On The Edge | Mega-Returns on Social Investments – Propel, Radian6, and Micro-Loans

By: Lisa Hrabluk

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Saint John residents have never been ones to follow the pack. It is a city that prides itself on going its own way, which is why, in 2003 a group of ICT leaders decided that if Saint John was going to have a vibrant startup culture, they were going to have to build it themselves.

By this time Gerry Pond, the former NBTel CEO, and a group of his former colleagues had reinvented themselves as Mariner Partners, a consultancy firm specializing in Internet Protocol TV – the technology developed by iMagicTV in the 1990s. Clients included Morgan Stanley, Lucent, Alcatel and here at home, Aliant.

However the executive team at Mariner Partners had another goal: to mentor Saint John’s emerging ICT sector. In 2004 they and other ICT professionals created PropelSJ (renamed and expanded to PropelICT in late 2008), a different sort of industry association and tech incubator.

“This is my 40th year in the ICT business and this is one of the biggest days of my life” – Gerry Pond

This group didn’t believe the traditional tech incubator model, which provides a combination of financing, office space and mentorship, would work in Saint John. At the time, venture capital investments in Atlantic Canada were almost non-existent and the big venture cap firms in Toronto and New York, rarely looked east of Montreal for ideas. Propel‘s founders knew financing would come through the development of strong relationships with would-be angel investors in Saint John and the Maritimes.

Office space in the city was ample and relatively cheap compared to other urban centres, so it was unlikely these start-ups would need help with the rent – if they needed an office at all. Home-based businesses were beginning to appear and Saint John’s long-standing relationship with fibre to the home, meant entrepreneurs could do business with the world from their living rooms.

That left mentorship. They immediately tapped into Saint John’s collaborative business community, pairing senior business executives with entrepreneurs, a one-to-one match-up. This idea would be replicated in other areas of development in Saint John over the next decade, including poverty reduction and immigration.

In 2006 Propel hosted Atlantic Canada’s first Angel Investor Summit to promote a startup investment culture in the region, anchored in Saint John. This event celebrated the birth of a classic angel investor network to help finance startups. It also launched a Canadian first; a group of in-kind angel investors. These were Saint John lawyers, accountants and other business service providers who accepted a small stipend (rarely claimed) from Propel in exchange for advice and services to guide entrepreneurs through business development, growth strategy and the regulatory and licensing process for their intellectual property.

In its first 36 months, Propel nurtured 21 Saint John start-ups and continues to work with early stage companies. Some of its early successes were: Brovada, which is a market leader with its business software for the insurance industry; ShiftEnergy, which develops real-time energy use analysis; and Radian6.

“We’re off to the races…We’re not having a big party here. We’ve got the resources to go do it, now we’re heads down and we have to go execute.” – Marcel LeBrun

There are gazelles…and then there is Radian6. In 2007 its original quartet – Chris Newton, Chris Ramsey, Marcel LeBrun and David Alston developed a new technology to monitor social media engagement across all platforms. In March 2011 San Francisco-based Salesforce.com purchased Radian6, with its 400+ employees and offices in Saint John, Fredericton and Halifax for $316 million.

Saint John can lay claim to another type of gazelle, this one in the realm of social entrepreneurship. The Saint John Community Loan Fund, led by Seth Asimakos, is Canada’s first micro-credit community investment group. Created in 1996, the fund provides credit to low-income applicants who want to start a business. Its first loan, of $5,000, went to a guy who wanted to salvage sunken logs from the bottom of the river. It was a success, the entrepreneur earned a living wage, paid back the loan and went on to start a second business in the city.

In 2004, the Fund was a founding member of the Canadian Community Investment Network. To date the Fund has disbursed over $200,000 in loans, generating over $3 million in new income. The average loan is $1,250.

The people behind these enterprises are all linked by one simple belief: that the power of one person, connected to a network, can fuel a transformation.