Success Through Validation with Lloyd Bureau and Mina Mekhail

Today I’m thrilled to be chatting with Lloyd Bureau, who is a ​​Venture Associate and Validation Program Lead at District 3 Innovation. There, Lloyd helps nurture and develop multidisciplinary teams that harness emerging technologies to create businesses with a global impact. 

As of today, Lloyd has run 4 cohorts of the D3’s Validation program, an early-stage startup program designed to help founders validate their business models through hands-on market research. He has also worked with a portfolio of 35 growth-stage High Tech startups and their coaches to prioritize activities through OKRs, all while providing coaching on sales processes, value-selling, customer success, and improving pitch decks.

Lloyd is also a founder in his own right, joining D3’s program in 2016 to build TRYNYTY, a Montreal-based freestyle scooter brand leveraging 3D-printing for product development, with a mission to support the growth of the freestyle scooter community.

Needless to say, Lloyd knows the startup and innovation community better than most, and his insights into what it takes to succeed and achieve growth are invaluable. 

But that’s not all!

Joining Lloyd and I for today’s conversation is Mina Mekhail, the award-winning CEO and Founder of Freshr Technologies. Mina participated in D3’s Validation and Launch & Grow programs at Concordia University’s District 3 Innovation Center when he was starting his company back in 2018.

Based out of Nova Scotia, Freshr Technologies is a biomaterials innovation Startup that’s focused on developing sustainable active packaging to prolong the shelf life of fresh proteins, with a focus on fresh fish. Mina and his team at Freshr are developing solutions that increase the return on investment for the entire value chain, while reducing food waste and reliance on traditional plastics.

I can’t wait to pick Lloyd and Mina’s brains on past projects, exciting initiatives they're both currently involved in, and what’s on each of their roadmap for the next year-plus.

Boast AI accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

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Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

Transcript

Paul Davenport:

Hello, and welcome to What The Tech? from Boast AI, where we talk with some of the brilliant minds behind new and exciting tech initiatives to learn what it takes to tackle technological uncertainty and eventually change the world. I'm Paul Davenport, Boast's head of content, and today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Lloyd Bureau, who's venture associate and Validation Program lead at District 3 Innovation. There Lloyd helps nurture and develop multidisciplinary teams that harness emerging technologies to create businesses with a global impact. As of today Lloyd has run four cohorts of the D3's Validation Program, an early stage startup program designed to help founders validate their business models through hands on market research. He's also worked with a portfolio of 35 growth stage high-tech startups and their coaches to prioritize activities through OKRs, providing coaching on sales processes, value selling, customer success, and improving pitch decks.

Lloyd is also a founder in his own right, joining D3's program in 2016 to build Trynyty, a Montreal based freestyle scooter brand leveraging 3D printing for product development, with a mission to support the growth of the freestyle scooter community. Needless to say, Lloyd knows the startup and innovation community better than most, and his insights into what it takes to succeed and achieve growth are invaluable. That's not all, joining Lloyd and I for today's conversation is Mina Mekhail, the award winning CEO and founder of Freshr Technologies. Mina participated in D3's Validation and Launch & Grow programs at Concordia University's District 3 Innovation Center when he was starting his company back in 2018.

Based out of Nova Scotia, Freshr Technologies is a biomaterials innovation startup that's focused on developing sustainable active packaging to prolong the shelf life of fresh proteins, with a focus on fresh fish. Mina and his team at Freshr are developing solutions that increase the return on investments for the entire value chain while reducing food waste and reliance on traditional plastics. I can't wait to pick Lloyd and Mina's brains on past projects, exciting initiatives they're both currently involved in, and what's on each of their road map for the next year plus. So without further ado, welcome to the show, gentlemen.

Mina Mekhail:

Hey, Paul. How's it going? Pleasure to be here.

Lloyd Bureau:

Pleasure to be here as well. Thank you, Paul.

Paul Davenport:

Awesome. I'm so happy to have you guys. So I'm going to kick it off. Lloyd, I'll start with you, could you tell our audience a little bit about your background? I know I gave a primer here at the top, but where are you based? Why are you based there? And why did you get involved in the startup and accelerator space in the first place?

Lloyd Bureau:

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm based in Montreal and I've been here for about 12 years now. So I moved to Montreal from Quebec City to play football at Vanier College at the time, and then I went on to study supply chain operations management at Concordia. And my background, so I've been an entrepreneur for about 15 years now, and I started my first company, QC Scooters, back in 2008. And this was the first freestyle scooter company in Canada at the time. I myself was a freestyle scooter rider, and one of the first in the country, and like many in this very small community, I kept breaking my parts since they weren't designed to be ridden in a skate park or in the streets. It was a big challenge for us. We spent a lot of time modifying our scooters and finding new ways to make them stronger, I started to realize some patterns and designed a few products that I then managed to commercialize and get manufactured locally.

Then our market started to grow, so I started to import all of the top brands around the world and started selling them in Canada and all around the world. I also organize dozens of freestyle scooter competitions to promote the sport and ensure its growth, and now it's really grown on the world stage, we have international competitions and associations. So it's been great to be a part of this journey. I started this first company and then eight years later in 2016 I had the opportunity to sell the company to a strategic acquirer. But it wasn't long until I got roped back into entrepreneurship. So later that year I joined forces with three partners to found TRYNYTY. And as you mentioned earlier, this was one of the first freestyle scooter brands to rely almost exclusively on 3D printing for our R&D processes.

So we also received the support of District 3 early on in our journey, they provided us with one-on-one coaching and access to free 3D printing facilities in a design lab, which really helped us hone in our processes. And to this day we've been able to achieve significant international success, but we're still not at a stage where I could say, "We can be full-time on this," it's still a passion project. So following my studies, I worked in management consulting and B2B SaaS, before I had the opportunity to join the District 3 team in 2022. So why join the startup ecosystem? Well, I clearly always had a passion for entrepreneurship and technology, and this felt like a natural place for me to help other founders while exploring the ecosystem that we have in Quebec, in Canada.

Paul Davenport:

That is fantastic, Lloyd. And I think it very much shows why you came to D3, just based on your resumé to date, you're in the business of building community, whether it's for freestyle scooters or whether it's for founders who are looking for an ecosystem that they can tap into. Now, Mina, I'd love to know, same question for you, where are you based? How did you get into the startup scene? And what are some of your passions that got you into working on the tech that you're working on today?

Mina Mekhail:

We're based in Nova Scotia, so the east coast here in Canada. We've been here for a few years now, we moved here end of 2020, so just at the height of the pandemic. Before that we were based in Montreal, that's how I got involved with District 3. I'm an engineer by training, I went and I did a master's and a PhD at McGill University focused on the use of biomaterials in order to solve complex biological problems. My PhD, which will seem far removed from what I'm doing now but it isn't really, but my PhD was mainly around developing biomaterials to try to regenerate some of the lost function after a spinal cord injury. So it was a medically focused problem that I was trying to use biomaterials to solve.

Right after I finished my PhD I knew I didn't want to go the academia route, I loved business, I had the entrepreneurial bug. I actually ran a tutoring company while I was doing my PhD, where I just hired a bunch of tutors and I matched them up with people who needed tutoring and I made a cut. It was my first entrepreneurial experience if you will. After that I worked at the Shriners Hospital for Children as a project manager, innovation lead, where I started and ran 11 innovation projects within the hospital. And that was very exciting times, but I knew that I wanted to start my own company, so that's actually what got me started with District 3.

We did the Validation Program, which I'm sure we're going to talk about in a bit, but that was really an eye-opener and I'm a big believer of that program. I'm an evangelist for that program. And since then we worked on growing our company, and the focus of the company is developing sustainable active packaging as you mentioned, in order to extend the shelf life of fresh proteins. I took the biomaterials expertise that I had developed in my graduate studies and I've applied it to a problem in the food industry, something I'm really passionate about. But that's where we're based, Nova Scotia, I'm sure I'm going to tell you more as we go on.

Paul Davenport:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I love for both of you what a diverse background you have, in that it wasn't just straight-up, "Okay, we want to start a business, what's the business going to be?" And like you said, Mina, you're an evangelist for D3. I think you guys are proof in practice of what success at D3 looks like. Lloyd, I'd love to talk to you a little bit more too about what the program is like and what you've been working on over there as the lead of Validation for the Innovation Center.

Lloyd Bureau:

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll start by telling you a little bit more about District 3 at a high level. First of all, District 3 stands for three things, innovation, collaboration and entrepreneurship. And this organization was founded within Concordia University in 2013 actually by Xavier-Henri Hervé, who is still involved in the Innovation Hub today. And Concordia has always thrived to be a forward-thinking university, so D3 was really a result of one of those initiatives. And I'm proud to say that 10 years later we're still helping founders from Quebec and Canada on their journey, so it's been awesome to be around this ecosystem. So really, our mission is to contribute to the emergence of Canadian startups that have a global impact, and we do this by filling the gaps in experience, network and capital that early stage founders typically face early on in their journey.

Everyone that's involved at D3 on the staff has either built or worked for a startup, so we definitely bring that experience when we're working with our teams. We're all very passionate about entrepreneurship, and I think that's what makes these incubators and these places such great places to build companies. We're a not-for-profit organization, we take no equity, we're really a part of Concordia and part of the desire of this university to have an impact on the community and on entrepreneurship. So now you know a little bit more about D3 at a high level I'll tell you more about Validation. So Validation is really District 3's flagship program, and it's a 10 week experiential learning program for early stage startup founders. Those that have an idea, a concept, perhaps a PhD research that they want to find a way to commercialize. But it's really designed for those that have the ability to build but are really at the idea stage.

And so the objective of the Validation Program is to validate the desirability, feasibility and viability of their business models. And the outcome is, through their hands on primary research, they will either validate their hypotheses, pivot or invalidate. And I look forward to hearing Mina's example so that this can be made a little bit more concrete, but essentially, the idea is to move quickly, fail fast and make progress. And so the whole thesis of the program is based on the fact that one of the top two reasons why startups fail, and this is according to CB Insights, is no market need for the solution. The number one reason, ran out of cash. Usually those two are quite intimately related, and so the Validation Program is designed to derisk the business model by attacking that no market need. We help our founders confirm the market need for their solutions so that they can move forward with confidence once they start building and investing and spending all this time and resources in developing their solutions.

So the way we do this is we teach our founders how to reach out to different stakeholders in their industries to conduct unbiased discovery interviews to validate or invalidate their hypotheses that they've built using the Business Model Canvas framework. And this is especially relevant for founders that have deep technical expertise such as Mina, because this process really helps them zoom out from the technology and all the details and really focus on the business. "Okay, I have this invention, I have this discovery. Now, why does the world care? What can I change? And how can I make things better for companies, for individuals?" Contextualizing the technology to a real problem.

So a little bit more about the process, every founder is going to conduct 10 interviews per week. And they're going to bring the insights of those interviews and how they've linked those to different hypotheses, whether to validate or invalidate them, so that they can generate new hypotheses and iterate constantly week by week. And every time they bring these insights they're going to get some feedback from coaches that have done this process themselves and so can provide feedback on the methodology and give them some insights and ideas, and sometimes I jump in as well to provide some ideas.

We've had some pretty cool aha moments in the past. The goal is to have 100 interviews by the end of the program, and every cohort is split into two groups, one in high-tech and one in life sciences for biotech and healthcare, and they have their respective coaches that are specialized in those areas to provide feedback on the teams. There's a big community aspect to this, like we were talking about earlier, these cohorts are extremely diverse and the participants really help each other out. And the last thing I'll point out is we also encourage our teams to have a global mindset from the start. There's not a ton of truly global companies in Quebec and Canada, and the local market is rarely big enough for our innovation potential to be fully realized, so it's important to have an idea of what other markets around the world are big enough to support these innovations. And I'm certain that Mina will be able to find customers all around the world with his solution, so that's a really prime example of this global mindset.

Paul Davenport:

That is so cool. I love the approach that D3 takes too, you had mentioned it earlier too, so many people who are working in the program either started a startup themself or they worked at startups in the past. But they have been elbow to elbow with founders who are in the same position as the folks that are in the cohort at the time. And that's very similar to how we work here at Boast, I'm the outlier on our team, I'm not a founder myself but I've only really worked for startups, and I love it. I have that entrepreneurial itch, it's why I wanted to hop on and work with the Boast team. Every single member of our team is either a founder or a cofounder, almost bar none. And it is fantastic seeing how that really makes a difference with the founders and the startups that we work with. Mina, I would love to hear about your experiences within the Validation Program. What did you get over those 10 weeks? And how did you change course and maybe see your business through a different lens given that exposure to those different individuals?

Mina Mekhail:

Yeah. No, I'm happy to tell you about my experience, because it was really an eye-opener for me. Let me just give you a bit of context coming out of academia. In academia you're trying to develop new technologies. If you're in applied science you're trying to develop new technologies, right? But you're doing this in a silo, you're not communicating with the outside world when you're developing all these new technologies, right? So coming out of that culture, similar to the product I mentioned to you in the introduction, I've developed this product, I've actually managed to get a patent on it, get a bunch of companies interested to look at it, the reason why it didn't move any further was because nobody teaches us in academia, is there a product-market fit? There's no such thing, right? You're just developing, publishing a bunch of papers, and that's about it. You don't go that extra step further.

So being an entrepreneur, the first thing I remember, meeting with one of the coaches there. I'll never forget that first meeting, and she sat me down and she said, "Are you actually serious about this or is this a passion project? Are you actually going to spend time or are you just going to do this for a few months and then drop it?" And I remember saying to her... Because I had a full-time job, a good paying job, I remember telling her, "No, no, I'm in this. I want to do this eventually full-time, it's not just a side project for me." So going into D3, as Lloyd mentioned, how the program is structured, the eye-opener for me is, talk to people outside of your space, get out there, talk to as many people as you can. We went in with the initial idea that we want to develop some sort of spray to apply on fresh fruits and vegetables in order to extend the shelf life of produce.

Started talking to people, went through the Validation Program, 10 people a week throughout the supply chain, very quickly came to realize, "Okay, first of all, spraying food has a very negative customer perception associated with it." And I also realized another thing is that produce is a low value commodity. It is a big chunk of the food waste problem, but it's a low value commodity. So unless we develop something that is very cheap, it's going to be very challenging for us to commercialize. So my first pivot was to say "Okay, let's move away from fresh fruits and vegetables, let's focus on a high value commodity in the food industry." And seafood on average is a high value commodity, so we said, "Okay, perfect. Let's spray seafood and extend its shelf life," so that was the first pivot.

And we went and talked to more people in the seafood industry, and lo and behold, everyone is telling us, "Well, if you're going to spray seafood you actually have to put the spray as an additive on the food label," and there's a negative customer perception associated with that as well. So then we had the second pivot, which is we said, "Okay, forget about spraying anything on the food, what if we had a packaging, a sustainable packing, that could extend the shelf life but does not actually add any ingredients to the food item?" And all of sudden we've had interest from a whole bunch of people that said... I remember very clearly my first conversation with the sixth biggest producer of salmon in the world, when I was talking to them they said, "Where do we buy this from? Are you guys manufacturing this?" I remember at the time laughing because all I said was, "It's just an idea now, but we're working on it."

Not once or twice but three or four customers started saying, "Where do we buy this thing from?" And once I started hearing this it was an aha moment, that's what Lloyd was talking about. I said, "Now we have something, there is a product-market fit here because now people want to buy this thing." So we went on to develop it, we started working at D3, we had a lab space that we were using, the rest is history. We started developing it, and ever since then we've had multiple patents that have been filed on the technology, we have multiple collaborations now, multiple partnerships with big global companies.

Again, to Lloyd's point, the one that is out there in the media is we were selected as one of six companies worldwide to work with Mitsubishi Chemical Corp in Japan. Actually, that was through Greentown Labs that is based in Boston, so it's in your neck of the woods. We were the only Canadian company, and it's been a year and a half now, almost two years. All of that came through making sure that we have a product-market fit. So that's why I'm a big believer of the Validation Program, especially to those who have a very strong tech background coming out of academia, I think it's a critical thing to go through.

Paul Davenport:

Wow. Okay, so you just took us on quite the journey from getting that new perspective on the business and the new product-market fit. I'd love to know, how are you using those skills that you got during the Validation Program today? And what's on the road map for the future?

Mina Mekhail:

So the principles of, validate your product-market fit, the Business Model Canvas that Lloyd talked about, we are actually using that for new products that we're thinking of launching, right? So every time we think of a new product we have to think, "I'm not just launching products or going into different interesting potentials without really validating, what is the need out there? And who is my customer, and are they willing to pay for it?" Every single new product that we're launching goes through the similar mindset as the Validation Program. We do it internally now, so I do it with my team, but the skills and the know-how was essentially learnt at District 3.

Paul Davenport:

That is so cool. All right, so I'd love to know for our listeners out there, could you guys maybe run through a few resources at District 3 that are available today that people can take advantage of now?

Lloyd Bureau:

Yeah, absolutely. The Validation Program is the entry program for District 3, and those that complete it and decide to move on can be considered to be participants in the Launch & Grow Program. And this program is really based on a combination of things, we offer one-on-one coaching with experienced coaches with decades of startup experience and industry knowledge. So they get some one-on-one coaching on a regular basis, but they also get access to different workshops, we bring experts from a variety of industries and knowledge spaces so that they can help our founders upskill their entrepreneurial skills. So that's one other thing that we do. We also organize some different events to create connections. I said earlier the network gap is also a challenge for startups and founders, so being able to bring VCs in the space to talk to our startups, organize some office hours, different community events to bring different actors in our ecosystem together.

We also go on different missions all around the world, we're going with a delegation to Lisbon Web Summit in November. We also went to Toronto earlier this year, we were at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas last week. We try to have a global presence and accompany our startups in those events. We help them prep, we help them debrief, and help them distill what they've learned at those conferences, so a lot of help with the biz dev. So that's essentially what you get. You also get access to the space here, we have a coworking space in Downtown Montreal, you can use the meeting rooms to have meetings with different stakeholders and work out of there. I'm happy to report that after a couple years of closures, now the space is booming and full of activity. There's founders and people working all over the place, it's very, very lively as a community.

There's a lot of informal conversations that happen, you make new connections. "Hey, what are you working on?" "Oh, that's awesome, I know somebody that I could connect you with that could be a potential customer." Those things happen all the time but they don't happen unless you create a space for these collisions to happen. So that's a little bit of a looser value proposition because it's tough to guarantee, but the more active you are in our community the more value you get. So that's the Launch & Grow Program. We also accompany startups over a period that's a little bit longer than some other incubators, it could go up to three, three and a half years in some cases, so long as we feel like we're helping the founders and that they're making progress.

Really it's a two-way relationship, but if they have the desire to continue and they're making progress and we can continue to help, we will keep them on our portfolio. But once they've hit that product-market fit, they're at the scaling stage, they can receive support from other organizations. And there's one here at District 3 called the MentorConnect and it's a group mentoring program. It comes from an MIT methodology, and we brought this to Canada I think four or five years ago. So MentorConnect is actually also a program that Mina participated in, so I'd love to hear what your experience has been with this. So we really have programs for any stage of a founder's journey, and really that's what we're focusing on following the Validation Program.

Paul Davenport:

That's so cool. Mina, I'd love to hear your experience in that MentorConnect program if you don't mind.

Mina Mekhail:

Oh yeah, I'd love to tell you about it. We were actually one of the first cohorts to get into MentorConnect, and it was just early this year that we graduated that program as well. But essentially, that program is a group of seasoned entrepreneurs who have had a successful exit, people in industry, it's a group of really talented individuals with a lot of experience, also quite diverse. And what they do is they match you up with between two and three mentors throughout the journey with you and give you high-level advice and mentorship. So I've been in the program for four years I believe or more, so essentially we would meet up and I'd present how things were going in the last quarter or few months, and then I would present to them some issues that I'm facing, right? Because they're not necessarily investors, as a matter of fact, if they were investors they couldn't be a mentor, right? They had to be unbiased.

So essentially, what I would do is I would present, "Here are the issues that we're facing," and they would help me think about it. A few times as well when there was a specific challenge that needed immediate attention I could easily pick up the phone and call one of them and be like, "Hey, can you help me out with this?" And they would really walk me through or even act as a sounding board to help me think about the problem and how to deal with it. So it has been really, really beneficial for us. So I would say our journey from District 3... I remember being in that shared space that Lloyd talked about, doing the whole community thing, which was amazing.

I love the D3 community and I was part of that from the beginning, and then going through the MentorConnect, I would say I don't think I would be here today if it wasn't for both these programs. MentorConnect has been I would say critical for us, not only actually the advice and call up the mentor if you have something critical going on, but also for connections. I remember there was a few instances that the mentors put me in touch with people who became investors or who put me in touch with companies that eventually ended up partnering with us. So yeah, I think the MentorConnect program is a great program and I really benefited immensely from it.

Paul Davenport:

That is awesome. I love how many connections have been highlighted here in this whole wide ranging conversation. First off, I love hearing Greentown Labs, it's very, very rare that I hear Boston callouts when I'm working from my seat here at Boast. So personally I love that, but I think that goes on to demonstrate that you truly mean it when you say you're thinking globally about everything that you're doing here. Sure, Quebec, Montreal, Eastern Canada, might be small in terms of who's there locally or in terms of the perspective founders have on the available market, but taking the approaches that you've outlined here, partnering with mentors who aren't necessarily a obvious choice for mentorship, is so valuable and definitely just shows the opportunities that are out there.

And I love that you guys are taking that approach, that's so cool. And Mina, that you guys have benefited in such a meaningful and critical way from it as well. So my final question's for Lloyd but I'd love to share it with everybody here, what's your take on the current state of startups? From where you're sitting obviously you have your finger on the pulse, what would you give as maybe a suggestion for somebody entering the startup scene today, whether in your local community or anywhere on earth?

Lloyd Bureau:

Absolutely. So I'll start with, perhaps preaching for the choir a little bit, but the Validation methodology I think makes a lot of sense for every founder that is starting out. Anybody that's looking to start a business, start by clearly identifying their problem, the problem they want to solve, and the value of solving that problem. Because there's a lot of problems out there that people face that aren't big enough to actually get them to spend money on. So being able to find that early on before you build anything is really critical early on in the journey, and you do it by speaking to stakeholders, speaking to different people. And you're going to learn those invaluable skills of reaching out to people, building a pipeline, and you're going to need that later on as a startup founder to start making sales. Just exercising those muscles in a low risk environment, because you're only spending time really, you're not investing in building infrastructure and product, that's really a critical way to approach building a company.

Regardless of the market conditions, if you can find a problem-solution-fit, your odds of success are much higher. We have to keep in mind we're in the business of failure here, most startups will not succeed. The idea is to derisk all along the way everything that you can. But you can be at the mercy of a lot of things that you can't predict, so being able to react quickly is super important. And maybe another thing, so in traditional education we spend a lot of time working through theory, building plans, different assets from traditional business schools, but you really won't make any progress on your business if you just take that approach by itself.

You need to get out of the building and speak to people, and once you know there's a market need you can learn the rest as you go. You don't necessarily need to have an MBA to become a founder. There's so many resources available for free to learn how to build financial models, learn how to run a successful fundraising journey, you can get access to coaches. Focus on finding the right problem that matches your ability to provide a... And the rest you can learn as you go. And finally, one thing that really struck me when I came to District 3 in the end of 2016 is just the amount of help that is available for founders. With my first company I really did everything by myself, doing research on whatever was the internet back in 2008, 2009. But I was really learning everything by myself, not really asking for too much help, and that got me to a certain point.

But with my second business, TRYNYTY, I really wanted to see, "Okay, what can we accomplish if we were to look around and leverage all of the help that is available to us?" I was blown away to see all these... Even at the time District 3 was pretty innovative, but having something like this in my university was really eye-opening. I realized, "I have access to space for free, I can get access to a design lab, access to machinery, specialized equipment," it was really eye-opening. And then they would also help us with the matching, with different grant opportunities. That's also something that we do here, we provide support letters and we review grant applications to make sure they're likely to be successful. So we accompany them with non-dilutive funding. So make sure you maximize the ecosystem's support that is available, there are so many different programs.

And I haven't even started to talk about all the non-dilutive funding opportunities that are available, especially in Quebec, in Canada, especially relevant to maximize those opportunities. There's SR&ED credits, as a shameless plug for Boast here, but there's a lot of other programs in Canada that you can benefit from to fund yourself early on. And it's especially relevant in a climate where it's increasingly difficult to do equity fundraising. So when you raise a round, one of the first questions you'll be asked by investors is, "What have you raised in terms of non-dilutive funding?" And if you haven't done your homework and maximized that, they're going to send you back and say, "Come back to us when you've gotten all the free money that you can." Yes, it's a lot of work going through the applications, revisions and all that, but you're going to get some value out of it and it's really going to help you out. So make sure that you find the help, it's out there. There's so many people in organizations, in government, in universities, and even private organizations, that are focused on helping startups succeed. So make sure you go and get the help, alone we go fast, together we go far.

Paul Davenport:

Lloyd, I couldn't have said it better myself, you put that beautifully. And even beyond SR&ED, when you were talking about fundraising too, Quebec specifically has such a unique structure for supporting small businesses. If you graduate from the SR&ED program that's when you can start exploring CDAE and bringing that into what you're doing. There's just so many options for Canadian startups on the federal and provincial level that you've really got to take advantage of it if you're a founder. It's on the table there, like you said, they're our partners there.

When you're focused on driving innovation, building your product, building your dream, you want a partner who can help take the heavy lifting and burden of getting you that capital off the plate for you in some capacity so that you can really focus on driving that change. And again, working with partners in the ecosystem to really find that market fit. I can't thank you enough for the shameless Boast plug too, always love getting that in there. And then Mina, I'd love to throw it to you too, just any advice generally for founders? Whether they're in the situation where you're in where they've been through the programs and they're benefiting and finding their fit in the market, or ones who are just getting started today, what would you say to them?

Mina Mekhail:

As you mentioned, it is a tough time right now in the startup ecosystem in general, but there's a few things that I think... I wouldn't say advice because I'm also learning on the go, so my two cents to share with other founders is, use your network, get as much non-dilutive capital as you can. I would say control your burn rate, make sure that you have your pulse on the burn rate at all times. I feel like this is a time where we have to live out this phase, we have to stretch ourselves a bit in order to make sure that we get out the other end. And I think also another important thing for founders is self-motivation during these tough times.

Myself for example, we started in 2018, we've already gone through a bunch of things, including COVID, you have all this headwind and you're trying to survive all of these things. And I feel one of the things that motivates me is why, I really like Simon Sinek's, Start with Why. And I think it's important for founders to start with why, because the why really drives, the purpose really drives, the purpose is what make you wake up in the morning and want to do this again and keep pushing. And grit is extremely important during times when things are not necessarily looking so great on the outside.

But I do believe that if you have a good product-market fit, if you've managed to get some investors interested and you have partnerships and customers that are willing to buy this product or are buying this product, I think it's just a matter of waiting this thing out, this difficult time we're in. And don't drop the ball too early, don't sell too early, wait it out, because it will pass like everything else. Just make sure you work on yourself as well, as the leader and as the founder and CEO of the company. Make sure you're self-motivated and you take care of yourself as well.

Paul Davenport:

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Like Lloyd said earlier too, it's the business of failure, that's what it is being in startups. And it's learning to have the grit, like you mentioned, Mina, to see your passion through, see your vision through. It's going to be tough, you need that entrepreneurial spirit. Even in the best of times it's never easy, so have that grit. I think that's a beautiful note to leave it on. Gentlemen, I cannot thank you enough for joining me today. Thank you so much, Mina, and thank you so much, Lloyd. We will have links to all of the programs that we talked about here, as well as more information about District 3 in the show notes as well as on the blog. But again, guys, thank you for hopping on the show.

Mina Mekhail:

Thanks, Paul, it was a pleasure.

Lloyd Bureau:

Pleasure to do this, Paul.