While being in Vancouver, Canada, I had the pleasure of meeting with Boris Wertz, former COO of Abebooks and founder of VC firm W Media Ventures.
A German native, Wertz moved to Vancouver in 2002 when JustBooks, the company he had founded in Germany, was bought out by Victoria based AbeBooks. Abebooks was recently acquired by Amazon in a long negotiated deal that was rumoured to be in the order of $100 million.
Side note: that estimate was made before the current financial crisis and one could speculate on aggressive last minute negotiations on the part of Amazon.
Through W Media Ventures, Wertz invests primarily in consumer internet opportunities in Western Canada. His portfolio includes companies such as Suite101 (who last year launched a German version), Indochino, Teampages, Techvibes (a local version of Techcrunch), and TripsByTips (German)).
In addition to managing his investments, Wertz works with Munich based Burda Digital Ventures as their ground zero contact person in Vancouver. He is also CEO of Edmonton based Nexopia, a social networking site in which both W Media and Burda co-invested.
When asked about business opportunities for the future, Wertz pointed out 4 main areas where he sees promise:
- Businesses such as Indochino which - although at heart a traditional commerce company - uses internet technologies as a lever to change the rules of traditional commerce.
- Niche marketplaces like Etsy.
- New technologies or methods which enable the production of high quality internet content.
- Niche social networks such as TripsByTips or Teampages.
Given his obvious penchant for social networking sites, I dug a little deeper into his opinions. On internationalization, as exemplified by the German launch of Suite101.de, Wertz commented:
“With over 300 million consumers in North America and the same order of magnitude in Europe, both markets are huge and justify separate investment. And it’s not a double investment since infrastructure such as servers, maintenance, backend functions, etc can be reused”.
On the challenge to monetize such sites, he explained:
“Targeted advertising based on interests and behaviors seems to be the best way to monetize social networks and the recession that we are in for the moment doesn't help this. At the same time, there are additional business models like subscription revenue for premium products (both Nexopia and TeamPages rely on subscription revenues) or selling of virtual gifts that can fill the void”.
Wrapping up our conversation, I was curious to know the reasons for his choice stay and live in Vancouver. Wertz replied:
“In Vancouver and British Columbia in general there are great opportunities. Lots of talent. It’s exciting to be part of this scene to help build companies.”
Comments