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John Skinner of Painted Rock Estate and Meridian Mining (TSXV:MNO) In Spring 2008, mining magnate Frank Giustra’s cell phone rang. John Skinner was on the line, looking to sell a large block in Giustra’s company New Gold to fund a 'side venture’. Skinner had worked two decades funding mining deals with Yorkton Securities and Canaccord Genuity. After a string of wins in the mid 2000’s mining boom he wanted to retire from finance and pursue his dream to build a winery. Skinner’s ‘side venture’ was already staked. He’d found an idyllic property on the north shore of BC’s Skaha Lake in 2003, bought the land, and begun it’s transformation. Giustra instructed Skinner to offer the New Gold stock at a set time, and with a few keystrokes and a blip on the screen, it was gone. As fast as Giustra bought his stock that day in 2008 Skinner left the investment industry. The timing turned out to be good. As the stock market reeled from the global financial crisis Skinner built Painted Rock Estate...

It was early 2016, and I doubted I would ever be able to afford a home in Vancouver. Six months later I bought a beautiful house with a garden big enough to practice my short game. I am a scavenger of the mining market. I look for ten baggers with less risk than pure exploration. Out of favour assets trading well below historical investment, ideally dropped by majors changing focus. Add skilled new management and good things happen if you time it right. My down payment came from a handful of startups following this formula. K92 Mining was one of them. They acquired a gold project from Barrick, the world’s top producer, for pennies on the dollar in a bear market. Around K92’s 2016 IPO I bought stock at 35 cents a share plus warrants at 45 cents. It reached $8.95 last week. - that’s a 50X return including warrants. You may have seen our reports on Skeena Resources ( 1 , 2 , 3 ). Like K92, Skeena brought new life to an old Barrick mine and has seen its share price 10X since. Sabina Gold ...

Entrepreneur Norm Francis was sitting pretty during the Dot Com boom, and even attended a private dinner once at Bill Gates’ house. Francis co-founded and sold a top accounting software for the early personal computer era, then created one of the leading Customer Relationship Management (“CRM”) software companies. But his biggest venture success began as a bust, and provides a valuable lesson to budding entrepreneurs: play the long game, and do right by your investors. A tablet software startup Francis co-founded in 1991, PenMagic, attracted backing from famed venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (“Kleiner”). Hardware could not keep up with PenMagic software, and by 1994 the company was running out of steam. Rather than fold and start over, Francis and his team pivoted to CRM software and rebranded as Pivotal Corporation, keeping old investors along for the ride. Pivotal went on to enjoy tremendous success in the late 1990s, IPOd on the NASDAQ, and was later acquire...

Mike Tyson and Aaron Hoddinott. Hoddinott delivered returns of approximately 50X to early investors in NexOptic. As a 21-year-old first-time entrepreneur running a web development business, I once spent an hour on the phone with one of my biggest competitors, posing as a potential customer. I enjoyed talking to the guy so much I eventually confessed that I was actually a mole who was trying to learn his secret sauce so I could compete with him. He thought that was funny, and we ended up becoming friends. He convinced me the web development space was crowded and that I’d be better off developing my own product, rather than consulting for others. It was an invaluable early lesson. I soon started the CEO.CA site after paying an ounce of gold and about $2,500 cash to a few old friends to buy the domain in 2012. CEO.CA would be a blog about Canada’s top investors and monetized through advertising, as soon as I figured out some of the legal requirements of working with public companies. Pi...

Ivanhoe Mines executive chairman Robert Friedland at the site of the initial Kamoa copper discovery in the Katanga province, D.R. Congo – Feb 11, 2014. Photo: Govind Friedland The reality distortion field , made famous by Steve Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson, is a personal intensity and vision so powerful it bends people to your will, convincing them of a project’s higher purpose. Isaacson describes this capacity for influence as a notorious trait of Steve Jobs, who, as founder and CEO of Apple, managed to ship mountainous innovation that consistently redefined the relationship between art and technology. An interesting footnote here is the fact that Robert Friedland, one of the world’s most successful global resource developers, taught Jobs about the reality distortion field when Jobs was a college student in 1972. And he’s used it to promote a ton of successful mining ventures over the past 35 years—he’s found and developed them on nearly every corner of the globe. And became a mul...