Enter the operational engineer

I'm super stoked to start publishing here, I've been keen to share some of my learnings over the years as a tech leader in North America across a number of small startups.

I come from hippy parents who moved all over Canada’s Quebec province in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I got to live life in small villages and always close to the sea. Nothing in particular drew me to technology, except the classic combination of access to a Commodore 64 and a big box of Legos.

I started in tech during the dot-com boom in 1997 as an intern at Nortel where I worked in a group called Advanced Technologies - essentially building proof-of-concept hardware in partnership with Nortel’s CDG design team. From high-end acoustics for Nortel’s line of PCM phones to what was then next-generation IP phones to replace the venerable Vista 350, it was a blast for a tech intern and a wonderful way to learn the industry.

In 1999, I was fortunate to be invited to join as a first employee in a startup in what was a new world of fabless chip designers. Zucotto Wireless developed chips that ran Java natively. At its peak, I was able to travel and live in Japan with a small team of coworkers and integrate our Java native coprocessor right on the flagship hardware of a large handset manufacturer.

Following the dot com bust in 2003, I used my experience to work as a contractor in a variety of startups doing similar projects from Grands Rapids, Sunnyvale to Calgary in western Canada. In 2005 finally found my place at Magmic Games in Ottawa where I helped put together the team that took Magmic’s pool of Blackberry games and brought them to mobile handsets.

After meeting my future wife in Montreal, I left Magmic in 2007 to found my own company specializing in mobile gaming and application portability which led me to partner with a US-based company that would eventually take over my business.

This ended my first arc with startups and brought me to Electronic Arts in 2008 and their mobile games division. Their wonderful coaching programs for leaders and the fantastic team in Montreal trusted me to manage and lead teams across all continents and over 1000 people participating in bringing some of EA’s portfolio of games from iOS to what was then the emerging Android platform. Five wonderful years filled with travel and awesome personal growth.

After spending this time managing travel schedules, excel and emails, I decided I wanted to get back to my roots and the directness of early-stage startups. After a few false starts, I found a great founding employee role at Videri in 2014 where we built one of the most innovative digital displays on the market. With over 60 people across two product lines, we designed and delivered digital displays in use today in exotic places such as New York’s subways, and bars across the world with Redbull and other enterprise customers looking for premium digital out-of-home hardware. Our consumer division, WHIM continues to produce some of the world’s most exciting in-home experiences long before digital display assistants were a thing.

This experience brought me to join Mylo/Moka in 2019 and help lead their team delivering a robo advisor and savings platform for Canadians in a classic round-up to save fintech style. The company was eventually acquired by Mogo in 2021 and allowed me to move on to my first venture capital founder role: Pillar.

Pillar Financial Technologies is a neobank for Canadian entrepreneurs. As a founder, I contributed so much more than just with tech. Across finance, HR, Legal, Marketing and all operational aspects of the business, CTO was just a small fraction of my day-to-day. We were able to deliver a great product for Canadians but ultimately failed to find our X as the VC market became more challenging so in 2023 we decided to shut down operations which has led me to this, my next adventure.