Charting a course with Chris Barnard of Points.com

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Introduction
Some founders don't have "entrepreneur" as part of their plan. They slowly evolve into one. That's what Chris Barnard shared with students at Ivey's New Venture project. After a slew of jobs, including investing money for other companies, Barnard wondered, 'why not invest in his own venture?'

That venture became Points.com, one of the earliest loyalty programs in the world. 

Barnard, his co-founder, Rob McLean, and Points.com, would go on to weather a series of world-changing storms, including the dotcom bubble , 9/11, and the War on Terror, before settling into cruising altitude. Barnard would go on to take Points.com public, and in 2022, the venture was acquired for half a billion dollars. In this episode, Barnard speaks with Ivey faculty member Eric Janssen about his incredible journey of building a startup in tumultuous times, the importance of travel, and how to navigate technological change as entrepreneurs.

Eric Janssen
Where were you at? Maybe when you were 22 years old, fourth year university.

Chris Barnard
So I was at Western I did an undergrad here, history, political science, and when I graduated, I had absolutely no clue what I was going to do, and trying to think the first job I had was as a commercial real estate broker. Got assigned a building downtown Toronto, in the outskirts queen and broad view area, if anyone's from Toronto, and my job was to rent this building out. And I graduated in when did I graduate? In 1991 and it was a bit of a ugly market. I had one meeting, the first day of someone who was interested in renting probably the smallest room in the whole building. And I thought it's gonna be easy. And didn't rent another thing for eight months. I think I probably made, like, $14,000 as a stipend, and did not last long in the commercial real estate game. Had three or four other jobs, and then did a lot of traveling. Traveled all over Southeast Asia, India, sort of the Southeast Asian continent. Love traveling. We'll get back to that a little bit. And so after I got back from traveling around, not around the world, but did a pretty good stint of traveling, had to figure out what to do. Had no clue still. So I thought I applied to business school, so I applied to Ivey. It was actually so long ago, it wasn't even called Ivey. It was just the Western Business School. Back then, we were the Harvard of the North. That's true. I still call it, still call it that. These days they're going to call them the Western of the South. But the funny thing is, one of the main questions on the entrance for the questionnaire to apply was describe your best manager and the attributes. And I kind of said, oh shit, I actually haven't really had any managers, because I hadn't really had a real job by then. So I wrote an essay on I don't know if there's any Star Trek fans here, but I love Captain John, Luke Picard, Star Trek Next Generation, way back when. Sorry, and he was amazing. You guys can probably look it up on YouTube, but he was a pretty cool customer that organized an entire future world. And so I wrote an essay on why he was such a good manager. I said, I haven't really had a good manager, but if I did, I wish it would be like Jean Luc Picard, so that, I think, actually got me into the Ivey Business School. And then from there again, continued my trend of not knowing what I wanted to do and really having not much of a clue on how the whole world works. To be honest, I don't, think I figured out what an investment bank was until a year after I graduated, joined a couple of finance clubs at school, and this was the MBA. So I was the youngest. There was one guy in my MBA class who was younger than me, so I started calling him Junior, and still, 30 years later, that's his nickname in our group because he was only guy younger than me. It was a bit intimidating. Remember, the first day everyone's introducing themselves in ba i go very early in the whole alphabetical thing. And I gave a spiel about made up something, probably, and then I was giving myself the pep talk, the fake it till you make it. You belong here. This is going to be fine. You're going to do okay. It's not like anyone's a rocket scientist or anything. Just as a guy named Richard introduced himself as an engineer at Pratt and Whitney, and he's designing jet engines, and I go, he's a rocket scientist, literally, so... But I had a great experience, great experience at the NBA. School. I think, I think it was amazing. One the people I had, some of my closest friends, are from that graduating class. And it did open up some opportunities. I ended up not getting a job at a school, beating the pavement, finding finding a pretty lame job. It was actually perfect job these days because I was working at home. It was, it was way before its time, with a guy in the finance world selling stocks. I was an institutional sales guy for a one man shop, but he had a seat on the Toronto Stock Exchange. She was a broker selling institutional stocks. I still have the first stock certificate of anything I sold, and I think I'm assuming sales is going to be a good theme for today, but as I agree with Eric, everything is sales. If I could leave you with anything today, I'd back up what he's been teaching, and that taught me a little bit about the knocking on the doors part of entrepreneurship. I guess I started understanding a bit more about finance, and that got me into a small merchant bank called HDL capital, just three guys. It was called HDL capital because HDL stood for Huey Dewey and Louis. So that's the quality of enterprise I was at, but they were terrific guys, and we did a bunch of early stage financings for small, usually technology companies. But this was in the early, mid to mid to late 90s, and the internet stuff had just started. There was a company started by a Western professor actually called bid.com which was going to be the next, I don't know if you remember that. That was probably before your time even there, it was going to be the first eBay. It was the auction platform before eBay even showed up. And we did a financing, and what's called a reverse takeover, which is a way to take a company public without doing an IPO, which we can also talk about later if anyone's interested. That's how we took the venture studio public. But, and then I, you know, we raised a bunch of money for smaller companies. And the whole fervor of the internet was starting. This is in 97 ish, 9697 and I just started getting sick of raising money for other people's businesses and realizing that they didn't, not that I knew anything necessarily, but didn't seem to me that they knew anything more than I knew either. So another guy and I through the little bit more complicated than I'm making it, but we started a company called exclamation International, which was, we call it an internet incubator at the time, only because we didn't understand, like the term venture studio wasn't around, but we had an idea to raise a blind pool, so a separate pool of capital, and start our own companies. At the time, they're literally kids, like 16 year old kids, because this was the start. You are experiencing it right now with whole AI boom, that people who notionally understand aI have a huge leg up, even though, I think maybe some people are starting to understand it now, but certainly two, three years ago, no one really understood it. But if you could have a compelling sales pitch that you did understand it, there's lots of money there. It's exactly the same in the late 90s on the internet. And there were 16 year old kids getting million dollars, which would be equivalent of like, four or $5 million today, for their business plan to help companies go online at the time. And so it seemed like a pretty, not quite a no brainer, but a fairly obvious thing, that if all this money was available and all this interest was out there to start up internet companies, we could just come up with our own stupid ideas and start our own and not invest in other people's. And I think for me, that was a one of the if I was kind of picking or looking back to the breadcrumbs of that led to some success that we had. That was the start of it. It was probably a little bit more betting on ourselves and not necessarily investing in other people's ideas, but at the time, it was so new that give Eric a million dollars and I own 10% of his business, he didn't know he was doing either. And so why not just spend our million dollars on 100% of our own business? Of our own business? Because they felt like we had pretty much equal chance of making it work. So we created an infrastructure, hired a good friend of mine, CFO, actually a guy graduated Western with we hired a CTO, got an office space, and that's kind of why we call it an incubator. That's a bit more typical these days of what incubator of what incubators do. And we eventually started four companies, and points.com was one of them. It was an idea I had actually at business school, chatted with some other people at the time. Loyalty points, there was air miles, shoppers, points. Uh, they're starting to grow. It wasn't nearly as pervasive as it is today, but it was clear they're a pretty compelling marketing tool. People were still members of a whole bunch of them, and no one really understood how to use them. So we thought it'd be a neat idea to aggregate a bunch of these loyalty points into some kind of package. Back then was called a portal that you could manage your your loyalty points. Anyway, that was kind of the start of of my entrepreneurial journey up till then.

Eric Janssen
To the beginning of points.com Yeah, I want to, I want to rewind back to when you were in these folks shoes for a second. I don't know if this term resonates with you, but I didn't really know exactly what I wanted to do at the time. Though, I knew I wanted to do something entrepreneurial. And so I don't know if this term resonates with any of you, but I read it recently, and it's exactly where I was, like, I didn't know where I wanted to go, but I knew exactly how to get there. Like, I had a bunch of this energy. I knew I wanted to start a thing, but like, please just help me figure out what that thing is, and I'll go do it. Did you know that you wanted to eventually do something entrepreneurial?

Chris Barnard
I had when I was bit younger, for I think, Canada's 125th anniversary, or centennial, I bought a bunch of Canadian flags and walked door to door and knocked on people's doors and asked if they wanted me to put up a Canadian flag, and I don't know, probably made like, 200 bucks that summer. A friend and I wrote a business plan like you guys are about to and happy to take this one if you want. It was a little plastic thing that you put on the side of a plate to hold a wine glass when you're at a cocktail party. Thought it was going to be a brilliant take over the world, because it's hard to juggle it all and still my hands still might work, yeah. And so we wrote the business plan. We actually applied for a student loan. I think we had a $250,000 that the Ontario government was going to give us. Found a company to make the plastic injection mold, and we're all ready to go until his name was Chris as well. He kind of found, I can't remember how he found it. He found someone had a patent on this thing from somewhere, and then we kind of lost our nerve. And I don't know if he screwed off or I did. Anyway, we that was the end of our entrepreneurial journey pretty quickly, after a pretty good business plan, I gotta say, but I have to say my dad was in was he had started his own business. My brother was a bit entrepreneurial as well, so I guess it was a bit in my blood. But I I wish, in a way, I had that burning desire back then, but I didn't, so I kind of evolved into it more than I didn't know where I was going or how I was going to get there.

Eric Janssen
Maybe talk about travel for a second. So I think we I felt, maybe you're feeling coming out of fourth year at Ivey. You've got some student debt to pay off. You feel like you got to get going. You want to prove yourself. I got stuff to do, you know, I've got to, got to, get to do all the things that are on my bucket list, it was hard for me to wrap my head around taking that time to do something like travel, but it's something that I regret not doing in my 20s. I did it later on, but it's not the same as traveling with a bunch of friends doing the hostile thing when you're in your 20s. So maybe comment on the role of actually taking some space for yourself. 

Chris Barnard
Yeah and I apologize to anyone's parents who've given you other advice, but I would go away instantly. You know, I actually find even these days more and more so you guys are gonna live to your 110 maybe 120 Like honestly, it could be 130 that's 100 more years of having to fill up your days. So I don't know if I'd be in a huge rush to get at work

Eric Janssen
That's getting tweeted out and shared.

Chris Barnard
But Yeah, honestly, it's something I think. Sorry. I have a daughter who's just turned 20, and my son just turned 22 so I have a little bit of context of in the mindset, I think. But I think about it a lot. Actually, I don't, we don't talk about it that much, but it's a long way to go. So I know it feels like you got to get at it right now, but I think there's gonna be lots of lots of times to get at it. I think the for me, travel was a lot different. You know, when I was your age, we we disappeared and didn't talk to anybody for months because you had to dial long distance like a collect call and hope someone was going to accept the charges back then. But so it's a little bit different. But I just think the experience of traveling is phenomenal. The people you meet the I mean, thinking about sales and negotiation, negotiating a rickshaw ride in India, and trying to and you spend 20 minutes, and then you just say, Oh, screw it. I'm going to walk because you didn't get the price you you got. But realize you just are walking because you didn't want to spend 87 Sense to take the rickshaw is a it's a great experience, and seeing how the rest of the world lives, and quite honestly, you come back with an appreciation of what you have here in Canada, way more so than starting here and ending here. I'm a huge believer in the in the value of travel.

Eric Janssen
I also think that we, we say, tackle a problem we're solving. And maybe you don't need to be passionate about it, but you've got to be at least interested in it enough that you're going to spend a significant amount of time doing that thing. And so how you get there, I think, is you got to go experience things in the world like you want to go travel. Is part of accumulating these stories and experiences and hardships and oh man, that was I have a student from a few years ago, Waleed. He's going to be in your new venture creation class in November, if you're taking that as a guest. Waleed was traveling and realized it's actually a huge pain in the ass to get local currency some places. Traveling in Egypt, trying to find cash to buy a souvenir is actually really hard. You're going to bunch of ATM machines to take out as much as you can, and then go to the next one, and I'm carrying around envelopes of cash. He's like, Man, this is a problem. And he came back and started a business based on that. So I think going out to experience the world maybe it feels like you're not getting after it. Think it's almost an investment in some of those interests that might turn into something which for you.

Chris Barnard
Well, except for Eric's class. I mean, if you want to, if you want to education entrepreneurship, you go to any developing nation, and it's run by 14 year old kids that are trying to sell you something or bring you over to their uncle's rug shop, or get you to into a restaurant. It's unbelievable. The lessons you learn about hustle and grit when you're traveling are it's not even close to what you can read about or watch online.

Eric Janssen
I don't think he actually knows this, but I have a class called hustle and grit. 

Chris Barnard
Yeah, I did not know that!

Eric Janssen
Any hustle and grit folks in here. All right, let's see you next week. We'll see you Thursday. I want to spend a few minutes on this venture studio, and this taking public vehicle for a second. There's a risk that this is radio for two and maybe only a handful of people are interested in how this happened. But to me, it's super interesting how you actually ended up getting like, almost like, rocket fuel in the super early days to be able to get something off the ground. So can you talk about the early funding of the venture studio, and then we'll talk about points.com

Chris Barnard
Sure. I mean, I do think ideas are great, and it's getting easier and easier to start ideas with less and less capital, but it is the lifeblood of any enterprise. You have to have some money. I think bootstrapping is important, for sure, but it's got to start with somewhere, even if it's just $10,000 loan from your uncle or something that kicks you off. We started exclamation in a very bit of a strange way. The guy started with he was already working at a company that was public. We negotiated with this company that was in the internet space to spin out a subsidiary called exclamation. And so on day one, we had this company that was effectively a mirror image of a public company, even though we were private, but we had all the same shareholders because they gave everyone. If you own one share of of this the public company, you now owned a share also of exclamation and in securities law, if you have more than a certain number of shareholders, you have to start reporting as if you're a public company. So you have to act like a public company, even if you're not listed on an exchange. And that puts a huge administrative burden on anybody. And so we kind of had no choice but to take this new company public Hands up if you're in a finance course. Okay, so maybe a third or half. We spun the company out with something called a warrant, so everyone now had a share and the right to put more money into our new company. And so we took that and we organized what I referred to before it was called a reverse takeover on stock exchange. Actually, it was very popular in Canada because Canadian industry is so focused on the mining sector. But if, if Eric and I started a gold mine or a gold resource company a while ago and ended up taking it public because we thought we were going to find gold, we'd have this public vehicle that's listed, and eventually we ended up not finding gold. And so this company is effectively a defunct company. This has nothing to do, but it's sitting on a public stock exchange. What is fairly common, then, is for another enterprise to merge with that public company. So exclamation as a private company, we merged with this sort of defunct public company, and all of a sudden, literally overnight, we were a public company on our own. The shareholders exercised their warrants. They put some more money in. I think we started with 6 million bucks or so, and then off we went. We actually started on the Alberta Stock Exchange back. Then that got merged in the Canadian Venture Exchange. We sort of grew into our listing along the way, and moved to the TSX, which was the main like the big Toronto Canadian stock exchange, and then eventually made it onto the NASDAQ, I'd have to say, early days because we were public, we got some much needed money. But being public was a really tough slog, like it was a bit of a soul sucking enterprise, pretty tough to be measured every day on something that's really tough to execute and be measured by people who'd never done anything like that before, but they control the purse strings. So it was an interesting experience. I'm not sure I'd rush to do it again, but it worked out okay.

Eric Janssen
So at the time, I just want to draw some parallels between maybe what's going on right now in the technology space, and where you were at then. It seems like money was being thrown at this opportunity. People maybe didn't even fully understand what the opportunity was, but there was money to be made in going online these marketplaces, like things were happening there, and people were interested in being part of it. Feels a little bit kind of like the AI, like everything happening with AI right now...

Chris Barnard 
Yeah, and what happened with crypto.

Eric Janssen 
And the mistake I think that people make often is they're like, too late. You know, it's already happening. I missed it, like, I'm in AI every day. And so I already feel like, am I? Am I too late with some of these things that I'm working on? But reflecting back, you're like, actually, no. If I would have invested in crypto back then, you would have crushed it. If I would have got in on the internet when the internet, when it was taken off, I would have crushed it. So maybe draw some parallels. When you were working on that. Did you feel like there was already a bunch of other people doing it, or did you feel like you were on the bleeding edge?

Chris Barnard 
Yeah, it's funny. So when we we called ourselves the internet incubator, and we were the first one in Canada to do it, there's two in the in the US, kind of called Idea Lab, and another one out of Boston called cmgi. And they were both public. They're sort of big enterprises back then, but we were the first ones in Canada, and trying to talk to people about it. You know, what's an internet incubator like? They didn't understand what it was, and within a year, they're probably eight or nine or 10. So the question was, well, why are you different than other? Back to my previous story. One of them was actually called Kids. NRG, so kids energy where, literally, they're trying to find 16 year old to run these companies for them. So that's where we were at. But I think, and to still link back to something else you said, Eric on the kind of, probably a bit of a FOMO issue, which I think is more misplaced than not right now, there's an AI interest again, three, five years ago, crypto interest before that, there was FinTech before that. There was just the internet, you know, or before that, sort of, there was mobile. Then there was the internet. You might miss. If anyone's a surfer, you might miss this wave. As long as you're out in the ocean, there's another wave that's coming. You just got to get through the chop to get to the good stuff. But whatever you miss this year, next year, next year, the like the next one will be right behind it, even that I see companies that I know started up in one phase, and now all of a sudden, they're in AI healthcare, whatever, even though they started eight years ago when no one even knew what AI was, but now they're marking themselves as AI. So they caught one wave. It didn't quite work, and now they're, they stayed out there. They're onto their next one.

Eric Janssen  
Cool. So we got to, got to be surfing. Yeah, to catch a wave, got to be on the water. Okay, points.com, you had this really neat experience traveling. Tell us about how points.com got started. I love that it had something to do with this experience that you got to do in travel. You developed a little bit of an interest or passion for something, and then started a business in it. So tell us how that got going?

Chris Barnard 
Yeah. So we started the incubator. We started four companies. One of them was points.com that was an idea that I had in in at business school. As I mentioned, I didn't really know much about the industry or how it worked, but in retrospect, loyalty points are kind of the OG cryptocurrency. To be honest. They're they're a form of value that is issued by a third party company, like an airline or a hotel or a credit card that actually has value, and the publishing or the printing company gets to control a lot of that value. But at the time, back in we started in 2000 it was just, you could see it everywhere in everyone's marketing materials, and we just thought there was some benefit in helping users manage their currencies a little bit more effectively. We did have in the back of our mind that eventually we'd be able to trade. You can take your Aeroplan points and turn them into high at hotel points or something like that back then. But I'll rewind back a little bit to some of the other founding principle of a. At our venture studio at exclamation again. The first was, we're just going to own our own ideas because we're as smart or as dumb as anyone else. The second one, though, was actually to be honest, the better one was a realization that we really didn't know what we're doing. So our core philosophy is, we're going to find people out of the industry that we were interested in that actually had some experience and knew what they were doing, and bring them in as the man, the early management team of each company. So actually bought from a Canadian in Ottawa, the URL points calm. You'll love this, for $5,000 back then, back then, I mean, it was probably a year or two later where URLs were going for millions, but and I got them to throw in points.net for 750, bucks, but we never used it. And we had a five, seven page presentation as our business plan. But again, a core part of what we did at exclamation was we created relationships with some service providers like accounting firm. IT firms. We had to deal with IBM. We had our accountants that did all our books and whatnot, but also had a relationship with a recruiting firm, and they would go out and try to hunt for these management folks that we wanted, and I pointed them at the Canadian. There was an airline called Canadian airlines back back then, that was the was kind of like the first version of West jet, and they had just been taken over by Air Canada. And so the recruiters found who turned out to be my, my co founder, my partner, Rob McLean, who was then the SVP of Sales and Marketing at Canadian airlines, and had grown up through the airline industry, and had run the Canadian airlines loyalty program, which was part at the time, of what's called the One World Alliance, one of the three big airline networks. And so he knew a lot about the travel industry, a lot about the airline industry and a lot about the loyalty industry, but he, he never heard of a cap table. He'd never dealt with a lawyer other than, you know, an employment matter. He'd never raised money for anything. He didn't deal with a CTO. So he had, he had, you know, no entrepreneurial experience. In fact, he'd grown up in the corporate world, but it was a bit it was again, it was very much like the AI world today. It was pretty frothy. So we met, never like again, didn't know each other, ever had a couple of beers, went out for a couple of dinners, and I said, yeah, look at these. There was a couple other loyalty programs that were started up and online stuff that were listed on the NASDAQ and worth a billion dollars back then, which, again, was crazy, but I pointed out how easy it was going to be. Why doesn't he just, instead of moving to Montreal and being an airline executive, why don't you just move to Toronto and be a internet guy, and it only take a few years, and then we'll get on something else. We both played golf, and we anyway, we got to be very close. He's now obviously one of my closest friends, after being partners for 25 years. But it was interesting. And again, if one other thing I throw out as you're developing your plans, I actually think it's a really lonely thing to do it on your own starting up anything, and so finding a co founder or two, I would, and I know there's actually some VC firms that won't even invest in a company unless they're co founders involved. They wouldn't back one person. It's really hard to find somebody with a background on everything you need to launch a business. So Rob was very process driven. He knew the industry. He had experience in how to sell and being in a larger company, which I had never had. But again, I had a pretty good foundation in some of the technology stuff. I had a pretty good foundation in the capital raising financial side and some of the strategy stuff. So it ended up being quite a good partnership, in that we complemented each other, as opposed to the Venn diagram, from a skill set perspective, wasn't really much of an overlap the Venn diagram, of the kind of values we had and what we were after, was close to a perfect circle, which, Again, I think is an important element, really important to have a co founder or two as important, or more important, to have somebody who matches up with your value set. Because I do think that's the easiest way to waste your time as things blow up if you don't have that coordination.

Eric Janssen 
Yeah, people can de risk ventures in different ways. A way to do it is save money, right? Save up enough money that you've got a couple years to work on this before you need to go find another job. One is some idea de risking, like, put something into the world, get some paying customers. Another one is find a co founder that you really love working with and trust. So it sounds like you had a couple of those, but one big one was your co-founder.

Chris Barnard 
Yeah, now again, one of the I actually think the venture studio is still a very legitimate model. I think we took away a little bit of the risk in that we actually had the money. And part of the pitch to Rob was, you know, you won't have to raise money. We have a million. We allocated a million dollars per per idea, which didn't last all that long, and especially didn't last all that long, because in the middle of all this, in 2000 the whole world blew up, and the internet bubble burst, and it's a bit of a nuclear winter, actually. And the good thing is, we were never smart enough to raise too much money, but we were never dumb enough to spend everything we had. So which, which was not the case with most it's funny, most internet companies that you go back and read in the history books, they probably had an okay idea, if they stuck it out long enough. And I do think one of the lessons I have learned is tenacity, and the stick to itiveness is one of the most important things. So it's important to try to scroll away as much resources as possible. They're huge, like notable flame outs, because they had private jet parties, and I get crazy what people were spending money on and then and then, just like that, everyone raising money is not revenue, like every internet company, not nine, not every but most internet companies thought, Oh, we just raised a million dollars. It's almost like they just signed a deal to sell their software for a million like, a million dollar service contract. It's not even close. So I think people misconstrued it back then, and we were never, we didn't, ever had that attitude. So we were close enough to a bootstrapped enterprise, to be honest. But when the internet world blew up, we had a pretty significant decision to make, and what we did was we kind of jettisoned or shut down for three of the companies that we started, which was, which was pretty tough to be honest. Had to lay off a couple people, and we pushed everything we had left over to points because it had a little bit of traction out the gate. And literally changed the name of the public company from exclamation International to points International, and off we were as close to a pre revenue as possible public company, which was a pretty tough spot in in an industry that was now in the doldrums, and no one want to talk about internet anything for a little while. And then a year later, in 2001 we launched the company, the public service in April of 2001 and 12 of our first 11 of our first 12 customers were airlines, and we had hooked them up to our platform to provide this ability to trade. So Rob came with the actual knowledge of how internet, sorry, of how the loyalty economics worked, and we figured out a way actually to present a way to trade loyalty points between point A to point B, literally and figuratively. And so we had this points.com It was a consumer service built to allow you to manage all your programs and then trade them, kind of like E trade for loyalty points. We had to back to your some of your background, Eric, we had to build an E commerce stack, because there really wasn't existent too much back then. We actually had a membership model, probably 10 years before anyone else. Our plan was to charge everyone $20 or 1999 per trade, or $20 a month for unlimited trading. But we had to then build a subscription service onto our platform, and we had to build back end technology that allowed us to go into the American Airlines database and pull miles or points out of your account and then also, similarly, put miles or points into your United or Hilton account. So all that was fairly, it sounds easy now, literally, API's didn't not exist back when we started. So it was, it was pretty in retrospect, was kind of interesting. Technology wasn't rocket science, but it was, it was pretty interesting. And so six months after we started just getting revenue going 911 happened and again, something you guys can watch on YouTube, but the whole world. And it was, it was, it was literally like a small it was a practice run for covid. The whole planes just stopped flying for four days, or it was a week and a bit, the airline's revenue went to zero overnight, and so they were all really stressed, and the environment was not good leading up to that. So it's not like these guys are all flush with cash and really strong balance sheets to survive. So another, another theme that I would propose. Is really undersold in the world of entrepreneurialism, is we got super lucky if, and I It's a bit embarrassing to be honest to say, but for September 11, we would not have made it. So I it's not that I'm thankful that that kind of tragedy happened, but it was a it was an event that changed the course of our company, because these airlines literally had no money. They had no revenue coming in. And this is a, these are massive worldwide enterprises that rely on money flowing through the system to survive. And so they had a proverbial, you know, they opened the drawer of any idea anyone had ever had to generate money to generate any revenue and somewhere and again. Way back when all these companies were working on mainframe computers, it took them, like a week and a half just to change a line on the statement that they would send you by mail every month. So they were very limited in what they could do technically. We had just installed our shiny new system, our internet e commerce system, onto their platform. And what it did, they asked us, so somewhere on their list of how do we make revenue was, let's sell people miles. Eric's got 48,000 miles in his in his American Airlines account. He can't go anywhere, because he needs 50,000 miles to book a flight, and in the old before us, it would be Eric would have to take four more flights to get those miles, and then he could get on a flight for free. They thought before, well, why don't we sell Eric miles? But they could never get it up the chain on their it priority list, and they asked us, could you do that for us? And we obviously said yes without knowing what we were saying yes to we had no idea how we're going to do it. But we came back from Dallas to American Airlines was the first one that asked us to do that, because we had this system as again described before was we charged Eric money off his credit card to put miles, to take miles out of his account and put them into his United account. So we just sort of copied and pasted our code, cut half of it off, and now we were able to charge Eric money on his credit card and put miles into his American Airlines account, and we skinned it with American Airlines. And again, back to the luck part of it. They were so screwed financially, they couldn't pay us like they generally had no funds to pay us. So we negotiated with them that we would take a percentage of the volume. We'd work on a percentage. And then the third lucky piece was because we were doing it on our system and we had our own credit card accounts, it is difficult for them to launch a new service, but easy for us. So we started running it on our own credit card accounts. So within like a month or two, we were selling millions of dollars of miles on behalf of American Airlines, but through our credit card accounts, cash flow in the early days of any enterprise. Whenever someone comes to me with an idea or tries to get some help on their business, I go right to how does the cash flow through the system? Because what happened was we collected all this money up front, and at the end of every month, we tell American Airlines how much we owed them, and the end of the next month we paid them what we owed them on a normal billing site. And that's totally normal for every big company, but it was the life led for us, like we never had to raise money again if we didn't want to. We had all this cash flowing through our business. It actually became a problem as a public company, we had 10s, 50, 100 million dollars on our balance sheet, and all these super smart hedge fund guys would ask us, Why aren't we paying that back? What do you do with that? And you know, that was a bit frustrating, but also it was quite a security blanket that we had the cash flowing through the business. So it turned into, I wouldn't say, the perfect money making machine, but a pretty good one. Pretty good one for us. But it was a series of based on an unfortunate event. It was a series of fortunate events for us. I don't think it's good enough just to be lucky, because if you're not ready or capable after you get some luck, then it's just squandered, but we had the people and the processes and some of the systems developed that we were able to take advantage of it pretty effectively.

Eric Janssen 
Well, I want to land this back to where some folks are here today, so they're early in their journey, meaning maybe they've got an idea that they feel excited about. Some of them don't. Some of them don't. Some of them are just trying to get clear on a problem that they're interested in solving. Rarely did I come to an idea in the beginning where I'm like, This is it? This is the one. This is the one that's going to hit it kind of is OK. Let's just see where it goes. Oh, this is a little No, it's not as good as I thought. Actually, this might end up working out. It's sort of like this ebb and flow. So when you landed eventually on points.com Did you know it was going to be a banger from the beginning, or did you have to actually work away at it and then realize that it was actually a good one?

Chris Barnard 
Well, again, one, it was one of four. So Right? It was in a bit of a horse race early. And then two, it started as a we're going to build this great consumer brand points.com, and it turned very quickly into A, B to B services play. So we, actually, I fought for the whole existence of the company to keep the consumer portion alive, even though it started getting started and started and starved eventually. So we pivoted a few times, not pivoted, because I think pivot for me is kind of a complete change of direction. If you think of it more as a tree growing it was, you know, one branch became the dominant branch. So I think that is, I think if you, if you, I go back to it's all for me, at least it was all about the people. They have a collection of people that all kind of have a common goal, not the end idea, but the goal of doing something together and making it work. And as things ebbed and flowed, we never shut everything down and did something completely different just because we had a little bit of money left. And lots of companies do that, but the it did not turn out to be the same company that we started with.

Eric Janssen 
Yeah, for sure. What about this advice to follow your passion? Were you like, Yeah, points is my thing. Like, this is my jam. I'm gonna go with this.

Chris Barnard
To be honest. I think it's a bit overplayed, especially I'm not quite certainly at 22 I did not know what my passion was. I think following your curiosity is more important. I think learning like your next easy for me say, and I just said, you have 10 more, 10 year cycles to deal with. But if you kind of think of it in 10 year cycles from 20 to 30, you just got to try to learn as much as you can about anything, because you never know when it'll be useful. And I and I think there's going to be lots of opportunity after that, but the passion side again, I go back to the people. Look selling people loyalty points wasn't curing cancer, for sure, it certainly helped. You know, in a way, I mean emotionally, people get on family vacations or family reunions or honeymoons or go visiting sick relatives or whatever. So there was something that was, I think, socially positive about what we were doing, but at the end of the day, it was, it was a lot more about we just, we just hired great people, and it was a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun. We had amazing parties. We we ended up with offices in London, in Dubai, in Singapore, and they're all filled with people who were passionate about working there and passionate about each other. Certainly, everyone had a bias toward traveling and had a global mindset. And you know, it's I find it interesting. It's a challenge to sell stuff to other people, and so getting something that you built and installing it in big enterprises is is pretty tough, but once you do that, it becomes a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, because big companies can't easily turn stuff off. So it's, it's, I'm way more biased now to B to B businesses than B to C businesses like they're they're tough to B to C's, I think are a little bit more, not random, but they're tough to plan on the virality that's needed to make them really successful. 

Eric Janssen 
Yeah. B to C, B to C. Yeah, I agree. I've taken a few swings at B to C. It's a tough racket. Was there a moment in your career that you felt like you'd made it, or what was the moment where you felt like you'd made it?

Chris Barnard  
Yeah, I wouldn't. I would not count on any of those. I don't, I don't. I think, to be honest, even selling the company was a little bit bittersweet. I was a bit ambivalent about it, but as a public company, it's tough to ignore. You know your responsibility is to partly to the company and its employees, but also to your shareholders.

Eric Janssen  
Hold on. I want to, I want to pause for a second, because not that it's all about not that it's all about money, but like a lot, at least when I, when I was graduating, I was pretty financially motivated, maybe coming from a lower middle class family. I was motivated to pay off my student debt coming out of IV, and really wanted to prove to myself that I could make it. And honestly, candidly, part of that was financial. And yet I hear again and again and again when people get to the point where you. Have more resources than you'd ever need, maybe surpass even your own expectations. It actually isn't. It's not like the peak moment of your career. I just, I want to, I want to spend a second on that, just to unpack it.

Chris Barnard 
Yeah, no, I think I would agree with that. I don't think it is, look, it's, it's awesome, and it's a it's nice not to worry too much about money, although I still do. It's nice to be able to make sure that the rest of your family is is going to be secure for a long time. But I think it's really hard if you're just about money. I think that would probably start showing up in everything else you do, and how you present yourself and decisions you make, especially with other people you know, not to throw Eric under the bus, but throw me. The first slide had me as founder of points to begin with, and I, you know, I'm not a founder. I'm not the founder of points. I'm a co founder of points. I have seen lots of companies where, if it's just about money, that the people who are leading it make decisions that end up being pretty problematic when they're trying to build a culture and grow a team, if it's hard to work for somebody, I'm assuming that if you're busting your ass and working 100 hours a week and missing family stuff or whatever, and it's all because Eric wants to make more money for himself, it's a tough that's a tough one to sustain all the time. Now, the benefit of being successful, if you've structured your company properly and hopefully protected some of your equity, which I have to admit, I did not do a good job of. Yes, we sold it for $500 million but I wish I owned it all. But not complaining, but it it's important to realize that not everybody that you're with has the exact same outcome. So if it's just about money for you, you're probably gonna start attracting people that's just about money for them, and that won't last very long. I don't think.

Eric Janssen 
Yeah. So it was there? Has there been a moment, if it's not in a great that actually, my guess was that it wasn't that wasn't your motivation. Because even trying to find a picture of you to put up on these slides, I think you've got like three on the internet that I can find. It's like 200 by 200 pixels. So you're not about you're not about you. You're not about like, money wasn't a motivator. So what was there a moment where you felt like you'd made it?

Chris Barnard
No one's ever asked me that. I don't think so. I mean, I hope not, because what am I gonna do for next 30 years or 20 years, hopefully 30 100. Yeah, no, these guys are I'm older. But no, I don't, I don't know if, if you think you've already made it, then? Yeah, I don't think so.

Eric Janssen
Okay, what are you most proud of? You've done a bunch of stuff, I know. You've got a couple kids at home, you've done some cool travel, you've built some businesses, you've you've had a pretty full first few chapters of your life. What are you most proud of?

Chris Barnard
Yeah, I think the culture that we built at points, I would put that, I mean, I'm going to not mention my kids and my family and all that stuff. But the culture we built at points was, was awesome we had. I can't remember how many employees that have kind of gone through people have gone through the company, but I know at least of half a dozen or more marriages that took place, people meeting with then kids produced in those families. And people talk about our company, you know, with a lot of fondness, which is, which is amazing. We were we, and I honestly think part of this because we started in Canada, and we have a bit of, we had a bit of a Canadian ethos. And my experience is the Canadian brand plays extremely well internationally in business, and you can really leverage it. We did close to zero. We had always had a relationship with Air Canada or air plan, but they were less than half a percent of our economics forever. So all of our business was international. And so I you know, part of that pride comes from representing Canada pretty well and leveraging the resources that we have here and and the brand that Canada presents. But yeah, just the people and the opportunity that we're able to provide people, I would say, would be what I'm most proud of.

Eric Janssen
If you are these folks right now. You know, early 20s, mid 20s, fourth year university, just kicking off this project, a handful of folks in here are going to arrive at something that they feel good about. Maybe they run with this. Maybe, maybe this is the next points.com maybe they shelf it and come back to it later. Maybe it's just a learning experience. Yes, but if you're them kicking off this year, fourth year university, any advice to 22 year old, Chris?

Chris Barnard
I'm going to give the travel advice. I remember, actually, when I was at my MBA, we had an exchange program, and I did not go. I stayed around to help organize a big conference of visiting MBA students, which was fun and pretty fulfilling. But I do think living abroad would be amazing and would help your entrepreneurial career. I think the advice, I'm going to reiterate the advice of finding a co founder or two that's complimentary, not just because your best buds from grade school or anything, but, but try to think about how that interaction would work, and the support that that gives like Rob and I would platoon on, as I mentioned before, investor relations, being a public company is kind of soul sucking, dealing with that kind of people all the time, and justifying what you're doing and and defending decisions and being measured every day on a stock price gets to be pretty soul sucking, and we would each get sick of it after two or three years and agree, okay, I'll do it now and then and then tap out a few years later. But having that option is is, I think, really important. You know, I spend a little bit of time these days with with other groups of people about your stage. Get asked a lot about work life balance. It seems to be a pretty heavy topic. I don't believe in work life balance only because work is life, and I don't know how you about, like simple math, that you're going to sleep a third of your life. You're going to, notionally work a third of your life, and then you do anything else you want the other third. I don't think it's easy to split them out again, like through my career, met someone, got married, had kids? Had a couple between our families, couple of terrible experiences with cancer, deaths of parents, bought three houses, renovated three houses, built a house, kids, growing up, going through school. All that happened in parallel to building points. There's no way I could say that's work and that's life like it's all one thing, and you'll figure out how to ebb and flow. I made sure I was at every soccer game I could be at. Did whatever homework or reading or whatever I could be at. We took great family vacations, but sometimes I just was and I was away a lot, I traveled a lot, which was awesome for me, but probably a bit tough on the family as well. But all that you can't really separate trying to figure out how to balance those two things, that's just the way it happens. And I think you'll figure it out. And I guess that's one of the keys to entrepreneurship is to figure out how to balance those properly so you don't explode and you're dragging people along with you. But that's again, why I think the support network of the people that you decide to get into the enterprise with is the most important thing. That's the most important decision that that you can make, I think, outside of any idea, whatever idea you're coming up with now is probably not going to be the one that ends up what you're going to actually do, but the people you start it with are going to end up with the people that you're either going to do it with or not do it with.

Eric Janssen
Last one, and it's a question for me. So we're got a faculty team that are running the new venture project. We're trying to set these folks up for success. Is there anything you think that we should be teaching these folks to give them their best shot at? Forget doing well on the project, being successful, whatever that means to them. Entrepreneurs, what should we be teaching them that we maybe aren't today?

Chris Barnard
Yeah, I think that's a good question.

Eric Janssen
Wasn't in the sheet.

Chris Barnard
It wasn't in the sheet, and I don't know the full breadth of what is involved now in the HBA program, but I do think Peter Drucker is pretty famous management guru. It's one of my favorite quotations, to be honest, is culture eat strategy for breakfast. And I know I've said it a bunch of times, but I can't overweight, so I know you kind of lots I did, for sure, roll my eyes a little bit at the organizational development, organizational management side of the of the world. But, you know, doubling down, and I don't know if there is a entrepreneurial organizational management, course, but there should be, if there isn't, because I do think ultimately that is, and not to be cliche about the whole AI advice these days, but I do think that's going to be doubly important. The next 10 years is interpersonal skills. Sales skills are going to be that much more important before you could potentially hide behind a door and punch out something. And that would be almost enough. I think when the machines start doing that, you got to you have to do something. And I think the sales, personal side is going to be hugely important. Everything works in a pendulum. And there's going to be a backlash against the automated process that the world seems to be on. And people are going to, I think, gravitate towards getting sold to by a person, if all they're doing is getting sold to by a robot forever. And I think that's going to be a huge advantage. Huge advantage to companies if you can crack that code in the next 567, years, and people aren't sick of it yet, but two years from now, people are going to be really sick of another robocall, even if it's really everyone's going to get really good at figuring out who's a real person and not a real person. And I think the real people will win for long enough that will matter to everybody in this room. That's awesome.

Eric Janssen
First, let's give Chris a round of applause. We appreciate your time.

Outro
The entrepreneur podcast is sponsored by Quantumshift 2008 alum and founder of Closing the Gap Health Care Group, Dr. Connie Clerici. To ensure you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast player or visit entrepreneurship.uwo.ca/podcast 

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