Flightpath Ventures relaunches as members-only network
An organization that started in 2012 as a venture capital fund is rebranding as a community for growth-focused innovators.
The new version of Flightpath Ventures is a private club focused on leadership, mentorship, and apprenticeship, where "members come together to build and scale companies, while impacting the communities they're based in." It is still becoming its new iteration, co-founder Ken Bautista told Taproot.
"Right now we're in early access, which is also bringing some of our brain-trust members in, so we're actually creating content with some of our members," he said. The idea is to "co-create content that we can distribute wider, so it doesn't just require in-person or a one-to-one type of engagement," he added, "because with all these people, time is always a limiting factor."
Bautista wants to provide an alternative to open-to-all tech meetups that already exist in the ecosystem, such as Edmonton Unlimited's Community Coffee or the many options collected by Technology Alberta. Flightpath should be a "curated" environment, he said, where entrepreneurs with traction can meet peers at their level, as well as more established mentors — and even investors.
"The first development of Flightpath is: Can we bring together 100 awesome brains and builders? Some are founders, some are investors, some don't identify with either one of those things, but they want to make something happen," Bautista said. "You have to build relationships with them, so then they can all become allies, and then want to invest in each other. … It's a two-way street."
Memberships in Flightpath go for $49.99 per month at the "Community" level and $299.99 per month at the "Builders" level. The distinction between the two is a matter of accountability rather than hierarchy, Bautista said.
"If you're a Builders member, you can either be an early-stage company or emerging or a growth one. And then you have access to things like our core groups, which are small accountability groups. I kind of think of them as therapy groups," he said. "They're very peer-minded, with this idea that you have someone that is at the same stage as you in a small group that you keep working with."
Between 30 and 35 members have signed on for the early-access version of Flightpath, Bautista said, though he declined to name any. "Their names will start popping up," he said.
Flightpath's original incarnation was co-founded by Bautista and Cam Linke (now CEO of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) in 2012 as a venture capital fund connected to Startup Edmonton. It seeded Edmonton success stories such as DrugBank, Poppy Barley, and Samdesk.
