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The Next Generation of Entrepreneurs

Category: AI, Technology and Innovation

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New curriculums changed how they learned, new technologies changed how they communicate, and new forms of work have changed their career paths. So why don’t more millennials embrace the challenge of entrepreneurship?

It’s hard to measure just how many Canadians are building innovative startups, but those born after 1980 are lagging behind—in 2014, three quarters of small-business owners were aged 40 to 64.

For millennials, who now represent the biggest age group in the Canadian labour force, entrepreneurship might seem like a natural choice as careers have become less predictable—according to LinkedIn, early-career millennials are already switching jobs twice as fast as some Gen-Xers.

“Millennials have this special passion, an ability to just want to disrupt everything,” said Emily Bland, who was 22 when she was part of the Enactus Memorial team that founded hydroponics startup SucSeed in 2017. “We don’t look at things as the way they are. We look at them for what they could be.”

What Canada needs to do is harness that mindset to build the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Next-gen Tools

Today’s entrepreneurs have a real advantage. It’s never been easier to start a company, build a website, and get your message out. Of course, that also means it’s never been harder to get noticed.

Emma Harris didn’t have a background in coding when she built her startup, Healthy Pets, at the age of 25. The company offers an online service connecting pet owners and veterinarians via phone and a mobile app.

“I’m not an engineer and yet I was still able to pursue those opportunities because of what exists today,” she said. “The flip side to the low barriers to entry is that it’s now harder than ever to succeed and make your way to the top of the industry that you’re pursuing, simply because more people are entering themselves.”

Harris and Bland spoke at the Aug. 21 RBC Disruptors event along with Daniel D’Souza, the 22-year-old co-founder of inclusion-training startup Crescendo, on the future of youth entrepreneurship.

They agreed that it’s never been easier to get a business up and running. The challenge is getting others to follow in their footsteps.

Innovating in the Classroom

One answer may lie in giving students more exposure to entrepreneurial options during their schooling. In 2017, more than 64,000 students participated in entrepreneurial competitions in Ontario and Quebec alone.

That’s how Bland got her start. Before she started working on SucSeed as a social enterprise to improve food security through hydroponic grow operations, she wanted to be a lawyer.

In university, she got involved with the Enactus socially conscious entrepreneurial competition and, in her final year, led a team that beat students from 1,700 other campuses with a business idea that would become SucSeed.

Bland said that international success showed her the value of entrepreneurship as a career, and showed her how to think big.

“I think as Canadians, sometimes we cut ourselves short,” she said. “We look at success as building a million-dollar company, doing a hundred thousand dollars in revenue, getting one big sale. But we need to take initiative, we need to believe that we can build billion-dollar companies here.”

What’s NEXT

Bland, Harris and D’Souza are all involved with the entrepreneurship programs offered by the non-profit NEXT Canada. Supported by RBC, it provides mentorship, professional development and networking opportunities for select groups of entrepreneurs at varying stages of their careers.

D’Souza said it’s a great time to be running your own business. The celebrity status of founders has never been higher, with innovators like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and even Kylie Jenner making headlines and becoming role models.

“Being an entrepreneur now is sexier than it’s ever been,” he said. “That inspires a lot of people and shows that it’s not as difficult as you might think.”

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Instagram started as a Foursquare-style check-in app. Slack came from a studio making mobile games. And YouTube was originally pitched as a video-dating site.

These stories share one thing, the secret that drives Silicon Valley’s best: the growth mindset. It’s about failing fast, learning fast and growing fast.

The principles of the growth mindset are straightforward: candour, ambition, resilience and diversity. But that doesn’t mean filling out the CARD is simple.

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Candour

Incident response startup PagerDuty is a great example of the growth mindset in action.

At an RBCDisruptors event on July 18, PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada said their culture of candour has room for everything, even stupid questions.

“I ask the question that often other people are afraid to ask,” she said. “That candour gives everybody else the freedom to be inquisitive in a non-judgmental way.”

PagerDuty runs a 24/7 IT alert platform that lets other companies know when critical services are down. That means PagerDuty itself can never go down—and when it does, it’s a big deal.

Tejada said that after an outage, the company holds “blameless post-mortems” to discuss what went wrong and how to fix it.

Using honesty and empathy gets people to open up, and that candour helps the company learn from its mistakes.

“If something’s not working, we’re going to talk about it,” said Tejada. “But we’re not going to blame people in that process.”

Ambition

Growing companies can’t be complacent—every success comes with the challenge to top it next time. That means instilling ambition to be the best, and to always be better.

And it’s not only about ambitious leadership. That ambition needs to be baked into the corporate culture from the bottom up.

“Part of my job is to articulate a vision that is approachable and consumable for every single person in our business,” Tejada said.

PagerDuty now runs an internal annual conference, PagerCon, where engineers and product managers give talks about their work and where the company is headed.

“We want a perfect experience for our customers,” Tejada said. “We put a lot of pressure on ourselves collectively to do that.”

Resilience

A key part of the growth mindset is the ability to come back from failure.

In October 2016, a cyberattack took down Dyn, one of the fundamental routing services behind major Internet services including Twitter, Spotify and GitHub. Parts of PagerDuty’s service also relied on that same provider, so they were absent when it was needed most.

The company worked to have its services back online within minutes, and the outage exposed a new point of failure that they now account for in all their planning.

Tejada said that’s one kind of resiliency: the ability to come back, keep working and pull through major obstacles. It’s not just about infrastructure, though—the same idea applies to people.

“Resiliency is about allowing teams to try new things and fail,” she said.

Diversity

The last ingredient for a growth mindset is diversity, which drives innovation in Silicon Valley and beyond.

More than a third of the Valley’s population is born outside the U.S., compared to around 13.4% for the rest of the country. PagerDuty reflects that diversity: Nearly two-thirds of the leadership team in San Francisco was born outside the U.S.

“We think about diversity and difference as upside, not downside,” Tejada said. “All the data points to better business outcomes, better respect, better results, better shareholder returns, better customer offerings if you have a diverse workforce.”

Tejada saw diversity as a way to improve performance once she joined PagerDuty in 2016. Now, half of the engineering leadership team is women, as is half of the executive team.

Tejada says they take their time in hiring, and will leave positions open if they can’t find the right fit.

“While you’re still growing it’s easiest to change the shape of your gender equity or your pay equity,” she said. “And we’ve just started with gender. There are a whole bunch of other classes that we need to look at.”

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our stories

Videos that showcase Canadian entrepreneurs changing the world. Learn and be inspired.

RBC has joined forces with the C100 to share stories of Canadian entrepreneurs and our connections with Silicon Valley. “our stories” is your inside track on what it takes to succeed as a global player. RBC and C100 will be sharing videos that showcase Canadians changing the world, provide real-life stories of successes (and failures) and advice on how to succeed as an entrepreneur.

RBC is committed to sharing Canadian technology, entrepreneurship and innovation stories to elevate the conversation at home and abroad. Sharing and highlighting content elevates the conversation around infrastructure, education, talent, regulation and resources needed for economic prosperity in Canada.

C100 is dedicated to giving back to the Canadian innovation economy and fostering the next generation of successful entrepreneurs and innovative companies in Canada. Showcasing Canadian business thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay area through storytelling sheds light on their successes, their challenges and their advice for those who are building global players based in Canada.

About the C100:

C100 is a non-profit, member-driven association of Canadian thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area committed to supporting and accelerating the innovation economy in Canada. The C100 represents a select group of experienced entrepreneurs, executives of leading technology companies, and venture capital investors.

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our stories

Videos that showcase Canadian entrepreneurs changing the world. Learn and be inspired. RBC has joined forces with the C100 to share stories of Canadian entrepreneurs and our connections with Silicon Valley. “our stories” is your inside track on what it takes to succeed as a global player. RBC and C100 will be sharing videos that showcase Canadians changing the world, provide real-life stories of successes (and failures) and advice on how to succeed as an entrepreneur. RBC is committed to sharing Canadian technology, entrepreneurship and innovation stories to elevate the conversation at home and abroad. Sharing and highlighting content elevates the conversation around infrastructure, education, talent, regulation and resources needed for economic prosperity in Canada. C100 is dedicated to giving back to the Canadian innovation economy and fostering the next generation of successful entrepreneurs and innovative companies in Canada. Showcasing Canadian business thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay area through storytelling sheds light on their successes, their challenges and their advice for those who are building global players based in Canada. About the C100: C100 is a non-profit, member-driven association of Canadian thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area committed to supporting and accelerating the innovation economy in Canada. The C100 represents a select group of experienced entrepreneurs, executives of leading technology companies, and venture capital investors.

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Materially improving gender, ethnic and cultural diversity, particularly within executive teams correlates with a wide range of successes – specifically being able to recruit top talent and improve employee satisfaction and decision making.

Diversity can also help drive technological innovation and disruption. Consider Montreal-based Lightspeed, one of Canada’s most successful tech start-ups.

The software firm launched in 2005 by Dax Dasilva and a group of LGBT+ colleagues, and has grown in size to now include 600 employees in eight offices around the world.

A culture of inclusion was essential. So, too, was a recognition that innovation through diversity is as much evolution as revolution.

“Company culture is just as important as code,” Lightspeed’s CEO and founder Dax Dasilva told RBCDisruptors, our monthly event looking at innovation and how technology is changing the world around us.

The purpose of these two organizations is to build up leaders. You can’t make change in the world without having everyone see themselves as a leader.

Dasilva stressed that companies need to iterate in order to innovate.

As part of Pride Month, RBCDisruptors profiled Dasilva, a leading voice for the LGBT+ community in business and technology.

After Dasilva founded Lightspeed, he developed a mantra to ensure that everyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, had a seat at the table.

“That gave everybody the freedom to help us to grow the way that we wanted,” he said. “It allowed anyone at the company to be themselves and who they wanted to be.”

Lightspeed’s growth has soared since its start in a converted Montreal home and has become one of Canada’s most successful tech start-ups in recent years after its latest financing round in October that values the company around $1 billion. The company makes a cloud-based point-of-sale system that runs on tablets and computers aimed at for independent retailers and restaurants who annually process $15 billion worth of sales in over 100 countries.

Several recent studies that examine the business impact of LGBT-positive workplaces conclude that inclusiveness results in a more innovative and productive workplace. A study published in the journal Management Science in 2016 found that companies in U.S. states that are considered to be more gay-friendly are actually significantly more innovative, specifically producing higher rates of patents.

On average, companies based in U.S. states that passed laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual preference or gender identity experienced an 8% increase in the number of patents and an 11% increase in the number of patent citations, compared to states that did not pass such a law.

And yet, LGBT+ people are among the most marginalized employees, according to a recent report by Diversio, a Toronto-based firm.

Diversio surveyed 2,100 people in 20 companies in Canada, the U.S. and Britain and found that LGBTQ2+ employees felt more at risk of workplace harassment, and were twice as likely to feel their opinions were not sought out or valued by their employers.

Dasilva shared an example in which he encouraged Lightspeed’s management to focus on diversifying the company’s data science team to gain additional perspectives.

“If we only build certain predictive models, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that creates a certain set of solutions. As great as the AI community is in Montreal, we have to have other viewpoints work on that data science and find new and different angles.”

Supporting LGBT+ inclusion also makes better business sense. A 2017 report by the Center for Talent Innovation concluded 71% of LGBT respondents and 82% of LGBT-supportive allies are more likely to purchase from LGBT-inclusive companies. Even more importantly, LGBT+ inclusiveness drives market innovation as teams with members whose sexual orientation matches the target consumer are much more likely to understand the market, the report found.

“We’re all looking for sources of innovation,” Dasilva said, stressing that one of his goals in technology is creativity. “All of the best of us is when we’re involved in something that’s creating good.”

After Dasilva launched Lightspeed, he discovered he had created a “monoculture” by hiring people from his own network of friends and acquaintances. It limited the company’s growth. “You have to own up to your mistakes and widen your circle,” he said. “You have to get out of your comfort zone of the people who are like you.”

In addition to managing Lightspeed ahead of a possible IPO next year, Dasilva also runs Never Apart, a Montreal-based non-profit organization that encourages social change through cultural programming. He understands that his role at both groups is to foster and build leadership, in the corporate world and within the LGBT+ community.

“The purpose of these two organizations is to build up leaders. You can’t make change in the world without having everyone see themselves as a leader.”

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our stories

Videos that showcase Canadian entrepreneurs changing the world. Learn and be inspired.

RBC has joined forces with the C100 to share stories of Canadian entrepreneurs and our connections with Silicon Valley. “our stories” is your inside track on what it takes to succeed as a global player. RBC and C100 will be sharing videos that showcase Canadians changing the world, provide real-life stories of successes (and failures) and advice on how to succeed as an entrepreneur.

RBC is committed to sharing Canadian technology, entrepreneurship and innovation stories to elevate the conversation at home and abroad. Sharing and highlighting content elevates the conversation around infrastructure, education, talent, regulation and resources needed for economic prosperity in Canada.

C100 is dedicated to giving back to the Canadian innovation economy and fostering the next generation of successful entrepreneurs and innovative companies in Canada. Showcasing Canadian business thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay area through storytelling sheds light on their successes, their challenges and their advice for those who are building global players based in Canada.

About the C100:

C100 is a non-profit, member-driven association of Canadian thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area committed to supporting and accelerating the innovation economy in Canada. The C100 represents a select group of experienced entrepreneurs, executives of leading technology companies, and venture capital investors.

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That’s the thinking behind the CanInfra Challenge Ideas Contest from the Boston Consulting Group, which announced a winner at its inaugural event earlier this week.

Infrastructure is about more than pipelines and highways. It’s about how we move everything, from resources to people and ideas, and building the foundations to help Canada meet the big challenges of the coming decades.

The winner out of more than 70 submissions from across the country was a proposal seeking to build a renewable energy micro-grid in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut.

Canada can be a world leader. If we can do it in the hardest possible places, it’s going to be a lot easier to do it in the easier places.

By using wind turbines and Tesla battery packs to build a so-called “IceGrid,” the project, called Polar Power, would replace diesel generators and power plants that rely on expensive, and dirty, fossil fuels with clean and reliable energy.

Memorial University professor Brett Favaro, who led the pitch, said IceGrid provides a model for the rest of Canada in realizing a lower-carbon future to producing energy without greenhouse gases.

“The entire planet needs to have access to cheap, reliable, carbon-neutral energy,” he said. “Canada can be a world leader. If we can do it in the hardest possible places, it’s going to be a lot easier to do it in the easier places.”

One of two runners-up was a proposal for a smart road that would charge electric vehicles as they drive. Canada faces unique barriers to electronic vehicle adoption. Building a network that addresses “range anxiety” for battery-powered automobiles would help address the challenge.

The second was a wastewater treatment retrofit that would allow such plants to dramatically cut methane emissions and produce a renewable energy fuel from food waste.

All three proposals show how infrastructure will be a key part of the solution for Canada’s 21st century problems. Canada’s carbon commitments—cutting emissions by 40% by 2030 from the 2005 level—provide the biggest opportunity for transformational ideas.

According to the Canadian Infrastructure Report Card, one-third of our municipal infrastructure is in fair or poor condition and needs rehabilitation or replacement.

The IceGrid proposal suggests savings of more than $300 million over 20 years from switching away from diesel, and its emission reductions could be the equivalent of taking 8,300 cars off the road—and that’s from the Iqaluit project alone.

The wastewater treatment project is even more ambitious, suggesting bio-gas from properly processed food waste, of which we currently use only 20%, could replace 10% of Canada’s natural gas consumption. And providing the infrastructure to support electric vehicle use would go a long way to addressing Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions—one-fifth of which come from cars and trucks on the road.

Vinay Shandal, a partner and managing director at BCG, said the contest was originally designed to help address a key missing element in the Canadian conversation around the future of infrastructure: big ideas.

“I think that the ideas from infra projects haven’t been coming from the right places,” Shandal said. “Having specific ideas that could be put in front of the right leaders to spark debate and give them a national spotlight was what was missing.”

The need for new infrastructure spending is significant. According to the Canadian Infrastructure Report Card, which comes from a group including the Canadian Federation of Municipalities, one-third of our municipal infrastructure is in fair or poor condition and needs rehabilitation or replacement.

“Everyone talks about incremental projects, like adding another terminal to an airport,” Shandal said. “Infrastructure is for the long term.”

The contest was open to anyone across Canada, and participants included students and academics, as well as employees from think tanks and private companies, competing for $100,000 in prizes and the chance to help chart Canada’s future.

Other finalists included an inter-city cargo transportation system for remote communities using blimps and airships, a blockchain-based identification system that would allow Canadians to use government services online, and a nationwide network of 30,000 water-monitoring sensors and a centralized analytical office to predict localized flooding and droughts.

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our stories

Videos that showcase Canadian entrepreneurs changing the world. Learn and be inspired.

RBC has joined forces with the C100 to share stories of Canadian entrepreneurs and our connections with Silicon Valley. “our stories” is your inside track on what it takes to succeed as a global player. RBC and C100 will be sharing videos that showcase Canadians changing the world, provide real-life stories of successes (and failures) and advice on how to succeed as an entrepreneur.

RBC is committed to sharing Canadian technology, entrepreneurship and innovation stories to elevate the conversation at home and abroad. Sharing and highlighting content elevates the conversation around infrastructure, education, talent, regulation and resources needed for economic prosperity in Canada.

C100 is dedicated to giving back to the Canadian innovation economy and fostering the next generation of successful entrepreneurs and innovative companies in Canada. Showcasing Canadian business thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay area through storytelling sheds light on their successes, their challenges and their advice for those who are building global players based in Canada.

About the C100:

C100 is a non-profit, member-driven association of Canadian thought leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area committed to supporting and accelerating the innovation economy in Canada. The C100 represents a select group of experienced entrepreneurs, executives of leading technology companies, and venture capital investors.

View By Topics Or Author Page Link

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It began with news that Barack and Michelle Obama will produce documentaries and television series for the streaming service. And it ended with Netflix topping Disney as the world’s most valuable media company.

Netflix is doing more than disrupt the business model of show business. With exploding growth (its stock is the S&P 500’s top performer this year), it’s become a case study in the culture of innovation, as it melds the moonshot minds of Silicon Valley with the creative souls of Hollywood.

To do that, the company puts a lot of emphasis on attracting the right talent, and getting out of their way. Which is how Netflix says it has pivoted successfully — twice — in its two-decade existence.

Its credo was established in the 2009 Netflix Manifesto — a 120-slide masterpiece that was updated last year as a crisper, 10-page outline known simply as “Netflix Culture.”

Among the highlights: Set your own vacation, don’t bother with performance reviews and demand “adult-like behaviour.” And most critically: always be testing. Whether it’s ideas, shows or people.

I sat down with Jessica Neal, Netflix’s chief talent officer, at the C2 conference in Montreal to talk about that culture and how it’s evolving as they company goes global.

Neal, a Kentucky native who studied at New York’s School of Visual Arts, was an early Netflix talent scout who left to work at a couple of other Valley startups. She returned last year to help CEO Reed Hastings manage a growth trajectory that now spans 4,000 full-time employees and 125 million customers in 190 countries.

Here’s some of what she had to say:

Give Employees a Long Leash

Netflix gives its employees lots of runway: to make decisions, to experiment and to fail. For instance, the company doesn’t have a corporate expense policy. Instead, it asks employees to “spend the company’s money as if it was your own.” And it has found that, when you give employees that kind of freedom and responsibility, they generally make the right choices. Giving employees a high degree of independence is one of the reasons why founder Hastings claims he sometimes goes an entire quarter without making a single decision.

Information Is Power — And It Should Be Shared Broadly

Netflix decided to become a “memo culture” around the time it hit the 1,000-employee mark. Rather than share minutes of a meeting after it’s over, Netflix asks anyone scheduling a meeting to write up the main takeaways and desired outcome before it even starts. The practice allows employees to get to the point faster and reduces the number of follow-on meetings. A relentless focus on information and data underpins pretty much everything Netflix does, which Neal credits for enabling the company to abandon bad ideas early and pivot to better ones. (Netflix began as a mail-order DVD supplier before embarking on streaming and later morphing into one of the world’s biggest producers of entertainment content.)

Expect Feedback. A Lot of It

Netflix encourages employees to try out new ideas and doesn’t shy away from failure, in the belief that continuous experimentation and feedback will allow the best ideas to surface. Even the CEO is open about “things he needs to get better at,” Neal says. It’s part of a culture of “sun shining” — bringing failures out into the open so all employees can learn from them. But feedback is about more than commentary. As part of its testing culture, it relies heavily on data to show how employees are doing — and ensures they know.

Don’t Be Afraid to Let People Go

Working at Netflix isn’t for everyone. It’s a high-performance culture, and Neal says the company is pretty committed to parting ways with employees who don’t have what it takes. It can also require an array of executives and managers — often in the scores — to comment on a hire or promotion before it’s made. The company talks a lot about “dream teams” — the ideal mix of talent that thrives when working together. And as Neal put it, a team isn’t a family. It’s there to win.

Inclusion Is Emblazoned

Inclusion is a big part of the Netflix Culture document, as it strives to help employees recognize and work past their biases. To many, it doesn’t embody the “bro culture” that’s common in the tech world. But what about #MeToo? Neal says that, as an executive who works in both the Valley and Hollywood, she continues to push for progress. Among her concerns: ensuring female talent gets paid fairly. “Equal pay isn’t that hard, just write a cheque” she says. “Just pay them.”
 

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Even for Canada’s digital natives, that might seem like distant dream. But it’s a reality in Estonia.

A lucky accident of history enabled the small Baltic state to embark early on the path to a fully digital society. Estonia’s independence from Moscow in 1991 — and the simultaneous need to reboot its institutions and economy — coincided with the birth of the Internet. As Estonia’s Chief Information Officer, Siim Sikkut, tells it, a group of Estonian visionaries saw an opportunity not only to foster citizens’ ties with the new state but to enable the country to punch above its weight by exploiting one of its greatest resources, a computer-literate populace.

Sikkut spoke about the birth of Estonia’s digital state at the latest RBC Disruptors, held at Montreal’s C2 conference on May 24. The conversation came on the eve of sweeping new European regulations on data protection that may reshape the relationship between citizens, companies and states.

What can Canada learn from a country of 1.3 million people?

It Empowers the Citizen

Sikkut said digitizing citizen-government interactions can strengthen people’s relationship with the state, making it “more beautiful” by taking some of the red tape and frustration out of the experience.

But Estonia’s bold digital experiment can only work if citizens retain trust in the system — a responsibility Estonia’s government takes seriously. That’s why it has put safeguards in place around data access and data privacy. He cited Estonia’s decision to make citizens’ health records — and all information about who has looked at them — transparent.

It Saves Money

Estonia went all-digital in part to drive efficiencies. Sikkut said putting a number on the overall savings is tough, but that the country has been able to quantify the benefits in some spheres. He cited Estonia’s practice of using e-signatures for anything that in other places would require a physical one. The country estimates the resulting savings amount to 2% of Estonia’s GDP — which happens to be how much the country spends on defence.

It Can Ease Trade and Investment

Estonia’s gained global attention for granting something called e-residency: basically, making it easy for non-Europeans to establish a virtual presence from which to conduct business in Estonia and therefore the EU. It’s more than a gimmick. Some 40,000 foreigners have taken up e-residency and are actively contributing to Estonia’s economy by accessing financial services and the like.

It Requires Vigilance

You’d think Estonia’s proximity to Russia would be a concern, given the latter’s reputation for global hacking. But cybercrime from non-state actors is a bigger concern, according to Sikkut. Either way, the country takes cyberthreats seriously, and it’s no accident that NATO’s cybersecurity centre is in Estonia.

Another aspect of the country’s defence is teaching digital hygiene — by making sure citizens are aware of cyberthreats and practice smart online behaviour. That’s baked into the school system (along with learning how to code) at an early age.

It’s a Matter of Balance

Will Europe’s new regulations on data protection drive businesses to jurisdictions with less stringent rules? Sikkut prefers to take a values-based view common in Europe, noting “we don’t want innovation at any price.” That sentiment underscores one of the biggest challenges facing governments and regulators as the world goes digital. People want all the convenience that digitization brings, but they want to be protected from its worst aspects, like loss of privacy and data theft. So far, Estonia believes it has found a balance.