McGill entrepreneurship program gets $2M donation

X-1 Accelerator helps students as they turn their ideas into businesses

A McGill University program aimed at helpings students get businesses off the ground has received a $2-million donation from the foundation that helped launch the university’s first entrepreneurship program more than 20 years ago.

The donation will go to support the X-1 Accelerator, a 10-week summer program now in its third year that helps student-run startups.

“It’s external validation for us,” said Gregory Vit, a McGill professor and the director of the Dobson Centre for Entrepreneurship, which runs the accelerator program.

“It also allows us to not worry about resources for some time, so it allows us to think more strategically and long term and permanentize what we have.”

The organization behind the donation, the John Dobson Foundation, was created by money manager John Dobson in 1986. In 1989, Dobson helped McGill launch the entrepreneurship centre that bears his name, funding it through the foundation.

Although Dobson died in 2013, the foundation continues to reside at Formula Growth, the investment management firm he founded.

“This gift is a continuation of many other gifts that Dobson and his foundation have given to McGill,” said Randy Kelly, the chair of Dobson foundation and the CEO of Formula Growth.

The foundation supports the teaching of entrepreneurship, investing and free market thought, Kelly said.

The money, which will be spent over a 10-year period, will allow the X-1 program to pay participants a stipend as well as pay student coordinators who help run the program.

Dobson “really believed in backing students,” Kelly said.

The donation will also help the program continue one of its unique features — startups “graduating” from the program pitch their companies at events in Montreal, San Francisco, Boston, Toronto and New York City.

Vit said the idea is to help those startups connect to potential mentors and advisers in those cities.

The X-1 program exists alongside several other Dobson Centre programs aimed at helping students at different stages of turning an idea into a business.

McGill says the Dobson Centre has helped launch 125 successful startups that now employ more

It allows us to think more strategically and long term and permanentize what we have.

than 1,200 people.

“Dobson had one big, big motivation: he really wanted jobs,” said Ari Kiriazidis, president of the John Dobson Foundation and CFO of Formula Growth.

“New ventures, small business, whether it’s a dépanneur or a guy with a nice piece of software code, that’s the way you’re going to grow jobs and if you grow jobs, that’s the way you’re going to grow wealth in a country and a society.”