Remembering the city’s driven tech entrepreneur
Antoine Paquin, who died earlier this week, will forever be remembered as the computer systems engineer who introduced Ottawa’s tech community to California’s Silicon Valley.
In 1997, he sold his startup, Skystone Systems, for the then unheard of sum of US$89 million to Cisco Systems, the San Jose giant that built much of the Internet’s backbone.
Cisco’s purchase marked the beginning of the high-tech bubble for the National Capital Region, which was briefly transformed into the epicentre of a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry involving optical communications technology.
Both Skystone and Paquin were blessed with startling youth at the time of the sale. The startup was barely one year old; Paquin was just 30. Five months ago, he celebrated his 50th birthday.
The cause of his death, confirmed by an executive at Paquin’s latest startup, Solantro Semiconductor, is not known. Paquin appeared to have been ill. He had stepped down as CEO in favour of his longtime colleague, Luke Smith.
Paquin drove himself with remarkable intensity, a hallmark of most of his business dealings. This was because he was entrepreneurial to the core. His drive was evident soon after he graduated from Carleton University in 1989. After a brief sojourn at the research arm of Nortel Networks, Paquin left to try his hand at building companies of his own.
It was his family that provided the initial $500,000 in seed capital for what became Skystone.
Paquin’s grandfather had run businesses that included hotels, real estate and some manufacturing. His late father was a mathematics professor at Université du Québec en Outaouais.
But, as with many entrepreneurs, it wasn’t the money that drove him. Following the sale of Skystone, Paquin threw himself into a string of startups as founder, executive or investor. The most successful of these was Philsar Semiconductor, which made communications chips. Paquin sold it in 2000 for more than US$200 million worth of shares.
Paquin’s most recent business, eight-year-old Solantro Semiconductor, saw him diving deep into the energy industry.
Along the way, Paquin seems to have been seeking more balance in his life. Two years ago, “after morning prayer and yoga,” he posted shots of Mount Fuji framed by a Japanese sunrise. This, from a Facebook feed he shared with me and hundreds of others for years.
More recently, Paquin mused about time. He wrote about the “simple yet profound truth” contained in the following quote attributed to late Apple CEO Steve Jobs: “Most people never pick up the phone and call.”
Sadly, we will never be able to call him again, and Ottawa’s tech community will be the worse off for it. jbagnall@postmedia.com