(Pictured above, from left: Jake Lawrence, Co-Group Head, Global Banking and Markets, Scotiabank; Brian Porter, President & CEO, Scotiabank; Dax Dasilva, founder & CEO, Lightspeed; Rana Sarkar, Consul General of Canada, Northern California/Silicon Valley.)

 

The Quebec technology ecosystem – including a broad talent pool and financing options – was a key element in Lightspeed POS’s journey from inception in 2005 to its blockbuster IPO last March, its founder and CEO says.

The point-of-sale payment company was "bootstrapped" for the first seven years, said Dax Dasilva, and the support it received in Montreal and the province more broadly helped it grow.

"Whether it was, in those early days, BDC or Investissement Québec, or a lot of local organizations, they helped us go from zero to 10 million in that first seven years without external investment," he said during a panel at a technology conference hosted by Scotiabank in Montreal.

And later, when influential venture capital firm Accel Partners wanted sell its stake in Lightspeed, other Quebec investors such as Inovia Capital and Caisse de Dépôt et Placement stepped in to make sure it stayed a Canadian company, Dasilva added.

“Today, we’re a public company,” he said, referring to Lightspeed’s IPO, the largest in the Canadian tech sector in several years. “It’s been a bit of a journey, and I think that there’s a lot of thanks that I have to this local ecosystem, which is quite, quite robust.”

His comments came during a panel at Scotiabank’s inaugural Quebec Growth Technology Conference in Montreal on Tuesday. The province is key for the Bank, particularly as it continues to invest in technology and digitization, said chief executive Brian Porter.

 “Our philosophy of how we operate the bank is we’re an important part of the economic fabric, and we're an important part of the social fabric wherever we work,” Porter said. “So, the economic fabric here in Quebec is very important to us. We're allocating capital personally and to commercial clients and corporate clients. We're making loans, we're managing wealth assets, and we're doing what we should be doing as a bank… What happens here is really, really important to wealth creation and the technology sector generally.”

In Montreal alone, there are 1,300 startups, 42 incubators and accelerator programs, 2,800 startup founders and 23 venture capital firms, according to an August 2019 report by Bonjour Startup Montréal. The Greater Montreal ecosystem’s strengths are in artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing and robotics, according to Startup Genome’s Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2019.

"I think why we're able to build great international companies out of Canada and out of Quebec is because we are unique,” Dasilva said. “We're able to do diversity really well, we're able to do inclusion really well. We're able to listen to what's great about the way people think, the way people communicate in other places. And I think that's strengthened us."

Rana Sarkar, Canadian Consul General to Northern California & Silicon Valley, who also spoke on the panel, said the country currently has an “extraordinary opportunity” to leverage its “huge Brand Canada halo” to attract key talent from abroad as some other countries tighten their immigration policies.

He points to the H1-B visas in the United States, which allow companies to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations. There has been a pullback of these visas, which are often used by Silicon Valley firms.

Meanwhile, Canada’s Global Skills Strategy program allows companies to get a visa within two weeks to bring in global talent, a unique proposition around the world right now, Sarkar added.

"Our real opportunity is to say to a lot of those folks, ‘Hey look... Canada is looking like the belle of the ball in that category.’ People are coming up, and they’re coming up unsolicited as well. And so I think from a talent inflow point of view, that’s a great thing."

Lightspeed itself has benefitted from repatriation of talent, Dasilva said. The company’s new chief people officer is a Canadian who started the role earlier this month after working in the U.S. for several years.

“She’s like, ‘finally, there’s companies that scale,’” he said during the panel. “She wants to come back to Canada and help (the) Canadian public success story.”

Scotiabank, which has been investing heavily in technology, has also been a beneficiary of this influx of human capital, Porter said.

“We’ve been able to attract talent,” he said. “We’re now one of the top four or five tech employers in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), and we’ve captured a lot of people on the rebound from the valley, who’ve said, ‘OK, I’ve spent my three years there and I want to come back.’ Or, they’ve made a fair amount of money and want to come back and like our value proposition and what the bank is doing in the tech space.”