Successful Canadian startups

By Victoria Lennox | PIVOT Magazine

Larry Keating is an Ontario-based serial tech entrepreneur who started his first company, Keating Technologies, in 1987 at 27-years old in his home with $11, 300. He grew it to more than $140m annual revenue before successfully selling most of the business, and is rebuilding the company. A three-time national winner of Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies award, he has earned a Top Ten Industry Newsmaker of the Year (2008) for his work partnering with Intel, HP and Autonomy to introduce the industry’s first Notebook-as-a-Service (NaaS) solution.

As with other great entrepreneurs, Keating also gives back to his community by mentoring and advising early-stage startups, supporting the commercialization of innovations out of York University, engaging in the York Region tech ecosystem, and helping to make Ontario and Canada a better place for entrepreneurs through his public service, including his role as founding chairman of the Minsters’ Technology Advisory Group in Ontario for eight years, for which he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for public service.

We had the opportunity to sit down with Mr. Keating to gain his perspective and glean his advice on Canadian entrepreneurship, startups and security.

In your view, what do we need to do to bring Canadian entrepreneurship to the next level?

LK: Funding for commercialization. Although we are producing world-class innovation in our universities, we need to do a better job at commercializing the innovation coming out of our universities. Also, while the support infrastructure does a good job of supporting early-stage companies in growing to 25-30 people, we have a serious issue at the next funding stage. If we do not address this, how are we to produce the next RIM? That is where we get beat on the global stage. I am also passionate about improving productivity for smaller enterprises. Productivity is the backbone of GDP growth in Canada and we need to equip our entrepreneurs with the conditions and the tools that they need to compete in the global economy.

Why do you think that so many entrepreneurs and startups have difficulty with IT?

We are in a new era where information has become the business. Your success depends on how you manage information, and the information flow, in your business. This is a big change from even 10 – 15 years ago. We are now innovating at a level that is far more nebulous in that the value is now in a piece of code, a technique, or information.

As a startup founder, you need to be hyper-focused on your goal. Often times that means that everything else is forgotten until you get big enough to resource a dedicated IT team. However, as most startups have IT at their foundation, this is an area that can really trip them up. The impact of a computer failure, a computer breach or information loss is exponentially larger on a startup than a larger company. Startups move so quickly, so a computer failure can mean that you lose everything that you didn’t back up for the last 4 months.