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Comment by shuckles | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or Canadian pension plans seem to be involved in a disproportionate share of dubious late stage tech investments? The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan has an extensive Crunchbase page. Are there differences in regulations between the United States and Canada?

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OTPP bought the New Zealand Yellow pages for $US 1.6 billion in 2007[1]. Perfectly timed just as the Internet and Mobile phones took over everything (and just before the GFC hit). Just 3 years later it was a complete mess.[2]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/2007/03/27/nz-yellow-pages-markets-eq...

[2] https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/64397212/yellow-direc...

My god. Even in 2007 one glance at the stack of phone books in any apartment building lobby would have told you how little people were using them even then.

Look up the "Canadian Model".

Canadian Pensions like OTPP are run more like private equity funds and they compensate their employees the same way in order to compete in terms of talent in order to generate deal-flow and deal identification.

Traditionally, this has meant above market returns and is one of the reasons that Canadian pensions are generally well funded.

This highlights the difference:

https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2016/05/17/lessons-f...

Looks like they like to go direct to “save on management fees” and “pursue environmental goals,” so they probably get excluded from good deals.

They’ve been getting 9.6% annually since 1990, so maybe they are on to something with their environmental goals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Teachers'_Pension_Plan

They bought the top of a bunch of (unprofitable) Indian tech startups as well.

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