Reflections on Choosing Co-Founders on the Passing of a Co-Founder and Friend

It is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of Norman Toms , the driving force for Sierra Wireless which we launched in 1993. I can’t remember exactly when Norman and I became partners in thinking about a startup, it must have been while we both still worked together at Motorola. I still have our very first business plan and financial model which we used to raise money. Of course, they were complete fiction, the adoption of wireless data embedded in things took way longer than we expected and we went through several near-death experiences, a leadership change and a major pivot before finding true product-market fit and heading ‘up to tornado’.

In year four we were profitable, in year six we IPO'd on the TSX, a year later on NASDAQ and in late 2001 our share price peaked at $232 and troughed at $3! The tech meltdown was a nightmare. But we had a real business and in 2004 reached $200m in annual revenue. Along the way Norman and I shared hopes, dreams, fears, lots of stress, lots of laughs (some hysterical), life-saving moments (I may not still be around if he hadn’t seen the Heimlich maneuver on TV), major family events and ultimately retirement from the company we started but was now run by the professionals, David Sutcliffe and Jason C. . They did a heck of a job taking it to the next level.

A number of years ago I found this quote from Dane Atkinson : "Co-founders are the foundation block that rocks most failed companies and strengthens winning ones. You MUST have a lengthy relationship with a co-founder PRIOR to founding. The ideal is a being part of another fox hole work environment where you can learn about each other through trials. You want to have common ground at the moral ideology level with a serious dosage of respect.“ There is so much truth here and this is how our partnership came to be.

Getting to know Norman at Motorola and enjoying his wit and intellect made me want to work with him. We both had similar backgrounds, growing up in Dublin, and shared similar values on life, work intensity and what the purpose of a startup really was - to deliver value and change lives. Observing his work on a particularly challenging project showed that he’d be a clear and critical thinker when things got tough, which they surely would. I trusted and respected him completely and when you’re out there day after day, making promises to customers that you will deliver something better than the competition, that really matters. I could not imagine a better co-founder for that incredible, manic, frightening, stressful, funny and ultimately (thank goodness) rewarding journey.

We made flawed assumptions about how quickly wirelessly connecting things would take off. So our lead investor Jim Diller told us that “you need a new CEO and neither of you is it”. Again, Norman’s clear-headedness led us to take a cold, hard, dispassionate look at the facts, which weren’t exactly in our favour. We both got behind it and supported the process, which I thought at the time was the normal thing to do, but have since learned that often founders fight this situation, subvert the process and undermine the new CEO to the point where they have to leave, and take their passion for the thing they started with them. We were the outliers in how we handled this, but the results speak for themselves. David was the catalyst.

I now have the chance to teach entrepreneurship, thanks to Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University , and to share these and many other experiences with our students so that they can learn from some of the right and wrong choices we made. Thank you Norman, you were an inspiration and a great co-founder. You’re in our thoughts, as are Heather and the family who loved you. I’m sure we all miss your logic, insight, quick wit and self-deprecating humour.