Business in Vancouver's "How I Did It" feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week's issue, serial entrepreneur Toufic Boubez talks about forming a new company, Metafor Software, following the recent acquisition of Layer 7 Technologies – the company he co-founded – by CA Technologies. The sale is rumoured to be in the $200 million range.
"I was born in Lebanon and my parents came to Montreal during the Lebanese civil war in the '70s. I went to McGill University and got a degree in engineering, did a master's in engineering, then went down to the U.S. to do a PhD from Rutgers University in biomedical engineering.
"I went to work with a company that was doing work on the Earth Observing System for NASA. IBM (NYSE:IBM) recruited me out of that. I left IBM to co-found Saffron Technologies. Saffron was hard-core analytics for intelligence agencies in the U.S.
"I decided I wanted to move back to Canada and moved to Vancouver in 2002. I started Layer 7 with Dimitri Sirota and Lonny McLean in May 2002. Today, we take it for granted that everything talks to everything. Our phones communicate with Google Maps, then with our realtor to show us interesting properties. All of this happens in the background through a programming mechanism called an application programming interface or API. That's what Layer 7 does.
"At some point, somebody like me is probably not well suited to a company like Layer 7. The technology was done. I like to find opportunities where I can invent new stuff.
"One of the things I noticed when I was still at Layer 7 was a perfect storm with the convergence of two major trends. One was the dynamic nature of cloud computing and virtualization on the infrastructure side. People would ramp machines up and down, which is chaotic. It causes all kinds of trouble for people who want to manage that stuff.
"The other major trend is continuous deployment. Most web-based companies are continuously deploying new code. You put those two trends together and you've got chaos squared. Things are falling out of synch all the time. The traditional tools don't help them.
"There was a golden opportunity to apply some of my analytics background to the data centre. Metafor detects trends and tells you when things are out of synch before the big problems happen.
Jenny Yang, my co-founder, used to be a VC at the Business Development Bank of Canada [BDC]. BDC was one of the first investors in Layer 7. She had just left BDC and was looking for something. She helped me put together the team.
"Jenny and I didn't take salaries. We were both doing consulting separately to feed our families and feed Metafor. The money we were making, part of it went to pay salaries.
"I was with Metafor when I heard that CA Technologies was about to acquire Layer 7. I was very excited. I had all my original shares from Layer 7. It was a happy day for me when CA Technologies bought the company. All the founders did really well." •
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