Whitecap Venture Partners Essay

1021 Words5 Pages

Whitecap Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital fund investing in high-growth companies. Whitecap specializes in three verticals: food technology, medical technology, and information and communication technology (ICT). To date, Whitecap has had 3 funds. The first two, Whitecap I and II, had extremely impressive internal rates of return, at over 75 and 30 percent, respectively. The firm is now halfway through their third fund, Whitecap III, and is looking ahead to a fourth fund, to be started at the completion of the current fund. Whitecap VP has had no problem attracting potential entrepreneurs with whom to partner; the goal is not to attract more deals. Rather, Whitecap wants to invest in higher-quality deals, ones that will produce …show more content…

Whitecap VP will be able to utilize CBC Radio 1’s wide listener base across Canada through podcasts and radio. It is projected that daily time spent listening to the radio in Canada is 128.3 minutes in 2018 (Statista, n. d.). Across the major cities of Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Calgary, CBC Radio 1 has 891,900 unique listeners over the course of a singular day that are exposed to the broadcast for at least one minute (Numeris, 2018). Having a podcast series featured on the CBC Radio 1 website would also provide the opportunity to harness the massive listener base across those four major cities by working to agree to a deal that has the podcast episodes aired. While the podcast platform is an option, it would be beneficial to integrate the 61% radio audio market share with the smaller 3% podcast share (Edison Research & Rain News, n. d.). Shifting to the American market, where podcast listening has seen 44% of Americans ever listen to a podcast, 26% have listened to a podcast in the last month, and 17% have listened to a podcast in the last week, equating to an estimated 48 million total listeners. Of the 48 million who listen to podcasts on a weekly basis, 80% of those people listened to most, if not all, of the episode chosen. These listeners average seven different podcasts a week with just over 4 in 5 preferring to keep the podcast at a normal speed to hear all the content offered (Edison Research, 2018). The American podcast market currently has a handful of venture capital firms offering insight into the industry. However, Whitecap has a distinct characteristic to be leveraged against these well-established companies—it is a smaller, Canadian firm that offers a different culture and perspective. Podcast listeners are looking for content and perspective in the different series they listen to. Whitecap is in the unique situation to