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Matt Golden reposted thisMatt Golden reposted thisToronto Tech Week reminded me why I love this city. Over the past week, I had the chance to spend time with founders, investors, operators, and builders who are shaping what's next. The energy was impossible to miss. Some highlights: Speaking on a panel with Krista Skalde-Roy from Inovia Capital about what AI means for the future of talent and how it's changing the way we work. Going to Homecoming and feeling prouder than ever to be a Torontonian. Geeking out with Christine Song, Lorena Scott, Jenny do Forno, Elana Ostrega and Benji Lightstone over some of the apps I've been building. Meeting an incredible group of people at the latest 5 to 9 Society dinner and hearing stories from founders and leaders across the ecosystem. Attending the Boardy party, packed to the brim in one of the coolest venues in the city. Having dinner with Sophie Lemieux and Jay Berard, where a conversation about vibe coding somehow turned into a three hour deep dive on the future of building. Meeting Jason Butcher's crew and learning from some of the most interesting founders building right now. Attending The Shortlist NY event with Boardy, Andrew D'Souza and Andrew Yeung and seeing some of the best founders in the ecosystem all in one room. (Shoutout Ruslan Nikolaev!) Catching up with Michele Romanow on the latest and greatest projects she's working on (plural, as always). And, of course, hosting our Golden Ventures gathering and spending time with my incredible team and the founders I have the privilege of working with every day. The curiosity. The ambition. The willingness to share ideas, make introductions, and help each other build. With more than 600 events across the week, Toronto felt alive, optimistic, and full of possibility. If Toronto Tech Week is a preview of what's ahead, the future of this ecosystem is incredibly bright. Already looking forward to next year! #TorontoTechWeek #TorontoTech #AI #Startups #VentureCapital #Founders #Innovation #BuildInCanada #TechCommunity #GoldenVentures
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Matt Golden reposted thisMatt Golden reposted thisHello, hello, and happy Tuesday! In this week's Golden Ventures Jobs of the Week, we're zooming in on five of the 10 open risk roles across the portfolio, anchored by a brand-new senior seat at Shakepay. 🛡️ Risk roles don't usually get the spotlight, but the function is having a real moment: in crypto, in retail credit, in SMB lending, and even in autonomous driving. Here's where the work is happening across the portfolio right now. Shakepay | Risk Operations Lead (Remote, Canada) Build and run the risk ops function at one of Canada's most loved bitcoin platforms. New senior seat with real scope: fraud, AML, transaction monitoring, the whole stack. Direct line into leadership. 🪙 Neo Financial | Senior Director, Credit Risk and Lending (Calgary or Toronto) Own credit risk strategy at one of Canada's biggest consumer fintech stories. Senior leadership seat, real P&L influence, and the chance to shape lending decisions across millions of customers. 💳 Clearco | Principal Underwriter, SMB Risk (Remote, Canada or US) Lead underwriting at one of the original revenue-based finance platforms for SMBs. Deep credit chops, comfort with messy data, builder mindset. The kind of seat where one good call moves the whole portfolio. 📊 Waabi | Senior Safety Engineer, Collision Risk (San Francisco) Risk thinking applied to autonomy. Help quantify and reduce collision risk for one of the most ambitious self-driving programs out there. A rare crossover for risk talent who want to work on physical systems. 🚛 ether.fi | DeFi Risk Engineer (New York) Build risk infrastructure for one of the largest liquid restaking protocols on Ethereum. For someone fluent in DeFi mechanics who wants to operate at the frontier of crypto risk. ⛓️ Five of the ten landed here. The other five are at the link below. 👉 https://bit.ly/4uZPaMc #JobsOfTheWeek #GoldenVentures #NowHiring #StartupJobs #VentureCapital #Risk #Fintech #CreditRisk #Underwriting #DeFi #Fraud #RiskJobs
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Matt Golden reposted thisMatt Golden reposted thisLong one today, worth it if this is your world. 👇 Everyone is building their own version of everything at work. Every team has its own prompts, its own workflows, its own interpretation of “how we use AI.” It works in the moment, but it doesn’t scale. You start to see duplication everywhere, inconsistent outputs, fragmented data, a slow drift in brand voice or decision logic. In a lot of ways, enterprise AI right now looks like SMB tinkering, just at a much larger scale. Most of the ecosystem is still focused on creation: tools to build with AI, no-code layers, custom GPTs for every use case. But I don’t think the next big company wins by helping people create more. My bet is it wins by consolidating and standardizing what’s already been created. Because once every team has built their own version of things, a new problem surfaces. Nothing connects, nothing compounds, and no one is quite sure what the “best” version actually is. To me, the opportunity starts to look like aggregation, then optimization, then governance. Almost like GitHub, but for AI behaviors. Or Figma libraries, but for prompts and workflows. A system of record for how AI actually operates inside a company. 🗂️ Some pieces of this exist already. Prompt libraries save things but don’t enforce consistency. Orchestration layers route between models but don’t solve for shared logic. Copilots are powerful but siloed. They all accelerate building. None of them help organizations converge. If every sales rep builds their own outreach tool, who’s testing across all of them, finding what works, and rolling it up for the whole team? Right now, nobody. 🤔 And this is a genuinely hard problem. Every custom workflow reflects how a team thinks, what inputs they trust, what tradeoffs they’re making. There’s a real tension between flexibility and guardrails. Lock things down too much and teams won’t adopt it. Don’t lock them down and you’re back to chaos. My guess is this doesn’t start as a broad horizontal platform. It probably wedges into a specific domain first, brand voice, sales workflows, or customer support, then expands outward. What I keep coming back to is this: companies are generating a lot of AI output right now. Very little of it compounds. There’s no shared memory layer, no way to turn experimentation into something durable. I don’t think we need more creation. I think we need coordination, convergence, and a way to turn local optimization into institutional capability. That’s where I think the next wave gets built. 🌊 Shoutout to Vanessa Piacente for the conversation that sparked this one. #AI #EnterpriseAI #FutureOfWork #Startups #TechTrends #ProductStrategy #Innovation
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Matt Golden reposted thisMatt Golden reposted thisHello, hello and happy Tuesday! 👋 In this week's Golden Ventures Jobs of the week, we're highlighting some of the 35+ seed-stage roles open across the Golden Ventures portfolio right now. Here are five worth a closer look. 🌱 Seed is where the canvas is biggest: small teams, real ownership, and the chance to shape the company you join. A mix of engineering, product, sales, and hardware leadership. Tempo (YC S23) | Software Engineer, LLMs & AI Agents (In-Person, Toronto) Build production AI agents at a Toronto seed team moving fast. Heavy LLM work, real product, in-person energy. 🤖 Dominion Dynamics | Director of Hardware (Ottawa) Lead the hardware org at a Canadian defense tech company building mission-critical systems. Big mandate, real ownership. 🛠️ The Nmbr Company | Product Management Co-op (Hybrid, Toronto) Co-op PM seat at a Toronto fintech building Canada's embedded payroll API. Ex-Humi founders, real ground-floor exposure. 💼 Terminal (YC S23) | Founding Account Executive (Toronto) First sales hire at a YC-backed telematics company building the API layer for trucking and fleet software. Build the playbook from zero. 📞 evolo.ai | Staff AI-Native Frontend Engineer (Toronto) Define the frontend craft at an AI-native seed team where shipping speed and design taste both matter. 🎨 These five jumped out, but there are 39 seed roles open across the portfolio. Full list at the link. 👉 https://bit.ly/42wyhwD #JobsOfTheWeek #GoldenVentures #NowHiring #StartupJobs #VentureCapital #SeedStage #EarlyStage #FoundingTeam #CanadaTech #TorontoTech
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Matt Golden reposted thisMatt Golden reposted thisCanada is a global quantum leader, but our position isn't guaranteed. In a new op-ed for the Financial Post, Xanadu Founder and CEO Christian Weedbrook warns that losing this lead could cost the Canadian economy billions. But there are ways to ensure that Canada captures the value of what it builds. It’s time to double down on homegrown innovation. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gWwjNEZpQuantum computing is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Canada. Here's how we can grow the industry at homeQuantum computing is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Canada. Here's how we can grow the industry at home
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Matt Golden reposted thisMatt Golden reposted thisGet in, loser. We’re going to Toronto 🇨🇦 A few weeks ago, Mell and I brought a little slice of Canada to San Francisco. We rented an LED truck, drove it around the city, and turned it into a rolling invite to Toronto Tech Week. Because Canadians are everywhere. Building category-defining companies. Shaping global industries. And yes, starring in your favourite movies. Toronto Tech Week is our moment to bring that energy together in one place. And we just crossed 400+ events on the calendar 👀 400+ opportunities to step into a room, meet the people behind the ideas, and be part of what’s being built here. If you haven’t planned your schedule yet, now’s the time 👉🏼 torontotechweek.com And if you’re thinking about hosting, take this as your sign. You bring a unique perspective and a chance to build the room you actually want to be in. See you in Toronto! May 25-29. #torontotechweek #ttw #ttw2026 #canadiantech CC: Rachel MacPhail, Ameet Shah, Satish Kanwar, Jingkai (Jack) Chen
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Matt Golden reposted thisMatt Golden reposted thisWe started Neo Financial because we believed Canadians deserved better from their financial products. Every product we launch is a test of that belief. Today's is the United Airlines MileagePlus Neo World Elite Mastercard. What I'm personally excited about: ➡️ Free checked bag, priority boarding, DragonPass, NEXUS credit. ➡️ Access to the Star Alliance network, so miles earned work on any global airline that's a part of Star Alliance ➡️ Earning on everyday spend, on top of access to our thousands of merchant partners to earn extra miles. ➡️ First in Canada: a World Elite travel card accessible to Canadians who are still building their credit. Every dollar you spend should be moving you ahead in your finances. That's what we're building at Neo. More details here: https://lnkd.in/gyHjih-A Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/g46Azv4T
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Matt Golden reposted thisMatt Golden reposted this🌟The doors may have been narrower, but they are wider today because of her. Love the B-roll clip with Formula One legend Niki Lauda. 🏎️ Thanks to Sara Bentham and the Canadian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association (CVCA) for capturing the celebration and the tribute to Whitney Rockley C.M. Senia Rapisarda, LL.M, CIM Matt Golden Michelle McBane Rick Nathan Amy Olah Peter van der Velden Lyne Jacques Constance Griffin Lily Lam, MBA, MSc Nancy Ewings Harry Zarek Mark McQueen Robert Rosen
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Matt Golden reposted thisMatt Golden reposted thisHello, hello and happy Tuesday! 👋 Over 170 new roles were posted across the Golden Ventures portfolio in the last month. Here are four #fintech ones worth a closer look. 💳 Canadian fintech is having a moment, and these teams are right in the middle of it. A mix of RevOps, sales, GTM, and design, across Toronto and remote. Float | Head of Revenue Operations (Hybrid, Toronto) Own the full RevOps stack at one of Canada's fastest-scaling business finance platforms. Real ownership, big canvas. 📈 Neo Financial | Team Lead, Eglinton Square (Toronto) Lead a frontline sales team at one of Canada's biggest consumer fintech stories. Perfect for a coach-first people leader. 💳 Cybrid | Account Executive, Spanish Fluency Required (Remote, Florida) Drive LATAM expansion for an Open API payment orchestration platform. Full-cycle sales into financial infrastructure buyers. 💸 Shakepay | Staff Product Designer (Remote, Canada) Shape the consumer product at Canada's bitcoin-native fintech, where design craft is taken seriously. 🎨 Whether you're into infrastructure, sales, or design, these teams want to hear from you. Find these and all 170+ other open roles across the portfolio at the link below. 👉 https://bit.ly/4sK6ovK #JobsOfTheWeek #GoldenVentures #NowHiring #StartupJobs #VentureCapital #Fintech #FinancialServices #Payments #RevOps #CanadaTechJobs at Golden Ventures Companies | Golden VenturesJobs at Golden Ventures Companies | Golden Ventures
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Matt Golden liked thisMatt Golden liked thisThis is very simple. Lets not talk about events beyond our borders. Talk to Canadians and assure them that every Canadian deserves the same rights protections and freedoms under our law. Canadian values are at stake - and I hope our PM makes it clear to Canadians that violence against any of us is a threat to all of us.NP View: What Jewish Canadians need to hear from Mark CarneyNP View: What Jewish Canadians need to hear from Mark Carney
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Matt Golden liked thisMatt Golden liked thisWhat's the fire that drives you to build something better right here in Canada? Still replaying the energy and insights from Toronto Tech Week Homecoming event, including the panel on "Playing to Win" with Rob Khazzam, Neo Financial's Andrew Chau, REBEL's Emily Hosie, and Boardy's Andrew D'Souza. You can watch the replay here 👉 https://lnkd.in/eVzhKbr7
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Matt Golden liked thisMatt Golden liked thisLast week, Christian Weedbrook, Founder and CEO of Xanadu, took the stage at the Creative Destruction Lab's Super Session to reflect on what it takes to scale a deep-tech company from startup to a public market debut on the TSX and NASDAQ. According to Christian, surviving the deep-tech grind doesn't just come down to physics — it comes down to human resilience. “You can't stop someone who's not going to give up when it's based on the foundation of learning and enjoying what they're doing.” Thank you CDL and Sonia Sennik for the great conversation!
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Matt Golden liked thisMatt Golden liked thisToronto Tech Week reminded me why I love this city. Over the past week, I had the chance to spend time with founders, investors, operators, and builders who are shaping what's next. The energy was impossible to miss. Some highlights: Speaking on a panel with Krista Skalde-Roy from Inovia Capital about what AI means for the future of talent and how it's changing the way we work. Going to Homecoming and feeling prouder than ever to be a Torontonian. Geeking out with Christine Song, Lorena Scott, Jenny do Forno, Elana Ostrega and Benji Lightstone over some of the apps I've been building. Meeting an incredible group of people at the latest 5 to 9 Society dinner and hearing stories from founders and leaders across the ecosystem. Attending the Boardy party, packed to the brim in one of the coolest venues in the city. Having dinner with Sophie Lemieux and Jay Berard, where a conversation about vibe coding somehow turned into a three hour deep dive on the future of building. Meeting Jason Butcher's crew and learning from some of the most interesting founders building right now. Attending The Shortlist NY event with Boardy, Andrew D'Souza and Andrew Yeung and seeing some of the best founders in the ecosystem all in one room. (Shoutout Ruslan Nikolaev!) Catching up with Michele Romanow on the latest and greatest projects she's working on (plural, as always). And, of course, hosting our Golden Ventures gathering and spending time with my incredible team and the founders I have the privilege of working with every day. The curiosity. The ambition. The willingness to share ideas, make introductions, and help each other build. With more than 600 events across the week, Toronto felt alive, optimistic, and full of possibility. If Toronto Tech Week is a preview of what's ahead, the future of this ecosystem is incredibly bright. Already looking forward to next year! #TorontoTechWeek #TorontoTech #AI #Startups #VentureCapital #Founders #Innovation #BuildInCanada #TechCommunity #GoldenVentures
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Matt Golden liked thisCanada doesn’t have a lack of viable businesses. We have an architecture problem. Matthew Mendelsohn hits the nail on the head here. The bottleneck in Canadian productivity isn't a lack of entrepreneurial talent or viable ideas. It’s an over-reliance on a single, rigid financial operating model. Traditional legacy institutions are built on monolithic tech stacks and physical branches. That legacy overhead forces them to build narrow, one-size-fits-all underwriting boxes. If a business doesn’t fit cleanly inside that box, they’re structurally excluded. True competition in financial services isn't about opening more physical branches or tweaking marketing copy. It’s about building a completely different infrastructure. When you don't have true competition like in the majority of developed nations, you end up with high costs and people/businesses who are cut out. By running a unified financial ecosystem on a modern, proprietary tech stack, you eliminate that rigid legacy overhead. You can look at real-time cash flow, behavioral data, and actual value creation rather than just backward-looking checkboxes. We need more platforms built to fit the modern Canadian economy that is more inclusive.Matt Golden liked thisCanada’s big banks do almost all business lending in Canada, but there are certain kinds of viable enterprises that the banks are not structurally designed to serve. Liquidity rules, capital regulation and shareholder expectations shape their lending decisions. Large swaths of the economy are structurally excluded from what the big banks are designed to finance. Canada is in the midst of a long overdue conversation about capital and investment – catalyzing them, attracting them, scaling them. That conversation must include how to better finance local Canadian SMEs. Social Capital Partners released a short paper on this yesterday by our brilliant colleague Michelle Arnold. She outlines the many viable enterprises that are not well-served by our existing financing infrastructure: non-profits, co-ops, social enterprises, small businesses, rural and remote businesses, enterprises that pursue mission and purpose while sacrificing some returns, those seeking small loans, businesses started by those with weak credit histories, businesses that build value through intangible assets, those pursuing non-traditional business models, and those requiring flexible terms or pursuing unfamiliar succession models (like transitions to employee ownership). Many viable enterprises are left out and cannot get financing -- not because they're bad bets but simply because they don't fit the operating model of a big, publicly traded, deposit-funded bank. It is often enterprises that are delivering value beyond financial returns – social, environmental, community – that don’t fit the banks’ model. Other countries have figured out how to overcome the structural limitations of big-bank financing by looking outside the banks. They intentionally cultivate more diverse financing ecosystems: community banks, public banks, community finance institutions, impact lenders, local loan funds, and credit unions. Canada has most of these, but not at the scale that exists in other countries (particularly outside Quebec). As Canadian policy makers and business leaders talk about capital and investment gaps, it is useful to remember that these problems are downstream from a financing architecture that lacks diversity and is overly dependent on one model. Canada needs to intentionally build more diverse institutions with different mandates and goals to serve different kinds of enterprises. https://lnkd.in/ewfJFNwmBuilt to Exclude: Why Canada’s enterprises need a different kind of financingBuilt to Exclude: Why Canada’s enterprises need a different kind of financing
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Matt Golden liked thisMatt Golden liked thisWhen we built Float's transaction coding agent, we made a deliberate choice that goes against the grain of most AI products being shipped right now. We optimized for accuracy above everything else. Finance is not a domain where you can vibe your way to the right answer. Every GL code, every tax classification has downstream consequences on your books, your reporting, and your compliance. Getting it wrong at scale is worse than not automating at all. So we set a high bar. Our agent delivers over 90% overall accuracy and outperforms best-in-class models like Claude Opus 4.6 by 30% on transaction coding specifically. Getting there required training on the specific patterns and logic of Canadian business finance, not just general intelligence. But the hardest product decision we made had nothing to do with getting the model to say yes. It was teaching it when to say nothing at all. An agent that guesses confidently on every transaction erodes trust fast. Knowing when to abstain is what separates a useful tool from a liability. The second thing we learned: finance teams do not trust black boxes. So we built the reasoning layer, the ability to see exactly how the model arrived at its conclusion, into the product from the start. It has become one of the features customers talk about most. Not because it is flashy, but because it makes the agent feel accountable. The result: customers using the agent are now automating over 70% of their GL and tax coding. Something that used to take hours happens in minutes. That is what real AI leverage looks like in finance. Not a chatbot on top of your data. A precision tool that earns the right to automate your most tedious work by being right, showing its work, and knowing its limits.
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Matt Golden liked thisMatt Golden liked thisNot quite all of Canada’s early-stage deep tech VCs… but close enough for one great photo! Great discussion on all the deep tech stuff shaping the future at Canadian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association (CVCA) Invest Canada ’26 in Halifax! cc Jenny Yang Jonathan Saari Jaime Christian Duncan Stewart Charles Lespérance
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