"Your pipeline is zero."

Last week, we co-hosted an event with Althra at And-Co ahead of the YC application deadline. The room was full. But the most valuable part wasn't the pitch prep — it was watching the panelists (Alexander Dungate and Sepand Dyanatkar from Ondeck, Josh Gray from Arlo Health, Jacob Shadbolt from Icepanel, and Brandon Waselnuk from Squire AI) channel their inner YC partners and give brutally candid feedback in real time.

The pattern: any time a founder talked about revenue being "on pace" or mentioned their pipeline, the response was immediate — something along the lines of: "your pipeline is zero." The message underneath it: stop dancing around your numbers. Investors hear "on pace" and "strong pipeline" a hundred times a week. What cuts through is direct, confident honesty about what's actually in the bank. That's the standard. Everything else is noise.

This is exactly why Relevant partnered on this event. Sanket Mittal (Founder, Althra) said it best when someone pushed back on whether helping founders apply to YC was off-brand for a program that wants to be the YC of Canada: best case, they raise a pre-seed round here. Worst case, they become stronger founders. Either way, Canada wins.

On conviction — the capital isn't the product; going first is

Rob Kenedi and Lise Birikundavyi (BKR Capital) published a note on conviction that's worth reading slowly. The line that stuck: "The capital isn't the product; going first is." In a market where most investors wait for social proof before writing a cheque, the ones who move early are the actual product. That's a different mental model entirely — and a reminder that the scarcest resource in early-stage Canadian venture isn't always money, it's the willingness to be first (and the impact that has).

Founders: stop playing games with your revenue numbers

Chris Neumann with a PSA worth flagging heading into Summer and Fall. The AI hype earlier this year made VCs more lenient about misleading metrics in pitch decks — red flags that would normally kill a deal were quietly overlooked. That window is closing. VCs have recalibrated to the pace of AI-driven investing and are getting back to fundamentals. If your deck counts non-recurring revenue as ARR or uses arbitrary time periods to inflate numbers, pull it out now. The bar is going up.

Turbopuffer: $100M ARR, less than $1M raised, built in Canada

Jesse Rodgers on Turbopuffer: a Canadian company just crossed $100M in run rate. It raised less than $1M to get there. Nineteen months from first million to hundredth. Profitable the whole way. The search infrastructure running under Cursor, Notion, Anthropic, and Linear. No mega round, no accelerator arc, no government strategy document. Just a small team that built something the best companies in the world needed, priced it properly, and let the work compound.

Next door neighbour: Sprout Fund VC shows its Alberta receipts
The question I always ask when I come across a fund: are they actually deploying capital, or just someone who likes to play investor? Shaheel Hooda (Partner, Sprout Fund VC) posted the receipts recently — 8 Alberta portfolio companies including DiveThru, Dryrun, Truffle Systems, and Smart Access, with two Series A raises in the mix. Across both funds, a third of their portfolio and roughly 40% of deployed capital has gone into Alberta founders building global businesses. In a market where a lot of people call themselves investors, it's worth pointing out who's actually writing cheques.

Michelle Sung → InBC
Michelle Sung has joined INBC as a principal. InBC is one of the most significant pools of capital in BC — any new voice at the table shaping where that capital flows is worth paying attention to.

Danny Halarewich (Orbit/Tiny, ex-LemonStand/Mailchimp) → building again
Danny Halarewich (CEO, Orbit under Tiny — previously founded LemonStand, sold to Mailchimp, then Head of Commerce at Mailchimp) is leaving to build again. Five years running a Shopify app portfolio will do that. What's interesting is what he's already shipping on the side: Ontrack, an AI coaching platform for trail and ultra runners, built solo in two months on Claude. He's not waiting for permission or capital — he's using the build to figure out what's next. A founder with that track record back in motion is worth watching.

Huan Ho (ex-Rallyteam/Workday) → Swell AI
Huan Ho and co-founders Ildar Muslukhov, Auzeb Manzoor, and Jeffrey Hsiung left Workday to start Swell AI — an agentic customer intelligence platform. Their last company, Rallyteam, was acquired by Workday in 2018. Seven years later, they're back. Worth following: they're documenting the whole journey on YouTube, raw and unfiltered. Episode 1 is The Why.

Liam Ross (ex-Withe) → Leap
Liam Ross (ex-CTO at Withe, the hiring fair platform that raised $1.5M before COVID and a cooling hiring market killed it) is joining Leap as Founding Software Engineer. Leap is tackling specialty infusion care — a part of healthcare that's expensive, opaque, and a burden on patients already navigating a diagnosis. His framing is worth noting: what used to require million-dollar implementations can now be built at a higher standard by a focused internal team. AI reaches workflows that off-the-shelf software never could. A sharp engineer betting on that thesis in healthcare is the right move at the right time.

Kathryn Hayashi (ex-TRIUMF) → The Founder Room at adMare BioInnovations
Kathryn Hayashi, former CEO of TRIUMF, has launched The Founder Room — hosted at Vancouver's new adMare BioInnovations life sciences hub. Two signals in one: a serious operator stepping into a community-building role, and adMare establishing itself as more than just lab space. Life sciences infrastructure in Vancouver is maturing, and having someone with Hayashi's credibility anchoring a founder community inside it is the kind of thing that can compound quietly over time.

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