Mike Benna

Mike Benna is a Vancouver-based entrepreneur-turned-angel investor with a long operating history in Canadian software. He studied Engineering at the University of British Columbia (roughly 1984–1987) before building a career as a founder and operator. He was CEO and Co-Founder of Mindspan Technologies, a Vancouver software design-and-development company he owned and ran with partner Jeff Sember — the origin of his `[hidden]` address and his listing among software/game-development credits.

Benna later moved into leadership and investing roles across the B.C. technology scene, including serving as Chairman of Strangeloop Networks, a web-performance-acceleration startup co-founded by Jonathan Bixby (Strangeloop's assets were later acquired by Radware). His long relationship with Bixby carried into their shared angel and studio work.

Since around 2013–2014 Benna has been a General Partner at Stanley Park Ventures, a Vancouver startup studio he runs alongside Jonathan Bixby. Rather than a broad accelerator cohort model, Stanley Park operates as a selective, "in-the-trenches" studio that co-founds and helps finance a small number of companies. Through the studio and as an individual angel, Benna has co-founded and backed a string of fintech and digital-health ventures over the past decade.

His portfolio work spans FinTech (KOHO), behavioral-biometrics security (Plurilock), and digital health (Blue Mesa Health, Alavida, Vios Health), typically taking co-founder, investor, and board roles rather than passive positions.

• Invests primarily at seed / early stage, often as a studio co-founder who is operationally embedded rather than a passive check-writer.
• Stanley Park's stated approach is hands-on: as partner Jonathan Bixby put it, *"We're hands-on, in the trenches, doing financing and all the things"* a co-founder would do.
• Selective over volume — the studio deliberately moved away from large accelerator cohorts (having found that funneling ~200 entrepreneurs down to 20 was ineffective) toward backing a handful of high-conviction teams.
• Prefers founders with prior startup experience who value real operational guidance and data-driven, realistic decision-making over optimism.
• Sector conviction in FinTech and digital health, plus enterprise/high-tech software — the areas where his own founded and co-founded companies cluster.