Sean Wise

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Sean Wise (born September 23, 1970) is a Canadian mentor capitalist who helps young firms grow. He is an international business speaker, a columnist for The Globe and Mail, an author, a partner at Ryerson Futures Inc, and a consultant for CBC on Dragons’ Den. He mentors many startups and shares business expertise widely.

Education: Wise studied Aerospace Engineering and Economics at Carleton University. He earned a law degree and an MBA from the University of Ottawa and completed a PhD in Business from the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow.

Career highlights: He began as a lawyer and is a member of the Upper Canada Law Society. He has served as an ambassador for the Toronto Stock Exchange, chaired the Canadian Venture Forum selection committee, and chairs boards of several venture-capital-backed and publicly traded Canadian companies. He was a director at Ernst & Young, where he helped found Canada’s Venture Capital Advisory Group.

Teaching and mentoring: Wise hosts The Naked Entrepreneur, a blog-podcast-vodcast, and is a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). He is a partner at Ryerson Futures, part of the Founders First Accelerator with TMU’s Digital Media Zone (DMZ), and he advises TMU’s DMZ, running pitch sessions and workshops for more than 125 incubated companies.

Books and writing: He has written more than five books and a graphic novel called Penance. His titles include Wise Words: Lessons in Entrepreneurship & Venture Capital (2007), How to be a Business Superhero (2008), Hot or Not: How to Know If Your Business Idea Will Fly or Fail (2011), and Startup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day Job (2015, with Brad Feld). Startup Opportunities aims to help entrepreneurs decide if they should quit their day job to start a business and was praised by the Financial Post.

Media and impact: Wise has written for The Huffington Post and The Globe and Mail about entrepreneurship and topics like the talent triangle in management teams. He has also published in The Journal of Private Equity. His notable academic work includes a study on value co-creation through collective intelligence in the public sector.

TV and entrepreneurship content: He creates and hosts The Naked Entrepreneur TV, filmed at Ryerson, in collaboration with the Ted Rogers School of Management and the RTA School of Media. The show features Canadian entrepreneurs and has aired on Rogers TV Toronto, the Oprah Winfrey Network, and as a podcast on iTunes.

Awards: In 2014, Wise was named Central Canada Mentor of the Year and later won National Mentor of the Year at the Startup Canada Awards, recognizing his contributions to Canada's entrepreneurial ecosystem.