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‘Yin to their yang’: Founders seek biz partners at inaugural Invest Ottawa ‘speed-dating’ event

November 29, 2024

Invest Ottawa welcomed 300 eager participants to the organization’s headquarters at Bayview Yards Thursday night for its first “co-founder speed dating” event aimed at connecting entrepreneurs who’ve launched businesses with prospective co-founders who can help them scale.

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Over three decades, Nick Quain has compiled a nifty CV: cum laude graduate of the Telfer School of Management, co-founder and CEO of a successful tech enterprise, and, for the past seven years, the leader of Invest Ottawa’s support programs for startups and early-stage growth companies. Now, he can add a new accomplishment to that list: matchmaker. Quain and his team at IO welcomed 300 eager participants to the organization’s headquarters at Bayview Yards Thursday night for its first “co-founder speed dating” event aimed at connecting entrepreneurs who’ve launched businesses with prospective co-founders who can help them scale. “It’s been an idea that we’ve talked about for a long time,” Quain told Techopia on Friday. “It is easier to have a co-founder, in terms of complementary skills, the moral support, and even just from a track-record perspective.” Quain noted that 11 of the 12 companies that have graduated from IO’s accelerator program are led by multiple founders. But with most entrepreneurs running at full speed just to get their ideas off the ground, he acknowledged that finding the time and energy to meet the right partner can be difficult. “In general, you see a much higher percentage of multi-founder companies get to later stages,” Quain said. “We end up supporting a lot of early-stage companies that are single-founder, and a lot of them are looking for a little bit of a yin to their yang – someone with those complementary skills and someone that they can work with.” Last year, he and his team hit on an idea: why not apply the same format single people use to meet a bunch of potential dating partners to founders looking for their own idea of a perfect match? Once IO set a date and started promoting the event on social media, Quain figured maybe a few dozen people would register. “Even 50, I thought, was a stretch,” he said. He was wrong. Before he knew it, registration soared into the hundreds, and the organization eventually decided to cap the number of attendees at 300. Even then, another 50 people were put on a waiting list. “We knew we always wanted to hold this event – the thing that we were unsure of was how much demand there would be from people who wanted to join a startup,” Quain said. “We knew there were some out there, but we had no idea of the demand on both sides of this.” Registration “just took off,” he added with a chuckle Friday. “And we were like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on here?’ We hold a lot of large events, but we don’t even have enough chairs in our building for that many people.” Eventually, they scrounged up about 200 seats. Participants wearing colour-coded badges – green for founders, red for prospects, along with blue stickers to designate those who were technical-minded and yellow for those who weren’t – then sat across from each other on three rows of chairs. Every three minutes, a horn sounded, and participants on one side would shift seats “like old-school, in-person speed dating,” Quain explained. After two hours of high-velocity conversation, almost everyone was spent – and exhilarated, he added. “Even those who were networking like crazy didn’t even meet half the people who were there,” Quain said. “It was definitely intense.”

'Unique experience'

It also appeared to be a roaring success. Friday morning, Quain’s LinkedIn post on the event was flooded with dozens of comments from people raving about the concept. “It was such a unique experience,” founder Emily James said in an interview with Techopia on Friday afternoon. A 2019 graduate of IO’s pre-acclerator program, James has developed a business networking app that allows users to find and connect with each other using short video clips. She attended Thursday in the hope of meeting someone with the technical know-how to help her refine her technology. While she admitted “it’s hard to know what might come” of all the mini “dates,” she said the event was fun to be a part of. “You can imagine the energy in a room of 300 people who are passionate about something and trying to light a fire. It was really palpable.” Yueyun Shu, a software engineer who launched a company to develop AI-powered applications earlier this year, said he’s seeking a partner to help take his products to market and “bring out their full potential.” “I’m trying to grow the business,” said Shu, who took part in IO’s Ignition Program, a 10-week bootcamp for tech founders, this summer. “I need to find customers. I do have some, but not enough to be a viable business.” Shu said he had a good time on Thursday night. His only complaints were the event’s frenetic pace and the high ratio of founders compared with people seeking to join companies. “It was so busy,” he said. “Three minutes is not really enough (time) to find a co-founder.” Overall, Quain said he was happy with how the inaugural speed-dating exercise turned out. The organization will likely tweak the concept for future editions with features such as “curated intros” based on registrants’ skill profiles, he said, adding he expects it to become a fixture of IO’s programming. “My email blew up today just with people saying, ‘This was amazing. Please do it again.’ I got like 30 people sending me notes saying, ‘How did I not know about this?’ We’re definitely on to something. This will probably become a constant part of what we do now.”