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Theresa Evanoff is the Executive Director of Global Angel Investor Network (GAIN), a non-profit organization based in Mississauga, and Canada’s first global-facing angel investment network. GAIN connects immigrant and underrepresented Canadian founders nationwide to investors worldwide who believe in the power of Canadian innovation. She is a seasoned executive with over 20 years of leadership experience in strategy, go-to-market execution, and innovation across Asia, Europe and Canada.
A serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of global business strategy experience, Tehmina Chaudhry is the force behind one of Canada’s most consequential entrepreneurial institution. She founded the Canada Startup Association (CSA), a national nonprofit empowering immigrant and underrepresented founders to build, scale, and globalize impactful businesses from Canada and most recently launched GAIN (Global Angel Investor Network), the only global-facing angel network in Canada, connecting underrepresented founders to investment capital across borders.
Their work sits at the intersection of policy, capital, and community, with a singular focus: ensuring that newcomers and underrepresented entrepreneurs don’t just survive in Canada’s startup landscape, but lead it.
Theresa, Tehmina, and I chat about how we solve early-stage capital for immigrant founders, and:
Where most immigrant capital in Canada sits today, and why that's a missed opportunity
Why Tehmina says immigration in Canada is now an economic issue
The stats that flip the immigrant-as-burden narrative on its head
How every investment is a vote for the world you want your kids to grow up in
What the GAIN Angel Investing Academy will teach first-time investors
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Chapters
0:00 There is no obstacle
0:19 Intro
1:01 Reframing the immigrant narrative around economic contribution
5:14 The two-way street between Canada and the newcomer
6:28 Failing miserably and what came out of it
11:50 Why GAIN exists and the access to capital problem
14:13 Early stage capital is relational
17:19 Activating the immigrant angel investor
20:10 Inside the GAIN Angel Investing Academy
23:18 Building infrastructure that outlasts the founders
29:58 Advice for the invisible immigrant founder
35:32 Outro
Some takeaways
The missing angel investor in the immigrant community is a gargantuan gap in Canadian venture. The capital, risk tolerance, and business understanding exists. What's missing is a process that turns a successful immigrant family into a first-time cheque writer. We've spent decades focused on getting newcomers housed and employed through newcomer support programs, which mattered, but the next era of the work has to figure out the wealth deployment layer.
Every dollar an immigrant family allocates is a vote in what kind of country they want their children to grow up in. That's a different motivation than maximum return, and a more honest one. The cultural diversity Canada is famous for can't be built only through arrival numbers. It can also be built through who gets to write the first cheque on the next generation's ideas.
The immigrant experience and narrative in Canada has been stuck in a help-and-support lens. 25 percent of net-new jobs in the last decade came from immigrant-owned businesses, and 40 percent of all Canadian entrepreneurs going forward will be immigrants. The settlement-and-support story has crowded out the contribution story for so long that it drives our public policy and narratives. We need to move the conversation on immigration to an economic one.
Links
Where to find Theresa and Tehmina:
The Newcomers resources
Want to work with us? Check out The Newcomers Media Kit.
Want more immigrant interviews? Listen to The Newcomers Podcast.
Looking to find out what Canadian immigration program you’re eligible for? Check out our Who’s Eligible For series.
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