Life After Mac: Real stories of alumni finding their way — Chris
I began my journey at McMaster University studying business. Since I was a child, I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur — I didn’t really have a plan for university other than to get that beautiful shiny piece of paper. I eventually got that piece of paper, but not without some bumps along the road. While at Mac, I started my second business called “TMP Media” which was a digital agency focusing on branding, web design and videography. As it turns out, I was focused more on the business than my degree and switched out of business school for failing my calculus course. I then entered the Faculty of Social Sciences, where I earned my degree in Sociology.
Somewhere along the way I fell out of love for digital marketing and decided to wind down TMP Media. While I did that, I temporarily joined a company called Procom, who focused on providing security systems for major grocery retailers across Canada. I wore a lot of different hats at this company; from installing IP based security cameras to building large scale DVR servers that were designed to capture terabytes of video surveillance footage on a daily basis. I picked up all these skills without formal training or education, and I really liked working with my hands, but I’m an entrepreneur, remember? So, this was not permanent. It was while I was at this company that I fell in love with a problem that I have spent the last 6 years of my life obsessing over. I discovered that organizing and accessing the collective knowledge of an organization is difficult.
Ultimately, in 2014 I quit my job to start a company called OneBase. OneBase was on a mission to help organizations onboard their employees more effectively by giving them all the information they need to be productive from day one. After about a year and a half, OneBase was not faring too well as a software solution solely dedicated to employee on-boarding. Though, this gave my co-founder and I the idea for Obie — the company we run today. Obie is the fastest way to find and capture knowledge at work. We are on a mission to make company knowledge universally accessible and more useful with the power of artificial intelligence.
Since the end of 2016, Obie has been quite the journey! From humble beginnings; living off of oatmeal and ramen, to raising almost $1M in venture capital. In 2017, our lives were changed when we were accepted into a startup accelerator program in San Francisco, California called 500 Startups. Obie graduated in the top 20 fastest growing companies in our batch as named by Mattermark. I currently live in Mountain View, California and manage our office in the US while the company remains headquartered in Hamilton, Ontario.
While my scholastic career at McMaster University didn’t go exactly as planned, it taught me the importance of networks and building relationships, it taught me discipline and how to get back up after falling down. I do not particularly like giving unsolicited advice, but in my experience, I would recommend that new grads try as many things as they can to find out what they love. Not everyone knows what they want to do for the rest of their life, but everyone can try.
Chris Buttenham
Sociology ‘13
