Business in Vancouver’s “How I did it” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week’s issue, David Snell talks about how Vancouver startup FusionPipe is getting a toehold in the competitive mobile security market.
“Peter Luong founded the company in 2010. He had a vision for mobile security and password-less authentication then, and he spent the next four years using his own money, about $500,000, and government grants. … And then really he got to the point where he had to make a decision: ‘Do I abandon this, because I’ve put enough money in?’
“When Steve Jobs told us in 2007 what we wanted, which is smartphones, and then 2010 announced and started delivering the iPad, we really started the march to replace laptops and PCs. Peter knew enough about technology – he was at CIBC Security for some years in Toronto, as well as Nortel.
“He saw… bring-your-own-device was going to become more common; BlackBerry was very secure but unfortunately being replaced by consumer Android and iOS devices; passwords were becoming very complex; and security breaches, he knew, were going to start happening in mobile because mobile was just not as mature as the Internet.
“He started to look at how you could build a separate container [for work-related data] that would be separate from personal that would encrypt data … and also look at a way that a mobile workforce could authenticate themselves without having to use passwords and do it in a secure manner.
“In September 2013, he was getting ready to look at launching the products in 2014.
He was getting married on a beach in Hawaii, saying, ‘Okay, what do I do now? I put a lot of money in and my wife’s kind of questioning my sanity. Do I get a job, or do I follow the dream?’
“So he followed the dream, he persevered and went out looking for a CEO, which is where he found me. I’ve been advising Peter since October 2012.
“What he wanted to do was find a CEO to grow the company, hire the staff and bring in the first seed round of the company.
“We’ve now gone from an oversubscribed seed round to a late seed round that’s already full and we’re in due diligence [proceedings] for Series A [financing] in 2015.
“One of the things Peter was very smart about – and not all entrepreneurs are smart about doing this – he hired Gowlings [law firm Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP] and did a very, very complex patent. It cost a lot of money for a startup, but we’ve just got an opinion letter from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office saying that 85% of our patent is unique and patentable, and it’s useful technology.
“That builds a whole bunch of things for the future … it protects your intellectual property from other folks coming in and gives a bunch of credibility to the intellectual property itself when you’re talking to investors.
“We have just been approved for the Apple Store for both our [products].
“We could never have gotten there if we hadn’t gotten a team on board to strategize and execute on this plan.”
