CEO.CA Mentors Podcast Episode 1: Norm Francis

his son luke and i are lifelong friends we were both chubby classic rock loving teenagers one day in grade 8 I noticed the teachers started high-fiving Luke it was the dot-com boom and his father norm had founded one of Canada's leading software companies norm is the recipient of the 2019 Fraser Institute Founders Award here is how they introduced him norm Francis was a pioneering technology entrepreneur in Canada he co-founded BSG which created a quack and simply accounting two of the world's premier accounting software packages in the early personal computer era later he was co-founder chairman and CEO of pivotal corporation which became a world leader in customer relationship management software as president of Boardwalk Ventures Inc he continues to be an active angel investor and mentor to early-stage technology companies norm was a co-founder of Social Venture Partners Vancouver and he and his family are active philanthropists in 1999 norm was named the BC technology industry Person of the Year and he was named 2001 Pacific region software entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young he was honored as a fellow of the BC Institute of Chartered Accountants in 2005 and in 2016 norm was inducted into the business laureates of BC Hall of Fame norm holds a Bachelor of Science and computer sciences and is fcpa I took advantage of my proximity to norm growing up and sought his advice many times in my career he has been a major role model for me I am honored and grateful to welcome norm Francis to the first episode of the CEO CA mentors podcast Thank You norm for coming on however to be here I I want to talk about everything but there's just one question I wanted to start with can you please describe the circumstances that led you to have dinner with Bill Gates what was that all about well we were close partner with Microsoft in selling software on what was at that point a new client server platform and so Bill and Melinda would periodically host at their house for some of their partners and I was fortunate to be able to go to their house and have dinner with a small group of CEOs it was pretty interesting what was the place like well at that time they had built a very modern in in that day that was 20 years ago now house but the most interesting was his library and in his library he had he has 40 pages of the da Vinci codex and so I was able to see that it still sticks in my mind be one foot away from pages with Leonardo da Vinci's diagrams and formulas on it that was amazing that's incredible is there anything else about that dinner you remember Martha Stewart was there this is pre-incarceration it was yeah that was in her hades they were hard on her yeah yeah Phil Knight the CEO of Nike was there John Chambers who was the CEO of Cisco so it was an interesting group it was kind of a little guy in the group so you come a long way from small town in the Okanagan at that point that's true that's true tell me a little bit about your early years where did you grow up grew up in Oliver and the South Okanagan when it was all fruit trees before grapes before well before the wine industry born there went all the way through up to high school before I left there so what was the population event of Oliver at the time probably the whole surrounding area under a thousand people where do you think your ambition came from you know I think farm farmers I think my sort of love of entrepreneurism came from growing up in a farming community his farmers are when you think about it at least in those days they're kind of little independent business people they have to rely upon themselves they have to help their neighbors and hard work work was always every kid was expected to do chores at a young age and every kid once she could go out and pick fruit you were expected to work you could go out and make money and quit and and everybody worked and I guess maybe that's where it came from plus I would say my dad who it was a high school dropout my dad worked hard he he always he did extra things to help our family he would buy a piece of land and he'd build a little house on it and then sell a house so he my dad was kind of was an entrepreneur and and I guess it kind of rubbed off on me would you say he was your early mentor your father oh yeah absolutely how did you get from from being in a farming community they focus into technology in your education well technology didn't exist in those days but when I I had we had very good high school great teachers and it was kind of expected in my family my my mother and my father encouraged both myself and my younger sister to go off to school and so I came to the big city to Vancouver to go to university and but all I knew was math and sciences and that's where I started and that was like really pre computers so were you in the accounting program first or in computer science computer science and really what happened is in the late 60s when that was aiding herself yeah yeah for sure the that was when UBC first put in a computer science program and I switched and what had happened actually it was kind of fortuitous because after my first year I had I applied to be an engineer I thought I would be an engineer and after my first year I applied and I got rejected so I couldn't get into engineering school so I continued in math and that's when they offered computer science and I said boy that sounds interesting and that's kind of how it happened what was computer science like at that time well in today's terms it was relatively primitive primitive they had one big computer it was an IBM 360 and for my first year you actually input Pro you keyed in punch cards and then you you take your program it was all low level programming and you'd put it in a card reader and wait overnight and then the results would come out and that's kind of was it like learning a new language at the time well it was because but but the good thing about UBC in those days was it was very theoretical computer science so we we learned the basics of how computers really operate and how you really program them and still the way they operate to this day where there are many technology companies in BC at that time none Wow none and in fact what happened with me was when I graduated with computer science degree there were actually no jobs you couldn't get a job as a programmer and especially the kind of theoretical computer science that they happen to teach there and in that day and age there were a few jobs out programming COBOL which is a distant long-lost language but I hadn't learned that at university and I literally there were no job prospects and so just because I knew some friends who are going into accounting I knew nothing about business I decided well I'm gonna go and become an accountant and so that kind of led me into becoming a chartered accountant are taking to become a chartered accountant that that there was a joint degree that you were doing at the time or did you no no that was after university it was after University and it just happened totally by chance did you have to put in the grunt work at like accountants to today when they're getting their designation and so you worked for a few years and audits and that sort of thing as an article student doing audits taking courses at night basically work and school like constantly because I had no background and in those days the accounting firms they were just starting to realize that computers were going to start the impact business so they kind of had this idea that they'd hire a few computer science folks and turn them into accountants rather than try to take accountants and teach them about computers and so it was just and what happened is actually I went to interview didn't know anything about I didn't know a debit from credit it went to interview and the guy doing the interviews he was from Penticton who which was ultimately north of where I grew up and he looked at my resume he says you're from Oliver we talked about the Oliver and the Okanagan heard it and the throughout the interview and lo and behold they invited me back for a second interview and it changed the that kind of one guy whose name was George Debra's a kind of changed the trajectory of my career actually absolutely and what good luck so did you spend a few years working as an accountant or yeah I spent six years full-time and then again somewhat fortuitously through at left it was with peat Marwick now KPMG and what happened is myself another fellow started a small accounting firm doing small business books and tax advice and all that kind of stuff and met a couple of guys who had started selling little computers called micro computers in those days this is in the late 70s and through that they had the idea hey maybe we little business businesses could do accounting on these things and that's when we form BSG and we developed act pack and it was kind of the marrying of early computers and accounting so how long was the BSG experience for you guys were you involved for it it started in the late 70s and we sold the company and the mid 80s to a an American company called Computer Associates now known as CA technologies but the concept was to simply accounting software originally it was accounting software but we also ended up doing word processing software and a variety of other software because these little computers at that time what happened was in the early 80s the IBM PC came out and that changed the whole world of small computers and IBM professionalized the business and and that's when things really took off and you're on another place at the ER every time right was there other accounting softwares at the time yeah there was the one of the principal competitors was software out of North Dakota of all places called Great Plains software and which is that company was later acquired by Microsoft and today that's what people would know as Microsoft Dynamics and that came out of North Dakota and the guy Doug burgum who was the CEO who became a friend of mine along the way as a friendly competitor and he's now the governor of North Dakota Wow so how did you finance BSG was that through the accounting business on the side or did you raise venture yeah yeah we we had other business interests on the side we're doing some real estate deals and doing all kinds of stuff and then we need to raise a little money and we we did a little tax shelter limited partnership if my uncle invested and a few other people we knew and it was $25,000 units one hundred seventy-five thousand in total Wow how that started how how did how did the commercialization go I mean you started with building a product and was it for yourselves in Italy well well but at that point actually we we had a couple of arrangements down at California where we licensed it to some of the early microcomputer companies company called Northstar we had a relationship with those companies are long gone now they eventually went out of business you know as the industry changed and and we actually also had a we wrote had a word processor called Easy Rider which we licensed to to a company down in Sausalito and became quite successful for us but later we just focus just on accounting what were some of the biggest lessons learned during that first software company building experience well I think again somewhat fortuitously we spend a lot of time in the Bay Area even though we're from Vancouver and Vancouver in those days if you went around and used the word software in those days people you just kind of have a glaze so you know like what's software but because of the relationship with these little computer companies down in the Bay Area in those days they actually weren't in what is now known as Silicon Valley they were actually in the East Bay over by Berkeley because a lot of the original people came out of those schools and so I think we we kind of had the early experiences in that us what became Silicon Valley market and so that was really I guess learning that american-style business I'd call it as that very rapidly growing computer business started to develop in the in in the early 80s what is the American style just just aggressive or more aggressive more think big you know Americans always like think about you know hitting not just a home run but like a home run out of the ballpark and just a faster paced more competitive more aggressive style of business so that experience made you more ambitious potentially I think more savvy about what the opportunity wasn't kind of how to go about it and then when we when we sold the company in the mid eighteen eighty five I became vice president of this company computer so shi'ites which was based on Long Island and it was run by a guy who became quite famous Charles Wang and he was a hard-driving New York style businessman and I spent three years with Computer Associates in a time when it went from what would now be considered small but it wouldn't those days it was I think around 140 million in revenue was publicly listed at that point on on New York and in three years we went the company went from 140 million to over a billion in revenue acquisitions with a very I'll call it that New York more sales style of business what was the the purpose and in the sale to them was it just to monetize and make some money for yourselves or partially and I think we were a bit I don't know where yeah may be worried is right term that you know the industry was growing and competition was coming in and as being based in Vancouver it was hard to finance you know something and to some degree we didn't know how and so it was kind of we'll take the money which is a bit of a West Coast phenomena and after the three years at was it was a computer so did you take some time off after that or immediately jump into yeah I sort of retired for a while yeah I went traveling and with with at that time young family and so yeah took some time off to kind of reflect would you mix mid 30s at that point I think I was around 40 their late thirties forties and you didn't actually think you were done at that point did you III didn't know what I was going to do interesting so how did you end up deciding what what it is you did well what happened was again a bit of coincidence is we had call from we had a call myself and fella named Keith Wales who had been BSG he was retired and we had a call from a guy we knew down in California and he joined a new company and they were doing this interesting thing which at that time was called pen computing and the concept was to be to have a tablet and you would write on the screen and it would interpret your handwriting and it would do things today we think of it we know of it as the iPad but this was the precursor of the iPad and it was a new company was called Gold Corporation and it was one of the hot new startups trying to pioneer this hardware and software technology and so the idea attracted us and so one thing led to another and and Keith and I thought well we'll jump back into this we started a little company one of the engineers that being at BSG joined us and we formed a company called pen magic and set off to develop applications that would work on this kind of new style of it was the year of the incorporation of pen magic that was in like 91 through early nineties just just before a pre pre internet was was Wales your partner at BSG as well yes so you had started the company together right what was the dynamic of your partnership like how did you divide responsibilities between you well Keith this was a deep technical guy he had come out of UBC also and so Keith kind of ran engineering and I ran the business side and because I had a computer science degree I know enough to be dangerous and sort of relate to engineers and we did what often happens with a new company we pulled in some of the guys that had worked with us before top-notch engineers and we just kind of did it all again how does how did you capitalize pen magic Oh Keith and I by that time we had the money to capitalize this ourselves personally put some money in and we're there were there tablets at the time or were you just hopeful that don't know they existed and they were they were prototype but your theory was that they were gonna get a lot bigger and that you'd be there in front of it yeah and there was a lot of it was kind of an interesting it was easy easy to publicize too because it it kind of had it was very innovative and we'd be we would do these photo shoots sitting and boats with a tablet and writing on them and you know at that point the technology was rapidly developed me but sort of relatively primitive but you could sense the market wanted it and says certainly the press likes an interesting idea that you could have a tablet and you could write on it and it would do all kinds of things that you wanted to do and then it would have a modem built into it and it could transmit and you could do email that was an interesting idea that was ahead of its time actually as it turned out which applications were you focused on oh we did a spreadsheet which you could think of it like you're writing on a spreadsheet but it would do the kinds of things that you think of that a spreadsheet can do and you could fold the paper on the screen and and we do a database and things that conceptually you could do on a personal computer because personal computers were kind of quite popular in those days but you would be able to do it on a portable tablet which what was the hardware at that time like what which tablets were in the market well I did that whole idea was pioneered by a company called NGO which was a pure startup and was heavily venture capital funded they were in the in Silicon Valley and they were doing the hardware and the software but then other companies that was coming called grid these companies are all long gone now where did the Palm Pilot become into picture around the same time a little later actually because what happened is the tablets for a combination of the technology just didn't come together the screens weren't good enough the battery life wasn't good enough not enough processing power and the tablets and that industry it just kind of went flat and and at that point the Palm Pilot guy named Jeff Hawkins had been in one of the early tablet companies and he had the idea that he meant let's just make this simpler and we'll make a more simple device and he developed that little sort of shorthand language that and and the Palm Pilot really restarted the handheld market was was your County pen magic was it slower to get traction than BSG was or oh yeah yeah because we never really could because because the industry never gelled and you know we would sell little bits of stuff but essentially it was still it that kind of beta testing or early stage so after several years of doing this everybody was running out of dough there'd been hundreds of millions of dollars poured into hardware companies and we really just to say hey this isn't gonna happen and so we sat there and said well shall we wrap this up or should we do something else it was literally like that is that pretty scary to walk away from the time and money that had gone into it yeah it was disappointing and we had lots of colleagues that were it was like a community all trying to create this new technology and actually there were some good lessons from it because the people who were behind go they all some of them went on to found Netscape and many of the other famous companies and and I think it's actually go Corp is a good lesson and you know failures not bad it happens when you're pushing the envelope trying to create something new and many those people went on to become key figures in the creation of the Internet create key people at at Google and in fact one of the fellows who became very well known after that the CEO of goal was a guy named Bill Campbell and Bill Campbell is a coach in fact there's he became the coach of coaching the young CEOs of Google and Bill's famous as Steve Jobs and yeah and and so in fact there's a very excellent book a bill was fabulous guy I knew him quite well and he was a fabulous guy and became in fact a mentor to many of the really big famous tech companies now well what what was it about him that made him a great coach or well interesting the reason they called him coach he'd actually been a football coach and he came from a sales background he had been the senior VP of Sales at Apple in the early days and he just had one of those infectious positive personalities just a guy who ever everybody liked he was just a really neat person was pen magic venture funded charts about the middle of its life we we had venture capital from a venture firm called kleiner perkins in Silicon Valley they were in the 90s one of the one of the really famous were they then the great success they became with a they were they had be they had been the original VC behind Sun Microsystems and they'd be involved in Intel and many of the early more hardware he was the partner on on kleiner side that that you was your liaison or who did you guys deal with there well I I sort of remember the first time they really got interested when they saw her software it was sitting in a hotel room actually I demo hourly pen suffer to John Doerr who's still the head he's very famous and he was instrumental with Google I think - yeah he found Amazon he was the first investor in Amazon he was the first investor in into it he was the on the board and he found he was first board member from Claire Google's a pretty well-known guy and you met him before that yeah yeah and he was John was one of these kind of venture capitalists that when he saw something man he was totally enthusiastic we were the first investment they did outside of the US actually this little these little guys in North Vancouver and but I actually negotiated the deal with another another fellow getting quite well-known Vinod Khosla was his name and he now he later split off and has Khosla Ventures he and a fellow named Doug McKenzie who was kind of his understudy who eventually became on our board that was really their heyday as a venture firm it was or what was their culture what was so special about them then well they they had a group of ten or a dozen really bright partners and they they went looking for new trends they actually bombed out of course on the pen the whole pen dry computing they spent a lot of money on it and it didn't work out but fortunately there were a few other things came along like this young guy named Mark Endres and who walked in the door with this thing called a web browser at a university and they thought oh boy we could maybe make a company out of that that became Netscape and that sort of pioneered the whole browser thing they they they I think they saw early trance and they they would bet on multiple companies in and and they they saw the internet coming and they saw the opportunity for e-commerce I think in particular you know on the Internet in the 90s what did you learn about raising money through those processes well I learned that you have to be a good pitch person and you have to have like to deal with those people you have to have like super good technology because they they really want to know that you've got defendable technology and so a great engineering team a big market potential a big market because they don't do anything you know they're not looking for singles or doubles they're you know looking for as I said earlier to not only hit homeruns but like big homeruns Google and Amazon style home runs was it a big relief when they agreed to sign on support you guys well they did and and but that was keep in mind that was in the pen days and then that all kind of as they referred to earlier that kind of went flat and we were sitting in a room Keith myself and Doug McKenzie on the board just the board of three and said this isn't gonna work what are we gonna do do we just take the money that's in the bank count and shut her down or why don't we do so we we kind of brainstormed and we had an idea we did a complete 180 and decided we would do so enterprise software and we kind of had some ideas about this area which with that time was called sales automation and we thought well we could broaden this and do client-server because Microsoft was doing this new thing called the Microsoft NT and sequel server and so we made a decision too we developed we went back to the drawing board spent the year developing a prototype and to their credit kleiner perkins stuck with us the whole time we Keith nigh decided we wouldn't just wrap up the company and do that in a new company we did what we thought was the honorable thing and we restarted it we ended up doing a down round another once we had the prototype we did a down round with new with an additional venture capital firm and I think Clara Perkins appreciated that that we didn't just sort of dump them and just start the new business in a new company kind of thing was that about mid-90s 95 something like that yeah it was in it was 94 actually I think so the the concept for the new product where's that coming from customers or did you guys have a vision or it's just I guess our knowledge of business and some colleagues who kind of were in the sales automation area and we thought gee we can do this in a much better way just just it I guess similarity to when we did accounting software we thought well we can do this every way and we can disrupt this market we come we can come up with something which is fresh and novel and sort of innovative and that's kind of how it happened how quickly did you get traction it took us it took us a couple years to develop the product and get those early beta customers and do a lot evangelizing about how this could help their business and then it started to take off and we went from basically no revenue to a hundred million plus US revenue and 20 plus offices around the world we did that in five years flat just on and and public on the Nasdaq at that point what what was the impetus to go public well once you have professional investors venture capital in the firm and you've attracted a lot of employees and you know you keep them with options you have to have a liquidity event and in those days it was the heydays of the dot-com era and what was it like being a public company CEO tough really really tough a lot of people think it's well at least in those days a lot of it was going on and it was sort of get-rich-quick kind of thing and it's a very intense kind of life that quarterly grind of making the numbers and always you know beat on analysts calls and being on the road it's it's an in very intense life especially in the tech business where it's very very quickly changing and you're kind of only as good as your last quarters results so I just said that dot-com boom I always wished that I was just born a little bit earlier so I could have participated in what was it lower you so focused on pivotal that you didn't really pay too much attention to what you know what else was going on I'm just wondering what did it feel like watching this you know tidal wave of capital and and questionable ventures get funded like what were you thinking oh no we were very because it was it was all around you you couldn't you couldn't avoid it and there were companies popping up and new technologies and a lot of newer acquisitions going on there were mergers so you always had to be sort of seeing what was the next thing because keep in mind that at that point everyone was really there were there just so many new things coming up search had come up with the early companies Yahoo you know was very successful how do you do ecommerce I can remember sitting around in the mid-90s when we were changing the business plan and I can remember sitting around the table and we're kind of thinking about gee could this new thing the Internet could you like do a store on this and in fact before we did CRM we kind of rejected that ideas shows you how dumb we were yeah oh no you that wouldn't really work and of course the rest is history and and I remember being at a kleiner perkins insider event and Jeff Bezos was there and that's when this little thing called Amazon selling a few books when they had started it and people were still but in 1995 people were still unsure as to whether that would really work with that business model incredible but by the late 90s said I'm sure there were thousands of listed companies and yeah questionable business funds getting funded yeah did you pay much attention to that I mean everyone around oh yeah I was I was given some of the you know some of them and and in actually today with some of the things going on with the valuations of the so-called unicorns and some of the recent revelations about we work and some of these others it's there's a bit of deja vu but if you put it that way of questionable valuations and questionable business models there's a bit of deja vu but in the early days I guess so it's just it was a tight community of really competent people and oh well there were a lot of people come into it because once there once because the technology keep in mind these markets tend to to happen when there's when there's a convergence of the right technologies become available and you know we had the internet we had hiked high powered computing we had wireless communication had come about so it was possible to do handheld devices like the blackberry in the early days and so once that conversion happened it'll tend to attract investment and so there's money pouring into it and so it was it was the Wild West all over again a little bit like in the mid 80s in the early days of the PCs what would you say we're the best days of the pivotal experience well I think the best days are when a market is just you're you have the ability to create a market and define a market and and it is just the customers are there once you're past the early adopters and you get into that sort of mid adopter stage and people are telling themselves they have to have it then and you're you're really just your biggest problem is can you hire enough people sort of quickly enough that's a lot of fun it's very entrepreneurial it's very fast-moving you feel you're creating something new that's helping people and in our case helping businesses and so it's pretty fun how did you keep your head on straight how did I keep my head on straight I mean you create one of the great Canadian software companies and valuations are soaring I mean I imagine that would have been a heady times it was and you know we're getting all kinds of company Awards fastest growing this fastest growing to that and and yeah I can it can kind of get to you and in in a bad way I guess having grown up in a small farming town I like to think of myself as being myself as being a pretty normal person I didn't change my friends I still hang around the same people I didn't you know I had family you know doing still doing like normal stuff when I guess that kind of kept me grounded to a certain degree what what did this what was the success what did it feel like and it was there anything that you did anything fun that you did at first celebrate or oh I think you always go out and buy yourself you know kind of reward yourself with the you're first you know watch that cost five grand or they're sort of first I'm thinking to yourself okay first your first decent car kind of things so yeah you you you do reward yourself a little bit I think were there any big regrets of the experience and pivotal I would say one of my regrets as we probably grew too quickly I think we got wound up a bit too much in the in the go-go and and and that's just because it's all around you the the grow at all costs and I think maybe probably there are a few instances where I felt you know see I take responsibility CEO maybe we you drop the bar a little bit on things like hiring and you maybe drop the bar and not so reinforcing you know culture as consistently and it's really difficult when you got offices all over the place and you're hiring people and we did a number of acquisitions to kind of hold all that together and have it sort of consistent what do you think were the toughest days well the toughest days were right after 9/11 because the market had starting started to flatten through early 2001 throughout the whole software space the whole industry in the Dutton and the whole dot-com was just booming at that time but you could sort of sense the the winds were blowing in a different direction and then when when the planes flew into the tower and 911 the towers everything went on hold because no one knew where the world was gonna go and so all the buying everything all capital acquisitions in our potential customers it all went on hold and we had to downsize and that was tough tough tough could you see that by that time actually I had retired just I had retired as CEO just I was still chairman of the board but I had retired as I had no operating sort of capacity but I was still the chair of the board and obviously I'd being a co-founder so I felt a lot of responsibility and and so you know our numbers flattened we had to downsize and that was tough real tough could you could you feel that immediately when you watched cable and saw this horrific scene on TV did you knew that that would happen in the market I don't think the next day but within you know as the feedback started to come from the Salesforce within a week all appointments were being cancelled everything was on hold and interestingly we were on a calendar calendar urine and so September 30th was a year-end and you know sorry a quarter and and you know that was the start of some sort of challenging times what was the ultimate outcome for pivotal it was acquired later is acquired later yeah yeah at that point I was on the but I was a still chair of the board and it was acquired merge into another company merged with other companies as often happens and we had had a number of prior to that we had had a number of merger and acquisition opportunities which we had not gone forward with so it was kind of there were a lot there was a lot of deal making going on mergers of different companies and in the 15 odd year since what are you beaten up to well I call myself a retired guy although my wife would sort of question that I took quite a bit of time out just like enjoy life and travel and find the Sun and go on ride bike and ski and attempt to do things like that yeah a temp that goes and and then I got back into doing more I was on a few boards but then I got all away from doing all that and I turned my in actually right in 2001 I turned myself to a more community giving back and helped found an organization called Social Venture Partners Vancouver which uses a engaged philanthropy model sometimes called venture philanthropy and I got a lot of satisfaction out of that where we all kind of put in money and time and donate it to we try to find early-stage nonprofits that and we'll take a risk on them and help them with their mission whatever it might be and so I spent a lot of time with that which would you say were the most satisfying projects that you worked on with BC Social Venture Partners well I'm very proud of recognising and being involved with an organization called take a hike which has flourished in what a tank uber throb be seen they help get kids who are out of school and on the street and doing drugs and get them back into school often these kids have had teenagers have had no chance in life maybe from foster homes etc and they get them back into school with a very high touch program get them through school and kind of try to change the course of their life and that's been that was being a great projects great organization one called kids safe that helps kids in the Eastside you know with after-school program another one I'm very proud of one to one literacy that uses a volunteer model to help disadvantaged kids who are falling behind in reading in schools and is now throughout BC and and they it mobilizes volunteers such as retired people to go in and read to little kids to help them keep up with their reading I'm real proud of that one you'll bro which is a program down in Surrey tribes tries to keep started with trying to keep young men teenagers out of gangs and going down the wrong path in life and now actually has a program for teenage girls to trying to keep them you know out of the sex trade and all that kind stuff and run by a great guy Joe Callan Dino whose story is well known as an ex Hells Angel and you're just coming from lunch with Georgia yeah and he's a great guy and proud to know him as a guy who came back from being a bad guy and and now is out there helping thousands thousands of kids so it's being enjoyable for me kind of doing that giving back a bit yeah I know I know you probably don't like the label a angel investor and don't appreciate too much solicitation but I'm wondering how do you decide to get involved with ventures today because you do from time to time yeah well usually they're introduced to me by colleagues there there are many around both our Vancouver and Silicon Valley and throughout North America there are these loose networks of people who have typically been successful investors or they come from the tech business they're retired from the tech business often and I'll get a phone call and somebody else say hey I'm at this great entrepreneur I'm gonna invest in this deal they've done a lot of due diligence and kind of in these loose networks kind of will put together attraction money and back a entrepreneur typically young entrepreneur with with a new idea and you most of these angels have made and lost money and they they know how to take risks and and I usually go by intuition both want the product or whatever they're doing and usually about the person you always get to know the founders oh yeah always yeah what expectations do you have of the founders that you invest in just honesty integrity be straight up with the business plan or whatever their ideas it'll never go according to the way you think you're gonna go be straight up with your investors there will be potholes in the road and just look for somebody who's really trying to do something truly different there's a lot of me to ideas out there personally I look for things that are true disruptors they're creating a new market with some some new kind of product or service that is truly doesn't exist and with usually I look for something that personally that has some kind of tech real deep technology strengths it's something truly innovative and new what do you think ours common common mistakes that founders make they go in to they try to compete against things that sort of already exist and they think they can with a few extra features that they can go in and compete against something that already exists pretty common mistake that they think they're innovative but they're not really I think most founders often don't gather enough expertise you know round them and I always tell young entrepreneurs in particular to go out and be a bit gutsy about making phone calls cold call people and say hey could I have coffee with you and solicit your advice people that maybe they read about that can help them and get a group of advisers who can kind of challenge your ideas do you think that ordinary investors should participate in venture capital and if so how well I think that for I don't know what you mean by ordinary investors like you're a mom-and-pop people are young people III don't think so very sexy yeah I don't think so the only way I'd recommend doing it is there are I guess a few ways to do it through a fund where professionals are doing the venture or seed investing if you can that's the only way I'd recommend doing it where people who know what they're doing you can get exposure to it and I I don't think people should invest much more than maybe 5% or 10% of their investable assets in something like that do you follow that formula yourself yeah absolutely smart yeah absolutely okay so let's assume you're you know you're starting over and you're ambitious like what what do you think are the best strategies for building wealth in a career if it's not investing in venture companies I'm a bit old-fashioned I don't believe in quick money I believe that you kind of have to put in the hard labor starting at the bottom so to speak and so I think developing good if it's well I assume we're talking about business here I've start at the bottom work your way up work your way up by earning it and sort of build the right sort of skills before you kind of get into the riskier make money quick kind of thing but ultimately built you think building business is the best way to build wealth oh yeah I do yeah I'm a free enterprise small business oriented I think it's a lifeblood of our country it's a lifeblood of the US economy and we need more of it you know in our country and so yeah but it's very it's tough it's it's really tough and a lot of people don't realize how tough it is and I think it's important for people to really understand themselves and are they willing to go through that pain of sort of starting a business knowing that a high percentage of you know small businesses fail we all we all know that and be prepared for I guess the the heartache that comes along with some of the success and it's it's tough how did you personally manage the heartache in your own business ventures well I think I just natural diversity I guess I guess you know my comments about earlier about growing up on a farm I guess I'm a relative the independent person I sort of have confident you know I think I've had confidence in myself and I'm not afraid to take risks I understand that you know failure will happen and that you can pick yourself up from failure and if you are that kind of person then you should you should go for it how did you manage stress when I could try to get out and exercise and try to take the weekends off and in my career it was easier to do because you didn't have things like cell phones didn't exist and email wasn't as common and kind of the instant communication that we have with something like text messaging today it was easier to turn off the business early on in my career there weren't even portable computers so you couldn't even take your computer home so it was easier to maybe get away from it you know take the weekend go to a circle ski and that kind of thing and I think it's a real problem today and and I'm a bit of a tech addict technology addict myself and it is very tough to turn off the cellphone and put it aside and I think it's a real challenge to have a balance you know in in kind of between work and kind of how you managed your life I remember vividly in the Entrepreneurship class that he spoke to when we were teenagers you said I think that the most solid business education you can get is in the Chartered Accountant program and you also are really strong on computer science and you're talking your book at that time you still feel that's the best education to pursue today well I'm biased so I I well technology certainly technology invades has invaded every part of our life right there's you know your home runs off technology your cars technology airplanes technology medicines technology technology is everywhere and software again my career was just totally fortuitous as I've described but software and related technologies are everywhere and and that will continue you know into the future so and whether that's you become a graphic designer to design the interface on an automobile or to design a website or whether you're a musician because you know musics kind of part of it technology you know will be pervasive in in the future even more pervasive as is now so certainly something related to technology I would certainly encourage are there subsets of technology that you think are the most promising or exciting to be involved in these days well I'd say probably the most exciting which is been around for a long time but is is now coming into prominence is is machine learning sometimes referred to as artificial intelligence we now have computing power and storage that and data that we can actually use software to actually make decisions and to understand patterns and data for example that humans are not capable of it's probably the most interesting area it kind of leads into robotics self-driving cars many others it's a hot topic that's probably one of the most interesting you follow the quantum computing story oh yeah could you explain it good luck well I was I was an early investor in a company called d-wave which still ain't coming back right just waiting for my money back and wrote one of the first checks to d-wave of almost 20 years ago again based on meeting a very interesting guy Jordi Rose who's still around town who's got a new robotics company just sort of believed in the idea and I guess at that point I was feeling a little and felt a little obligation to help somebody with a dream which was a whacko idea that you can create a computer using sort of subatomic physics and it would be able to do things faster than a conventional computer and that's yet to be proven but they've made progress and there are people like NASA using the d-wave computers and several hundred million later in financing they're still working at it did you see the Google News last week about some breakthroughs potentially well there's a lot of different ways a lot of different technologies are called quantum computing and yeah there's a lot of competing technologies but it's probably one of those things that will look back and say yeah it really did happen how do you choose mentees and like who is worth your time and how does this relationship of all from a mentors perspective it usually always happens because someone knows me and they say hey would you have coffee with somebody and and and I usually always happens through somebody I know and and they're trying to give advice to somebody and say hey I know some guy who knows about whatever what I know about you know it's just software and say how to build a company and so it's usually somebody refers and I'll always do it for a friend and and then what what happens now I've been are I've been around so long that often now it's some friend of mine who's my age my vintage says hey my son or my daughter so now I'm I'm kind of meeting all these they're all the kids who are same as us Mike is that satisfying for you yeah I enjoy it where do you think the best business ideas come from usually from personal experience meaning meaning the person comes up with the idea they recognize something they could use yeah product or a service and they just have that aha moment that says wow and often it's quite a simple concept and they just have an aha moment and and usually it's from some kind of personal experience it's like what's his name Trevor Travis cowl-neck who you know had the idea of gee I could you know he had the limo service and you know he just so had this kind of aha moment that gee you could just do a little app and people would go on the app and somebody could come and give him a ride because they were in the area right it was that was up just a personal aha moment so from personal experience yeah use it using personal experience that's where I see most of the ideas I'm just recently invested in a company called embrace which is developing a new technology for a knee brace and it came the entrepreneurs have knee injuries as athletes and kind of personal experience and you know one of those I'm a mechanical biomechanical engineer and thought gee I could make a better brace than the one that I just paid a thousand dollars for so you know another example of kind of personal experience do you believe in karma no no no but why are you so principled to yourself I don't know what Swale was brought up I guess what for a closing question arm what's your definition of a good man someone who is who deals with integrity and honesty and cares about their fellow human beings I guess what kind of and that you leave the world just a little bit better than it was when you came into it I guess if you can if you can help a small step forward with kind of society and you know how the world is I guess that's my definition of a good person it's amazing how much you can get out of giving back personally yeah it is thank you so much norm for years of friendship and for agreeing to do this today it's been fun yeah great to see you and fun thanks thanks [Music]

Channel: CEO.CA

Views: 961

Keywords: Pivotal Corporation, Bill Gates, Norm Francis, Boardwalk Ventures, Traction on Demand, BSG, ACCPAC, CRM, Customer Relationship Management, Software, Angel Investing, D-Wave, DotCom Boom, Technology in Canada, Keith Wales, NASDAQ, Investing, Entrepreneurship

Id: _h-Ggbc_d5w

Length: 56min 29sec (3389 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 06 2019