“In the first year or so, the community might have grown to about 1,200 people, if I remember correctly. Every single one added manually,” he recalls. “I spent hours each day on LinkedIn adding people one by one, writing to them personally, responding, giving feedback, listening. Friends and family thought I was a little crazy, but I believed if we built the right community, with the right people, it could genuinely make a difference in Canada. Each year after that, it just took off.”