Yahoo Finance Non-profit AceTech aims to cultivate next wave of Ontario tech successes
Every time you check your email while waiting in the Starbucks line, you’re benefiting from the brainpower that’s been simmering in southern Ontario’s tech space for the last several years.
And while mobile email – created by Waterloo-based Research in Motion, now Blackberry — is a notable legacy on its own, the Waterloo-Toronto tech corridor is hoping for even bigger and brighter things.
Helping to nurture that progress is AceTech, a non-profit that aims to bring tech executives from Internet communications software companies together to share experiences and help each other succeed.
Founded a decade ago, it now counts a membership of more than 200 CEOs and executives, says AceTech CEO Jodi Kovitz.
“It’s a group of people who really do want to be the best they can be. We help them do that through providing a best in class experience of peer to peer learning,” she says.
Building a community
While southern Ontario, and Waterloo in particular, has developed a reputation as an incubator of tech startups, AceTech quite deliberately aims a bit higher up in the food chain. It restricts its membership to top executives of companies that already are past the idea stage and are pulling in revenue, generally in the $2 million-$50 million range annually.
Currently, the bulk of the participating companies are based in the GTA.
Kovitz, a former lawyer at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt, says the idea is to provide the leaders with connections and other resources that can help a small player fast track itself into the big leagues.
“Once they have a proof of concept, and a market need that’s clear, and they’re starting to operate, then I think the CEOs are actually ready to go to one another and say these are my growth challenges, what can I learn from you,” she says.
The group does this by providing opportunities for executives to interact, such as roundtables and retreats, and by bringing in speakers to present ideas in areas such as marketing and finding investors.
Networking key
Joel Lessem, CEO of Firmex, a cloud-based virtual data room, became an AceTech member in 2010 and has since joined the non-profit’s board.
He said that while the events that AceTech holds have been helpful to his development as a CEO, the main benefit for him is the networking opportunities. Executives in the southern Ontario tech hubs historically tend to communicate with each other less than executives in California’s silicon valley, he says, which means there tends to be less sharing of ideas.
“The speakers are good, but the absolute core of AceTech are the roundtables,” he says.
Rubbing elbows with other executives from other like-minded companies allowed him to get answers to questions about things like how to structure deals, to expand customer contacts, how to find good executives and lawyer referrals.
“All of those key little operating issues, rather than trying to figure out it always on your own and sometimes making mistakes, you actually get it done right the first time,” says Lessem. Since joining AceTech, Firmex’s revenue has grown eight times over and the business is now highly profitable, he says.
What Kovitz also hopes to do with AceTech is help tell the story of the Toronto-Waterloo corridor, which can often get overlooked.
“There are a number of success stories that are showing that we are attracting talent and there are a number of companies that are scaling out of Toronto-Waterloo,’ she says.
She points to companies like management software provider Intelex, enterprise software company Accelerated Connections, and financial services software maker Doxim as examples that have benefited from executive participation at AceTech.
“I think that’s something that we are just starting to do a better job of: sharing our story with the world,” she says. “That there actually is an incredibly strong and growing super cluster here in the Toronto-Waterloo corridor.”
