Montreal Start Up

Investissement Quebec is piling a lot of money into promoting the benefits of succession planning recently and whilst not directly relevant to our area of interest (start-up’s) there is a mutually important economic message:

Get the money into the hands of the next generation of guardians in a timely, smooth manner !

I mentioned in a previous post that MSU had been described as "…an agency that encourages successful entrepreneurs to become angel investors." We see this as one of the best forms of  succession planning possible and will continue to strongly encourage it ,but there are other variations on this theme.

Just recently David Crow, originally from Austin, Tx but now living near the beautiful shores of Lake Ontario blogged about how in thriving markets successful companies seem to spawn founders of new companies.

So para-phrasing a question he asks "Where are the Montreal companies that spawn founders ?"

I wasn’t in Montreal to remember the heady days of Softimage, but that’s still the company most people seem to refer to when this subject is discussed locally - and according to the NY Times, that happened in 1994 !

My limited digging around has also shown that Dialogic has spawned a few other founders, as has Telesystem, Mamma.com, E-Fundraising , Zero Knowledge/Radialpoint and AskMen.com but I would be really interested to hear of other successful Montreal companies that have gone on to spawn a new set of founders.