About
Good to meet you
Opening round is a hands-on consulting firm for progressive venture leaders.
We collaborate with startup founders, angel investors and venture capital firms to identify opportunities for strategic growth and execute on winning go-to-market strategies for venture success.
We will embed ourselves into the company structure to best understand the internal rhythms of the business and create a meaningful impact; or provide high velocity results on a project-to-project basis.
What we do
We collaborate with like-minded partners who understand the value of community in the world off tech and innovation.
We specialize in creating content and experiences that engage purpose-driven leaders in the innovation space and build connections into underserved communities.
We provide:
Marlon has spent over a decade working at the cross-section of innovation, economic inclusion and community. He is a seasoned executive, startup founder and career startup investor.
In 2020, Marlon launched Future Capital with a mission to bring a new kind of equity to the venture capital space. The company was acquired by Spring Activator in 2023. Marlon is also trained in instructional design and financial modelling for venture capital.
Marlon has served on the Board of Directors for QueerTech since 2022. QueerTech is Canada’s leading organization dedicated to queering the tech ecosystem in Canada.
Get to know our founder:
The Craft with May Globus: Ep 067 - Marlon Thompson
About our founder
Our Methodology
We provide forward-thinking venture solutions from the inside .
We work on a project-to-project basis or in a fractional capacity and centre our work around key operational principles":
Culturally aligned lead-generation
Defining and attracting partnership potential through strategic alignment.
Data-driven Strategic Development
Capture and analyze the relevant startup and vc data to craft meanginful strategies for growth and exection
Creating for the New Majority
Thinking differently about the way business can and should led.
Operational Agility
Developing organizational capacity for inevitable pivots + strategic growth.
Our Founder
Marlon has spent over a decade working at the cross-section of innovation, economic inclusion and community. He is a seasoned executive, startup founder and career startup investor.
In 2020, Marlon launched Future Capital with a mission to bring a new kind of equity to the venture capital space. The company was acquired by Spring Activator in 2023. Marlon is also trained in instructional design and financial modelling for venture capital.
Marlon has served on the Board of Directors for QueerTech since 2022. QueerTech is Canada’s leading organization dedicated to queering the tech ecosystem in Canada.
In 2022, Marlon was appointed to the Inquiry Committee for the College of Physcians and Surgeons of British Columbia, a regulatory body that serves the public by regulating physicians and surgeons.
SHORT ESSAY
MAR. 2025
Time + Space
BY MARLON THOMPSON
Money is a construct.
It took me over 30 years to really understand this. The pursuit of wealth had always been an unintentional one for me. I knew that I wasn’t born into it, I knew that people who had it seemed better off, and so I oriented my entire life around the pursuit of career success without much investigation.
For a while - mostly in my early thirties - I had a one dimensional understanding of wealth. To a large extent, this perspective was shared by a large majority of mid-career millennials like myself at time. Somewhere between 2015 and now, being wealthy became the opposite of aspirational. In 2021, The Guardian shared a confusing report that looked at shifting attitudes across Gen-Z and millennial populations in the UK around the economy. Nearly 80% of millennial and Gen Z Britons blamed capitalism for the housing crisis, while 75% believe the climate emergency is “specifically a capitalist problem” and 72% backed sweeping nationalization.
At the same time, popular culture was increasingly damning the wealthiest groups in western society. HBO’s critical and commercial darling ‘Succession’ spent four seasons - about 37 hours straight - scooping up every single award for repeatedly making the point that billionaires do not deserve what they have. The 2022 satirical black comedy “Triangle of Sadness” took great pleasure in throwing a group of out-of-touch passengers on a luxury cruise ship around a cabin in their own excrement and vomit. And AOC literally wore a dress with the words “Tax the Rich” spray painted across the back to the Met Gala.
Like many of my peers, I started to wonder if buying into the pursuit of wealth was an indicator that something was actually wrong with me. But as I get closer to 40, I understand that it’s simply more complicated than that.
Growing up, my family had next to nothing. We couldn’t always pay the hydro bill, and I still remember gerry-rigging some wires to create a completely makeshift antenna to plug into the single television we owned in our living room to get whatever tv channel we got. Wealth was a complete mystery to me. What I was missing wasn’t just a basic understanding of how currency, investing and the economy work. I didn’t realize that we were completely starved of the luxuries that come with the time and space that wealth affords you.
I started working at 11. I did a pretty inconsistent job of delivering newspapers to my neighbours on the five or six blocks that surrounded our semi-detached home in Oshawa, Ontario. It was the only way I could afford to do anything with my friends who typically had more financial stability than we did. I developed a good work ethic very early on, which I’m grateful for today, but I didn’t have the freedom to be truly creative, or explore different pathways than the most conservative one available: go to university, figure out how to pay for it, get a secure job, by a house and so on.
Now, as I sit in a different phase of life, having accomplished things I didn’t know were possible as an underage paperboy - I understand that the pursuit of wealth is a necessary evil if you want to be comfortable within the structures that we live in. It’s not all bad. Contributing to society is a useful practice.
