The build was never the hard part
We started in 2008, taking briefs and shipping software for other people. We were good at it. Clients arrived with a specification, we built what it described, and it worked — as a service.
What we could not help noticing was how many of those products went nowhere. Not because the code was wrong. The code was usually fine. They went nowhere because the thing being built was the wrong thing, or it was funded in a way that ran out before it could find its footing, or the team hired eight people for a problem that needed two. None of that was in the brief, and none of it was ours to raise.
So we built our own
We founded companies. We ran them, made the decisions ourselves, and lived with the consequences. Some of them we sold. Along the way we did all the things we had watched clients do — committed to the wrong architecture, hired ahead of the revenue, left non-dilutive money on the table because nobody told us it was there.
That experience is the whole difference. Not because it makes us smarter than the founders we work with, but because it moves the conversation earlier. The questions worth asking arrive before anyone opens an editor, and you only learn to ask them by having got them wrong with your own money.
Now we work the way we wished someone had worked with us
Which means being useful before the build. Telling a founder that the roadmap will not survive contact with customers. Finding the SR&ED and IRAP money while the work is being scoped rather than at year end. Sitting in the diligence conversation. Occasionally saying that the honest answer is not to build the thing at all.
And then building it, because we still love that part — just not as the whole offer, and not for anyone who only wants a pair of hands.
For a small number of companies we would rather take equity and stay for years. That is not a business model we arrived at cleverly. It is what happens when you have been the founder and know how much the third year matters.