Frederic Lalonde and Dax Dasilva, two notable figures of Montréal’s tech scene, had somehow barely met before they entered the green room.
“If everything has to go through you, it’s not a scalable system.”
Frederic Lalonde
Hopper
But on stage at North Star in Montréal on Thursday they traded jokes like old friends as they unpacked their “rollercoaster” journeys to building billion-dollar companies. Their main tips: take care of yourself, find purpose through social impact, and once your startup scales large enough, learn when to let go.
“When you reach the point that you can no longer walk around and know what people are doing…now you have to build people,” Lalonde, the founder and CEO of Hopper, said. “You have to get people to do the right thing when you’re not in the room.”
Founded in 2007, Hopper saw rapid success with its mobile app that recommended the cheapest times to buy flights, and eventually turned to selling travel software to corporate clients. It raised more than $700 million in venture capital and reached hundreds of millions in revenue along the way.
Lalonde said getting to that level requires knowing when to pull back and let teams make decisions independently. “If everything has to go through you, it’s not a scalable system.”
Dasilva, who co-founded the public point-of-sales and e-commerce software company Lightspeed Commerce in 2005, agreed. Another key piece of advice—which has become a Dasilva adage—he offered on stage was to “throw away your job description and write a whole new one” every year.
Lightspeed, which is dual-listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange, reached $1 billion in revenue last year, but its share price has struggled to regain its 2021 high. Its market capitalization is roughly $2 billion CAD.
The Dasilva and Lalonde fireside chat closed off the second edition of North Star, a Montréal-based, founder-focused speaker event organized by a group of Montréal tech players, alongside McGill Ventures and HEC Montréal’s incubator La base entrepreneuriale. Held at the event space La Nesra in Griffintown, it featured speakers of multiple generations of Montréal’s tech scene.
Dasilva stressed the need for founders to take care of themselves—mind and body—to set an example for their teams. “The best thing you can do as a CEO is learn how to meditate and stay calm, because everyone’s going to draw that from you,” Dasilva said.
“Meditation and yoga will actually save your life,” Lalonde added.
The conversation veered into how the CEOs have found purpose through social impact initiatives. For Dasilva, this was through his non-profit environmental alliance Age of Union, for which he travelled the world to work on conservation initiatives and co-produced film projects like the Emmy-winning documentary Wildcat.
For Lalonde, social impact comes through another Canadian tech startup he co-founded: Deep Sky, which is seeking to suck carbon out of the atmosphere to slow the impact of climate change (though as Lalonde puts it, we’re already screwed).
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Deep Sky opened a direct air carbon capture facility in Alberta last August, the first of its kind in North America. The company aims for the facility to capture 3,000 tonnes of CO2 per year to store it underground.
But Dasilva and Lalonde said part of why they were able to take on social impact projects was the money they’d made from their original ventures.
“One of the best ways to solve these really fundamental problems, whether it’s ecosystem, whether it’s carbon management, is to build companies,” Lalonde argued.
For Dasilva, pursuing causes he cares about is another way to demonstrate leadership. “I think that folks want to see a leader that’s driven by doing something for the greater good. It’s like you’re a role model for doing something bigger than you.”
Feature image courtesy Eva Blue.