Kevin Talbot

Kevin has been an entrepreneur, operator and investor in both Canada and the USA for over 25 years. From 1997 until 2010, Kevin was with the venture capital arm of Royal Bank of Canada where he was Vice President of Venture Capital and Managing Director of RBC Venture Partners. He was focused on investments in financial services, SaaS and enterprise software throughout North America. He co-founded Relay Ventures in 2008 with John Albright.

Kevin presently sits on the boards of Prove (formerly Payfone), PubNub, Mojio, Circle, Populus, and Bird Canada. Previously, he served on the boards of Jelli (acquired by iHeartMedia), Xobni (acquired by Yahoo!), Thor Technologies (acquired by Oracle), iPhrase Technologies (acquired by IBM), Inea Corp. (acquired by Business Objects, now SAP), and Tacit Software (acquired by Oracle). He was also an investor and advisor to WiFiSlam (acquired by Apple) and CashEdge (acquired by Fiserv).

Kevin is the author of ‘Strictly Mobile – How The Largest Man-Made Platform in History is Changing Our World’ and was the curator of the Strictly Mobile conference. He is a frequent public speaker and delivered the TEDx talk ‘Hope is Not a Strategy’ before an audience of 2,000 in Brussels in 2014.

Kevin holds an MBA, with distinction, from York University, a BA degree in Strategic Studies and the ICD.D designation from the Institute of Corporate Directors’ Corporate Governance College at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Kevin also held an appointment as Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at the Schulich School of Business (York University) in Toronto.