Christopher Reid

This is a Canadian startup that grew to US$500M in revenue, PROFITABLY, with less than a few million raised. VCs passed, AdTech wasn't hot, and until last year most people didn't know who they were. It didn't matter. Customers loved the product. Vitality and his co-founders delivered value year after year for 10+ years. They grew to US$10M+ revenue and became profitable on $2M in funding. They doubled profitably year after year after year. Under the radar. No hype, no noise, no press. Now they're doing ~US$500M in revenue, have raised US$500M, and are worth over US$2.5B. People complain there's not enough happening in Canada. Ignore it. StackAdapt isn't the only $100M+ ARR Canadian startup you hadn't heard of. There are 2x as many $100M+ revenue companies created in the 2010s as in the 2000s. By the time the cohort fully matures, the decade to decade growth will likely be 3x+. We are creating way more at scale companies than ever before. We're just doing it without making noise.

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There's a pattern I've seen across 40 years of investing: The biggest companies don't always build the flashiest products. They build the layer everything else depends on. Skype didn't invent calling, it made it borderless. Bitcoin didn't invent currency, it made it sovereign. That's what drew me to XTrace. Right now, AI has a memory problem. Every refinement you make within each AI vendor trapped in that platform. Switch tools? Start over. Bring in a new agent? It knows nothing about your business. Run a workflow that takes three weeks? By message 1,000,000, the agent has forgotten why it started. XTrace is building the private, portable memory infrastructure for AI. Think of it as the context layer. Your institutional knowledge, your preferences, your procedural refinements all packaged as a private, portable identity that travels across every tool and agent you use. What excites me most is the downstream unlock: → Forward-deployed agents that arrive at a new customer already trained on institutional knowledge, collapsing integration timelines from months to days → Memory-as-login — replacing "Sign in with Google" with "Connect with XTrace," routing the right memory to the right agent at the right time → Long-running workflows where AI agents maintain only what matters across sessions, tools, and handoffs — so critical context never drowns in noise We're entering an era where memory becomes the most valuable asset in enterprise AI. Whoever owns the context layer owns the future of how humans and agents work together. We believe XTrace (https://xtrace.ai) is building exactly that.

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58 Comments

Glad to share that our portfolio company Vention is raising a $110M Series D today and welcomes onboard NVIDIA as one of its investors alongside with Investissement Québec Desjardins and Fidelity Investments to build the future of industrial automation.

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Canada gives 100% tax write-offs to drill a hole in the ground. But invest in a Canadian startup? Good luck. We celebrate exploration risk with one of the most generous tax structures in the world -- flow-through shares, full deductions, the works. But the entrepreneur building the next fintech, the next AI platform, the next global infrastructure company out of Waterloo or Calgary? She gets a maybe. A someday. A "have you tried SR&ED?" Here's what nobody wants to say out loud: Scared money doesn't make money. And right now, Canada's tax code is scared. The US figured this out. Israel figured this out. Singapore figured this out. Early-stage startup capital is exploration capital. The risk is the same. The failure rate is the same. The upside - when it hits - is generational. We don't have a talent problem. We don't have an ideas problem. We have a political will problem. If Canada extended flow-through share treatment to early-stage startup investment, we wouldn't be watching our best founders move to San Francisco. They'd be building empires right here. The mineral is under our feet. The talent is already here. What are we waiting for?

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Great conversation on the latest episode of the Flagship Podcast with Anthony Azrak, CEO & co-founder of General Magic. Anthony is part of a new generation of builders coming out of the Canadian AI ecosystem. He’s already launched multiple startups, gone through a16z speedrun and recently raised a $7M seed round led by Radical Ventures. In this episode we discuss: • The journey from building robots as a kid to becoming a founder • Why the traditional graphical user interface might be reaching its limits • General Magic’s vision for the Language User Interface (LUI) • What it’s like building a company in the middle of the AI wave (link in comments)

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Y Combinator just deleted Canada from its investment list. 17 years and hundreds of startups later, the world's top accelerator told Canadian founders to incorporate somewhere else or stay home. As of November 2025, YC's standard deal terms dropped Canada from permitted investment jurisdictions. Now it's US, Cayman Islands, or Singapore. Canadian founders who want in have to flip their corporate structure before they apply. Garry Tan, YC's CEO (born in Winnipeg), said he loves Canada but told founders to "just convert to Delaware C Corp." This isn't new. It's the same pattern I've watched for years. Brilliant IP comes out of Canadian universities. Over $50 billion in annual R&D investment. But more than half of that IP gets assigned to foreign companies because the capital and infrastructure to commercialize it isn't here. We're world-class at invention. We systematically export the value. The pre-traction funding gap forces founders to go elsewhere. The risk-averse VC ecosystem won't write first checks into IP-based companies before revenue. So innovators either die waiting or leave. YC didn't create this problem. They're acknowledging what's already true: if you're serious about building a globally competitive company, the path of least resistance runs through someone else's jurisdiction. This isn't about patriotism. It's about structural design. Canada built an innovation system optimized for research output, not commercial capture. And now the best accelerator in the world is making that explicit in their deal terms. The question isn't whether founders will incorporate elsewhere. They will. The question is what happens to the ecosystem when the best ideas are structurally required to leave before they prove anything.

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I see a lot of hunting/outdoors brands on Shopify + Klaviyo stuck at $60–$80 RPM. Quietly, the top 5% are running $180–$227. (Quick definition: RPM = Revenue Per Mille, or revenue per 1,000 emails sent. It’s the single best number to tell you if your email program is profitable or just noise.) Similar list size. Products in the same niche. Three times the profit per subscriber. Here’s exactly how they do it. They stop blasting everyone. They use one segment like this: • Predicted LTV ≥ $350 • Bought 90–365 days ago • Zero opens last 30 days One brand sent a single email to this group → $94K in 30 days. They only send when Klaviyo says “this person will buy in the next 7 days.” Click rate jumps from 1% to 4.7–5.2%. Same copy. They make every email feel personal. Subject: “Hey [First Name], still need another [last_product_name]?” Dynamic block pulls the last thing they looked at. One brand: open rate 31% → 52% overnight. Real example - $3.2M hunting brand, last 30 days: Dropped from 24 emails → 9 Revenue went from $91K → $142K Deliverability score 83 → 97 Same list. Zero new subscribers. You can run the check on your account right now: Klaviyo → Analytics → Campaigns → last 90 days Email Attributed Revenue ÷ total emails sent If it’s under $0.14 per email, you’re losing money on volume - and one new segment could bring you incredible value (yes, still in time for Black Friday). This KPI works in every industry, every niche - and the segment works for every industry and every list size. Focus on improving this metric and watch your email program drive incredible value for your organization!

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Every investor deck has a ‘Problem’ slide, followed by a 'Solution' slide. You want investor to lean into the problem and get curious about your solution. I remember the first time that I was nominated for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. It was in the ‘Emerging Company’ category, so the other nominated entrepreneurs were not necessarily in tech. I was talking with one of the other nominees, and he told me that his solution enabled doctors to use eye drops instead of sticking a hypodermic needle into a patients eye. He asked me what we do. I told him that our technology enabled people to watch more TV. I thought in my head, “This guy is gonna win.” Not all problem/solutions have this level of pain and antidote/solution, but our job as startup founders and entrepreneurs raising capital is to create the visceral reaction on our audience, in this case prospective investors, around the customer pain related to the problem that our solution solves. Keep in mind, to be compelling your solution needs to address a big and painful problem for your customers. A problem that has their attention. A problem where there are desperate for a solution. A problem that eliminates pain and frustration for them, and enables them to make more money. Your story should put your audience into your customers shoes. The best way to do this is with a story. It can be your story, or a story of a customer. #startups #founders #funding #strategy

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