TOUCHED BY FIRE
Antoine Paquin was the capital’s wunderkind, the heir apparent to the throne of Ottawa’s tech kingdom during its biggest boom. But Paquin struggled to replicate his early success and faced an inner battle that few knew about. Last spring, he took his own
Antoine Paquin was a tech wunderkind and a portrait of success. He had it all: Money and sports cars, family and friends. But his suicide this year laid bare a private battle with mental illness that had haunted him for years.
It was an unseasonably warm day in early November when an Ottawa police officer noticed the car.
The silver Honda Civic was parked on a Vanier street, blocking traffic.
When the constable approached, the man inside was, as he’d later be described, “combative,” and would reply to the officer only in German.
The driver’s licence indicated the occupant was Antoine Paquin, one of this city’s best-known entrepreneurs.
A few kilometres east, Kerry Pfahl had just come back from dropping off her two boys at school.
She noticed her husband, wasn’t home. That was a concern. He hadn’t mentioned plans.
Twenty minutes later, Pfahl got a call from Paquin’s priest. He told her Antoine had scheduled a meeting but hadn’t shown up.
“Where was he?” Pfahl asked herself.
The answer came shortly from the police, who described the confrontation to her.
It was the day that worry turned to fear.
Paquin had suffered a psychotic break.
For years, Paquin had been silently suffering symptoms of what would later, and somewhat tentatively, be diagnosed as depression and bipolar disorder, an illness characterized by severe mood swings.
He’d had racing thoughts, difficulty concentrating and sleepless nights. But last November, the illness began roaring through him like a freight train.
Paquin was checked into the Montfort Hospital for emergency assessment and given anti-anxiety medication.
Six months later, on May 23, Paquin took his own life at his Navan estate. His friends and colleagues, including the very few who had been aware of his mental condition, were rocked; left with more questions than answers.
“I haven’t been able to reconcile this,” says Dave Furneaux, Paquin’s friend for 20 years and a eulogist at his funeral service.
Paquin was the wunderkind. Twenty years earlier, he had made a fortune from his very first startup, Skystone Systems. He had helped launch Ottawa’s tech boom.
In those days euphoria was normal and the industry’s risk-takers had ushered in a new order.
The brash, intense Paquin was one of its high priests. He ran a string of tech firms, invested in fellow entrepreneurs and became a venture capitalist.
Aside from his well-known career success, Paquin was, outwardly at least, the picture of health: supremely fit, an ironman, skier, surfer and a cyclist.
Then there was family. Paquin’s relatives were many and his marriage was solid. Two of his three boys were still in high school.
To outside observers, Paquin had much to live for.
The world of mental illness is filled with people unwilling to accept that their brains are betraying them. For much of his adult life, Paquin tried to fix himself. This was just who he was — different, that’s all.
Until last November, he believed his symptoms had nothing to do with mental illness. Even then he wasn’t totally convinced. Shortly before his death he drove himself to a clinic in Kingston to get a brain scan, to see if a tumour or some other physical cause was at the root of his affliction.
What seems clear is that he was somehow pre-disposed to a brain disorder, which made him vulnerable to certain types of stress. He experienced more than his share of it, starting early in life.
There is no direct line from one trauma to the troubles that plagued the mind of Paquin. But there are glimpses, hints and suggestions, especially in retrospect, of a brilliant mind on fire.
In the summer of 1984, Antoine Paquin was deep in the interior of B.C. and facing a revolt from his platoon.
Just 17, he had completed his first of two years at Collège Militaire Royal, the Saint-Jean, Que. military academy that prepares talented Quebec cadets for university. Paquin and his fellow classmates had travelled to the Canadian Forces Base in Chilliwack, B.C., for military exercises.
As part of the simulation, the platoon leader was “killed,” forcing Paquin to take over. The platoon was in the wilderness, without food. Paquin’s job was to locate supplies that had been dropped nearby by helicopter.
Paquin led the search without success. After 36 hours, his troops were hungry and foul-tempered.
“There was a revolt,” says one member of the platoon, a former St. Jean classmate of Paquin’s. “The guys said ‘You’re not a leader’ though I and others stood by Antoine.”
The whole exercise had been a test, meant to see whether Paquin could keep the respect of his troops. He failed it. Worse was to come, though. “We weren’t liked,” says the former classmate. “We were from Quebec and we were in officer training. Chilliwack was run by corporals with experience in the real army. Their attitude was ‘These guys are going to pay.’”
The abuse came in many forms. The corporals would shout into squad members’ faces to see how they’d react. Platoon members were frequently pushed to the edge of exhaustion to test physical endurance. They were compelled to eat food that had been chewed by fellow soldiers. On one occasion, the classmate says, a trooper was made to bend over while a corporal simulated a rectal probe with a stick — a warning of what was in store if anyone disobeyed orders.
Paquin’s personality didn’t help. “Antoine was intelligent and gifted, and he was always questioning things,” the classmate explains, “That made him a target.”
Despite the difficult introduction to military training, Antoine completed two years at Collège Militaire Royal, graduating to Royal Military College in Kingston, where he intended to earn his university-level degree.
But the hazing rituals and abuse he received there proved too much.
“He was a top cadet, top marksman, top student, an overachiever in every way,” said one close family member, “but he broke down there.”
It was not a physical breakdown; Paquin simply couldn’t face returning for his second year there.
Paquin didn’t like to talk about RMC. “He would hint at things that happened but said only that RMC wasn’t completely his thing,” said Chris Riordan, the Carleton University classmate who later cofounded the company that led to Skystone, Paquin’s breakout success in the tech world.
Sylvain Charlebois, who started RMC the year after Paquin left, noted that just 25 of 300 original recruits in his class survived the five-year program and graduated.
“It was a very different era,” explained Charlebois, currently dean of Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management, “You weren’t allowed to show psychological weakness, let alone the physical. Today I’m a civilian dean in a university where students can’t relate to what I went through in the 1980s.”
Neither of Paquin’s closest friends at Carleton University — Riordan and Brian Gieschen — recognized signs of mental distress.
During their school years, Riordan and Paquin started the Objectivist Club, which celebrated the fiction of Ayn Rand, among other conservative philosophers. It was, after all, the era of U.S. president Ronald Reagan and his agenda of smaller government. “He was really gung ho on the U.S.,” says Riordan.
It’s not clear where Paquin picked up his initial instincts for laissez-faire capitalism.
His father, Raymond, taught mathematics at the Université du Québec, including campuses in Outaouais, Sherbrooke and Montreal, where Antoine was born. Antoine’s grandfather was a successful businessman. But Raymond was one of seven siblings, which meant that any inherited wealth was substantially diluted. Antoine and his brother and sister were middle-class francophones.
Antoine was the only sibling to fully embrace anglophone culture. During his first year at Carleton, Antoine’s English was improving though still strongly accented. He went by the name Marc (his full name was Marc-Antoine) because he hated being called Anthony or Tony. By the time he graduated, Riordan says, Paquin’s English was nearly flawless. And he reverted to Antoine.
Paquin had a good ear for languages. During his career he acquired some fluency in German and Spanish.
“He was a really interesting guy,” says Dave Furneaux, “He was highly intelligent, very driven and very creative. Other creative people lack discipline, but he used both sides of his brain.”
Like so many other engineering grads in that era, Paquin started his career at the research arm of Nortel Networks, where his first boss, Stefan Opalski, introduced him to the fine art of building complex chipsets for the telecommunications industry.
“Antoine was a bit cocky, but I ascribed it mainly to his youth,” says Opalski who was Paquin’s senior and an island of calm by comparison. “He felt he could do anything.”
Paquin laboured just two years at Nortel before exploring other options. He was not going to spend his career tweaking semiconductors in a laboratory. Paquin kept in touch with Riordan, who had landed a job at Newbridge Networks, the telecom equipment firm launched a few years earlier by Terence Matthews.
“Antoine was entrepreneur, entrepreneur, really eager to get going on something,” says Riordan.
There were subtle signs of Antoine’s inner struggles. There was the rashness of some of Paquin’s decisions, particularly when it involved spending money, his brusqueness when he casually dismissed work done overnight by his engineers or his sudden loss of interest in projects or ideas he had been obsessing about for ages.
In the context of the late 1990s high-tech industry, these qualities were evident in many others as well. But even within that crowd, Paquin’s brashness, and unreserved enthusiasm for taking big risks was exceptional.
Paquin and Riordan started Aurigor Engineering out of their basements in 1993.
That year, a record 10 Ottawa tech companies listed their shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange for the first time. Entrepreneurs Terry Matthews and Michael Cowpland were making headlines virtually every week.
Paquin, meanwhile, was living in Aylmer with his wife, Caroline; Riordan was in Manotick.
Eventually, the Carleton grads turned their focus to building custom chips. One was particularly promising — a semiconductor that offered a bridge between the thenseparate worlds of telecommunications and the internet. It would prove the basis for Paquin’s first, monster home run.
By 1996, it was clear Paquin’s enthusiasm for risk far exceeded that of Riordan.
“I was nervous about building up too fast,” says Riordan, “Antoine wanted to push aggressively.”
They came to an agreement. Riordan spun off a new firm, Aurigor Telecom Systems, leaving Paquin — along with his former Nortel boss, Opalski, and half-adozen others — with the original entity, Aurigor Engineering.
Showing good instinct for marketing, Paquin promptly renamed the firm Skystone Systems, after the meteorite that provided the raw material for the sword of Excalibur in the legend of Britain’s King Arthur.
Riordan, Paquin and Opalski retained ownership in both firms.
Just one other step was required: to get the chip into the hands of the tech legends building the internet. That’s where Dave Furneaux came in. Though he, like Paquin, was still in his 20s, he was the son of a prominent U.S. venture capitalist.
In 1994, he and his father were mulling a new fund that would invest in tech startups. On a visit to Ottawa, Furneaux dropped in to see Paquin after hearing about Aurigor from a manager at Nortel.
“Call me if you ever decide to build products,” Furneaux had told Paquin. When Skystone became a reality, Paquin made the call. Shortly after, the two began a cross-continent journey to show the industry’s most important firms what their semiconductor could do.
“It wasn’t until we started meeting with people that we realized that what we had was really important,” Furneaux recalls.
Skystone’s timing was exquisite. The worlds of telephone networks and the Internet were converging. Cisco knew it and, unlike Nortel, was willing to act. Three of Cisco’s top executives flew from San Jose to Ottawa in June 1997 and presented Paquin and Opalski with a stunning offer — $89 million US in cash and shares for 100 per cent of Skystone’s privately held shares.
“You have to do everything right,” says Opalski, “but luck is a big factor.” Paquin was in the right place and time with the right people.
“It was a massive offer,” says Furneaux, “and it had happened so fast, Antoine’s first validation of being an entrepreneur.”
The journey to great success would never again be this easy for Paquin.
Paquin’s greatest corporate triumph had come at significant personal expense. The day the sale of Skystone was announced, Caroline was preparing to sign divorce papers.
For Paquin, the rush to build Skystone had been all consuming. He had hired dozens of employees, often inviting them unannounced to his home for dinner. At one point, Paquin invested their life’s savings without informing his spouse. Nor was he shy about raising seed money; he approached members of his family and Caroline’s. He persuaded prominent high-tech executives to invest — Mike Foster, Leo Lax, Douglas Smeaton and John Roberts, among others.