Have desire to build with unwavering commitment

**Justin Smith-Lorenzetti** (0:02)
Investing is not a little bit different from, you know, maybe choosing a partner in life. If you're hymming and hawing, and you're trying to find ways to make this work in your brain, it's a no.
Everything in this asset class is an undeniable yes, or it's an obvious no. If you're on the fence, run away. I think that's the way we see the world.

**Gopi Rangan** (0:25)
You are listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur, a podcast for founders with ambitious ideas. Venture capital investors and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful and authentic stories to help you realize your vision.
Welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I'm your host, Gopi Rangan. My guest today is Justin Smith-Lorenzetti. He is the Managing Director at Intact Private Capital based in Canada. Intact is an early stage venture capital investor. They also have a growth fund. In addition, they also invest as limited partners in venture capital firms.
We're going to talk to Justin about Intact. What kind of founders do they like to invest in? What's their role in the ecosystem? Talk about both early stage and growth stage investments.
And some trends that he's excited about. Justin, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur.

**Justin Smith-Lorenzetti** (1:27)
Gopi, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

**Gopi Rangan** (1:30)
So you are based in Canada. You're from Canada. And probably one of the most prominent venture capital investors in Canada.

**Justin Smith-Lorenzetti** (1:37)
In the insure tech space, definitely. But we do have an ecosystem up here that we can touch on a little bit as well. But yes, I am born and raised in Montreal. So I grew up speaking French. But I've been in Toronto for, I guess, 12 or 13 years now, which is a different feel entirely. But yeah, proud Canadian.

**Gopi Rangan** (1:55)
Well, we are co-investors in Coterie, and we are both focused on the insure tech space. But before we go into all of that, can you walk us through your career and your journey? Like, how did you choose to become a venture capital investor?

**Justin Smith-Lorenzetti** (2:08)
Sure. So I, throughout my undergrad, I guess, did the typical finance tracks. I did one summer investment banking and didn't like it. And, you know, me, I desperately wanted to actually get into consulting out of my undergrad, which didn't work out all that well. I did the typical dinners and whatever else as you try to get those entry-level positions. And as it turned out, I wasn't very good at it, probably too opinionated.
So fast forward to the tail end of my senior year in university, and I actually wasn't sitting there with a job offer anywhere until I got an offer to join the insurance industry. So I joined Intact in a sort of innovation consultant type role. We still do it to this day. Intact is great at actually hiring young folks, giving them an opportunity to work on different projects, try to bring in some of the outside information happening outside of our walls into the core business.
So within a few months of being at Intact, I was given the opportunity to identify some disruptive trends, most namely what was happening in the sharing economy. So at the time, Uber, if we remember 11 odd years ago now, I was making headlines everywhere, and it was no different in Canada. The narrative was, don't send your children into Uber, it's dangerous, et cetera. Obviously, the taxi lobbies are spending a lot of money pushing certain narratives. But me, as a young 20-something, I was using it all the time. So I was actually pushing Intact to try to actually create an insurance product for Uber. And I was given the opportunity by our CEO and executive teams at the time to put a bit of a plan in place in terms of how we would actually design new insurance products.
Given I was early in my career, there were, of course, sort of executive presences on top of me. But we ended up designing new insurance products for Uber as Android Canada, working in the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Transportation, Ministry of Insurance, etc. That was a great project. Ended up bringing in a large account and ended up, I think, a little bit putting Intact on the map in terms of companies that are eager to engage with startups. Fast forward a few months later, Turo was coming to Canada, called Relay Riots at the time. And we decided to run the exact same playbook, but this time we chose to invest in Turo Series B at the same time. So my career as a VC sort of, I landed in it. I was afforded the opportunity quickly thereafter, sort of formalize the practice or help formalize the practice. And after a year of being at Intact, I was sort of employee number one, what we used to call Intact Ventures, our first inaugural fund being $250 million.