Success Stories
A Halton Region Success Story
Fusenet
Taking casual Fridays to a whole new level helps employees grow their ideas, and their company
Fusenet Labs
Every Friday, employees of Fusenet 
, an Oakville-based software development company, can take the day off their regular jobs and spend it at Fusenet Labs — an in-house R&D lab and think-tank where they can brainstorm ideas and try to transform their personal inspirations into software that can be sold to the world. If their technology makes it to market, they get to keep the intellectual property rights — so long as the idea does not compete with Fusenet's existing businesses.
Much more importantly, he says, "we get the talent of these entrepreneurial, innovative people for the 80 per cent of the week when they work for us."
Fusenet's CEO Sanjay Singhal with co-founder
and partner Ryan Van Barneveld
Singhal learned the importance of nurturing talent first hand.
Before he co-founded Fusenet, Singhal was at another company. There he met a co-worker, Ryan Van Barneveld, who had developed — on his own time — a video search and playback browser that would allow users to search for, download and stream full-length, high-quality videos over the Internet — without throttling their Internet connection.Both men were convinced that Van Barneveld's idea had commercial potential. But their employer refused to invest in it. So in 2007, they left their full-time jobs and founded Fusenet.
Their goal was to bring Van Barneveld's software to market; and if possible, develop other technologies that make things easier to get on the Internet. Their new company would specialize "in disruptive innovation — not just making things a little better, but changing the rules of the game," says Singhal.
Because of their own experience, he says, "we vowed that none of our employees would come up with a great idea and be forced to quit in order to commercialize it."
Van Barneveld is now a 50 per cent partner in Fusenet. His software, known as Graboid , was the company's first software to market. It is still one of the company's signature products — selling to users around the world.
And the company didn't stop there. Fusenet has earned $18 million in revenue since its inception and now employs 60 staff.
Graboid's success enabled them to buy and own the place they used to work — Simply Audiobooks . With 15,000 members and $6 million in revenue so far, Simply Audiobooks is the world’s premier online audio book rental club — as large as its six major competitors combined.
Fusenet's in-house entrepreneurs have created another five profitable products — Fusepay , gygan , Whendy , iBundle , and Present Feedback . Each of these technologies has an equity structure in place to reward the employee who created it.
"We plan to grow every one of these ventures and keep innovating and growing," says Singhal.
Along the way, Fusenet’s senior staff have attended and learned from events at MaRS and Communitech — not-for-profit organizations that support technology companies in the Toronto and Waterloo Region, and promote the areas as technology clusters. Both these organizations are members of the Ontario Network of Excellence (ONE) .
And, Singhal and Van Barneveld look forward to working closely with Halton Region's HalTech Innovation Centre — now a member of the Ontario Network of Excellence (ONE) .
"It will be a great resource for our staff who want to be entrepreneurs — and for myself as the CEO — through its peer networking groups, the speakers it will bring in, and its ability to provide access to trusted or recommended professional groups like venture capitalists, startup consultants, and recruiters.”
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