We have strong belief that Web3 applications will power the most important technological transformation of our time and likely exceed the extraordinary benefits of the Internet Revolution.

And yet, even with this promise, we have a* very* long way to go. Only 12% of Americans and about 4% of Canadians have ever interacted with a Web3 product. And while this market is growing at about 12% CAGR, regulatory and governance uncertainties cast a pallor over mainstream adoption.

Our central conviction is that Cybrid will play a critical role in accelerating the mainstream adoption of digital currencies and underlying Web3 applications by bringing the technology to where consumers already* are* like neo-banks, financial institutions, and even alternative financial platforms like loyalty programs.

For legacy financial institutions, moving into the Web3 space is critical, if not existential to their long-term survival. As a testament to this risk, even at this very nascent stage, over 80% of Millennial millionaires have Blockchain/Web3 investments; and*** all of them*** (yes, you read that right) are not using traditional financial institutions to purchase and/or trade in these assets.

For neo-banks and financial technology firms, the ability to quickly provide Web3 applications will be a significant differentiator in their go-to-market function as seen by the stratospheric growth of trading applications on Robin Hood and Public in the United States.

Cybrid’s team is uniquely qualified to tackle the immense challenges that exist in this space. Avinash Chidambaram, the company’s Co-Founder and CEO, was formerly the CPO at Thinking Capital and previously started Ario, a platform that was acquired by Purpose Financial in 2020. The Company’s CTO Brent Carrara was the Head of Security at Ario and spent close to a decade in enterprise security at CSIS.

While the mainstream adoption of Web3 applications may still be some ways off, our conviction is that Cybrid will play a significant role in accelerating this process and opening up new opportunities for everyone.

On an overcast but incredibly humid day in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I was standing outside a nondescript apartment block. No more than a year old, the cheap construction was already showing its wear; drainpipes were rusting, the carpet was slightly worn, and a smell emanated from the hallway that I could only generously call “Apartment Special.”

With nary a real estate agent in sight, I scanned a QR code on my phone and was let into the building and onto the prospective unit. Using an application called Instahome, I was guided through an augmented reality tour of the unit and once this was complete, directed to closing and signup forms; all on my smartphone.

For someone who spent the better part of a decade in San Francisco scouring overpriced and sham Craigslist postings for someone’s backyard shed, this experience was nothing short of revelatory.

It made me ask a simple question: is one of the most change resistant verticals of all, real estate, finally ready to move into the digital age?

For the first time ever, the data is starting to say yes. Venture funding into property technology was $16 Billion in 2019 alone according to TechCrunch.

But statistics alone do not tell the entire story. What’s driving this change is deeper. It’s demographic. Millennials expect a more virtual and on-demand experience. And Baby Boomers have the capital and desire to age in place rather than seeking nursing home care.

Virtual and On Demand from Day One

About a decade ago, I was shocked to find that the laundry facility in my apartment only accepted quarters and offered no change. On top of that, I had to provide a certified check for rent. In many ways, this experience is extremely common as landlords, many well beyond retirement age, have been long resistant to instituting any digital protocols to virtualize pen and paper processes.

The past few years have fundamentally shifted this value equation as a new group of predominantly Millennial and now Generation Z tenants are demanding instantaneous gratification from their landlords. From managing maintenance requests and common space reservations to rental payments, these younger demographics do not want to wait in line and carry a full wallet of loose change. Real estate management is secondary to their lifestyle.

While Instahome is a great example of an end-to-end solution for landlords and tenants, many platforms are now starting with the basics to address these needs; like digitizing maintenance orders, rent payments, laundry services, and parking reservations. Nascent start-ups like Propra and Knock are seeking to fill this gap and are acquiring some of the largest real estate investment trusts in the world as the marketplace becomes eager for these types of solutions.

Baby Boomers: Aging in Place and Loving It!

Just outside of Daytona Beach, Florida lies Latitude Margaritaville. A detached arrangement of townhomes and singles, the community’s developers promise all the fun of Jimmy Buffet’s eponymous songs — every single day. There’s even a frozen concoction machine.

Yet purposely hidden within the development is an array of sensors and technology vendors to manage fall prevention, temperature, and security. The idea is to allow residents to maintain a sense of independence and age in place while acknowledging the realities of life.

Baby Boomers are going to age like no other generation; they are going to want to maintain independence, accessibility, choice, and most importantly, freedom. According to Sotheby’s stratospheric 86% of urban Baby Boomers want to age in place, at home as long as they can; representing a monstrous step change from previous generations.

Fortunately, property technology entrepreneurs are seizing on this opportunity and developing solutions that address these needs. From connected in home sensors to monitor sleeping patterns, biometrics, motion, to even temperature and lighting control, property technology founders are going all in on serving this extremely large and wealthy demographic. The absolute key is to have the technology blend into the background so that lifestyle and freedom of choice and movement are maintained.

A good example of this is the Emfit Sleep Sensor. Emfit is a ballistocardiograph sleep sensor that monitors individual biometrics like heart rate, respiratory rate, and even sleep motion. Installed under a user’s bed, the sensor can monitor health metrics from the home rather than having an individual repeatedly visit the clinical setting.

Early Stages of a Generational Change

We’re only in the early innings for how property technology entrepreneurs are going to fundamentally reinvent a once staid industry. While advancements in technology are powering innovation, a deeper force is at work: demographic change. Specifically, the preferences of Millennials and Generation Z consumers for instantaneous product offerings similar to consumer social applications and the extraordinary desire of Baby Boomers to maintain their independence and freedom as they age.

Alex Gold is the Founder & General Partner of Harvest Venture Partners

Editor’s Note: a version of this article first appeared in Forbes Magazine, June 2021 by the same Author

Walnut is at the forefront of unlocking a $200 Billion opportunity in the generational transformation of insurance.

We’re excited to announce our partnership with Walnut; a breakthrough embedded insurance business. Our partnership brings both growth capital and distribution acceleration with leading challenger Neo Financial to Walnut’s already impressive growth trajectory. Currently offering subscription based Life and Cyber policies, Walnut will soon be expanding to offer a select range of P&C products as well.

As financial technology investors, we are continually monitoring advancements in the insurance vertical. We’ve seen the rise of successful Direct to Consumer (D2C) offerings in the United States like Lemonade and Kin; both of which went public well above $1 Billion in value. We’ve also seen the development of platforms like Qantas Assure in Australia which ties behavioural economics to underwriting and rewards clients for positive behaviour.

Yet in many ways, things haven’t changed. Legacy carriers take months, if not years, to integrate with. Policies advertised as instantaneously binding often just mean an instantaneous phone call from a broker.

It’s no wonder why leading market research firm Ipsos indicated over 70% of respondents would never recommend their insurance policy to a friend; the lowest score ever recorded by the firm.

Walnut aims to change this model by incorporating some of the best elements of emerging marketplace winners across the insurance product stack. By embedding distribution with channel partners, Walnut can reduce acquisition costs by up to 40%. By offering insurance as a subscription product, Walnut is opening up the vertical to new policyholders. And by eventually incorporating behavioural elements into the consumer experience, Walnut aims to reduce their claims loss ratio.

Walnut has built the entire stack for embedded insurance from the ground up; allowing them to integrate with any carrier and distribution partner in a matter of hours. Further, as a Managing General Agent (MGA), Walnut has the capacity to work with carriers to create truly instantaneously binding policies and has already done so with RBC Life Insurance Company in Canada and SBLI in the United States.

Walnut’s model of embedded distribution through channel partners like challenger banks and large financial institutions is aligned with our approach of providing unfair advantage to our portfolio companies in this area. In the short time that Walnut has been working with us, the company has increased their addressable market by close to 2 million customers through partnerships with Neo Financial and others within the Harvest network.

Yet what impressed us the most is Walnut’s founding team. Derek Szeto, Walnut’s Co-founder and CEO, is one of the most accomplished entrepreneurs in Canada. As the Founder of RedFlagDeals, Derek grew the business to become the largest consumer savings platform in the country before selling the business to Yellow Pages in a landmark deal. Adrien Niblock, Walnut’s Co-Founder and CPO, has the product and technical expertise to make this work, spending the past five years as a senior product leader and engineer at FullScript.

We’re very excited about Walnut’s trajectory and being one small part of their journey to creating an easier and better insurance experience that *everyone *will enthusiastically recommend.

In the middle of the night close to 30 years ago, my father woke me up and said: “We have to get to the factory — now!”

We had just spent the past year building out what had quickly become North America’s largest cotton candy manufacturer. We patented our own plastic bag. We signed deals with big box retailers at the time when Wal-Mart was on the cusp of being a thing.

And now, in the middle of the night, our factory was being robbed.

Racing to the factory, we were greeted by the night manager who told us he had caught a disgruntled employee stealing. Calling the authorities, we settled into hours of backup work to not only trace the events but also get the factory back on track.

Just another day at the office, right?

Looking back, I consider myself quite lucky to have gone through that experience. I learned about entrepreneurship through the hardship of it. The grind of it. Every single day.

These are lessons you cannot pick up in business school; or any school for that matter.

After personally investing in over a dozen companies and starting two myself, what’s become clear is that starting a business is an exhilarating journey. However, it can also turn on a dime to become harrowing and frightening.

Fortunately, many founders intuitively understand this. So, they seek out counsel at the start of their business. Many believe that if they get assistance at inception with a group of great advisors, they will be ok.

Unfortunately, too many founders underestimate the longevity of the support they will need. Recruiting isn’t just about finding the right team leaders; it’s about building long term culture. Branding isn’t just about the logo; It’s about ensuring the right messaging and targeting every day. The scope of counsel is often too short term to drive lasting impact and build game changing businesses.

We started Harvest Ventures to solve for that exact reason: to provide generational support to founders along their journey to building breakthrough businesses. Just writing a check and saying you’re there “to help” is no longer enough; you need to be a true lifetime partner with the resources, agility, and capacity to see it through to the end. While we start with the check, we provide unwavering support because, as founders ourselves, we know that at the core of every great company is an extraordinarily dedicated and skilled team.

The Resources

Too often, founders underestimate the resource drain associated with services like recruiting, growth marketing, and accounting. In fact, close to two thirds of all founders admit to repeatedly underestimating the cost of these types of resources and services.

Harvest Venture Partners’ relationship with Harvest Builders, a venture studio platform, ensures that founders have access to path breaking resources at virtually no cost. Harvest Builders has over 40 full time staff dedicated to helping you build your business. In a way, Harvest becomes your* fractional co-founder,* scaling up the gaps in staffing and resources when you need it and ratcheting down when you don’t. These resources are available for the entire lifetime of your business; not just during the earliest stages of your company.

Building a new tech team? Harvest’s recruiting team has successfully built a hiring engine for the largest tech companies in Western Canada; hiring at a pace of about 20 people — a day.

Designing and deploying a new marketing funnel? Harvest’s growth marketing team is amongst the best in the business, having successfully built the marketing plans for over two dozen startups including 4 of the top 10 venture backed businesses in the country.

Yet we do not stop there as we back this up with financial planning, accounting, and back office support so you can focus on going heads down and building product.

The Agility

Harvest is built by founders for founders. That means we understand the speed with which deals need to get done and the counsel you’ll need when you encounter the bumps along the way. We’re operators supporting other operators; it’s just that simple.

Speed is critical in venture. You want to spend less time on deals and more time on building.

That’s why we’re comfortable saying our goal is to close our deals in five days or less from the time of decision with the right team and company. With documentation now pretty much standardized, our focus is squarely where it should be: helping founders succeed.

Our diligence process is also different. Harvest’s core team and close advisors bring close to 50 years of entrepreneurial experience to the table as your direct counsel. We leverage this to help you with introductions to crucial customer connections, key hires, and other investors because we believe the best diligence takes place by being helpful. If we can create value together right out of the gate, who knows what we can achieve in the future.

The Capacity

First time founders focus on product. Second time founders often focus more on scaling distribution. We not only believe that distribution is what differentiates; we have strong conviction it’s the secret unfair advantage underpinning true category winners.

Central to our funding process is providing portfolio companies access to key anchor distribution partners to supercharge growth right out of the gate. By starting the flywheel towards accelerated scale, we can take advantage of embedded distribution channels, lower the cost of customer acquisition, and speed up the product development cycle.

With partners like Neo Financial and ATB and over 20 other financial technology leaders globally, we cover the gamut of the types of relationships we know you’re looking for.

Why We Focus on Founders

At the core of every great company is an extraordinary founding team. A team that is dedicated to making one small dent in the world that could eventually grow to disrupt how we live and work every day. From the earliest days of Silicon Valley and the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor to more recent entrants like Airbnb and Doordash, this is how it’s always been.

And will always be.

We never set out to start a venture fund because we wanted to be fund managers. In fact, we started a venture fund so we could do what we love best: helping great people bring extraordinary things to life. If we can do this for just one founder or just one team, we will have succeeded.

After all, as Walt Disney said:

“You can design and create and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.”

Alex Gold is the Founder & General Partner of Harvest Venture Partners.