EDMONTON CHAPTER

Welcome to the Edmonton chapter of FEI Canada.

Our chapter provides a great forum for peer networking by CFOs and other senior financial executives who want to meet quality people and share solutions to the crucial issues that confront them daily.

Our FEI Canada dinner meetings, professional development seminars, and informal outings focus on the highest quality speakers and entertainment to facilitate the flow of new ideas and perspectives, as well as sound career and business decisions.

About Our Chapter

Eye on FEI

Edmonton Chapter Member Spotlight

FEI Canada boasts more than 1,100 members nationwide. This professional network brings together financial executives to enhance their professional success, to advocate on issues that affect the finance function in Canada, and to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and experience among its members. Eye of FEI shares a glimpse into the accomplished members that make up our Edmonton Chapter. Nominated by another member based on their accomplishments, leadership, and shared values, this monthly Member Spotlight uncovers the personal benefit of membership through a thoughtful Q&A.  

This month’s nomination is by Larry Brownoff, FEI Edmonton Membership Chair and National Representative, and Director, Member Relations, CPA Alberta. As Membership Chair, Larry has dedicated the last five years to the development of strategies and processes to grow the Edmonton Chapter’s membership and sharing those at the National level to help other chapters recruit, onboard and retain FEI members.

May Member Spotlight:

Tim Lynn, CPA, CFA, CBV, Co-Founder Startup TNT

A week away from the FEI Canada 2024 Annual Conference hosted in Edmonton, we are proud to celebrate Tim Lynn as our May Eye on FEI member spotlight! Tim is a champion of Edmonton startups, many who are pushing the boundaries of innovation and transformation in their field. His investment leadership at Startup TNT has put many of these local seed-stage entrepreneurs on the map. 

Tim is a home-grown Edmontonian with a Finance/Accounting degree from the UofA. After graduating, he joined Sensassure, a very early-stage startup creating innovative technologies to improve senior care. After helping bring the company to a successful exit, Tim came back to Edmonton to work in mid-market corporate finance with Deloitte. This is where he built up his skill at helping others sell their businesses and where he received his CPA, CFA, and CBV. Today, he is the co-founder of Startup TNT, responsible for leading the capital side of the business. It is here that he has become one of the most prolific early-stage startup dealmakers in the country.

Startup TNT started five years ago as a weekly happy hour gathering point for the startup community to get together, have fun, make friends, and build companies. From this, the Investment Summit was born - local investors working together over 8 weeks to make an investment into an awesome local seed-stage startup. Through these Investment Summits, Startup TNT has raised over $13M for nearly 100 companies and is recognized as the most active pre-seed/seed-stage investor in Western Canada. 

Q: What inspired you to co-found Startup TNT?

Raising the $1M round at Sensassure was structurally challenging - too much for friends and family, but also too small for venture capital. Local angel/startup investors need to fill that gap, but in less developed ecosystems like Canada, or especially Edmonton, there are not enough active early-stage investors. So, our startups leave to more developed capital markets like the US. It is also hard to be a traditional angel investor - doing solo diligence and writing $50K+ cheques are both really time consuming and requires a relatively large net worth. We want to help awesome people build awesome companies right from their hometown, and for each city to succeed. And selfishly, I want to help create jobs so that my super sharp friends have something interesting to come back home to in Edmonton and build here!

Q: How would you describe the current startup environment in Edmonton?

Like in most communities, Edmontonians understand that it is important to be collaborative to compete on the global market - we are much stronger together than separate. Plus, Edmonton’s business community operates like a big-small town on handshakes and being small enough to know everybody. This culture permeates into the venture community. 

From an industry perspective, Edmonton has fantastic research and technical depth through the University of Alberta and life sciences community. So, most of the next generation of startups are deep tech, especially life sciences. Some examples of these deep tech companies are DrugBank, Future Fields, PulseMedica, 48Hour Discovery, Medo.ai (just acquired), G2V Optics, and more – most of which TNT has invested into. On top of this, there are a host of organizations built around this important life sciences community - API, Health Cities, Startup TNT’s Life Sciences Summit, Nucleate, and others.

To the point of a collaborative community - because it’s challenging for traditional investors to have the technical depth required to invest in life sciences, Startup TNT’s group diligence model helps bridge that gap, both in Life Sciences but also more broadly in all industries of startup investing. Through that collaborative model, we have been able to build conviction to invest in companies that otherwise are inaccessible to investors.

Q: How does being a member of the FEI Edmonton Chapter support entrepreneurship?

The Edmonton market is mostly private market. This means that a lot of the FEI Edmonton Chapter members are entrepreneurs themselves or work 1:1 with folks who started their own companies. This leads to a lot of sympathy and curiosity for the founder journey, a business path that is both possible and lucrative. With that, a bunch of the FEI members in Edmonton are investors in local startups whether directly or indirectly through TNT! The speakers, events, and, of course, other FEI members provide a network of engaged entrepreneurs.

Q: The 2024 FEI Canada Annual Conference in Edmonton is in less than a month - from June 5-7. What are you looking forward to the most?

I am excited for the opportunity to meet with and learn from the sharp folks who are coming in and sharing what works for them in other markets. Of course, I’m also excited for Edmonton to showcase what is going on here and what makes this city such a great spot to build both a company and a family. Edmonton is really understated and does not have a deep professional services market due to the lack of public companies, meaning senior level finance talent has a lot of opportunity here. So, I’m most excited to ultimately hear down the line that somebody is moving to Edmonton because of what they saw and who they met through the conference!