Sramana Mitra: Give me the chronology of it. You didn’t mention raising money at any of these points. Michael Sikorsky: I raised right away as I started the company. Sramana Mitra: In Alberta? Michael Sikorsky: Yes, in Alberta. I presented to 11 investors when I was 22. Just to tell you a neat story there, the
Sramana Mitra: This is a very common scenario in technologies trying to start their first ventures. They end up building technology, which essentially turns out to be a solution looking for a problem to solve. How did you maneuver out of that situation? Michael Sikorsky: As you’re in that situation, you can feel it but you
Sramana Mitra: What specifically did you do as you started this company? Michael Sikorsky: I got the best term for it from Michael Gerber. I actually had an entrepreneurial fever and had no clue what I had to do next. I just decided to do it. It’s not something I would recommend. I had only
Sramana Mitra: What kind of company did you join? Michael Sikorsky: It was a supervised control and data acquisition company. They sold software to pipeline companies that wanted to monitor what’s going on across all their pipelines. What is the pressure? What is going on? There is a visualization aspect, remote monitoring, and then there’s a hardware
The story of a serial entrepreneur from an off-center place, this time Alberta, Canada. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Michael Sikorsky: I was born in Alberta, which is in Canada in 1972. I’m
Robin Smith: The corporate clients are amazed. A lot of them have to be in meetings over weeks and sometimes months just to have a project completed. They can do it with us, basically, overnight. Everything is geo-tagged. All the metadata includes time and date stamps. It’s all very secure. We’ve gone through our second
Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. How big is your company? How many people do you have? Robin Smith: I have over 20,000 agents in our database nationwide. We only use around 65 to 6,800 of those on an ongoing basis, but we do have quite a few people interested in working for us. In my corporate
Sramana Mitra: What is the business model? Robin Smith: We’re basically a mobile technology platform that provides data point retrieval for individuals and enterprise clients. We deliver that data however they need us to. Sramana Mitra: How do you get paid? Robin Smith: Our customer places an order and pays via credit card. Our enterprise