We’re excited to officially welcome Bocar Dia to the Forum Ventures family as our newest Managing Director. Bocar will sit at the intersection of Investing and guiding portfolio founders through the early stages of building, including go-to-market, founder-led sales, and fundraising.

As part of the founding team of the Enterprise product at Hootsuite, Bocar helped the business grow to well over $150M+ and 2,000+ employees in under seven years. He led multiple GTM teams at Hootsuite, leading the largest revenue region (NA East) and office in Toronto (100+ people). That experience, along with co-founding, advising, coaching and angel investing in a number of SaaS startups from pre-seed to Series A, has contributed to Bocar’s passion in helping build and scale hyper growth SaaS companies.

Bocar joined the Forum family in 2018 as an LP and Advisory Board Member when we launched in Toronto, Canada. Since then, he has worked closely with a number of our portfolio companies and has remained one of our highest-ranked mentors. When Forum invested in his startup in 2020, he experienced first hand how involved our team gets with the founders in our portfolio, working closely on product strategy, introductions, and operator support.

When it was time for Forum to bring on a new Managing Director, it was a no-brainer to recruit Bocar for the role.

As a GTM leader and investor, he is deeply dedicated to helping founders with early stage sales motions and finding a repeatable model, something every founder in our portfolio needs guidance with. He is looking forward to sharing his personal experience at Hootsuite and the other early stage startups he has worked with.

This same dedication to supporting founders is what inevitably drew Bocar to a full time role with Forum.

“There are a lot of early stage funds that can write checks, but few go the extra mile like I have witnessed the Forum team do and I will now do,” explains Dia. “Supporting companies in the most formative stages is a way to change the world for good. What could be more impactful than helping people achieve their dream?”

Bocar will be helping 30+ Forum portfolio companies each year on a 1:1 basis, becoming a fractional co-founder to those teams, focusing on founding sales and helping with customer acquisition. His hope is to be more geo-agnostic, embracing a remote-first culture and helping great founders with massive impact ideas wherever they are in North America, and the world.

Bocar was born and raised in Senegal, and lived in Europe before moving to Canada for university. He now calls Vancouver home. He is multilingual (fluent in French and English), loves to travel and discover new cultures, and his love for wine has brought him to many of the most famous wine regions around the world — Australia, he is coming for you next. He also has a slight obsession with sneakers, is an NBA fan (Raptors, of course) and a soccer fan (Paris Saint Germain).

Bocar Dia is also currently a Sales Coach at the Harvard Business School, revenue.fyi, and scalingto100.com. Needless to say, Bocar is extremely impressive and will no doubt be a huge value addition to both the Forum team and community of founders.

New Forum Venture Managing Director Bocar Dia