Entrepreneurship – Jon Felske

Santiago

I visited Chile for Jan – Mar 2014 in an attempt to escape Canadian winters. Was a real amazing trip. I spent most of the time based out of Santiago while visiting other cities around the coast. Was able to work remotely out of Startup Chile. It’s a very cool global entrepreneurship incubator where entrants get $40k USD to start a company in Chile. Made some great friends and business contacts and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens to the companies that mature out of the program.

Inevitably I learned a lot about wine. It’s a huge part of the culture and national commerce there. Had a chance to walk through the 2nd large vineyard in the world and sample the grapes. Would go back anytime.

Ooploo

Thought I would talk a little bit about my company Ooploo inc.

This company started after the Nortel / Avaya chapter of my life came to a close in January 2013. Diving into startup life again after gaining 6 years of large enterprise corporate experience gives you a different perspective of business and customers. The larger the customer, larger the sales cycle and the larger the product creep. 80 / 20 rule is never so important.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to go through Lead to Win, an intensive bootcamp for startups, in February 2013 which later helped me secure some government funding from FedDev through a program called Global Start. Along with securing our first “real” corporate customer / partner this really helped facilitate the growth of the company.

Ten months later and Ooploo has grown significantly and is currently offering solutions in the financial and healthcare verticals. We are still very much a startup and bootstrapping as much as we can. It’s such an exciting time as I am forming new partnerships, meeting new customers, getting to travel and making some great new friends. There will be new innovations coming out of Ooploo in the near future. I look forward to sharing them with you.

Lead To Win

I just got some funding from Fed Dev through the Lead to Win program in Ottawa Ontario. 25k + 25k match = 50k of awesome.

Lead to win is 2 x three day, all day intense bootcamp for entrepreneurs.

Learned a lot and eventually got a cool certificate! (also now hanging in the Ooploo offices)

Lots of good things coming!!

I’d like to thank Tony Bailleti and everyone involved in the program for all their valuable insight and support!!