From Investing at 12 to Managing Multimillion-Dollar Venture Funds

What we talked about.

Marco, managing partner of WeaveVC (formerly Redthread Ventures), joins Sunny Ray to trace his path from running an angel investing syndicate in Edmonton to managing multimillion dollar venture funds. Marco explains how organizing a network of high net worth angels taught him the power of urgency and deal tension, lessons he later used to raise Redthread's first $6 million fund and back 12 companies. He recounts his first angel check, an early stake in eventual unicorn Uni Oi, and the mistake of exiting too soon. Marco unpacks why being based in Edmonton, once a limitation, became an advantage once COVID globalized deal flow and Western Canadian startups became 40 to 60 percent cheaper than comparable Silicon Valley companies. He details his fund's fly on the cap table strategy, using small checks for meaningful ownership to force secondary buyouts from larger investors at Series A or B. Marco also discusses portfolio companies like Blossom, Got Care, Home Team Network, and Wyvern, red flags in AI pitches, and previews his upcoming fund focused on AI infrastructure, energy, and defense technology investments.

An Edmonton angel investor turned VC explains how urgency, ownership math, and a hometown edge built multimillion dollar venture funds.

The questions, and the answers.

What did running an angel syndicate teach you about how people decide to invest?

Running the room taught us urgency matters most. Give angels unlimited time and they'll take it, so we learned to create deal tension and excitement around opportunities. That skill translated directly into building a fund and closing LPs, since without urgency almost nobody moves from interested to committed.

What was your first angel check, and what did you get wrong?

Our very first deal was Uni Oi, which became a unicorn now valued around 1.4 billion Canadian dollars. What we got wrong was getting too excited and exiting our position way too early, missing most of the upside that came later as the company kept growing.

Why did Edmonton work for building a venture fund instead of Toronto or Silicon Valley?

Honestly it started as a personal decision, I met my wife and she needed to be here. But COVID globalized deal flow right as we launched, so location stopped mattering. Now it's actually an advantage. Western Canadian companies raise far less capital than Silicon Valley or Eastern Canada, so we get 40 to 60 percent cheaper valuations for equally strong companies.

What's the one habit from your early angel network days you've kept?

Urgency, one word. If you ask someone once and give them time, they'll say they're interested and stall forever. You have to create deadlines, hype, and energy around the opportunity. It's baked directly into our LP generation funnel today, because if you give people a minute they'll take an hour.

What's a red flag in AI pitches that founders don't realize is one?

It usually comes down to overclaiming your technical or business capabilities. We talk to thousands of founders a year, so we can quickly tell who can actually execute. We also have reference experts in our network to validate claims, so overstating your abilities almost always leads to a fast pass.

How does a $6 million fund with checks of $150,000 to $300,000 for 3 to 6 percent ownership actually return a real outcome?

Being a micro fund meant limited dollars, so we needed enough ownership in Western Canada's undercapitalized market to make it worthwhile. Our idea was to be a fly on the cap table, big enough for board observer seats and pro rata rights, so bigger investors later want to buy us out as a secondary at Series A or B for a quick 5 to 7x.

What do your best deals have in common, and where did they come from?

Our top performers include Uni Oi, our first unicorn, Blossom, Got Care, Home Team Network, and Wyvern. They came through very different paths, a warm intro, an accelerator in Saskatchewan, and Wyvern we actually found before it was even a company, when the founders were still finishing a university satellite capstone project.

Can you sum up your new fund Weave in one minute, what do you back and refuse?

We invest in early stage founders building AI infrastructure, from energy to defense autonomy to chips, at pre-seed to seed stage where we can get 5 to 8 percent ownership. That's the new target for this fund, and I'm happy to talk to any founder in that space who reaches out.