Stanley Park Ventures

Stanley Park Ventures applies the foundry model: rather than investing in existing startups, it forms companies internally and works alongside the entrepreneurs running them. General partner Jonathan Bixby has argued that the model suits a noisy ecosystem, and that the studio's best candidates are founders who have already been through raising money, building a product and selling — and failed at it. KOHO was the first company to emerge from the foundry. Bixby, who co-founded and led Strangeloop Networks before this, took the TechVancouver stage in May 2016 with a talk simply titled "Passion". His argument was that passion in a company is nurtured rather than assumed — that it starts with a founding story and rests on giving employees control over their own lives, since nobody grows up wanting to be a job title. His practical suggestion was to keep a list of every employee and find one genuine thing each of them cares about, then surprise them with it once a year.