Saturday, February 16, 2013

Exceeding expectations


Exceeding expectationsSaeed El-Darahali’s working career started early and has included many stops. He began programming at the age of eight, and by 14 he was running a home-based confectionary business in which he paid his father to drive him to make fudge and candy deliveries. While serving in the Canadian military between 1997 and 2001, his army unit was one of the first to secure the scene of the Swissair disaster off Peggy’s Cove. He later worked at Innovacorp, a provincial corporation that funds early stage companies in Nova Scotia. Since 2009 he has been building his own start-up, SimplyCast, into a global online marketing company.
SimplyCast’s software provides a host of online marketing functions; it conducts surveys, sends newsletters by email, and automates Twitter feeds. The company has customers in 175 countries, and its products have been translated into languages spanning from Chinese and Russian to Portuguese. SimplyCast is debt free and posts seven-figure annual revenues. All that, El-Darahali notes, has been achieved in just three years from the company’s base in “Silicon Dartmouth.”
Despite his own success, El-Darahali, 31, who emigrated from Kuwait with his parents in 1992, acknowledges that Nova Scotia lacks a formal network for supporting tech entrepreneurs. “The people exist,” he says, “but there’s no central location where you can ask for advice.” The result is an over-reliance on government resources such as Innovacorp. “It’s not so much that people turn to government by default,” adds El-Darahali. “It’s that there’s nowhere else to go.”
Entrepreneurs often seek out El-Darahali for advice. And he’s happy to oblige, viewing it as an opportunity to return some of the support he has received. In late June, for instance, he attended 48hrs in the Valley. Held twice a year, the event is organized by C100, a tech group mainly composed of Canadians in Silicon Valley. For 48hrs in the Valley, the group invites 20 of Canada’s promising start-ups to California for two days of mentorship, workshops, and investor meetings. SimplyCast was one of two Atlantic Canadian companies invited to that session.
A decade ago, El-Darahali called for the creation of a $1-million private-sector-led fund to support early stage companies in Nova Scotia. The vision was never realized. But now, inspired by such groups as C100 and Propel ICT, he is calling for a formal network of mentors to guide entrepreneurs in his province.
“We need to create a group from the private sector,” says El-Darahali, who serves as a director with Digital Nova Scotia. “The best model is always led by the private sector.” Nova Scotia also needs a major tech exit—something on the scale of Radian6—to help break down the province’s conservative investing habits. Only a multi-million-dollar exit can show what is truly possible. “We need that big success,” says El-Darahali.