Entrepreneur has a way with threes
Triathlete aims to make third startup another success
By JOHN SCHREINER
The Financial Post
VANCOUVER - Both personally and professionally,
technology entrepreneur Jim Miller is looking for hat tricks.
A 55-year-old triathlete who represented Canada twice in
the Ironman world championships, the sinewy Mr. Miller has
begun training for his third Ironman.
A former medical professor who took two Vancouver drug
companies from startup to success, Mr. Miller now has taken
over as chief executive of a startup software company called
ThoughtShare Communications Inc., which will launch its
Internet software next month.
ThoughtShare's product, emerging from five years of
research at Simon Fraser University, is a tool allowing users to
organize information found on the Internet to reduce the
deluge of data that search engines generate. In June, the
company will start giving away the tool to potential users.
Under development are a number of related software
products that will be sold.
"This is not a fait accompli by any means," Mr. Miller said of
the company in which he has invested some of the money he
has made in past successes. "This is still a challenge to
deliver."
A native of St. Catharines, Ont., he grew up in Quebec,
where his father ran the railroad to the iron ore mines and
where a summer of driving spikes inspired Mr. Miller to get a
doctorate in medicine, teaching his specialty -- epilepsy and
strokes -- at the University of British Columbia.
He became interested in commercializing the biotechnology
research being done at the university and in 1981 became a
founder of what is now called QLT PhotoTherapeutics Inc. A
producer of light-sensitive drugs for treating cancer, QLT is
Vancouver's largest pharmaceutical firm.
In 1991, when QLT had entered into the glacial process of
filing for various regulatory approvals of its products, the
restless Mr. Miller moved on. After a brief period as a venture
capitalist, he helped found Inex Pharmaceuticals Corp. When
it had raised $100-million in private and public equity and
taken its drugs into clinical trials, Mr. Miller replaced himself
as CEO in March, 1999, with David Main, a former colleague
at QLT. Mr. Miller, who remains the chairman, since has been
involved with a private fund investing in biotechnology.
"My original game plan was that I was not going to be
involved in anything longer than five years," Mr. Miller said.
He learned that biotechnology works on longer time lines.
He expects success or failure to come much more quickly in
information technology.
"We've raised close to $7-million for ThoughtShare and we
feel that is sufficient to bring this to the point of
commercialization."
One of the investors is Meteor Technologies Inc., an
ex-mining junior that has acquired 50.3% of ThoughtShare.
Mr. Miller moved from investor to CEO earlier this year at
the urging of Fred Fabro, ThoughtShare's president. The two
have been associated at other technology companies and Mr.
Fabro sold Mr. Miller on the novelty of running a software
company.
An habitual doodler, the casually dressed Mr. Miller fits in
easily at a company where someone is always sketching
software solutions on white boards. At one memorable
meeting with his engineers in a sushi bar, Mr. Miller spent
three hours scribbling diagrams on napkins. When an
overeager busboy cleared the table, Mr. Miller had to retrieve
his notes from the garbage.
At the heart of ThoughtShare are two technologies being
made to work together. One is Web organizing technology
developed at Simon Fraser and the other is a complementary
bookmarking technology developed by a private Vancouver
company. The resulting software allows an individual to create
virtual maps of Web searches. The object is to group and
annotate relevant sources of information, to revisit these
sources easily and to forward them electronically.
Mr. Miller believes the applications of the technology are so
broad that one of his most important jobs as CEO is to keep
his engineers focused on the most promising aspect "and not
be all over the map."
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