Five Questions with Simon De Baene, Co-Founder and CEO of Workleap

Workleap is a Montréal, Québec-based company that is building the operating system for hybrid work - unifying the experience to streamline talent management and scale the tools that drive productivity.

Co-Founder and CEO Simon De Baene recently sat down with CCI President Benjamin Bergen to talk about how Workleap got started, how the hybrid workplace has changed office culture, and what it’s like to build a successful company in Canada. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

‍

Benjamin Bergen: Simon, thank you for joining me. Workleap was founded almost 20 years ago, and the workplace software landscape has changed dramatically. What is Workleap's origin story, and how has the company evolved over time?

Simon De Baene: Actually, Workleap started as a company called GSoft in 2006. We were three kids, 20 years old, and just bored at school. We were looking at the tech industry in Québec and felt it was very gray, with gray carpets, gray cubicles, and a gray mood. We could see that it felt very different in Silicon Valley, so when we started GSoft, we wanted to bring some fresh air to the tech industry in Québec.

First, we started with the not-very-original idea of approaching companies in Québec to build software for them. We became involved in so many different companies and built software to enable employees to achieve more, and because of that, we became very passionate about the workplace. We realized that the workplace was the focus of the company, and we wanted to help workers do a better job in their day-to-day lives with our software.

ShareGate was the first product we built in our early days. It began as a simple tool for moving data within Microsoft's SharePoint. Little did we know at the time, SharePoint would later evolve into Microsoft 365, their cloud productivity platform. Our technology suddenly had a much bigger purpose, and ShareGate became a leading product, helping millions of people transition to Microsoft 365. I'm proud to know that we've played a part in helping companies modernize how they work.

‍

BB: That’s interesting! There’s so much opportunity to improve workplaces with technology. Would you say that Workleap is trying to solve the problem of improving digital work experiences? What’s involved in integrating workers in a world that is both in-person and digital?

SD: It’s obvious now that hybrid work is the new standard. The pandemic didn't change the vision; it reaffirmed that our goal needs to be centered around helping companies scale their hybrid work force. We have different products that all serve a purpose that you can attach to the common theme of hybrid work being the new normal.

Many companies are struggling to integrate hybrid work into their workplaces. They are often concerned about losing their culture and how they will operate day-to-day. Most companies have not cracked the code so far. This is what we are all about, and there’s a land of opportunity around the new standard of how we work.

‍

BB: It sounds like the real value add is that all firms are going to need to go hybrid to be successful and remain competitive. But if you cannot measure the success of your employees, you don't know, and if you don't know, you can't make improvements. Is that the key to success for hybrid companies?

SD: What gets measured gets done. We live in a world where we have dozens of tabs open in our browsers and so many tools at our fingertips; we live in such a great era of technology. We can achieve more than ever, but the downside is that we have been lost in the abundance. There are so many opportunities, but it’s impossible to know what the right move is. It’s almost like there is a new opportunity in how we can make sense of all the complexity companies are facing.

Hybrid work seems optional to many companies now, but this is the new normal, we need to plan for it as an ongoing reality. Adapting and using technologies is the only way companies will keep up with competitors. I take a lot of pride in helping other companies succeed, and we’ve been told many times that we did that.

‍

BB: Yeah, that's a great way to get in to our next topic. You work with a lot of different international brands as partners. What’s it like working in that environment, and what’s the adoption rate from Canadian companies and government been like?

SD: Our strategy is volume. We've built simple products that have reached many companies because we solved key problems for them. We’re at the point where we have more than 20,000 customers. I like the stability of not depending on a single client; it allows you to be more resilient.

We are much more popular in the United States. Companies that have large and expensive solutions with a long sales cycle are more likely to reach the government level, but we are more focused on private companies because they’re easier to reach. I think we weren't as motivated to figure out how we could get government contracts because it felt too complicated. Private companies make decisions faster, they have a need and will reach out to you immediately if they like your product.

‍

BB: That’s very interesting from a growth perspective. What are some of the positives and negatives of trying to build a company in Canada that you have experienced while building Workleap?

SD: The main problem while building a business in Québec is the extra legislation that you need to deal with in this province. It’s almost like the federal and provincial governments are trying to reinvent the wheel.

Until the governments of Canada and Québec figure out how to work well together, it will be hard for companies to operate here. Many companies in the US and other competitor markets don't need to deal with these issues, so it's an added challenge for us. One of the things that we are very good at in Canada is adding a bunch of extra work to do while building a business; we have a lot more bureaucracy to deal with.

If you look at the business culture in the US, you see a lot more risk-taking, big thinking, and money. They have all the tools and ingredients to build highly successful companies, but that doesn't mean we can’t achieve it here in Québec or Canada. It forces us to be more creative and do things differently, and Workleap is proof that successful companies can be built in Canada.

‍

About the Council of Canadian Innovators

The Council of Canadian Innovators is a national member-based organization reshaping how governments across Canada think about innovation policy, and supporting homegrown scale-ups to drive prosperity. Established in 2015, CCI represents and works with over 150 of Canada’s fastest-growing technology companies. Our members are the CEOs, founders, and top senior executives behind some of Canada’s most successful ‘scale-up’ companies. All our members are job and wealth creators, investors, philanthropists, and experts in their fields of health tech, cleantech, fintech, cybersecurity, AI and digital transformation. Companies in our portfolio are market leaders in their verticals, commercialize their technologies in over 190 countries, and generate between $10M-$750M in annual recurring revenue. We advocate on their behalf for government strategies that increase their access to skilled talent, strategic capital, and new customers, as well as expanded freedom to operate for their global pursuits of scale.

‍