Inside the Accelerator — SideDrawer
The Catalyst Cyber Accelerator is the first cybersecurity-focused commercial accelerator in Canada. Headquartered at the Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst at Ryerson University, the Accelerator offers technical, strategic advice, mentorship and business resources to cybersecurity businesses that are ready to become national and international competitors.
In August, the Accelerator launched its third cohort with five innovative Canadian cybersecurity businesses. In this series of articles, we’ll be talking to the entrepreneurs behind each business about the Accelerator experience.
SideDrawer is a secure and real-time life-planning/organization platform that allows users to easily organize and share personal and family information and important contacts from any device — including banking, investments, identity, real estate and all other critical information. SideDrawer offers guided organization and the flexibility to provide as much or as little information as users desire. The technology’s permission-based settings allow users to invite collaborators to help with documents, allowing easy access to trusted advisors and loved ones.
We spoke with Ali Qureshi, Chief Revenue Officer & Co-Founder at SideDrawer (and previously the Executive Director, Institutional Equity Sales at CIBC) about how SideDrawer works, and his own entrepreneurial journey…
Tell us about your business and what problem it solves in the marketplace?
My business is called SideDrawer, and what we’re trying to solve is the secure collaboration and communication between professionals and their clients. So if you think about a financial advisor that engages with a client, their family, their account, their lawyer, their executor — there’s a lot of sensitive information that has to be collected. The simplest things are the passport and driver’s license that they have to receive from a client, but also there are investment statements and tax forms. All of that communication today takes place over email as either attachments or file-sharing links, and there are a number of problems with that. As you know, on a daily basis you’re seeing mailbox server hacks, and people are getting access to sensitive client documentation. They’re able to click on file-sharing links which then open up all the sensitive information that might be on traditional file-sharing sites.
So, we’ve eliminated that entirely, and we’ve created a really engaging platform that allows multiple parties to collaborate on and share documents back and forth with all these people, and we have a variety of permission levels that allow you to expand the network. A very simple example would be a parent who has children they want to share information with. In the past, it would have been a binary setting: they either have access or they don’t have access. A lot of parents aren’t comfortable sharing their financial and estate plans with their children until they get to a point where they’re much older, but sometimes it’s too late to have those very important conversations. With the variety of our permission settings, we’ve actually seen financial advisors and executors have those difficult conversations with parents and bring the family together and engage them.
How have you made your technology secure, and why have comparable systems never been as secure?
If you take basic file-sharing — Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etcetera — they were invented in 2007–2009 to solve a problem of unlimited storage. Sharing was a consideration after the fact. In today’s environment, we are a more collaborative and connected society, and the pandemic has shown you need to be able to have means to communicate remotely with your team members, and more importantly your clients. What’s unique about the way that we operate is, we don’t include any attachments or file-sharing links in any of our email communication — everything is done within our platform.
What’s unique about the way that we’ve done it is we allow multiple users to be able to access those documents if the permission allows them to. As a client, I’m able to extend the permissions to my account, my lawyer, my family member, whereas that’s not always the case — and in some cases it’s not possible — with the other solutions in the market. While we are using encryption technology that’s very similar to what’s being done by leading firms today in the market, what’s really unique is our permission sets and our centralized platform that everyone has access to, but with gated access. Not anyone can come in — they have to have permission to come in.
What is the user experience like?
We recognize that not everyone might be very tech-savvy. Generally the average age of a financial advisor client is between 50 and 60, so we understand that the interface has to be able to accommodate different levels of familiarity with software. So, the user experience has to be seamless, and that’s how we designed it: to be able to get wherever you need to within two clicks. It’s very seamless, it’s very intuitive, and in fact that’s the word that many folks have used to describe our platform: intuitive.
For advisors and professional users of our platform, we actually have a number of admin functionalities outside of the normal environment — we have another dashboard that they have access to. There is some learning curve there because you need to get familiar with all the features and functionality, but that’s not something that the end client would use — that’s for the admin team on the client side.
What has been your career path up to now, and what has led you to becoming an entrepreneur?
I’ve been in financial markets for about 20 years. I’m an accountant by training and I’ve been in capital markets in the institutional equity sales role for quite some time. The actual original idea came to me when I was on a flight internationally — a 14-hour flight to the Middle East on a business trip. I thought, “If my plane were to crash, my wife would have no idea where any of my insurance policies or our household financial information is left, who our estate lawyer is…” Then I had an even scarier thought. At least my wife knows to call my friend Mark and he’ll help her out, but if both my wife and I passed away in a car accident, my parents would have no idea who Mark is. My parents have zero idea about my financial planning, estate planning, what we’ve got, where it is, and so on. That would have actually put us in a real pickle.
That’s where the idea came from, and we put some things in motion at that point. We hired a team to develop the platform, and at that point it looked like a phenomenal opportunity given the client interest and investor interest we started to get.
I’ve not been an entrepreneur my entire life. I’ve always had a job — a job that required some entrepreneurial skills, perhaps, but a job at the end of the day — so this has been my first foray into it, and I’m loving every second of it.
Has there been a learning curve for you?
My skillsets were definitely more sales and business development oriented. I would like to think I’m a bit of a Swiss Army Knife in that I can pick up different skills quickly. That was required of me in my prior role, but it was very narrow in terms of its application to finance. To be able to roll up my sleeves and be able to create a website in Hubspot, and figure out how to do marketing campaigns, and get the resources to get people to make content copy — those types of skillsets were obviously new to me. What I’ve realized is that if you’re a resourceful individual and you’re willing to learn with no ego, and you work at it, you will figure it out at the end of the day.
How did you become interested in bringing your business to the Catalyst Cyber Accelerator?
From our business perspective, we’re solving a cybersecurity problem. We’re not solving an email problem, we’re not solving a document storage problem — we’re solving a cybersecurity problem. The fact that there’s such a significant increase in digital identity theft, digital fraud, identity fraud and mailbox hacks is a result of people going after that sensitive information that is trafficking over email. Being affiliated with the Catalyst was very important to us because the Catalyst has such a strong reputation for being at the forefront of new cybersecurity technologies. Also, being associated with the university and having a national presence and being the first of its kind, it’s like the Harvard equivalent of accelerators in Canada.
I think it’s far more important to be associated with this accelerator, from our company’s perspective, than it is a FinTech accelerator, because we are tackling a real cybersecurity challenge. So, it was very important to us, and I’m very thankful we got accepted into it. I think the team and the organization saw and recognized that this is truly a cybersecurity problem, so it validated our hypothesis and gives a lot of credibility to what we are trying to do.
What are some of the resources at the Catalyst that you’ve found particularly useful?
Where do we start? I think the Entrepreneurs-In-Residence and the Corporates-In-Residence have been phenomenal resources for us to tap into. We normally would not have had access to these individuals. Not only are they helping us in guiding us from a business perspective, but they’re also helping us from a business development perspective. We’ve got potential business leads and opportunities that would not have come across to us if it had not been for the Catalyst. I think I’ll be forever grateful for having been associated with them and for what they’ve been able to expose us to. It’s really created a significant impact on our business and how we’re managing it going forward.
On that note, has there been anything specific you’ve learned at the Catalyst that has changed the business?
I think it’s touched us on every aspect of what we’ve done. If I think about our technology, for our consumer-facing product we have a full set of APIs that are used by enterprises. Having been exposed to a number of Entrepreneurs-In-Residence we’ve had an impact in how we actually address new releases in our APIs. That’s a conversation we were able to get only through the Catalyst, and it’s had an impact on our CTO and how he plans.
From a business and marketing perspective, the exposure that we’ve had to a number of CMOs and PR executives has had an impact even on how we present ourselves on our website landing pages. From the sales-oriented individuals we’ve had exposure to, we’ve already started to change the way that we analyze and do reporting of our business, and we’ve actually had training sessions to other individuals within our organizations so they can be familiar with those metrics that are very important for managing a business of our type.
What do the next five years look like for SideDrawer?
From the Catalyst we’ve learned a number of different paths we can go down, and we are continuing to work with a few of the executives to map out what those opportunities might look like. From what we can see, the interest level is exceptionally high for our product because we have not come across another solution like ours, and neither have the corporates that we’ve been engaged with.
I would say the next five years look like us continuing to go down the path of the financial services vertical and expanding beyond that into other equivalent verticals, and then into the enterprises associated with financial services, and then expand outside of that. So we are driving down the lane of financial services, but we have already started to get interest from other industries and verticals outside of that, and we’ll start to touch on those as our team grows and as we have more resources available to us.
Now that you’ve been in the game for a little while, what advice would you give to somebody in a position like you were in when you started the business?
I was always a risk-averse individual. Unless I had everything mapped out 100 percent or 99 percent, I would not have taken a step. I was selling stocks, and if you were right, you made money, but if you were wrong, you would start to lose your capital, so you had to be very careful. The advice that I would give is: there are a lot of things you can’t map out, and you have to get comfortable with the unknown, and you have to have confidence in your decision-making process. If you have confidence in your decision-making process, and they’ve proven to be good decisions in the past, then it’s very likely that your gut is good at processing your decision-making properly. If there’s an opportunity you see, and even if you don’t have all of the unknowns mapped out, you should take a bet on yourself.
