Described as a ‘Tech Titan’ and ‘serial entrepreneur,’ Michele Romanow, 32, is delighted to be the youngest member of the popular CBC show Dragons’ Den.
Romanow is one of several keynote speakers in town to inspire entrepreneurially-minded Sault youth at the first annual, two-day YES Algoma event (Youth Entrepreneurship Summit), which wraps up today at The Water Tower Inn.
“It was a great honour to join the Dragons’ Den panel,” Romanow told SooToday Friday.
“It feels like I’m doing what I did every day before, but now I’m doing it on television.”
“The show’s real. We don’t know anything about the pitchers before they come down the stairs, we invest our real money, it’s interesting,” said Romanow, who joined the show in 2015.
She has been ranked among the WXN (Women’s Executive Network) ‘100 Most Powerful in Canada,’ is the only Canadian on the ‘Millennial on a Mission’ list published by U.S. business magazine Forbes, and has won the Toronto Board of Trade award for entrepreneurs under 30.
Romanow has started five of her own companies, while having an interest in many others.
Her first business was The Tea Room, an exceptionally environmentally-conscious coffee shop which she established as a 20-year-old student at Queen’s University (and which is still there today).
From there, she founded Evandale Caviar, (employing fishermen to capture sturgeon and selling it to high-end restaurants across Canada), co-founded e-commerce platforms Buytopia.ca and Snap By Groupon (formerly known as SnapSaves), and co-founded online financial service clearbanc.com (for independent contractors and entrepreneurs).
She has also provided digital solutions for Netflix, Starbucks and Cirque du Soleil.
“I started being an entrepreneur when I was young, while I was an undergrad, then I did all of this immediately after I finished school, so I think there’s an enormous amount of benefit in starting early, and I would never have been here today if I hadn’t have had those learning experiences from my first businesses,” Romanow said.
“I think that’s really my message here today. I didn’t have any magic, competitive advantage. It was about starting early and learning quickly and figuring out how to build a business.”
“It’s important to start a business early because that can give you a tremendous amount of freedom later in life. There’s nothing that holds you back.”
“You’ll learn more from starting your first company than you ever will in an academic program (though Romanow, a civil engineering graduate of Queen’s University, did by no means downplay the importance of formal, postsecondary education).”
“I started early and I think it’s the primary reason I’m successful today.”
For those of us who are middle-aged or seniors, and who relied solely on a structured, formal postsecondary education, or went straight to the factory, we look on in amazement at today’s youthful, successful (and very wealthy) entrepreneurs.
“It’s better to own the factory,” Romanow grinned.
“You can rely on yourself,” she emphasized.
“There are so many opportunities that people are finding everywhere, and if you can find one of those opportunities, you can create your own future.”
“You have to look at the shift that happened,” Romanow said in discussing today’s economy.
“With the dawn of the internet, everything became a lot cheaper to build. Building a company 50 years ago, you’d build a single manufacturing place and every single extension of that, expanding into a new city, it was enormously capital intensive to do that.”
“Today, 22 engineers built the WhatsApp app, and it was sold for $19 billion and they connected over a billion people over a messaging platform, and so you think of the scale technology has today, and you can grow so much faster with social media to share your message. It’s really powerful.”
A native of Calgary, Romanow now lives and works in Toronto.
On Monday, she will attend a meeting in Toronto with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, founder of the Alibaba Group (a group of internet-based businesses), as the two men discuss the Canadian and Chinese economies.
The YES Algoma Youth Entrepreneurship Summit has been organized by the Sault Ste. Marie Innovation Centre and its YouLaunch division.