Failure: a necessary evil for success?

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Strive for Higher Highs and Lower Lows

Today, she works in a leading position at Crew, but Stephanie Liverani and her husband Mikael Cho also had their challenges when they started out as entrepreneurs. Accepted into the 2012 cohort of the accelerator FounderFuel, they struggled to come out with a potentially viable project: a platform for app developers similar to Kickstarter, called Ooomf.

“I’m a trained actuary and Mikael is an American who studied psychology: we knew nothing about how to start a company or about the field of technology in Montreal,” recalls Stephanie Liverani. The platform wasn’t as successful as they had hoped. “We fought hard to keep going and we motivated ourselves by repeating, “you just need to be right once.”

In 2013, the couple made one last move to avoid sinking: change directions completely and connect web developers and designers of only the highest quality.

Since then, the company (now called Crew) is astonishingly successful. After two series of funding campaigns that collected over 10 million dollars, Crew opened the Crew Café and Collective last spring in a breathtaking building in Old Montreal.

But their rapid growth came with its fair share of setbacks too. After having raised so much money, the cofounders felt pressured to recruit personnel quickly and conform to the classic successful start-up model. “In just a few months, we went from 8 to 22 employees. I grossly underestimated the structure that needed to be in place in order to manage all that progress,” admits the Head of Operations for Crew. Nonetheless, she feels that she learned that she must better target her hires.

Interested in reading the testimonials by the two other entrepreneurs?

Read the complete article on the Clearfacts.ca website of the National Bank