John Ruffolo isn’t as well-known as some buyers, however he’s very well-known in Canadian enterprise circles. The longtime head of Arthur Andersen’s tech, media, and telecommunications observe, he joined OMERS roughly a decade in the past when a former colleague turned CEO and introduced him aboard the pension big to create a enterprise fund.
The thought was to again essentially the most promising Canadian corporations, and Ruffolo steered the unit into investments just like the social media administration Hootsuite, the not too long ago acquired storytelling platform Wattpad, and the e-commerce platform Shopify, amongst different offers. The final was notably significant, on condition that OMERS owned round 6% of the corporate crusing right into a 2015 IPO that valued it at roughly $1.three billion on the time. Alas, owing to the pension fund’s guidelines, it additionally started steadily promoting that complete stake, at the same time as Shopify’s valued ticked upward. (Its market cap is presently $130 billion.)
Indeed, after serving to OMERS subsequently get a development fairness unit off the bottom, an antsy Ruffolo left to launch his personal fund. Then got here COVID, and as if the pandemic weren’t attempting sufficient, Ruffolo additional underwent a harrowing ordeal final September. An avid bicycle owner, he got down to trip 60 miles one sunny morning on a rustic highway, and was knocked far off his bike by a Mack truck in an accident that shattered most of his bones and left him paralyzed from the waist down.
That sort of one-two punch may drive somebody to the brink. Instead, six months and a number of surgical procedures later, Ruffolo, is present process coaching and remedy and intends to bike sometime once more. He can also be very a lot again to work and simply taking the wraps off his new Toronto-based agency, Maverix Private Equity, which has $500 million to put money into “traditional businesses” that already produce a minimum of $100 million income and are utilizing tech to develop however might use an out of doors investor for the primary time to essentially hit the fuel.
We talked with Ruffolo in regards to the accident and his new fund this morning. You can hear that dialog right here (it begins across the seven-minute mark, and it’s price a pay attention). In the meantime, following are excerpts from that interview, edited evenly for size.
TC: You’re certainly bored with answering the query, however how are you doing?
JR: Well, when anyone says it’s nice to be alive, it is. I really by no means knew how shut I used to be to loss of life, to be trustworthy, till about eight days after the accident. When I requested for my cellphone, simply to sort of see what’s occurring on this planet, there was hundreds of messages coming by means of. And I’m like, ‘What the hell?’
People had been copying numerous articles. I picked off the primary one, and it stated, ‘John suffered a life threatening injury.’ And I’m sort of pondering, ‘Life threatening? Why are they saying that? And the doctors came in and said, ‘Because it was. We thought that you were going to die in the first 48 hours.’ I subsequently spoke to a number of the high physicians [in Canada], and so they don’t perceive why I didn’t die on affect. That sort of scared me just a little bit, however I’m so glad to be alive. And my restoration is way forward of schedule. It was solely inside a few weeks the place I began feeling my legs once more.
TC: You had been principally pulverized, but a current piece about your restoration in The Globe & Mail notes that inside a month or so, you had been again to fascinated by your new fund. Do you suppose you could be . . . a workaholic?
JR: Some individuals name it silly. [Laughs.] For the 2 months, my first reminiscence was worrying about my household and stuff [but] I’ve group of biking pals — we’re referred to as Les Domestiques — who’ve dedicated to biking, and it’s lots of of us who’re buyers, CEOs of huge banks in Canada, we’re all shut pals, [and] all of them got here to cocoon the household to make it possible for nothing went unsuitable.
So in a short time, all of those of us take over each aspect of the household, and the children had been nice, all people was nice. I then had a…
