneurs must adapt their approach to attracting investment to take advantage of the abundance of opportunities offered by new development in the city, particularly the NextStar Energy battery plant, said Adam Castle, director of venture services and partnerships at WEtech Alliance.
“We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity right now to capitalize on the battery plant,” Castle said Friday. “Everything’s kind of working towards that.”
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The $5-billion battery plant under construction on Twin Oaks Drive, scheduled to be completed by mid-2025, will eventually employ about 2,500 people, with the potential for thousands of additional spin-off jobs for goods and services suppliers.
“We have a huge opportunity over the next decade to change this city in really meaningful and powerful ways and get it ready for what comes next,” Castle told the Star.
“The thing is, it’s such a question mark of what the future looks like right now.”
Key to encouraging the thinking needed to take advantage of those opportunities is to spotlight successful entrepreneurs in the area, Castle said.
“Letting the world know that you don’t have to be in a major tech centre to get something cool done. That message needs to be told to to our region.
“We don’t need to be like Detroit. We don’t need to be like Waterloo. We don’t need to be like Silicon Valley.
“We need to be like Windsor. We’ve been making and growing things here.”
Castle spoke to the Star during a seminar last Friday organized by WEtech Alliance, a non-profit organization that provides entrepreneurs and companies with business services aimed at helping them grow.
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The event at the Walker Power Building on Devonshire Road featured speakers such as Ron Spreeuwenberg, who co-founded the HiMama Daycare software company in 2013. Now called Lillio, it helps connect parents and child care professionals by replacing administrative procedures, thus giving educators more time to spend with children.
The company recently raised $70 million in series B (second round) financing to fuel further expansion.
“He just went through this process,” said Castle. “We wanted to bring someone (who has) been in the shoes of the folks that are in this room and show them how it’s done today, because the reality is that process changes dramatically from month to month, from six months ago to today, how you raise $1 million in our country,” said Castle.
“Everything has changed, I think, since COVID. Since 2020, you’ve seen like everything kind of turned upside down.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, venture capitalists were looking for growth, so investment money was more available, but they are more careful now, said Castle. “Accessing capital has become harder with interest rates going up. There’s a lot less capital available. Venture capitalist investors are thinking a lot more carefully about the investments they make.”
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Building relationships, rather than well-honed pitches, is the single-most important approach entrepreneurs can take to attract investment, said Castle.
“I think it’s less now about just creating a slick pitch and having a pitch deck … the Dragon’s Den-style of how we see things happen. That has been the traditional trope, whereas now you’re going to develop a relationship with your first investor one year, two years, three years before you even think of asking them for a dollar.
“I think you have to you have to be an aggressive collaborator when it comes to this.”
Entrepreneurs will need to develop a “give-first mentality,” Castle said. “So, being there not to just take value all the time (from investors) but also create it for the folks that are in your network. I see that as having this huge multiplier effect.
“Businesses that are starting to do that, entrepreneurs that do that are going further faster.”
Other speakers at the WEtech Alliance event included experts from the Ontario Securities Commission; Redstick Ventures (food ecosystem investment); Round 13 Capital (venture and growth equity investment); Osler, Hoskin & Hardcourt (business law) and the Windsor Essex Capital Angel Network (investors who typically own some equity in the company).
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Entrepreneurs should realize they do not have to escape to major population areas to become successful and run a global organization, said Castle.
But that requires another change in thinking.
“Windsor has always thought small about the businesses that they’ve created. There’s this mentality that I’ve seen that, ‘(It’s) good enough, I make enough money, I make a good living. That’s all I want.’
“But when you look at where we’re situated in the heart of manufacturing, the biggest cluster in North America … you’re at the crux of an economic powerhouse of this region. That’s Detroit, it’s Windsor. It’s Chatham-Kent. It’s Waterloo. It’s London.”
“Which means we have an opportunity to work within it.”
One WEtech Alliance client started small and now has space in Miami and Detroit, but it’s running its production and manufacturing out of Windsor, he said.
That reverses the brain drain.
“What we lack in market here — because we don’t have millions of people to test a product or service — we make up for in relationships.
“We’re able to connect you with Windsor police, we’re able to connect you with the folks in Detroit, the global automotive manufacturing competition. There’s an endless amount of ways that we can connect into what’s happening. You can do that from right here.
“You don’t have to go anywhere else.”
In fact, Windsor is now the city with the highest immigration of tech professionals, Castle said. Almost 580 tech talent workers have moved to the Windsor Essex region since 2020.
The rise of Zoom video conferencing and better internet connectivity evens the playing field, Castle said. “You can stay here and build a company and build it big and you don’t have to go to these large centres.”
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