For the company that does not fit a thesis yet.

Most venture firms decline what falls outside their thesis, and most of the time that is correct. It is also how a category gets missed for the four or five years in which entering it was cheap.

Gord Ventures exists to catch that case. Where a company fits one of the group’s verticals it goes to that vertical’s Ventures arm, close to the deal flow and the operators. Where it fits none, it is underwritten here rather than declined for want of a category — and if enough of them accumulate in one direction, that is how the group learns a vertical is forming.

Two of the group’s current verticals started this way.