Samuel Poirier On Recognizing Tech Opportunities
Terminal Tech Talk speaker and rising Canadian entrepreneur Samuel Poirier talks about how his approach to startups has evolved over time.
Ten years ago, Samuel Poirier was just a kid from Montreal with the kind of hobbies you would expect from the son of two academics. He collected venus flytraps and gemstones and daydreamed about the infinite possibilities of outer space. What would soon set him apart was his entrepreneurial drive.
While most teenagers were busy trying to figure out how to navigate the awkward social waters between middle school and high school, Samuel was steering his first business ventures. He started his first company at fourteen. When he was seventeen, Samuel set his sights on cryptocurrencies and networked his way to a $700k investment to help create the world’s first Bitcoin debit card. The company, Yagi, eventually merged with Bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox. And although Mt. Gox would eventually fall victim to the greatest Bitcoin hack in history, losing over $450M, it didn’t rattle Samuel like it would most teenagers his age. Instead, he rebounded. Immediately. By the time most of us were figuring out what major to select in college, Samuel was already deep into VR and co-founded an analytics company, Retinad. Samuel would eventually accept the Thiel Fellowship, and much to the dismay of his parents, drop out of university to take Retinad to the next level. In total, Samuel and his team raised $2M for the project. Earlier this year, it was acquired by LumiereVR.
So what does a young, accomplished entrepreneur do after he’s already broken into two difficult markets? Do it all over again. In preparation for his Terminal Tech Talk, we sat down with Samuel to talk about his latest project Seahub and his experiences so far as a young, accomplished entrepreneur.
Terminal: Let’s start on the mountaintop — Mt.Gox. You merged your company, Yagi, with the exchange months before the big hack. Explain how as a teenager you rebounded so quickly from that experience?
Samuel: Yeah, it was a weird experience. Frankly, I was lucky because I wasn’t conscious enough at 18 or 19 years old to fully understand the event. I remember feeling very stressed for about 48 hours. I wasn’t getting any replies from our partners at Mt. Gox. They weren’t picking up the phone or answering emails. Radio silence. It took us a while to figure what was happening. Eventually, we did and that really hit me. It sucked because we were very close to growing the business exponentially. We had the biggest partner in the whole bitcoin industry with us, guaranteeing distribution and guaranteeing payouts. Those payouts, for a few 19-year-olds like us, were amazing. So I definitely felt the weight of that loss. You have this thing that you have built get smashed in your hands, but the response was pretty much immediate. I knew I had to build another one. The question was, what am I going to build?
That’s a pretty heavy fail-forward experience…
You know, it’s just a part of the process. Breaking your teeth is part of the journey. It’s normal.
People usually use the Thiel Fellowship to start their entrepreneurial career or launch an idea… Why did you decide to go for it knowing that you already had success as an entrepreneur?
Yeah, there are a couple of reasons there.
First off, I’m from Montreal, and just five years ago, the Montréal tech ecosystem wasn’t nearly as mature and global as it is today. It felt really small. I grew up watching and reading about legends like Peter Thiel from afar. They always felt very distant. It has a very powerful effect on you when you are an average guy from Montreal, and you realize that you might be eligible to be in a program, a circle, that a guy like Peter Thiel created. For me, it was something that I would have thought impossible about a year before it happened.
The other reason is that I come from a family of academics. My mother has her PhD in genetics and my dad is a surgeon. They were supportive, but they thought it was weird that I wanted to take an entrepreneurial path. Like most parents, they felt that I should maximize my chances of being successful by having a college degree. It was a really tough sell to convince them that I should drop out of college. I already had Retinad, the VR startup. We had already raised over a million dollars, but that wasn’t enough. The Fellowship gave me the opportunity to say, I get this. I get a boring degree like everyone else has, or I get this. And that helped me close the sale with my parents so to speak
Following Yagi, you went on to work on VR and now Seahub, which is a booking site. There’s a lot of variation there. What do you think the commonalities are between those projects?
More than anything, I think that succession shows the evolution in my taste of how to build a company.
How do you mean?
I started out thinking that the Silicon Valley model was the only one that was valid. I thought the only way to build a successful company was to look at what was missing in the world. You look at a bunch of markets that are emerging and you ask yourself, what can I do here that will shape the future of this market? When you look at the Google’s and Facebook’s of the world, this works. It works like crazy, but for most companies, this model results in failure because you are attacking a space that might not be proven. The risk of failure is much higher.
In 2012, we went after unproven model with Yagi. We asked, what can we do to help digital currency take over the world? And our answer was to bring a currency over from the digital world to the physical world via a debit card. There are a lot of companies doing exactly that now. Bitcoin debit cards are here, and that’s great. It means the model worked and it’s validated. It was the same in VR and our company Retinad, but it can be tough to get that right. Both companies were limited by the growth and speed of the market.
Now, my approach is different. I was fortunate to have a mentor that taught me that the best way to build a company is to attack an existing space and try to modernize it. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. That’s what me and my business partner are doing at Seahub. Together we are modernizing the cruise industry.
What’s a team that you look at and say, they are using that same model well?
Jack Abraham, Andrew Dudum, and the team at Hims. I doubt they were passionate as kids about hair Loss and erectile dysfunction, but they recognized a chance to modernize an industry and they are doing it really well. It’s a great model.
Tell us more about Seahub. What’s your long-term vision there?
We’re not in this market to play around. We’ve been studying the industry for the last year, and now we are starting to scale up. We want to be the biggest and best cruise booking platform on the market.
We want to modernize it and make it a better experience for the modern customer. We have the right plan and team to do it.
Next month, Samuel will join the Terminal community in Montreal to talk more about his experiences. Sign up for the free event here, or check out other Terminal Tech Talks on our website.
