Hello World. (Again).
Last week, Estateably was officially announced as general members of the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project. This marks a significant milestone for the company — a coming-out party of sorts. As a small, 7-person startup, we are absolutely honored to be in the same group of industry giants such as IBM, Deutsche Bank, Cisco and others. But the truth is that the company started much earlier before today’s announcement. Its’ roots go back much farther: October 12, 1984, to be precise.
I was eight years old when my late father, Peter Brojde, and his brother-in-law, Maks Wulkan, teamed up to form Eicon Technology Corporation. From humble beginnings, the company eventually became a computer networking pioneer in Canada, providing remote access solutions for personal computers around the globe.

A few months before the sale of the company, I graduated from Simon Fraser University with a BA degree in Liberal Arts. When I returned to my native Montreal in the Summer of 2000, I experienced difficulty finding meaningful work, and spent the first few years after graduation moving from one uninspiring job to another.
If there was one thing I could remember about my father, it was how much pride he took in his own work. And after witnessing the dispassionate way with which I was going about my own professional career, he nudged me towards an alternate path. In the early Fall of 2004, a few months after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, he enrolled himself into an introductory portfolio investment class at Concordia University’s night school. He insisted that I come with him. And I did just that.
He passed away just a few months later.
In the months preceding his death, we spent a lot of time together. On weekends, we’d take walks together in the park. When I delivered the eulogy at his funeral, I spoke about the footprints he’d left behind in the snow as we walked and the difficulty that I’d face in trying to walk in his shoes.
A few months after his passing, I got a job working as an investment advisor for ScotiaMcLeod, the full service investment brokerage arm of Scotiabank. True to the financial field, the atmosphere at the branch was extremely competitive. Fortunately, I developed somewhat of a niche trading and managing portfolios of commodity futures for high net worth individuals. As commodity prices soared, so did the assets I had under management.

Two senior advisors at the branch wanted to incorporate futures portfolio management into their business, and in 2006, made me an offer to join them as a partner. The relationship with my new partners was extremely symbiotic: their existing client-base benefited from access to new asset classes, and my existing clients benefited from the senior members’ equities expertise.
There comes a point in time where every industry is forced to reinvent themselves and this seems to occur more frequently in the finance industry than any other. In 2013, robo-advisors emerged as a serious threat to the traditional advisor’s business. With so many professionals underperforming the market, these automated systems that invested in low cost index funds provided disenchanted investors with a viable alternative.

One shortcoming of the automated investment trend, however, was its inability to provide holistic advice to its users. In an attempt to stay one step ahead of the robots, I enrolled in courses on advanced financial planning, in trusts and estates, and in retirement planning to complement our overall service offering. While integrated wealth management — the combination of traditional investment management techniques with tax, legal, and risk management — had been around for decades, it had typically been the preserve of the uber-wealthy, offered exclusively in family office environments. At the turn of the century, however, the family office model started moving downstream, as many high net worth investors began pooling their assets together to take advantage of the economies of scale offered by multi-family offices. Eventually, virtual family offices began to emerge.
Robos had democratized diversified portfolios for the masses, and I began to wonder whether technology could do similarly for integrated wealth management and virtual family offices. In the Summer of 2013, whilst on vacation in South Carolina, I started putting my ideas to paper, and created a business plan for creating software platform that would facilitate the creation of virtual family offices. I called the platform Wealth Canopy.
I had an excellent grasp of integrated wealth management, but I knew little about building a software company. I needed a partner with technical experience. When I returned home, I approached a longtime friend about the idea. He had built a very successful e-commerce platform business, which he had sold to SAP earlier that summer. He liked the idea behind Wealth Canopy, but he had already committed to a project in the digital workforce management space. Wealth Canopy would have to wait.
In the Summer of 2014, I received a telephone call from another longtime friend, whose father had fallen ill and, as a result, lost the ability to manage his finances. He asked if I knew of a software tool that could help him do so on his father’s behalf. I told him about Wealth Canopy, and a few weeks later we met in New York to further the discussion. It turned out that his wife’s cousin, an experienced software engineer, had just moved to Toronto from Israel. We set up a conference call to introduce Wealth Canopy.

In the Fall of 2014, the three of us would meet in Toronto on a weekly basis to research the market and whiteboard ideas for the platform we were contemplating building.
As anybody who has built a company from scratch knows, these are exciting times, where the possibilities are limitless.
But, all the moonlighting and traveling were beginning to take a toll on me. I’d arrive at the office exhausted from working the night before and having to catch the first morning flight from Pearson to Trudeau airport. In early November, when one such flight was delayed and I arrived at the office more than two hours late for work, I knew I had to make up my mind.
Leaving a comfortable job that I loved was a hard decision. But I thought about my father. About his entrepreneurial passion. And about following his footsteps. Indeed, when he was my age, he faced a similar decision, and rolled the dice. So I gathered the courage and early one morning broke the news to my partners that I would be leaving them to become a technology entrepreneur.
For more than two years we built the virtual family office software in stealth mode. In April 2017, we unveiled the platform at Finovate, one of the world’s largest FinTech conferences. The reception was fantastic; upon returning to our exhibit booth, there was a lineup of people wanting to talk to us and learn more. Barron’s, one of the investment management industry’s more widely read publications, wrote about us in their coverage of the event.

We leveraged the positive coverage we received from Finovate and met with dozens of financial institutions, wealth management and professional services firms. We had hypothesized from the very start that the key to great consumer adoption was to have the product pushed to them by professionals with whom they worked. But the enterprise sales cycle was long; contracts and revenues were proving slow to materialize. Towards the end of the summer, senior management at the company began losing patience. We met offsite, and a decision was made to pivot towards building a more consumer-focused product.
It is said that a watched pot never boils and a watched toaster never pops. Fittingly, almost as soon as the decision to focus on B2C was made, several enterprises began using the product as it was originally intended. But in the meantime, the company kept its head down and continued on its transformation from a virtual family office platform to a solution that would allow for adult children to help manage their financial affairs. The enterprise content that had once been prominently featured on the company website was reduced to a mere button at the bottom of the page. This was a far cry from the vision with which Wealth Canopy was started. I felt I could no longer make a meaningful contribution to the company, and in January, after serious consideration, I resigned as a director.
As a technology entrepreneur, one must keep constantly abreast of the emerging technology landscape. And during my tenure at the company, the emerging technology that fascinated me most was blockchain. After seeing Vitalik Buterin present the idea of smart contracts at one of Ethereum’s very first meetups in Toronto, I began wondering if there was a way we could somehow begin incorporating this new technology into what we did. When I brought it up with fellow members of the senior management team, I was told it was too bleeding-edge and would distract us from reaching our objectives. To be honest, it was hard to argue against them at the time.

So when I resigned from the company, one of the first things I did was to enroll in a series of blockchain courses to augment and formalize my knowledge of the technology. And the more I learned about its’ potential applications, the more I became convinced of the transformative power of the technology, particularly with regards to its ability to expedite all kinds of settlements: from land ownership titles to bond trades.
I remembered the frustration that my uncle experienced when he acted as the liquidator for my late grandmother’s estate, and began wondering whether blockchain could help drive efficiencies in that process, as it had the potential to do in the other use cases I had been learning about. So once again, I hit the books to learn more about the estate administration process in Canada and around the world. And what I found in estate administration was the perfect use case for blockchain: an old and antiquated process with multiple participants that don’t trust one another needing to come together to form a business network.
Around the same time as I was making these discoveries, I received a telephone call from my cousin Alexander Wulkan. He was nearing the end of his junior year at Tufts University, where he is pursuing a dual degree in human factors engineering and entrepreneurship. He asked whether I knew of any venture capital firms in Montreal that might be looking for summer interns. I made an introduction, and Alexander booked a flight to come in for an interview.
We arranged that he would come by my office after the interview, so I could fill him in on what I’d been working on for the past few months. The 30 minutes we had allotted to the meeting quickly turned into 4 hours, as we discussed problems with the estate settlement process and identified potential business models. When we began discussing potential marketing channels, Alex began to shine beyond his years.
When Alex left the office, I thought back to October 1984, when I was eight years old visiting the small office my father and uncle worked in when they started Eicon. My mind recalled quite vividly the two of them scribbling notes and drawing diagrams on a whiteboard with great intensity, much as Alex and I had done a few minutes before. It was as if we had momentarily stepped into our father’s shoes.
A few days later, my phone rang again. It was Alex. Before we could exchange pleasantries, I jumped in and asked whether he had heard anything back from the VC with whom he had interviewed. There was a long pause. “Actually,” he started, “I was hoping we could work on Estateably together.”

I thought of my dad and the footprints he’d left in the snow. “Of course,” I replied. “I think that’d be absolutely awesome”.
In providing remote access solutions, Eicon was really in the business of manufacturing time. Thanks to their innovation, no longer would employees need to be physically onsite to access their corporate networks. More time could be spent on things that mattered. And when you think about the problem of estate settlement, it too boils down to a problem about time.
Too much time wasted on inefficiencies, leaving little to no time for things that mattered.
So, hello world. Again. Here’s hoping this iteration is as successful as the first.
Visit www.estateably.com to learn more.
Ari Brojde is the Founder and CEO of Estateably. He can be found on Twitter and LinkedIn. Visit www.estateably.com and follow Estateably for frequent updates.

