Terry Doyle Skipped the AI Gold Rush. He Was Right.

While everyone was diving headfirst into the AI gold rush of 2022, Terry Doyle was doing something counterintuitive: staying away. "You want to invest when nobody else is investing," he says, "and if everybody's investing in the same thing, you probably shouldn't be in there."

This contrarian approach comes from someone who's witnessed multiple tech cycles firsthand. As Managing Partner of TELUS Global Ventures, Doyle has spent over two decades navigating everything from the dot-com crash to the mobile revolution. His corporate venturing arm manages 90 companies in their portfolio, with 60% maintaining commercial relationships with TELUS, generating $34 million in business last year.

In this interview, Doyle shares what 27 years of investing has taught him about spotting genuine technological shifts versus hype cycles, why the best founders often come from unexpected backgrounds, and how corporate venture capital can bridge the gap between horizon-scanning investments and immediate commercial value.

Terry Doyle: I've been investing and working in technology companies since 1999. I've seen a bunch of technologies come and go. I saw the first dot-com crash when Webvan got hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and then went bankrupt. I was working in the mobile phone industry when all of a sudden the world discovered mobile phones.

What I think that does is it changes the lens under which you look at new technologies and new developments. In 2014, I was spending time with a whole bunch of some of the best people in the world in artificial intelligence. This is great, it's going to be a good development. Maybe I won't be as excited about the changes in the marketplace as if I'd never seen those previous cycles.

It means that when I was investing in 2022, I was not investing in what everybody else was investing in because I felt like we were going straight up the hype curve. You want to invest when nobody else is investing, and if everybody's investing in the same thing, you probably shouldn't be in there. You should wait.

Terry Doyle: When a good investor is able to see a fundamental shift in society, the consulting firm McKinsey has a language which is Horizon 1, Horizon 2, Horizon 3. Horizon 1 is something that we can use now. It's getting to the beginning parts of the use of its life as a technology. Horizon 3 is well into the future, very far away from being commercialized, more like fundamental science.

We will sometimes want to make an investment in a Horizon 3 company, and the business just doesn't see the opportunity for it. The area of quantum security is a good example of this. We know that at some point in the future, quantum will change how people can create tools where people can do harm, just as we start to see with AI.

We've done some investing in quantum security, and we're not quite at that point where we can use it. We have to make an educated guess. We think this is going to be a problem in the future, so we should probably invest early and learn, get what we'll call tuition value about how this particular space is evolving. As a result, we'll wait 5 or 6 years before we have any commercial deal with the company.

Being able to spot the large shifts makes you better able to invest in the right things. I think if you jump at every new development, you're probably going to have a hard time. You're probably going to make a lot of mistakes.

Terry Doyle: Age is not a determination of intelligence. And in fact, some of the best founders I meet are great because they don't have preformed ideas. Sometimes you meet people and they've got lots of experience, and because of that experience, something that hasn't worked, they sort of shut their minds off. 'That doesn't work. I can't do this. I can't solve this problem this way.'

Whereas I think sometimes people who maybe don't have that experience, they bring a very new perspective to solving a problem and they don't make assumptions. If you talk to people in great companies like Google, they spend a lot of time trying to prevent people from making those assumptions. Your response to this question is X. Do you realize that there's two assumptions that are part of that? Why have you made those assumptions? 'It's always how it's always been.'

Removing that bias almost is where you get some real breakthroughs.

Terry Doyle: We've invested in companies like Clinia, which has really developed an AI-driven optimized search for enterprise customers, and that helps providers give better outcomes to patients. We knew we had a lot of data, but again, data is only as good as how it's presented, how it's accessed.

Clinia has really changed the way we think about what we can do with that data and that business. It's changed how our customers think about their own data, but also how they run their businesses. Creating that shift in the way we think and how our customers think was really one of the important outcomes that we got in making that investment.

Terry Doyle: I talk to my team all the time about this idea that we will make mistakes. As soon as you say that, that changes the way people do things because they don't freeze up, they're not nervous about making mistakes.

So, one, we're gonna make mistakes. Most important thing is acknowledge that you've made a mistake. Second is fix the mistake as best you can. And third is obviously the most important thing, don't make the same mistake twice.

If you create that environment for people, they feel more comfortable, they explore options more. They don't freeze up and be conservative in how they think. And I think that's really our job. Our job is to take risk on behalf of the company and do that in a way which is sensible, but to push the company and to help get more technology into the hands of our customers to make their lives better.

Terry Doyle: You'll hear many investors talk about, are you investing in the individual or are you investing in the idea or the market? I think the individual is really the most determinative factor. Somebody's ability to solve problems and continue to work at problems even when they're not making headway is the sign of a good entrepreneur.

There's a level of stubbornness there, which really is important in taking on big problems, that problem-solving mentality and that ability to continue to work even though there's no progress. I think that's one of the things that makes good founders.

So our job is to really find great founders who are solving significant problems. If you find those people, generally, you can usually find people who want to give them money to solve those problems. That's really what you're doing as an investor. You're finding money and you're finding smart people and you're bringing them together.

Being a founder is a really hard job. It's an exceptionally hard job, and you have to have that ability to wake up every day and want to take on and solve a difficult problem. So I think the thing that I find rewarding is every time I work with a founder and I'm able to help them go that little bit farther on their journey, that's rewarding for me.