- President, chief executive officer and co-founder, Radialpoint Inc., Montreal
In many industries, Hamnett Hill would not be deemed old enough to lean back and tell war stories. But his business is technology, where it doesn't take long to earn the status of veteran. He did, after all, come through the dot.com crash of 2001 and live to tell about it.
He got his start in start-ups early. While studying business administration at Montana State University in the early 1990s, he founded a company to help executives create multimedia presentations. Though he was on track to become an accountant, he switched gears to come back to Montreal to start, along with his father and brother, an Internet service provider called Infobahn. The company eventually merged with a competitor and was sold to BCE Emergis.
In 1997, they started Zero-Knowledge Systems, offering encryption technology to help customers ensure privacy on the Net. He refers to that stage as, "The darling dot.com for a while, and the dot.com bomb for a while."
The company raised $55-million (U.S.) in venture capital and attracted top-notch techies. But there were some lessons to be learned. One was that easy money doesn't last forever. Another hard-won bit of knowledge, he says, is that "it's really hard to get consumers to pull their credit cards out." It's also difficult, as he knows now, to build a consumer brand, no matter how great your technology.
But when the dot.com bubble burst, Mr. Hill was forced to reduce his staff to 50 from 275 and reposition the company — fast — before the money ran out. In 2005, Zero-Knowledge was reborn as Radialpoint; it works with broadband service providers, such as Bell Canada and Telus, to provide Internet virus protection, firewalls, backup and parental controls.
"Ultimately it was a combination of being stubborn and also feeling a lot of responsibility to people who had invested," he says of the drive to keep going through tough times. His staff has grown to 140 and the company went from zero to $40-million revenue in five years, putting it back on the fast track.
"Business is going to go up and down. Markets are going to change. You're not going to hit every time," says Mr. Hill, who is single and whose hobbies include sailing, scuba diving and skiing.
He believes the old analogy of "turning the ship around" doesn't work any more for his kind of business. "In technology, it's more like a plane," he explains.
"You can't just sit there and float — you're either going down, or you're going up. You're going to hit all kinds of turbulence. You've got to just keep driving forward."
