Star-gazer, trailblazer: Meet Ottawa’s serial entrepreneur John Criswick

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For the better part of two years, John Criswick was in constant pain.

“There were times when I was completely immobilized,” the Ottawa entrepreneur says. “I wouldn’t know from day to day how it was going to feel.”

His mysteriously shifting, sciatic pain persisted through much of 2016 and 2017, at times rendering his right leg useless. Trips to doctors and other health-care professionals yielded only misdiagnoses and frustrations.

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Finally, Criswick’s physiotherapist, seeing no improvement, insisted that he have an MRI. Criswick and his girlfriend drove to Buffalo, N.Y., for the scan. It revealed a thumbnail-sized tumour in his spine.

The good news was that it was benign. The bad news was that high-risk surgery would be needed, and quickly. “I knew this thing was dangerous,” Criswick says. Beyond the pain it caused, the tumour could have, in the event of an accident, paralyzed him, he says.

In the leadup to the surgery, Criswick, who had spent the past two decades earning millions upon millions of dollars with an astounding array of enterprises, had to do the one thing he had never done.

He slowed down. He stepped away from his dozen or so businesses — from the mobile gaming company Magmic Games, from his Mercury Lounge nightclub in the ByWard Market, from Top Shelf Distillers, the Perth-based craft vodka and gin company he co-founded in 2014.

“I put things on hold. I found people to keep stuff running,” Criswick says.

It was the kind of pause that can give even a millionaire time to reflect.

And it gave rise to questions that might not strike others.

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“Why aren’t I a billionaire yet?” the 54-year-old recalls asking himself.

And of his life as an entrepreneur? “I wanted my companies to do stuff, have meaning, not just make stuff and pay people’s salaries.”

Beduin Communications, which was begun in his Lowertown apartment, was snapped up by Sun Microsystems for an estimated $20 million in cash and shares.

Over time, the value of those shares doubled, then tripled, then continued to multiply.

At the time, Criswick told the Citizen: “It’s not going to make big changes in my lifestyle. My mother and my father always worked, and I’m going to keep working.”

And so he did.

Criswick rode 20 years of economic cycles to see two more companies flourish to the point where they, like Beduin, which made a Java-based web browser for cellphones before mobile internet had really emerged, would be sold in eight-figure deals. Today, he is the figure behind an eclectic mass of businesses.

Despite his successes, he has remained behind the scenes, quiet, understated and often inscrutable to outsiders.

Some consider him, given his mix of interests, equal parts idiosyncratic bon vivant and visionary entrepreneur.

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Among the nicknames that follow him around?

“The Patron Saint of the ByWard Market.”

One night, when Criswick was a 10-year-old growing up in Victoria, he caught sight of Saturn’s rings through the lens of a telescope stationed on the balcony of his parents’ home.

“I had no idea where anything was in the night sky,” he says. “It was such a leap. It was one of those experiences in life where you make a bit of a leap.”

From that moment, Criswick became fascinated with space.

After receiving his electrical engineering degree from the University of British Columbia in 1986, he came to Ottawa for the first time to work as a software engineer for the space hardware maker Canadian Astronautics. In the early 1990s, Criswick studied space physics at York University. After obtaining his master’s degree from York, he worked at an observatory in Utah.

Criswick spent the summer of 1991 in Toulouse, France, at the International Space University, immersed in a multidisciplinary program of study centred on space technology. In January 1992, he travelled to Cape Canaveral, Fla., to watch Canadian astronaut Roberta Bondar take off aboard the NASA space shuttle Discovery.

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He applied for the Canadian Space Agency’s astronaut program, knowing he was a long shot — there were 5,200 applicants for six positions. He figures he made it into the top 200 before he was cut from consideration.

But the setback didn’t end his fascination with space, and he would continue to shoot for the stars.

Soon after the Beduin deal made him rich, Criswick bought into the Mercury Lounge nightclub, in part, he says, to provide the youthful employees of his ByWard Market-based companies with a place where they could wind down.

He also bought a sleek loft in the ByWard Market, an open-concept space that, over the past two decades was graced with, among other things, a Mercury Lounge disco ball, a Celestron telescope and a Sony Aibo robot dog.

Criswick shelved that last gadget and subsequently got a real pooch — Arthur, a pug-beagle. He also has 150 plants. “I just like the nature of a tropical space in winter,” he says.

His admits that his living space can be, in a word, messy. The clutter, he adds, is symptomatic of “a classic person who can take on many, many things.”

Between the sales of Beduin, and the comparably valued sales of Rove Mobile, which made a mobile IT management product, and more recently Blacksumac, which made Piper, an early-to-market Wi-Fi-enabled home-security system, Criswick figures he has brought $100 million of U.S. capital to Canada. “Some chunk (of that money) came to me, and I dispersed that into new companies,” he says.

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After the Rove sale about six years ago, Criswick bought a house on Upper Rideau Lake and later the 540 acres surrounding it. When he started Top Shelf Distillers in 2014, he considered putting the distillery on his property, but ultimately located it in Perth, about 20 minutes away, also on property that he bought.

Of his big wins, Criswick simply explains: “If you pick the right track, and you’re getting a lot of consumer love, you get bought out at a price you can’t refuse.”

Of course, Criswick has seen many more projects fizzle.

He recalls one of them — NuJazz Chronicles, a early 2000s TV show that didn’t work out — with amusement.

“It was at the same time as Celebrity Pets. I got to know Marlen Cowpland a bit,” Criswick says, referring to the Ottawa socialite and wife of former Corel CEO Michael Cowpland who hosted that CTV show.

Most painfully, there was the drastic demise of Zucotto Wireless, a computer chips company that raised $53.5 million in venture capital in 2000 and employed 145 people in offices around the world at its peak, only to shut down in 2003.

Of his setbacks, Criswick says: “I’ve survived three substantial down cycles. The recession is one of them.”

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He calls it “a character-building time.”

“Ending is a negative thing. It’s hard to do,” he says. “But you have to think of what you can take from it and apply to the next thing. That’s the real value.”

In the past few years, Criswick has launched a range of smaller, non-tech-related projects spun from his own predilections.

“I like unique jackets,” says Criswick, explaining why he started his jacket-making business, Arthur Limited. The four-year-old company that sells its wares online and at pop-up events is, of course, named after Criswick’s dog, whose image adorns the label on each piece of clothing.

Criswick is less further along with a cold-brew coffee business called Middle Ground.

His Upper Rideau Lake property is available for rent on Air BnB, and Criswick wonders aloud whether he might try to turn the area around it into a mountain-biking destination, inspired by what he’s seen in Northwest Arkansas. “I used to bike when I was younger,” he says.

Do his assorted enterprises make Criswick Ottawa’s most eclectic entrepreneur?

“It looks like I’m all over the place,” he says. “But there is a common thread — fun.”

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To hear others describe Criswick, it’s simply the activity of creating companies that he most enjoys.

“I’m often blown away that John can create companies in fields that he has little initial background,” says Sara Ainslie, who is Top Shelf’s community partnership director and events co-ordinator, but has known Criswick for almost 20 years.

“He will buy books, travel to conferences, interview people in the field, find alliances and before you know it, there’s a new company.”

Even while atop the org chart, Criswick has been keen to do grunt work.

In the 2000s, when Criswick’s company, Idokorro Mobile, which was building apps for the BlackBerry years before the BlackBerry App World service debuted, Criswick would go to the nearby Chapters on Rideau Street and insert company flyers into the pages of tech magazines to get the word out about its products, Paul Dumais recalls.

Dumais, who worked at Idokorro then but is now the CEO of Ottawa-based mobile app company ITmanager.net, recalls driving with his boss from Ottawa to New Orleans non-stop for 25 hours to go exhibit Idokorro’s apps at one of the first BlackBerry trade shows.

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Criswick, Dumais says, is “willing to do anything to get the word out about a product.”

Or, he might just like road trips. This fall, he and two Top Shelf employees drove to Kentucky in Criswick’s four-year-old Tesla Model S to pick up two oak barrels for the distillery.

“He’s accessible. He’s loyal. He’s unpretentious. He doesn’t lord over people,” says Rob Woodbridge, who worked for Criswick during the 2000s, rising to become the CEO of Rove Mobile, as Idokorro was eventually renamed.

Less to Criswick’s liking, some say, is rubbing shoulders with tech titans.

Criswick “prefers others to take the spotlight,” says Dumais. “I remember a few times we met with the CEOs of Nokia and BlackBerry and John would step back and let others lead.”

Criswick had as many as 20 companies four years ago, but is now down to 12. This week, Criswick consolidated his portfolio of businesses under one roof when staff at his longtime ByWard Market base of operations — the fourth floor of  126 York St. — moved to City Centre, where the Criswick company Makerspace North is already located.

“It’s a cost thing … a good decision all around,” says Criswick, who nonetheless admits a twinge of sentimentality about leaving the York Street building where Beduin’s office was located.

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Over the years, Criswick has employed scores of people, including about 120 at the moment.

Claudia Balladelli, the Mercury Lounge’s longtime music programmer, calls Criswick “the best boss ever.”

In 2005, she had just returned to Canada after a few years in Brazil. A horrible relationship there had ended, and after Balladelli came to Ottawa she discovered she was pregnant.

She met with Criswick to propose a monthly series of Brazilian music at the Mercury Lounge. He said he wasn’t interested, but proposed that she work part-time to help with bookings and events at the club. “I was thrilled. I mean, who hires somebody seven months pregnant? Who does that?” Balladelli says.

Criswick “has had a huge impact on my life,” says Mohammad Agha, the president and chief operating officer of Magmic Games.

They first met when Agha was an international student at University of Ottawa, studying computer engineering. Then, Agha found part-time work at the Mercury Lounge, bussing tables. In 2007, Agha got his first computing job when he was hired at Magmic as a Java developer.

“Back then, you had to get a job in your field of study to be granted a work permit, so landing that job enabled me to stay (in Canada),” Agha says. He has since become a Canadian citizen.

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“I call John the Patron Saint of the ByWard Market — he’s employed so many people in the Market area that it’s hard not to appreciate what he’s done,” says Rob Woodbridge, now the CEO of Gymtrack, an Ottawa-based company that makes technology that allows gyms to generate user data so that they can choose the right mix of equipment.

Woodbridge met Criswick in 1997 because their offices were in the same building. Two years later, Criswick invested in one of Woodbridge’s startups. Woodbridge then spent much of the 2000s working for Criswick, including a stint as the CEO of Rove Mobile.

“He is the ultimate entrepreneur,” Woodbridge continues, lauding Criswick’s resilience, constant nature and willingness to extend opportunities to his employees.

“Nothing fazed him during the hard times and nothing changed him during the good times. He was always even. He believed in his people. You were in with John and you were trusted to do your job. Without fail, John supported the people that worked for him.”

The Mercury Lounge’s Balladelli says Criswick is “a maverick in every way,” open-minded and always willing to try something new, innovative and even environmentally friendly. The Mercury Lounge was the first venue in Ottawa to ban straws, she notes proudly.

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Criswick sends Balladelli and other colleagues to conferences so that they can better do their jobs. This fall, she travelled to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the Spanish island off the coast of Morocco, to attend Womex, the mammoth world music festival geared toward presenters.

“We can keep up with the current music scene around the globe, scout new acts, make new connections and return inspired with fresh new ideas to apply at the club.” Balladelli says.

Criswick admits that the Mercury Lounge doesn’t make him any money, and that, indeed, “the nightclub business doesn’t work anymore.

“I will commit at least a few more years to it,” Criswick says nonetheless. “It’s hard to run when you’re not on the scene,” he adds.

That said, Criswick gives Mercury Lounge credit for giving him expertise and connections that helped him launch Top Shelf, which, he says, could become his biggest success.

Fellow Ottawa entrepreneur Adrian Salamunovic calls Criswick “Mr. Yes.”

Around 2000, Salamunovic met Criswick for the first time. Salamunovic, who was in his early 20s, pitched him the idea of a technology for remotely accessing files, comparable to current services Dropbox or Hightail. Criswick cut him a cheque for half a million dollars on the spot, recalls Salamunovic.

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“He sees patterns and recognizes trends way, way before other people see them,” Salamunovic says. “John is one of the most brilliant, in terms of seeing things before they happen. He’s done it multiple times.”

Woodbridge agrees. Criswick, he says, “has an incredible sense of what’s to come — being ahead of it most times. Great business ideas would fall out of his pockets and I’d be the guy to walk behind him, scoop them up and try to make them into real businesses. He’s been in the front of many shifts in tech and lifestyle since.”

However, Salamunovic’s company, Ventrada, wound up shutting down after less than two years. It was a good idea that was too early, Salumnovic says today.

How did Criswick respond to Ventrada’s failure? “I never, never heard a negative word from him,” Salamunovic says. “He knows we put everything we had into that. … He never made me feel guilty about it.”

Mention the shuttering of Ventrada to Criswick, and he just shrugs. “For every Facebook, there are hundreds of others that didn’t work. One gets it right,” he says.

“I think of it in terms of experience,” Criswick says, meaning that he and Salamunovic learned a lot of giving the venture a go.

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“What makes a guy bet big on new ideas instead of banking his hard-earned money and living a good life?” Woodbridge asks. “What makes a guy give up sleep, take on mouths to feed and add unneeded stress in his life to build something new?

“I often asked him why he didn’t just buy an island and live happily ever after. All he ever did was laugh at that idea,” Woodbridge says.

“His joy is in innovation and investing and being a futurist, not in buying Ferraris,” says Salamunovic. “I’ve always admired that in him. Instead of hoarding his money or moving to California.”

Ottawa, Salamunovic says, needs more John Criswicks. “The newly minted millionaires … I want them to reinvest locally. I hope Shopify spurs more Criswicks.”

“The newly minted millionaires … I want them to reinvest locally. I hope Shopify spurs more Criswicks.”

Soon after the Beduin deal made him rich, Criswick donated $272,000 in money and stock options to the University of Victoria, where he had done his first year of post-secondary studies, in support of its astronomy and astrophysics program. To say thank you, scientists at the university named an asteroid that they charted after Criswick.

A few years later, Criswick devoted more of his fortune to his love of space.

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Nothing may epitomize Criswick more succinctly than the fact that more than 15 years ago, he was the first Canadian to make a downpayment when British mega-entrepreneur Richard Branson offered would-be “space tourists” rides, at the cost of $200,000, on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane.

As a prelude to that trip, which in fact has yet to happen, Criswick, just after sunrise on June 21, 2004, stood amid a throng of thousands at Mojave Airport in the California desert to witness the morning launch of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded rocket plane to journey into space.

In a crowd that included such as space enthusiasts as actor William Shatner and bonafide astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Criswick could faintly see the plumes of smoke when SpaceShipOne’s rocket engaged, separating it from a carrier plane called White Knight.

SpaceShipOne ascended to 100.1 kilometres, experienced a few minutes of weightlessness, and fell back into the atmosphere. It glided without a hitch to land at the airport, before roars from from the crowd.

“I was surprised at the simplicity of it,” Criswick says now.

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The fact that 14 years later, Virgin Galactic still hasn’t given its customers their suborbital ride doesn’t bother Criswick.

“It’s fine,” he says. “People think it’s a long time to wait. I’m not in a hurry.” The trip on SpaceShipTwo was “two years away for 10 years,” he says. He thinks it’s just a year away now.

Criswick says, perhaps unsurprisingly given the trajectory of his career, that he hopes to start some kind of space-related business.

“It’s really interesting to see what companies are doing,” he says, adding that such a venture could be his last one.

When Criswick speaks of entrepreneurs other than himself, two contrasting big-name examples come up: Richard Branson and Elon Musk.

English magnate Branson’s Virgin Group controls more than 400 companies including Virgin Galactic. “I’ve met Branson a few times,” Criswick says. “He’s like me, very much like me.”

Pressed to elaborate, Criswick offers a string of adjectives. “Kind. Self-effacing. Positive. Quiet. Approachable.

“He likes to get attention,” Criswick adds. “But he probably likes to stay away (from the limelight), too.”

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Then there’s Musk, the man behind electric-car maker Tesla Motors and spacecraft company SpaceX, who is famous for his ambitions that could revolutionize how we live and for his hands-on and at time mercurial management style.

Speaking of Criswick, Salamunovic says: “To me, he’s like Ottawa’s Elon Musk and Richard Branson. He’s just as nice as Richard Branson and just as visionary in many respects as Musk.”

Criswick figures that he spends about 80 per cent of time on Top Shelf. “I operate that in an Elon Musk-type of way. The others are important, but the time and energy that’s needed by me is best spent on Top Shelf.”

He got into the vodka business despite friends who told him that the market was already saturated. “There’s just many vodkas, how are you going to sell vodka?” Criswick recalls being told. “That just made me want to sell vodka.”

He has high hopes for Top Shelf, which grew from five employees in 2016 to 35 in 2017. The company wants to sell across Canada and especially in Alberta, Criswick says. It has begun the process to sell in Nevada, and Criswick hopes that Top Shelf’s Tom Green-branded moonshine will help attract spirits-lovers in the United States.

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“I think Top Shelf will be big,” Criswick says, envisioning an acquisition one day worth $50 to $60 million.

And what if it isn’t?

“If you have the right mindset, you never fail,” Criswick says.

Criswick’s spinal surgery at the Ottawa Hospital’s Civic campus was a success.

“The next day was like nothing. The pain was gone. I was walking right away. They were trying to slow me down,” he recalls.

Now, more than a year later, he says he’s “90 per cent back. A year and a half of constant pain reprograms your brain, affects your brain, affects your sleep.”

The Mercury Lounge’s Balladelli says that since his health scare, Criswick “has been more aware of himself, and did slow down — just a bit. He’s looking into different ways to take care of his health more.”

“Having an intense brush with the fragility of life is very difficult,” Top Shelf’s Ainslie says. “John thrives on the ability to think and create, but being paralyzed by pain removed that part of his life for almost a year.”

Criswick, she says, “is resilient and pushed his recovery process along quite quickly so he could get back to doing the work he loves.”

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Criswick says he’s also become more clear on the idea that companies can support causes.

The support can be as conventional, such as Top Shelf pitching in to support last spring’s Ottawa Humane Society Garden Party, a cause close to Criswick’s dog-owning heart.

Top Shelf supports the Ottawa Jazz Festival because it’s “grassroots culture,” Criswick adds, but hasn’t gotten behind the Ottawa Bluesfest because it’s more “commercial” and mass appeal in nature, he says.

Outside of being visible at events, Top Shelf this month will begin its #moretrees campaign. Working with conservation authorities, the company will plant one tree for every bottle sold, and the tree will be planted within 100 kilometres of where the bottle was sold.

“I’ve been a bit of a arborist/horticulturalist fanatic almost all my life,” says Criswick. He does not mention, but Magmic’s Agha does, that he “carries seeds in a matchbox and drops them in random places as he walks.”

Criswick hopes to have 250,000 trees planted by the spring of 2019, and as many as two million trees in the ground by the end of next year.

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Across all of his companies, Criswick already has a program, hashtagged #7days4change, to support employee volunteerism. His staffers can go off and do good for a week or two each year — supported by a travel stipend and while still collecting their salaries.

“The employees can choose wherever they go,” Criswick says. “So we have seen trips to Sri Lanka, and to work on a reserve in Southern Ontario, and lots more to come.” He expects to spend about $400,000 yearly on this program.

The guy who pondered why he wasn’t a billionaire now says: “I was never really about money.

“It’s about creating opportunity, making change in the world.”

phum@postmedia.com

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