Techopia interviewed three serial tech entrepreneurs who have each had more than one local startup success to find out why they chose to stay in Ottawa rather than seek new tech ecosystems to apply their expertise.
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Mike Weider
“There is a great culture here of very loyal people that enjoy working for startups.” That’s the view of Mike Weider, a partner and co-founder of Ottawa-based Fundfire, a seed funding venture that invests in early stage tech startups. “They hang in there. I think people here have a greater sense of commitment and loyalty to the projects they’re working on than in other tech ecosystems, which is a unique feature of our market.” Weider has ample experience as a local entrepreneur, having co-founded his first start-up, Watchfire, a software security company, in 1996. “(Watchfire) developed tools to automate the detection of security vulnerabilities in applications. It was acquired by IBM and integrated into a larger software development tooling offering that they had,” he explains. In 2010, Weider co-founded Blaze Software, a web performance optimization business that developed software to make websites faster. Blaze was subsequently acquired by Akamai Technologies, a large content delivery and Internet infrastructure company. Weider also co-founded Fundfire in 2010. “Our partners were doing individual angel investing, so we decided to form a partnership together to invest as one entity, versus as separate individual angels. We finance using our own internal capital. We pool the funds and invest in startups together,” Weider says. In addition to local tech entrepreneurs having a strong base of technical talent to draw on, Weider notes that Ottawa provides a strong market for the other specialists necessary to build a successful tech startup, including sales and marketing professionals and finance and legal people, among others. Weider, who sits on the board of Invest Ottawa to help coach startups, praises that organization for its work in assisting many local companies through all stages of their respective business life cycles. Furthermore, “A lot of people in the community share that ethos. They want Ottawa companies to succeed, and so when someone reaches out for assistance, they are extremely generous with their time,” he says. When Weider started out, he recalls, “The principal ecosystem was around telecommunications. When that took a downturn, there was, maybe, a bit of a dip in the overall strength of our community, but then it came back strongly and much more diversified.” Today, he notes, there are many excellent companies in many different disciplines, including software, life sciences, cybersecurity, cleantech, e-commerce, and smart mobility. Like many other entrepreneurs who have chosen to remain in Ottawa, Weider is bullish on the lifestyle the city offers. “We raised our three children here. It’s been a great place to live as well as to work,” he says.
Marc Gingras
Ask Marc Gingras, and he’ll tell you that Ottawa offers “all the amenities that you want for a really good lifestyle.” The co-founder and CEO of Bloks says, “It is just the right size of city. You’re close to nature, there is Gatineau Park. When you have a family, Ottawa is a great place to be.” Founded in 2021, Bloks has developed software designed to brief and prepare employees for upcoming meetings, and even tailor that briefing depending on who the interaction is with. “For example, if it’s a first-time meeting, we’ll give more information on the people you’re about to meet, including their background. If it’s with people you meet often, it will be more about giving you context about your last few conversations, the action items and what you should be talking about in this conversation,” says Gingras. Gingras previously co-founded Foko Retail in 2014, which developed software for retailers. “If you’re a retailer managing multiple stores, you need a tool to help communicate with all the store associates for the things you need to get done, whether it’s changing merchandising displays, changing pricing, or for recurring tasks that need to happen. So we brought in this two-way real-time communication between the store associates and the headquarters,” he says. In addition to the local lifestyle attractions, Gingras says he remains in Ottawa to pursue his entrepreneurial endeavours because of the quality of talent available. Employees are technically savvy and the city has good universities that train students well on different technology stacks, Gingras says, noting that he has hired students from the University of Ottawa’s co-op program. This affords him the opportunity to vet potential future employees that he might hire full-time upon graduation. The local entrepreneurial spirit also thrives, he says, noting how some of that originated from the large tech companies of the past, such as Mitel and Nortel, as well as from those of the present, like Shopify, with former employees of those companies contributing to the growth of Ottawa’s tech ecosystem by “spinning out several great companies.” That talent and spirit is fuelled by community support, says Gingras, who praises the efforts of Invest Ottawa. He says its experienced staff members have an immediate and positive impact on helping technology startups.
