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Fax person mark

our next speaker is going to be very interesting a quick question who has used a fax machine in the last month raise your hand I bet you about 10 years ago 20 years ago you all would have raised your hand anybody in business mark is going to talk about us our next speaker is Mark escaping Kerr has been an entrepreneur and seed invest in the Canadian software industry since 1980 in 2008 co-founded bright spark ventures in Toronto with over 135 million under management his mission is to create a dynamic startup ecosystem in Canada and obviously have fun doing it come on up mark mark is gonna marks title of his presentation is so this one time I built a fax machine hence my reference earlier take it away thank you Shh can you guys talking about it's a little tough speaking after down bricklin because when when Dan speaks about the early days though those were the real early days but what I wanted to do was tell you a little bit about the early days here in Canada in the software industry because we have had quite a lot of successes that of that have gone before the current time in terms of many software companies that have got started I don't know how many of you remember or how many of you were around at the time but there were a number of big computer companies that were founded in Canada in the early 80s you may not know that Commodore was founded in Canada Atari was founded in Canada and in the early 80s late 70 Toronto in particular was a real hotbed of activity where a lot of things were going on in the in the software industry and in the software business and there was a whole bunch of activity quite close to whether a center of activity is today most of the startups in tirana today a sort of round adelaide street and and spadina but on Queen Street they used to be a huge activity of what was happening in the Commodore an Atari wells in that time and it's sort of it's an interesting time to go and look look back at it in terms of the start of the Canadian software industry sometimes we tend to think that this industry is brand new and it's true much of what we do today is is new and different than quite alternative to what we used to do in the whole days but probably the biggest difference today is the sheer size of things if you if you watch dan dan bricklin presentation earlier you sort of started seeing the size of numbers so you did really well if you sold 20,000 copies of a piece of software or 30,000 copies of a piece of software but when when we looked back when when we got started we got started back in nineteen ninety-seven so sort of take yourself back to nineteen ninety-seven the computer that the industry resolved around this thing called a personal computer in this big bucks which was this PC which is very much of an island that that didn't speak to it to each other business ran in a very much an analog world and if you wanted to communicate with anybody chances are you used a telephone chances are you had a receptionist to give you a little piece of paper that said while you were outside you had a whole pile of those and companies like no tell started doing well simply because they had a voice mailbox that could give you a fern a fern mailbox we turn around and we we kept saying what can we do in the Canadian software industry that could make a difference what could we do that that could create a massive software company and we we were determined to create a company within the Canadian environment that would would make a difference and frankly we drove a lot of people very crazy walking around asking them what would you prefer to do with your computer that you're not using your computer for what would you really like to do that you aren't doing and we came upon this this revelation which seems pretty obvious now which is communication like why don't you use your your computer to communicate with other people why users using it with spreadsheets and databases and word processors why aren't you getting in touch with anybody else and if you looked at our business round at that time everything was was built round our the mailing a letter sending an internal memo or sending a fax and if you sent a fax you sort of printed out a piece of paper walk to a fax machine put a piece of paper in the fax machine and sent that fax to somebody else who was living far away and we decided why don't we create a way of computerizing facts why don't we create a way of taking facts and putting it on a computer which nobody was really thinking about and it was really one of those moments in the in the technology industry when we we found that just like today a lot of people talk about a lot of different sexy products and a lot of interesting products and often those most interesting products make the least amount of money and we decided well what is out there that that can become the most interesting from a business perspective and we cannot put this the software product called winfax we launched it in 1988-89 at Comdex because computer shows were sort of the only place you could you could launch the products in those days we went to Comdex we we add of this little toronto-based company with with the 20 by 20 foot booth and we can up started talking to people about this concept of setting effects using your computer and actually creating the facts within your computer and sending it from within from within a word process or or receiving it directly on your computer and magically by the end of Comdex 1988 we're walking around everybody at Comdex was talking about this product everybody was walking around saying there's this really interesting product called winfax sitting out there and between the years of 1988 and the years of 1994 we shipped about 40 million copies of win facts and grew this little company into about eight or nine hundred people in the company which in those days considering that there was probably only about 70 80 million computers worldwide turned into a hit that almost anybody who had a computer at the time remembers when we win facts from that from that time we did this based run a few principles we did this based on knowing that from our perspective nothing was more important to a computer software company than products that worked I know that you know for again for a lot of people who run a lot of these a lot of startups and a lot of businesses that don't tend to think about the product being the most central part of what they do but certainly it was the center of everything that that we did and we started shopping this this product to try to get it as worldwide as possible we created I the first ever free software in those days when you bought themselves software you put in a package to the toy store and you sold it in a store and we came up with this concept called winfax light and decided that we wanted to give away one to every single person who had a computer and we managed over a five-year period to give away about 40 million copies of when winfax lights and magically when you installed it the first thing it did was send a fax to us at with the Nava getting you to do an upgrade and it really was you know today we sort of take some of these these these things for granted like giving software away for free and trying to entice people with upgrades but it really was a was a first in terms of how we did it and and where we did it we raised money whenever we could again if I was to give anybody advise who's looking at a start-up or creating startups today what I can tell you is that there is no such thing as a bad time to raise money any time that we raised money we raised money and we never turned around at any later stage and said gee maybe we shouldn't have raised money at that at that particular stage but of course we only raised money when we were successful the Canadian industry was quite similar to what it is today in that nobody really wanted to give us money when we needed money everybody wanted to give us money when we when we least needed it and when went when we were doing quite quite well in it we we also realize that the most important thing we could do was have the most incredible talent that we could surround ourselves and so not not surprising to most most people here we managed to find incredibly good talent within the Canadian marketplace and when we had seven eight hundred people we had a fabulous group of people running with the business over the subsequent six years we grew the business from three of us in with in my basement to about 800 p people right around the world with the nasdaq listing and nasdaq listing and a run rate of about two hundred million dollars I'm going out the marketplace unfortunately we woke up one day and it all ended we were happily figuring out how to sell more software to set to to let you send a fax and let business and effects and within our own company we weren't using facts we were using email and we were communicating with each other with email where could really catch it with the rest of the world with email and we sort of woke up and realize that this is going to end there will be a time when somebody will stand in front of the stage like us and say how many people send a fax or nobody will put their hands up so we we we quickly realized that email was going to take over and we had this revelation when Bill Gates came to see us and said oh by the way we're giving fax software away free with the next version of windows and it sort of freaked us out a little a little bit as you can imagine eight as you can imagine fortunately symantec who bought peter norton software and created the norton utilities decided that they wanted to get into the communications world and they bought bought the company and actually did really well with it selling it over the next few few years if I turn around and I say what lessons have we learnt they've only given me 15 minutes to talk so I've got to speak real fast in the last five minutes if we turn around and say what were the biggest lessons we learned what lessons that we learn at that time what lesson did we learn running a company here in Canada growing it to that size and having a business what what lessons we learned that that I could possibly pass on I sort of wrote down a bunch of ideas so the first thing I could say to you is keep nagging everybody don't give up with an idea if you have an idea don't stop talking to people about the idea and as many people who come to you and say that's a bad idea ignore them actually take as little notice of the naysayers as you can possibly make the second lesson I would say is test test test test test like crazy test absolutely everything we turned around and we said why don't we try to bundle winfax with a computer and the next thing we knew we had 40 million copies of winter acts being bundled out there we then rewrite history and said of course we thought of that long ago and that's how we designed the company we actually didn't didn't design anything we just kept trying different things trying different things and as soon as anything's stuck we scaled up in it we learnt what what channel we had understand your channel understand who your customer who is selling your customer who's selling your product for you who is selling to your marketplace we were really successful because what we did is that we begged borrowed and stole every kind of faxmodem we could get our hands on until we knew that if you had a copy of windex it would work with every single fax fax modem in any computer that result there it was incredibly expensive we had a room with about 3 400 different modems sitting in it with people testing in it but we understood that at retail if you walked into a retail store and said I need software to send a fax the personal retail would sell you in facts long before they sell you anything else simply because we made that effort of understanding exactly what the highest need of our channel was don't assume anything will last very long in this business everything changes every two years whatever we're talking about two years ago changes sort of you know nowadays we call it the cloud but a few years ago we call it something else but we do tend to change what we talked about and how we talk about things so don't assume anything is going to last forever because most things in this industry last very short time on the other hand don't assume that change happens like a light switch you know it wasn't sort of one day email or arrived and fax went away the reality is it took many years for this change to take place and there's a long time for you to pivot and make the changes that you need to make more lessons having great partners you can rely on makes all the difference we had a team that was the same group of people that started the business that grew the business all the way through its success that exited the business and it was largely because we knew each other we understood each other and we had a team of people that we respected and worked with that made all the difference and frankly as an investor now on the bright spark side that's all that we focus on is that team and that team that that that can execute and can rely on each other and lastly selling out is sometimes a great strategy when we sold the company a lot of people said to us why are you doing this why you selling the company and we absolutely knew that the writing was on the wall we sold the company at a market value of about 550 million dollars in 1995 which you know in today's dollars is probably another zero at the end of it but the reality was that we knew that that that would be the maximum that the company was was ever at on it yet it was a little tough sort of firing three four hundred people one day and having to be having having to move it on but the flip side was that out of that company we created hundreds of small startups and many of the VCS that are in business today many the incubators that around and many of the technology companies that are around certainly in the Toronto area with spin-offs out of what what what we had we have a lot of companies that we can continue to work with that that that works with these other other people I'll leave a couple of minutes for any questions if there are any but you know all I can say is that if you if you stick to your ideas you willing to fail a few times don't be scared of failing failing is actually a pretty good lesson to know what to do well the next time there is massive opportunity and nothing Israeli changed and if anybody tells you that we haven't had a lot of successes in the Canadian marketplace you can you can remind them that that that over the years we've actually had a lot of very successful companies so I'd be happy to answer any questions if anybody has any any questions anybody alrighty thank you very much