Entrepreneur Angel

Carleton University Magazine
Fall 2006
Page 14

By Richard Martin

Life can take “a bazillion different paths,” says Coralie Lalonde, and she should know. After all, at one point she was a figure skating teacher. In Germany.

But Lalonde, BA/90, MA/93, decided to study psychology instead. Then, she started her own high-tech services firm. Later, she invested in another high-tech firm, cashing in big time when it was taken over. Now, she is both an investor in start-up companies and a committed volunteer helping the next generation of entrepreneurs find their own paths to success.

She’s involved with Shad Valley, a national four-week program that encourages entrepreneurship in science and technology. It runs at Carleton and involves a group of 52 senior high school students who form teams to develop and pitch a plan for a science- or tech-based business.

“I just love working with them,” she says. “They’re brilliant.” Lalonde attends the launch, networks with the students and gives them feedback. The students themselves judge which team’s plan will go on to compete at the national level. The last two years, the winning group from Carleton has won the national RBC/Shad Entrepreneurship Cup.

Then there’s the Curry BizCamp, which helps at-risk high school students develop entrepreneurial skills. It welcomed its first eight students to Carleton this year.

With Luc Lalande, director of Carleton’s Innovation Transfer Office, Lalonde is involved in two other programs and is developing a third. “Luc is great,” she says. “They should clone him.”

The first is the Tech Venture Challenge, an eastern Ontario competition for the best technology business idea, which links students with CEOs and investors. The three finalists pitch their ideas to an audience of 200 members of the local business community.

“Every winner for the last six years has started a company that still exists,” Lalonde notes.

The second is the Foundry Program, which encourages entrepreneurship and innovation among faculty and students at Carleton. The program grants money to research projects to turn them into a more concrete form.

She’s particularly excited about two new programs: Social Entrepreneurship Challenge, a project she’s developing with Lalande that encourages students to develop innovative solutions to social problems; and Engage!, a program launched last year that is designed to encourage and inspire successful people to invest in the future of their communities. “We already have 178 entrepreneurial leaders as members in Engage!,” Lalonde comments.

Lalonde is herself one of the successful people she’s referring to. After graduating, she started Integra Solutions, a high-tech services firm that researched and designed products “with a human element.”

To pick a simple example, when we see a door with a handle on it, we pull. When we see a flat panel, we push. “We tried to make products easy to use by looking at how to make the relationship with the users work,” she says.

Although this work drew on her education in psychology, Lalonde values her Carleton experience for other things: “It’s not about the facts; I’ve forgotten all the facts I learned at Carleton. It’s about learning how to think, to solve problems, to make connections and work with people. It’s about learning how to learn.”

Lalonde would “wander the halls” at Carleton saying hello to people. Some of those people turned out to be professors who gave her research positions.

“I had a wonderful time at Carleton,” she says. “I had so many opportunities.”

As a result of her natural talent for networking, Lalonde heard about and invested in Sybarus Technologies. She realized a tidy sum when Lucent Technologies bought Sybarus in 1999 for an estimated $105 million.

She had enough money to retire – at 33 – but started making investments in start-ups as an “angel.”

Typically, angels are private companies that invest small amounts of their own money at an early stage in a company’s development.

Over the past three years, she and a loose group of five others have invested in such companies as Softv.net, Quake Technologies and Galazar Networks, as well as in venture capital funds such as Kodiak Venture Partners and Skypoint Capital.

She calls her company Katsura, after a Japanese tree. “I had an hour to come up with a name,” she says, “and started looking at a gardening book. I thought the tree was appropriate, since it represents growth, and I like Japanese styles.”

Although there are few female entrepreneurs and few female participants in the workshops she attends – Lalonde is often “the only female in the room” – she hasn’t found her gender to be a drawback. “I don’t think about it,” she says.

What she does think about is the challenge involved in being an entrepreneur. “I love working with people, being engaged, having to make decisions, the anxiety,” she laughs. “I just like to spend time with entrepreneurs.”

 

Richard Martin, BAHons/70, BJ/83, is an Ottawa-based writer.

© Carleton University Magazine 2006