After 12 years at the helm of one of Ottawa’s best-known startup accelerators, Patrick White is ready to begin the next act in his entrepreneurial career. White, the executive director of Kanata-based L-Spark, will be leaving the organization next month to take on a new role as director of corporate programs at Solink, one of […]
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After 12 years at the helm of one of Ottawa’s best-known startup accelerators, Patrick White is ready to begin the next act in his entrepreneurial career.
White, the executive director of Kanata-based L-Spark, will be leaving the organization next month to take on a new role as director of corporate programs at Solink, one of the tech hub’s leading software companies.
The move is bittersweet for White, a former film producer who helped grow L-Spark into a household name in Ottawa tech that has nurtured 130 companies that have raised a collective $388 million.
But the 48-year-old southwestern Ontario native says he felt it was time to exercise his own business-building muscles in the executive suite at Solink, which was founded in 2009 and is on the cutting edge of using AI to mine insights from digital security footage.
“L-Spark has been an amazing experience for the last 12 years,” White says. “I would say anybody in the accelerator (sphere) is always thinking about ideas themselves or looking at some of the companies they’re working with and thinking how great they would be to possibly work with.
“(Solink) is a company I’ve known since they’ve started, and I've known (co-founder and CEO) Mike Matta a long time. I decided to take the jump and join them.”
Thousands of organizations, including Burger King, Little Caesars and Tim Hortons, use Solink’s software to quickly search footage from digital security cameras and marry it with point-of-sale data to pinpoint specific events, such as when employees dole out refunds or a coffee shop runs out of baked goods.
Now, White will oversee the creation of new partnership strategies and help the firm tap into government programs as it looks to stay on an impressive trajectory that’s seen its revenues grow at a rate of 70 to 80 per cent annually.
He calls his new employer “a remarkable company that is doing some really cool stuff in cloud video and security and analytics. It has changed that game in a really positive way, which is awesome to see.”
White will also be saying goodbye to Wesley Clover, the global investment management firm founded by tech billionaire Terry Matthews. He’s spent nearly a dozen years at the organization, first as director of government relations and then, for the past nine years, as managing director of its growing tech portfolio.
White’s connection to the legendary Matthews goes back more than two decades. After attending the Vancouver Film School, White moved to Ottawa in the early 2000s to launch Brookstreet Pictures with classmate Jon Knautz and Terry Matthews’ son Trevor, who graduated from the New York Film Academy in 2002.
White, who spent four years as a producer at Brookstreet, credits Terry Matthews for inspiring the young film executives to think big. During his time at Brookstreet, the company turned out a number of short films and features and worked with actors such as Robert Englund of Nightmare on Elm Street fame.
“Terry very much pushed us to build a company,” White recalls. “That was a fantastic experience. I was extremely lucky to have that time and learn from them.”
At L-Spark, White worked with another Ottawa tech titan, Leo Lax, a former Mitel executive whose resume includes several stints as a CEO.
With encouragement from Lax, White played a leading role in initiatives that have had a lasting impact on the Canadian tech ecosystem. Among them is SaaS North, an annual tech conference he helped get off the ground in 2016 that now draws thousands of software entrepreneurs to Ottawa every fall.
“L-Spark is very much about mentorship, and I was extremely fortunate to be mentored by Leo and Terry and (longtime Wesley Clover president) Paul Chiarelli,” he says. “SaaS North, I think, was a massive gamble. I think we really needed an event in the Canadian ecosystem and once we put it on, very quickly it grew. I’m extremely proud of it.
“A big piece that I’ve learned, especially working with Leo over the last 12 years, is to have those bold and audacious goals and to really strive for them.”
White now hopes to take that lesson with him to Solink. He can’t wait to get started.
“It’s a solution I think everybody can use,” he says. “It’s pretty remarkable just to see how (the company) has grown.”
