Inside Investor Arlene Dickinson’s Venturepark for Startups

• Arlene Dickinson is an investor and founded startup ecosystem Venturepark in May 2021.
• Venturepark offers founders, especially women, capital, resources, and space to work.
• Dickinson was inspired by the pandemic and looks for companies that prove they can scale.

When she was 33, Arlene Dickinson was invited to join Venture Communications, a tiny, Calgary-based marketing firm, as a sweat-equity partner, where she told Insider she worked for free. At the time, she said, she was a single mom with four kids, no savings, and no other options. 

Ten years later, she bought out the other partners and took sole ownership of the company. From there, she ran a $100 million venture-capital fund and secured her spot as one of the longstanding investors on the TV show “Dragons’ Den” (the Canadian version of America’s “Shark Tank”), where she’s invested in female-founded companies such as SmartSweets and Drizzle Honey. 

Now, with Venturepark, an ecosystem focused on early- and late-stage businesses in the food and beverage, health and wellness, and personal-care sectors and founded in May 2021, Dickinson plans to accelerate growth for female founders even more. 

“I recently heard there are three phases to life: learning, earning, and returning, and I think I’m at the returning stage right now,” Dickinson said.

One hundred businesses have gone through the accelerator at Venturepark Labs, Dickinson said, with 64 of those businesses being female-led. In 2020, she said accelerator alumni achieved over 150 million Canadian dollars ($116 million) in annual revenue.

Building a startup ecosystem

Six years ago, Dickinson started putting together the idea of Venturepark, although she was met with confusion from others. 

“Eventually, I realized I had to stop talking about it and go do it,” she said. “I needed to make people believe in it. And I had to illustrate it so people could understand it and prove that I was actually doing it.” 

Dickinson acknowledged there’s a lack of access to capital and resources for founders, especially women, with only 2.3% of venture-capital funding going to women-led startups in 2020, according to Crunchbase figures. 

After seeing how painful the pandemic was for businesses, she decided to take further initiative.

In March, Dickinson acquired the female-founded and operated media company The Bullet and content-development agency Newsworthy Co from digital entrepreneur and industry veteran Joanna Track, who now serves as the executive vice president of Venturepark’s media properties.

Venturepark offers businesses capital, a six-month accelerator program, a 20,000-square-foot commercial kitchen innovation hub, a content-development platform, and marketing and strategy agencies that cater to each aspect of an entrepreneur’s need to grow their business. While capital and resources were previously provided through Venture Communications, Venturepark expands and rebrands agency and venture-capital verticals under one roof, with Dickinson overseeing it all. 

“If you can let these businesses operate in a way that they are good at, whether they are a nonprofit or make their money through earnings, ROI, marketing — if you allow entrepreneurs to collaborate, learn from each other, and share in that success, then you create an ecosystem of real value,” Dickinson said. “I think this is the future of business.”

Giving female founders a space to come together

Alumni like organic meal brand Chickapea are now multimillion-dollar businesses with products available across North America. Shelby Taylor, Chickapea’s founder, told Insider that the accelerator program focused on branding, working with brokers, gaining distribution, and sales. She said she was also paired with an experienced female entrepreneur who helped her develop an employment contract and discussed challenges faced as a mother and entrepreneur.

“Arlene signed her first investment deal with Chickapea just two days after I had my second child and never questioned my ability to build the business,” Taylor said, adding that the pressure to be a full-time entrepreneur, full-time mother, and house manager can be crippling because “there is just no space for ourselves in our own lives.”

According to a study from consulting firm Mckinsey & Company, burnout is escalating “much faster among women than among men,” with one in three women saying they have considered downshifting or leaving the workforce this year, which is up from one in four who said the same at the start of the pandemic. In addition, the food and beverage industry sees only one in five females holding a C-suite position. 

According to a 2018 Boston Consulting Group analysis, when women-led startups get funded, they deliver higher revenue with more than twice as much per dollar invested.

“Women look to Arlene as an example of what’s possible,” Taylor said. 

Focusing on businesses with strong leaders and an ability to scale

Dickinson said her father, a former educator, taught her to have an opinion about things, think critically, defend herself, and persuade people instead of buying into what they say. She wants entrepreneurs to do the same.

“If you want to be connected in business strategy, marketing, and life, then you have to be an observer of human condition and the zeitgeist of what’s going on around you. You have to be of the world,” Dickinson said.

She’s also hyper-aware of the value of time and money, especially when building a business.

“I didn’t have savings until my late thirties, early forties,” she said. Her budgeting rule of thumb is to “save 10%, give 10% to a cause you care about, and the remaining 80% is how you live your life,” she said.

Her main draw for an investment is the people behind it. “When you start to invest in people, that human capital you are investing in is so integral to the success of our world. It’s people you hedge against the world, not stocks,” she said.

Dickinson said Venturepark in particular is drawn to businesses that need help scaling.

“It’s about creating value in the long run, which is why useful, sustainable, and health-conscious businesses are ones we invest in,” she said.