Dan Robichaud aka Daniel Robichaud

I like to think of myself as being born an entrepreneur. Growing up in Drummondville, a small French Canadian town in 1976, I arrived at about the same time the Olympics landed in Montreal. Our family was never rich per se, and despite that I never had a sense of feeling poor watching my hard-working mother and father jointly operate the Dry Cleaning business my grandfather proudly founded in 1948. I remember my Dad working both days and nights, following in the footsteps his own father showed him when he left school to work at the family business at only 14 years old.

As a boy I enjoyed helping my Dad at work yet the entrepreneur inside of me was calling out for expression, so I launched my first business at 10 years old. Even after I paid my employees I was still able to clear $20 an hour for myself (which in those days for a ten year old was quite a windfall). Ironically at the tender age of 12 I received a letter from the lawyer of another local landscape gardener accusing me of stealing his business and enforceable on the grounds that I had no valid tax number. Needless to say … my business lessons in life started early.

I headed off to high-school at Claretain College and spent 5 years sleeping in a 200 person dormitory after which I earned 3 year College Degree in Art & Technology of Media from Jonquiere College where I graduated in 1997. That entrepreneurial blood still running through my veins, instead of getting a ‘normal’ job at a radio station I instead decided to partner with three established and well-known radio hosts to buy our very own station that had recently hit bankruptcy. Since the ‘old guys’ didn’t want to get up at 5 in the morning I was the default fit as the ‘morning man’. Collectively we re-built the station into something that still operates today and I retain my shareholding position in with pride.

Like any twenty-something young man I wanted to work in the ‘big city’ so trucked off to the closest metropolis of Montreal and subsequently hosted three different radio shows all at varying stations. My last gig I called Radioactif.com, an innovative program for the times – it was launched it in 2000 – and featured pioneering initiatives like webcams, live chat, and Podcasting.

Growing tired of the monopoly in the Canadian Telco industry I leveraged the name of my radio show, RadioActif.com, to launch my own ISP in 2001 after which by 2003 the website was listed as one of the top 15 most visited French sites in Canada according to Mediametrix stats. As my new initiatives continued to take off, I made the choice to leave CKOI FM and streamline my focus. In fact, I remember during those days that if I wanted to go out and meet with friends for an evening I needed to splash water on my face throughout the night just to stay awake. I was hosting the morning show from 5 to 10 AM, running my business from 10 AM to 7 PM and then going to business school at night. In the long run it all paid off as my ISP remains as the largest independent French service nationally.

The success of my website caused Corus Entertainment to take notice and contract me to create their online media portals. Operating under the title of New Media Director I established the vision for each property and then fulfilled projects by outsourcing the work to employees still retained by my company. As we consistently delivered on our mandates other large organizations started hiring us to create their web presences, namely the Montreal Canadians Hockey Team. Finally I sold my web development company to the media division to a Fortune Global 500® company in 2006 and having learned the key lesson of the service business, I started to focus on recurring revenue models moving away from the daily grind of specific project management all with different expectations and needs.

Ultimately my entrepreneurial spirit is the driving factor that has allowed me to easily identify paradigm shifts in media and telecom subsequently launching successful start-ups to fill the gaps I recognized. StreamTheWorld.com for an example was created with a team of genius engineers and allowed us to grab the global web streaming market replacing traditional Radio listening with online access instead. The company has been sold in 2010 to a California base company but the team is still in Montreal.

Now I invest in promising entrepreneurs as an angel and try to help them to build a successful business. I’m also a Limited Partner in 2 VC funds and I have my own companies to run.

Since I sold my first business in 2006 I haven’t felt like I actually ‘work’ anymore – instead, I have fun doing business with people I like. In its simplest form, I am a businessman and entrepreneur because I want to change things and build a better world. I always remember during my studies at HEC Management School a teacher named Omar Aktouf who said “It is true that if everyone is making a little effort, things can change – but there are only a couple of people in the world who can make decisions that really have a tangible impact. Those are the people with a disproportionate amount of money.” Since hearing those words I wanted to be a part of that group of people choosing to have a bigger impact and fundamentally improve our world.

And, one more thing … when I am not working towards changing the world, I also like snowboarding, surfing, wine tasting with friends and travelling around the planet meeting incredible people … who knows, maybe I will pass you on the way somewhere down the road.