An Appetite for Risk with Allen and Eva Lau

Eva is a well-respected entrepreneur-turned-investor and one of the few women leading a venture fund in Canada. She is the Founding Partner of Two Small Fish Ventures, a venture fund that invests globally in early-stage, transformative tech companies. Before starting Two Small Fish Ventures, she worked alongside the co-founders of Wattpad in the company’s early days. She helped nurture and scale the company from its infancy, and grew it to tens of millions of monthly users around the world. Eva is also involved in many incubators and accelerators, such as Creative Destruction Lab at Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto’s Entrepreneurship Hatchery, Ryerson’s DMZ, University of Waterloo’s Velocity and Techstars. With a sharp focus on investing in companies with strong network effects as their defensibility, Eva has created the ASSET framework that many entrepreneurs and accelerators have adopted in their developing business strategies. Eva is regarded as an expert in this area.

Allen Lau is the CEO and co-founder of Wattpad, a global multi-platform entertainment company and the world’s leading social storytelling platform, where he leads the company’s vision to entertain and connect the world through stories. A leader in Canada’s technology sector and startup ecosystem, Allen is a member of the Canadian Council of Innovators, a lobby group that advances the interests of Canadian technology companies at all levels of government. He is also the co-founder of Two Small Fish Ventures, alongside his wife Eva. 

“We listened to our users and understood their intrinsic needs. We allowed them to be our ambassadors and our marketers and it worked out beautifully.” 

In this week’s episode of the #StartupCanadaPodcast, sponsored by Mastercard, Eva and Allen join us and we cover a ton! Tune in to hear how the two met and what the early days of Wattpad looked like for them, Allen’s first advertising cheque from Google, what excitess Eva as an Angel Investor and why your partners in business (and life) must bring out the best in you. 

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