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SMALL BUSINESS MONTH - SUppLEMENT TO THE WINNIpEg FrEE prESS - WEdNESdAy, OcTOBEr 22, 2014
Ambitious entrepreneur finds niche in getting
projects finAnced
Vancouver’s Matt Toner can talk the talk, and backs his startup pitches with solid proposals, reputable specialists
Matt Toner of Zeros 2 Heroes in Vancouver, B.C. Zeros 2 Heroes is a digital media company that’s won a City of Vancouver award for business innovation. They find, finance, develop and deploy a new industry innovation every year. Photo by Arlen Redekop
media campaigns. ARGo is to launch on Hootsuite’s platform this month. Toner has had notable success attracting seed-stage financing from private investors and sources such as the Canada Media Fund. The next — and bigger — challenge will be turning his early stage products into mainstream businesses. The former Bank of Canada economist, sometime playwright and 2013 NDP candidate for Vancouver-False Creek believes his success at raising early-stage financing comes from “the discipline to embrace failure instead of kidding yourself that it’s somehow going to work.” A lot of digital operators “go in hell-for- leather” and don’t realize they’re stuck in a rut until it is too late. “We have this model of an idea a year,” Toner said. “We know we have to move on to the next idea if this is not worthwhile.” Toner knows what he’s talking about. His first startup, We Media, failed spectacularly. “Four guys and a card table in a back office. Eighty employees. We raised $25 million, did presentations at the White House,” he said. “A year later? Gone.” We Media was to be a social network for people with disabilities. “It failed for the same reason that a lot of dot-coms failed back in 2000,” Toner said. “Too much money, too little common sense.” Toner is no fan of (CBC television show) Dragons’ Den-styled pitching for funds. “People have five minutes to tell their story and use 10 PowerPoint slides to convince you? It’s turned into an exercise for its own sake,” he said. Instead, Toner customizes a five-page proposal for three people, agencies or investors, and augments each project team with specialists with notable track records. His New York Rolodex helps. This summer, Zeros 2 Heroes won a City of Vancouver Award of Excellence for business innovation (Creative — Under 25 employees category.) Toner started the company in 2006 with funds from two angel investors and has leveraged that money ever since. He has about 17 employees. Each year, he starts with about four new ideas, knowing only one is likely to go through early-stage development. Toner seeks private and Canada Media Fund money to create an initial team of three or four of his staff. “We pull together a team of expert specialists to break a lot of eggs,” he said. “The road to success is paved with broken eggs.” jennylee@vancouversun.com
Jenny Lee Vancouver Sun A nyone can have a great idea, but few can weave the magic to get those ideas financed. It seems Matt Toner can. For the past four years, Toner, 45, has found financing to develop one ambitious new idea a year. In the past two years alone, he has raised $3 million. Toner is president of Zeros 2 Heroes Media, a small Vancouver digital media incubator that seeks ways to connect film, TV and games content creators with their audiences. His projects range from a social media tracking application to a TV show, and an application to help theatres use crowdsourcing to choose films. Toner comes up with project ideas by listening for complaints, a lesson he learned as vice-consul with Canada’s trade commission in New York in the late 1990s. His 2014 refinement? “Ideally, there’s a pain point, and ideally it’s one shared by people with big bank accounts,” Toner said. WannaWatch. It, his theatre crowdsourcing application, for example, grew from his discovery that most independent cinemas fill from 15 per cent to 20 per cent of available seats from Mondays through Thursdays. “Our solution tries to better manage that surplus inventory through a crowd- distribution model that lets audiences help program screens,” he said. Toner was sitting on an entertainment industry panel when an American film distributor and fellow panellist described the problem. “I grabbed my napkin in front of the water jug and started frantically scribbling this idea,” he said. By the end of the guy’s talk, Toner was ready to pitch. Three years and $1.5 million later, WannaWatch. It helps audiences find movies they want to watch, plan movie nights with friends and crowdsource choices to local theatres. Emerging Pictures, a network of 150 U.S. independent cinemas, intends to use the service to screen new, classic and cult films across the United States. Another project, Animism, is an animated children’s TV show with related interactive video games, mobile games and graphic novels. Created entirely in Vancouver, the first season aired on APTN last year and was profitable. Season 2 is in development. Toner’s social media analytics application, ARGo, started with the observation that most conventional entertainment producers and executives need a better measure of return on investment from social
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