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New Brunswick businessman Gerry Pond pictured on Oct. 13, 2011. Mr. Pond died on July 8 at the age of 82 and backed as many as 55 little enterprises.PAUL DARROW/The Globe and Mail
Gerry Pond was a technology pioneer and economic change agent who spearheaded a digital revolution in his province of New Brunswick. As a second act in his already impactful life, he emerged as an influential investor and mentor who seeded two of Atlantic Canada’s landmark tech startups.
“He was the architect of the modern New Brunswick,” said Frank McKenna. As premier from 1987 to 1997, he teamed with Mr. Pond, then a local phone company executive, to digitally connect the far-flung regions of the province through fibre optics and internet broadband.
Still, in his later years, Mr. Pond was haunted by a sense of unfinished business. He yearned for one more startup that would reap huge economic returns – possibly a unicorn, the venture-capital lingo for a billion-dollar valuation. He would often muse about “another big one” in conversations after 2011, when he and his partners had sold two hugely successful Fredericton startups – Radian6 and Q1 Labs – for staggering sums by Canadian standards.
This quest was not motivated by personal gain. (Mr. Pond lived a comfortable lifestyle in Rothesay, an affluent suburb of Saint John.) Another big payday would generate wealth for the region, with spinoffs to investment, talent and research capability. And the public exposure would cast a different light on an area often dismissed as hopelessly have-not.
He hoped this next big exit – ideally through a public share offering – would spawn a major head office in a region starved of corporate heft. The aspiration was typical of Mr. Pond, who bristled with frustration when others did not share his drive and enthusiasm for the future of his beloved home region.
When he died on July 8 at the age of 82, he had not witnessed his last great hope. There was no big public share offering. No unicorn.
But he still left a powerful legacy. As an early angel investor, he backed as many as 55 little enterprises, about 30 of which were still in his portfolio (some promising, others embryonic). He also left a generation of people he nurtured with unwavering loyalty who are now leaders in Atlantic Canada.
Since Q1 Labs and Radian6 hit pay dirt, the East Coast has witnessed one massive unicorn: Verafin, a St. John’s startup in financial fraud detection technology, was sold to an American buyer in 2021 for almost US$2.75-billion. Mr. Pond wasn’t part of that deal, but the Newfoundland techies were inspired by his New Brunswick successes.
Mr. Pond spent his life trading in ideas, not the rocks, trees and fish that were traditional mainstays of Atlantic Canada’s economy. He saw ideas as the carpenter’s nails that connected teams, companies and technologies. “My job is to be the hammer so that the nails go in,” he said.
And in they went, with striking results at Radian6 and Q1 Labs, which together garnered about US$1-billion in valuation when sold to American tech giants Salesforce and IBM in 2011. The young people who came out of those companies – including Marcel LeBrun, Sandy Bird, Daniella DeGrace, and Jeff White – are now angel investors, philanthropists and entrepreneurs in their 50s and older. But they will always be Gerry’s kids.
It is often forgotten that before Mr. Pond became an angel investor, he was a telecom executive who helped transform the province into a digital hothouse. That mission continued after he retired.
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A 30-year partnership to build a tech ecosystem across the Atlantic provinces began when Mr. McKenna, as premier, was selling the region to would-be investors, and Mr. Pond, an executive at (and later CEO of), New Brunswick Telephone Company (NBTel), was the private-sector enabler.
“I couldn’t have a more faithful friend and partner,” Mr. McKenna said.
They turned New Brunswick into a much-studied laboratory and a magnet for investment and jobs, often by hosting corporate call centres. It meant young kids growing up in remote regions had access to cutting-edge technology, enabling them to embark on career journeys that often led to Mr. Pond’s door.
Mr. Pond himself came from a family with roots in the trees and streams of New Brunswick’s Miramichi region, but he was born in Northern Quebec, where his father worked in the forestry industry.
There followed a bachelor of arts degree from the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. After school, Mr. Pond joined NBTel and rose through the ranks.
As a young man in Saint John, he met a public health nurse named Anne Kennedy from the province’s Woodstock area. They fell in love and married, raising a boy and a girl.
In Canada’s balkanized telecom industry, NBTel was a pipsqueak, especially compared with the behemoth Bell Canada in Central Canada. It had to be nimble and creative. Mr. Pond was one of a series of senior managers who created islands of innovation inside the company, enlisting smart young people who would be with him the rest of his life.
One such company was iMagic, a before-its-time pioneer of transmitting TV content over the internet – think Netflix before Netflix. Mr. Pond elevated Mr. LeBrun, then a young University of New Brunswick grad, to head the startup. Even after iMagic was spun off and shut down, Mr. LeBrun remained part of Mr. Pond’s corps of bright young things, and Mr. Pond turned to him again to build Radian6, a social media marketing platform. Today, Mr. LeBrun is a social entrepreneur and a pioneer in building tiny-house communities.
In 1999, Mr. Pond’s life was blown up by the merger of Atlantic Canada’s four phone companies under the Aliant banner. He briefly headed Aliant’s telecom arm, but the company fell increasingly under the thumb of parent BCE and its Bell Canada affiliate. “The truth is I was let go,” he said, describing his fate at 57 after three decades with the business.
He was packing boxes in his Saint John office when he received a visitor, local entrepreneur Brian Flood, who urged him to join cybersecurity startup Q1 Labs as a director and investor. It was a fresh beginning. Mr. Pond would be pivotal in the company’s success, including its 2011 sale to IBM for about $600-million.
Meanwhile, he had joined some old NBTel colleagues in founding Mariner Partners, an IT services and consulting firm. Inside Mariner, Mr. Pond co-founded East Valley Ventures, an investment arm that was his principal vehicle for hatching startups.
As his influence widened across Atlantic Canada, he became an éminence grise for tech incubators and accelerators. He teamed up with entrepreneur Gururaj (Desh) Deshpande, a University of New Brunswick grad who had struck tech gold in the United States, to create a social innovation and entrepreneurship hub inside the university.
The executive director of the Pond-Deshpande Centre, Vanessa Paesani, is another recipient of the Pond treatment: direct, blunt but ultimately caring. “He was kind but firm,” Ms. Paesani says. One young female manager saw him as this crusty but lovable old bear.
Mr. Pond was a tireless advocate for the often-underrated science of selling things. Many Atlantic Canadians, and Canadians generally, shy away from what they see as a grubby practice. This anti-sales mindset was hurting the country economically, he felt. A crowning achievement was a new chair in sales research at UNB.
In his last few years, Mr. Pond suffered from a variety of ailments that took him in and out of hospital. The last time was for septicemia, a blood disorder.
Anne Pond watched her husband working right to the end. He couldn’t stop. He had that unquenchable optimism, that there was another big winner around the corner. As he said: “You wouldn’t be in this business if you weren’t optimistic.”
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