A handful of entrepreneurs who have the Montreal technology scene at heart and who miss the heyday of the technology ecosystem start-up of the past decade are organizing the North Star conference on Thursday. With the main guest being the president of Shopify, Harley Finkelstein, himself a self-proclaimed Montrealophile.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
The businessman was born in Montreal, before moving to Miami, then working in New York and Ottawa. He was planning his return to Montreal at the end of 2023, while he was involved with organizations like the CBC and the OMERS fund, whose hearts beat more in Toronto than in Montreal. And yet, even then, he did not hesitate to describe the metropolis as “the most entrepreneurial city in the world”.
It is this unbridled optimism, or almost, that Gabriel Sundaram and Nectarios Economakis, two well-known figures in the Montreal new technology sector, hope to recreate this Thursday at the Hélène-Desmarais building at HEC Montréal, also located across from the Shopify offices in Montreal.
With an open heart
To add a layer, the North Star event is intended to be a sort of Montreal copy of a similar and more or less informal event held in Toronto in the spring of 2023 and where the CEO and founder of Shopify, Tobias Lütke, himself spoke in front of 500 Ontario entrepreneurs.
North Star hopes to attract 300 people. Entrepreneurs, innovators, students. But no sellers, no peddlers or large institutional investors eager to find the rare pearl. “We want to have a frank and open conversation about the entrepreneurial journey. THE goodthe bad and theugly. And it will obviously be in Franglais, in the purest Montreal style,” summarizes in a call with The Press Nectarios Economakis, also associated with the firm Amiral Ventures, specialized in seed investment (early-stage).
Among Mr. Economakis’s accomplices is also Montreal entrepreneur Ian Jeffrey, who is currently employed by a financial technology company called Zinnia. With Gabriel Sundaram, who was in turn founder, investor and advisor to young Montreal startups, and Éléonore Jarry-Ferron, partner at Brightspark Ventures, the quartet would not be opposed to the idea of recreating this feeling of camaraderie, of brotherhood, which hatched in and around the Notman House during the prosperous period for the innovation industry from 2004 to 2019.
“We find that this ecosystem has crumbled a little, especially because of the pandemic, and then, we also lost Notman,” continues Nectarios Economakis. Maison Notman was for a generation of entrepreneurs, if not the heart, at least the right lung of the ecosystem of start-up of the metropolis. Its sale and transformation last spring into a philanthropic organization somehow formalized the end of this era.
North Star is just a conference, but its organizers would like to pick up the torch from Notman. “That’s a bit like our goal,” says Nectarios Economakis. “The StartupFest conference is already doing incredible work, and the Québec Tech organization is very organized, but we feel the need to have an event that is a little more disheveled, a little more messy. »
-Between us
At another time, Ian Jeffrey entered the world of entrepreneurship through the FounderFuel event, of which he became managing director at the turn of the 2010s.
His involvement in North Star has a whiff of nostalgia for this competition involving “co-opetition” of young dreamers wanting to go into business using technology. This was long before GAFAM took the lead in world stock markets.
We hope to have 200 students and 100 entrepreneurs, or at least a mixture of the two. We avoid investors, accountants, the idea is to inspire the new generation.
Ian Jeffrey
This desire is embodied in the series of half-day panels that make up the North Star event. It starts with a quartet of young students who are already business founders. It continues with four other people who are no longer at school, but who are also at the head of young companies. And it will all end with an informal discussion between Nectarios Economakis and Harley Finkelstein.
Shopify may be worth almost 200 billion on the stock market, but the company has experienced ups and downs in recent years which certainly make it an example of a resilient Canadian technology company. A lesson for future business creators.
“There are people who have stopped believing in it, who don’t know where to start,” says Ian Jeffrey. The community spirit has diminished a bit. We want to force all these people to talk to each other more. »
