Boris Wertz, who has invested in hundreds of companies, is still seeking out new opportunities.
He most looks for two things: A passionate entrepreneur and an emerging niche subsector.
Wertz is one of this year’s inductees to BC Tech’s BC Innovators Hall of Fame and he said he knows what it is like to be a young entrepreneur in a fast-growing niche sector.
That combination of strengths is what he had in 1999, when he and four university buddies co-founded JustBooks in Germany.
The concept started when they had trouble finding used books to buy. They decided to build an e-commerce website that sold a wide range of books.
The business was such a roaring success that, two years later, the quintet sold their venture to Victoria-based AbeBooks.
Wertz moved to Victoria a year after that.
He continued to work with the bookseller in his role as COO at AbeBooks, and sales grew. By 2007, Amazon.com Inc. came calling with an offer to buy the venture for more than US$100 million.
Wertz was one of many principals at the company, so his stake was small, but not insignificant.
Then 34 years old, he used proceeds from the acquisition by Amazon to get him started in a second career, as an angel investor.
He began to invest money into dozens of companies—first $25,000 here and $50,000 there.
Some of the startups that caught his eye at the time, such as Indochino, went on to find significant success.
In 2012, he founded the venture capital company Version One Ventures LLC, and he started courting other investors to provide money to invest in funds that he oversaw.
Version One has grown to have six funds, with about $250 million under management.
It has invested in more than 100 startups across a range of geographies, with some investments at $250,000, and others between $500,000 and $1 million.
"Dapper Labs was more like a $1 million investment," Wertz told BIV of an equity purchase back in 2017 or 2018 that Version One still owns.
By late 2022, Dapper Labs, a blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) venture, had grown in value to around US$7.6 billion.
Undoubtedly, that value has lost some of its lustre with the collapse in interest in NFTs, but Wertz said that this is the way it goes with investing in upstart private companies.
“We’re big supporters of the company,” he said of Dapper Labs. “Innovation markets have ups and downs. Sometimes there is too much hype, and then there is disillusionment.”
He said he usually keeps his stake in companies until they go public or get bought out.
Version One, starting in 2017, invested a total of US$2 million over two rounds in Coinbase Global Inc. It then exited the position in 2021, after that company went public, Wertz said.
Sometimes Version One does sell its shares when a venture is still privately held—and sometimes that move has been regrettable.
Version One in 2019, for example, sold to TCV its stake in the privately held, cloud-based legal technology firm Clio, which has a head office in Burnaby.
Clio then went on to land several huge financings, including the staggering US$900 million venture-capital raise announced July 23 that put its valuation at more than US$3 billion.
“I still do angel investing but in things that are not competitive to Version One,” Wertz said.
“Version One is very focused on software startups. If there was a consumer packaged goods company or a company in India, where Version One does not invest, I still write the odd angel cheque, but 90 per cent of my energy is focused on Version One.”
Given that artificial intelligence is the zeitgeist of the current era, it is no surprise that this is an area where Wertz has been focused.
One investment, for example, is in Ada Support Inc., which uses AI to automate customer support with chat bots, emails and voice assistance.
“Today almost all of our portfolio companies are using AI to automate aspects of their business,” he said.
BC Tech president and CEO Jill Tipping said this year’s inductees into the BC Innovators Hall of Fame all have deep respect from the province’s entrepreneur-founder community.
“It is always impressive when people not only have created wealth and created value, but championed innovation throughout their careers and earned the respect and admiration of those that they've touched along the way,” she said.
Entrepreneurs such as Indochino co-founder Kyle Vucko have told BIV through the years that Wertz has operated somewhat in a mentorship capacity.
“Boris is a great example—probably the best example in modern times in B.C.—of someone who had all the skills required to build a business, but then was also successful in transitioning to being a highly successful investor who was able to identify the business opportunities in different, very different, areas of tech," Tipping said.
Ray Walia, and Dr. Allen Eaves and Dr. Connie Eaves have also been announced as 2024 inductees into the BC Innovators Hall of Fame. Including this year’s honourees, 55 individuals have been recognized by the initiative, which aims to recognize the role of innovation in B.C.'s economy, and the leaders that have left an important legacy of innovation in the province.
