Peter Lalonde

Peter Lalonde is a Canadian Entrepreneur, Chief Evangelist at Apprento, Founder and CEO of Openera and Co-Founder of JustReply. The Technology powering Enterprise Cloud has to step up and work harder so we can #DoMore.

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Openera has been acquired

I'm happy to announce that Openera has been acquired by LiveQoS. The Openera service will remain and our technology and team will continue to deliver on our promise of making technology work harder for you, without changing the way you work.

You can read more about the acquisition here. 

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Finding a co-founder is hard

As a non-technical founder of a startup, I didn't realize how difficult it would be to find a technical co-founder. I thought I had such an incredible idea and market opportunity that finding a co-founder would be relatively easy. I was wrong. I struggled to get a working prototype hacked together, thought I had found a CTO a couple of times and made some huge technical blunders. Then I realized I had to sell the dream to the right person first. I had to prove the Openera vision was the right solution to a big enough problem. I also had to prove that I had what it takes to build excitement around what that person was going to be responsible to build. It was tough. 

I met Marc Lennox through the Ottawa startup community and begun to woo him with my vision (aka bullshit) and drive. I was meeting a lot of potential co-founders but Marc had a unique quality I really liked. He was in almost every way my opposite. He's uber fit, early riser, runs marathons, pays very close attention to details and he had successfully co-founded and exited his own startup, MXI. 

So, how did I convince him to leave another startup and join me and Krissie? Here's how I remember it. Marc's version will likely be more detailed and accurate. I said...

"Hey, why don't you come to San Francisco with me? Openera was selected to be a C100 company and invited to their 48 hrs in the Valley program. Make up your mind after."

We went, he saw that the story had legs and then we won the C100 Sandhill Road VC Pitch Competition. He was sold. Going straight to the International Startup Fest in Montreal and taking home 2 top prizes was the icing on the cake. 

I was very happy. He joined Krissie and I, he re-built the platform, we joined the FounderFuel accelerator, lived together for 3 months in Montreal, raised a little money, built a business with great customers and partners and hit operational profitability. Then we were acquired. 

The next startup story will be a lot different. We both learned a tremendous amount and are much clearer of purpose and determined to do it again. This time, I won't need to waste my time searching for co-founders or raising money. We can take what we learned and focus what we are great at doing. Being opposites and doing what we do best...build.

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Building a great team is hard. We were lucky and simply hired one good person, who attracted the next great hire and continued the cycle.  

Our culture was great and encapsulated by one phrase. "Make it Happen"

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Automate your Inbox with Openera

This is the last video we produced to show how Openera helps our customers manage corporate compliance while not changing how employees work.

We learned a lot of lessons of video production working on it. We worked with a great team Simple Story Videos and are happy with the end result. The toughest part of it was knowing we were a tough client for them. My background includes formal education in video and film production and spent a lot of time in Hollywood, NY and London working with clients in the creative industry. So, being hands off did not come naturally for me. Fortunately, I had Krissie Thornton running things so it actually came together in the end. 

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Scrappy Startup Gets Attention at Dreamforce.

It was two years ago the Openera crew headed to San Francisco for some serious #hustle in the valley. We spent 5 weeks in the valley and met an incredible number of great entrepreneurs. We learned a lot, had some fun and validated we had a business we had to build. Two years later, we're heading back to Dreamforce as an acquired company and our technology in the hands of Salesforce customers all over the world. 

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Road Hero by Openera

This is a sneak peak at something the Openera team is working on. We realized that we were seeing a lot of travel related content flowing through our own Openera accounts and many on the team built custom rules to handle travel documents like boarding passes, reservation, receipts, invoices and other travel documents that mattered. We asked ourselves:

"why don't we pre-package a bunch of travel related rules, capture all the email sources of travel related information and make an app that makes travel suck less?"

Add in geo-fenced / location aware notification rules and you have a really useful travel tool while on the road. The goal was not to replace Tripit, Expensify or Attachments.me but to produce something that took the basic, most useful aspects of each app and design around notification to make life easier for business travellers. 

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Visit the new Openera.com now. Login or sign-up and see what fresh new features we have launched to help automate your inbox. 

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International Startup Fest's Best Reporter

Last year we pitched to Harrison and the rest of the teen judges at Startup Fest. Everyone fell in love with this kid. I had the chance to speak with him in the green room prior to my stage pitch. I was blown away by this smart, articulate and ambitious kid. I wanted to hire him on the spot or invest in his future. This video captures some of his exploits at Startup Fest and we were honored to have him interview us. 

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Startup Festival Judges Pick, Openera, has doubled since the Festival, raising $1M seed round.

They say everything comes in threes, but for cloud content management StartupOpenera, two was enough. The team took home the top honours at the Startup Stage Pitch and walked away with the FounderFuel Prize.

The Startup Stage Pitch involved pitching on a main stage to a panel of judges. Winning the FounderFuel Prize gave Openera a spot in FounderFuel’s 12-week program.

A lot has changed for Openera since last summer. The team, which doubled from three to six members is “in full-on commercialization mode,” says founder and CEO Peter Lalonde. And it’s paying off – Openera is already working with disruptive companies like Box, Salesforce and Workday.

So what have they learned since Startupfest 2012? “Finding the right people isn’t the hard part, it’s harder to finance new hires,” says Lalonde. Which is why Openera is raising $1 million to bring more world-class talent on board.

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Openera named "Canada's Hottest Early Stage Startup" 

“Email ends up becoming the most valuable resource for corporate intelligence, corporate assets and work products as well,” said Lalonde. “Were not trying to be a security company, we’re not trying to stop people from doing the wrong thing, but we’re trying to make it really easy for people to do the right thing. That’s what Openera does.”

The launch comes after an eventful two years for the company. Thanks to a no-show from a competing startup at the Canada 3.0 Conference in April 2011, Openera won the Road to Banff Venture Forum Pitch-Off. Here they were named “Canada’s Hottest Early Stage Startup in 2012”. Then came top honours at C100’s 48 Hours in the Valley in June 2012. Lalonde called it one of his best moments with the company after gaining “the validation that this is a world class problem and [Openera] is a world class solution.”

A month later they took the International Startup Festival by storm,claiming both the Startup Stage Pitch and the FounderFuel prize. Four monthsafter entering the FounderFuel programLalonde and his team proclaimed to the audience their selling point. Indeed, people do hate filing.

Read the full article here

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Openera was featured in TechCrunch:

Openera, an Ottawa-based startup which automatically moves email attachments into cloud services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, Salesforce and more, has raised $250,000 in seed funding, which the CEO Peter Lalonde jokes is “equal in significance to raising about a million if we were raising in the U.S.” He may be right – the company has been winning pitch competitions all across Canada for its service, which could be characterized as something like a IFTTT for the enterprise.

Read the article here. 

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Openera Selected to Spend 3 Months in Silicon Valley

Nine startups from Montréal accelerator FounderFuel’s recent graduates are coming to Silicon Valley. The temporary move is funded by the Consulate General of Canada in San Francisco, and the goal is to help the startups build relationships, raise capital, and grow faster as a result of living and working in the startup capital of the world.

As part of the Canadian Technology Accelerator program, each team will be getting fully paid office space in one of four facilities: Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, RocketSpace and CTA@Mission Bay in San Francisco, or Environmental Business Cluster in San Jose. In addition, the startups will be introduced to mentors and potential partners in the Valley.

“The FounderFuel teams will benefit from unprecedented opportunities to develop partnerships, accelerate their customer acquisition and raise additional funding,” FounderFuel’s general manager Ian Jeffrey said in a statement. “Free office space in Silicon Valley is an invaluable advantage to our teams, and weʼre very excited to be the first program to partner with the Canadian Technology Accelerator.”

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Openera: How constant refining led to a beer-stained termsheet -- with founder Peter Lalonde

Me & My Startup Stache being interviewed on Untether.tv by the incomparrable Rob Woodbridge.

Note to self: Don't do interviews when growing a Mo for Movember. Donate here. 

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Openera: How constant refining led to a beer-stained termsheet - with founder Peter Lalonde

This is the story of Openera, a company focused on automated filing - and also founded in my home town of Ottawa, Canada. While document management may not be everyone's sweet spot, the story that ...

Here is a quick reference of what we covered in the show. Click on the link and the video will take you to that clip

1. Did you sign a term sheet at a bar? 1:50 2. What is Openera 5:00 3. What is the problem Openera solves 7:00 4. Why start Openera 9:15 5. Peter’s process for defining his product offering 14:00 6. What did spending 5 weeks in the valley mean for building relationships 16:00 7. How did you come up with the original idea 19:00 8. How different is the idea today versus when you started 23:15 9. Why simplicity rules 26:00 10. How did you find your technical co-founder 28:30 11. How did you find your partners 33:30 12. How do you compete with incumbents moving into your space 37:00 13. What has the fundraising process been like for you 40:00 14. Why go down the funding route instead of finding customers first 45:30 15. How do you deal with the manic swings of being an entrepreneur 47:40 16. Is there anything better than being an entrepreneur in the mobile space? 51:40 17. What would you not do again on your next startup 53:15 18. What is the one thing you would do again on your next startup 54:45 19. People call entrepreneurs crazy – how do you deal with this? 55:45

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All our FounderFuel friends have access to this video. 

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Lalonde becomes the idol of every startup when he signs a term sheet with an investor at the bar.

Now that’s killing it. 

John Koetsier Journalist, VentureBeat

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VentureBeat Covers FounderFuel Demo Day

Here's the Openera Demo Day story: 

It wouldn’t be a Demo Day without big numbers. Most are cautious, but some throw out large numbers ending in billions or millions. Those who do, however, usually have the ability to back them up.

Like Peter Lalonde, of Openera, an automated filing system that helps companies be regulations-compliant without relying on the unreliable (that would be me and you). Lalonde later becomes the idol of every startup present when he signs a term sheet with an investor at the bar in the after-party.

Now that’s killing it.