fter graduating from Ox-
ford University, Mike
Brown worked in his

grandfather’s firm —
Odlum Brown — before opening
the doors of his own business
along with two other men in 1968.
Here, Brown reflects on his work
with Ventures West, now the larg-
est company of its kind in Canada.

What kind of companies does
Ventures West invest in? “We
are not (usually) investors in things
where you can identify the market
today. By and large we're in-
vestors in things where we don’t
know there’s a market place
because the thing is so new no-
one has figured out they want it
yet.... It's a very risky business,
because quite frequently you
make a wrong guess. You can
guess wrong about the market,
you can guess wrong about the
technology, you can guess wrong
about the people, and unless al!
three of those things you have a
superstar equivalent of, you lose.”

How often do you make the right
decision? ‘We win about 30 per
cent of the time. Twenty-five or 30
per cent of the time we lose every
nickel we put into the businesses.
The rest of it just kind of exists, but
it’s extremely boring and never
goe: anywhere and at the end of
the day you're lucky to get out
with your money.”

How involved is Ventures West in

PARTCPACHION DB.

27 - Sundays, January 28, 1990 - North Shore News

AFFLUENCE gs INFLUENCE

VENTURE CAPITALIST MIKE BROWN:

IN HIS OWN WO

the management of its com-
panies? “\hen things start to
look bad, we know there’s only
one solution. Either we don’t write
any more cheques, or else if
you're going to write more che-
ques, you bloody well better get in
there and understand what's going
on and try to fix it. Since you
know that from the beginning, you
know that you might as well start
spending time with the companies
right from the outset.’’

What kind of lessons have you
learned along the way? “So
many that you'd think ! wouldn't
keep making mistakes, but the fact
of the matter is | keep on figuring
out new ways to make mistakes
....What have | learned most along
the way? Oh, | think the most im-
portant lesson is how important
the people are. That's absolutely
the most critical issue .... if you
don’t have a good management
team, it doesn’t matter how good
the rest of it is. ve seen really
good things blown because you
have bad managers.”’

What would you most like to
change about yourself? ‘That's
dead simpie. To be more aware of
people and of their problems and
concerns and feelings.... | really

have to work hard at it. 1 think
there are a lot of penple to whom
it comes much more naturally, but
! just have to work really really
hard at it, and | think | do a lousy
job by and large.

Do you consider yourself a
hard-nosed businessman? ‘‘I
don’t think I'm hard-nosed,  al-
though | know a lot of
businesspeople who [ think are. 1
just prefer to try and sleep at night
rather than be hard-nosed. Every
once in a while you have to make
decisions, though, that are very
unpleasant, | mean, they're really
nat nice. And the hardest deci-
sions of all are where you have to
go to somebody and say ‘1 just
don’t think you're suited for this
job’ ... That's very hard.”

On Globe ‘90: ‘I think that it’s
kind of neat that maybe Van-
couver gets known to be the focal
point for this kind of issue. The
object is to have this bi-annual-
ly...In my view the industrial op-
portunities that would evolve from
that are significant.””

“The more people that talk about
this and try to understand what we
all have to do, the more likely it is
we all do it.”

NEWS photo Neil Lucente

Mike Brown, partner in the largest venture capital firm in Canada,
started his career in the offices of Odlum Brown.

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