Montreal Tech Watch

James A Duncan (@ jamesaduncan), serial entrepreneur, kindly shared his experiences at last week’s mentoring event.

The event was at Café République, a quieter place, right in downtown Montréal, probably a better place than last month’s spot. Indeed, last month felt more like a group of friends gathering for a summer drink, amongst all the buzzy noise of Montréal, while this time we had an entire floor reserved for the meetup.

James Duncan is known in Montréal mainly for Reasonably Smart, a cloud computing startup which used javascript and git for a new application platform, à la google app engine. For most external observers, it looked like a technology experiment, up until Joyent, a well-known cloud hosting provider acquired the company.

This is where it gets interesting. We learnt James actually started *very early* in technology, launched tech ventures at 18 years old, co-founded an ISP in Ontario and also one of Britain’s largest hosting company, and grew those companies to hundreds and hundreds of employees. Many aspiring entrepreneurs asked James how he felt starting a new technology company, also how he found new partners, and also how he got contacts to make his businesses grow. I think the most important James had to share was his mindset. He had a few principles which were:

• work on problems you currently have. Chances are that many other people have the same problem, but actually noone tried solving it.
• grow your business by finding partners. You’ll get much more things done, and the potential of the company is multiplied. Give them ownership and greed will get things done.

It’s an interesting approach. Indeed, many entrepreneurs want ownership, thinking that others won’t valued it as much or maybe things will go wrong. Seeing James’s mutliple and inspiring successes, there’s certainly lots of food for thought here.

Thanks to James for the inspiration and his time!

Other pictures here