Reza Satchu is relevant to both the tech crowd and the many matrons of Rosedale who read me. He also made major incursions into the world of money management, though he has lately retrenched. In 2020, over the course of 4 posts, I tore down the myths surrounding Reza Satchu and wrote about some of his crappy deals and products. A good chunk of my writing was devoted to debunking Reza's origin myth of selling his "first startup" for nearly $1B:
He now de-emphasizes this particular experience. Big phoneys have trouble keeping their stories straight and there is a revealing tell in a case study Harvard Business School wrote with Reza's collaboration. That case centers on Reza's thought process last year on whether to sell his student housing business. Apparently, he regretted selling his previous storage real estate venture for $110m back in 2007, because he felt that could have been a billion-dollar business. On that earlier episode, he's quoted as saying:
“At that early stage in my founder career, the pressure was on me to get a “win”, to prove I could build a successful business in a traditional sense and sell it for a good return. And at the time, life-changing money like that was a significant motivator."
This quote only makes sense if he had not started, several years earlier, a startup he sold for "nearly $1B." My posts had no impact - a few weeks after I wrote them, he was appointed a lecturer at Harvard Business School. My posts did have some impact in Reza's native Kenya, where he is now reviled as the "Som Seif of Mombasa." They have a strong culture of commercial ethics over there, shame on you North Americans. In this post, I will briefly touch on Reza's tech accelerator Next Canada and his ties to Harvard Business School. I will have more to say about the student housing business later on in another piece.
Next Canada and Reza Satchu
Since it was founded in 2010, graduates of his tech accelerator Next Canada have collectively raised $5.7B in capital, created 4,000 new jobs and delivered $17 and 83 cents in ROI.
There was a press release last year from Next Canada that was headlined thusly:
With anything involving Reza, you have to parse things carefully. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, Tim and Reza are not married to each other. You read things like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has $6B in assets and you always wonder, where did Ms. Chan get her billions? But if Tim and Reza were married, Reza must have contributed more on the domestic front, because $10m of the $11m comes from Tim. He was a long standing executive at Brookfield. I don’t think Tim would enjoy being married to Reza, he’d come home from a hard day of wheeling and dealing and Reza would be busting his balls about the need to “seek positions of discomfort.” To be fair, Reza has given over $5m to Next Canada, when including all his previous contributions.
I don’t want to detract from what Next Canada might have contributed to creating a culture of entrepreneurship in Canada. But when I look at the list of success stories that Next Canada has launched, I mostly recognize 2 standouts: Ada and Blue J. Ada, last valued at US$1.2B was co-founded by Mike Murchison, 4 years after taking part in a Next program. Blue J was last valued at $300m and was founded by Benjamin Alarie, a professor at U of T. Next Canada has been around since 2010.
Harvard Business School and Reza
Reza Satchu is a bona fide professor (”Senior Lecturer”) at Harvard Business School. He teaches a course he developed called the Founder Mindset. His scholarship focuses on a special group of founders known as Total Phoney Baloneys. He has written case studies on Wes Hall and Kevin O’Leary. Thanks to his connection to Reza, KO is now an “Executive Fellow” of HBS, whatever that is. Whoever founded HBS is rolling over in their grave, as is KO’s arch-nemesis Mark McQueen (in a manner of speaking).
Reza Satchu recently brought his “close friend” actress Reese Witherspoon to speak at Harvard. That’s Reese Witherspoon of Legally Blonde fame and “you’re about to find out who I am” infamy.
You can use this website's search function to find my other posts about Reza Satchu. There are 4 previous posts:
