It was the 1970s, a decade of energy crises, and Ryan Holmes’s parents decided to get off the grid. The family bought 40 acres near the small town of Vernon in the British Columbia interior, raised goats and chickens, and drew their water from a well. In the evenings, they read by the light of a kerosene lamp.
When Ryan was in Grade 5, he became obsessed with the computer at the school library. “I fell in love with it. Before school, recess, lunch, after school - as much as I could get.” Soon after, he won a district-wide programming contest. First prize: an Apple IIc.
One problem, however.
Not yet ready to tap B.C.’s electrical grid, Ryan’s dad jury-rigged the new computer to run 12 volts. “Every day I’d come home after school, pop the hood of my mom’s car, put alligator clips on the battery, and wire into the house and go play on my computer,” recalls Ryan Holmes. “If I used it for too long, I’d wear down the car battery and my mom would be all mad at me the next day.”
Today, there are few Canadian executives more plugged in than Mr. Holmes. In a country that has produced few Internet companies of any size, Mr. Holmes has become a force in the hottest new market, the burgeoning field of social media, and his firm, HootSuite Media Inc., is arguably Canada’s hottest web startup.
HootSuite makes what it calls a social media dashboard. People can use the software and mobile apps to better manage the torrent of information from online services. Picture a single screen with several columns of Twitter feeds, plus from one LinkedIn and another from Facebook.
Corporations use it, too, to monitor and measure their brand, conduct co-ordinated marketing campaigns - even scout for talent. PepsiCo Inc., for instance, uses HootSuite and its connection with LinkedIn to find talent to fill open jobs. HootSuite has attracted a blue-chip list of clients, from the White House to Fox Broadcasting Co., Dell to Disney. The U.S. Army uses HootSuite as a central point from which to listen to what’s being said by people about the military across social media, to engage supporters and critics, and to broadcast its messages.
Over a simple lunch of salad and several cups of coffee at Two Chefs and a Table, a tiny and popular outpost near his office on the ragged streets of Vancouver’s rough-hewn Downtown Eastside, Mr. Holmes says HootSuite has elbowed out early competitors. He’s the company’s largest shareholder and believes $100-million in annual revenue – and $1-billion market valuation – is within reach for his two-year-old company. “We’re now the guys to beat,” Mr. Holmes says.
Canada has had technology successes - generally in hardware, Nortel Networks and Research In Motion - but has failed to generate household names on the Web. The bar for success is now set low: Startups that attract a takeover offer from foreign buyer are celebrated as a win by the domestic industry. And the dollars involved aren’t particularly impressive, especially by Silicon Valley standards. Radian6, a social media management company in New Brunswick similar to HootSuite, was one of Canada’s big tech sales this year at $325-million.
Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg – whose companies have a collective value of at least $350-billion – did not dream of selling out to the first bidder.
“I’ve had offers along the way. My ambition is to build something large,” Mr. Holmes says. “I’d love to build a brand, a legacy. I’m always thinking about how big we can make this, about how big this industry is going to be. It’s sticking. It’s not going away. Initially, it was: ‘How big could this be?’ We’re seeing it’s going to be massive.”
A year ago, HootSuite had no revenue. As it cracked the one-million-user mark, the company released premium versions of its product, with rates as high as $100,000 monthly for large companies. It currently brings in about $1-million of revenue a month.
