Eldon Sprickerhoff put his house on the table before he had a single customer.
It was late 2001. He had just come back to Canada from New York, where he had worked at a prime brokerage through the dot-com crash and the aftermath of 9/11. He had a degree in computer science from the University of Waterloo, a childhood friend ready to join him, and a plan to sell cybersecurity consulting. He took a $150,000 line of credit against his home. He told a podcast that he did not ask friends or family for money, and he stayed away from venture capital.
He has described them as a death march, with long hours, almost no pay for himself, and cheap JetBlue flights from Buffalo to New York to save money.
That decision shaped everything that followed. The company, eSentire, was started with Edmund Dengler, a fellow Waterloo computer scientist with a master's degree. Its first customer was in New York, not Ontario: ING Asset Management, reached through a contact he had met while doing an earlier contract for the bank's prime brokerage. Sprickerhoff did a weekend network cutover for that contact, who later hired him for more work.
The early years were lean. He has described them as a death march, with long hours, almost no pay for himself, and cheap JetBlue flights from Buffalo to New York to save money. He has said he had almost no business knowledge and the team made up the rules as they went.
What almost nobody sees from outside is how slow it was. It took about seven years to reach US$1m in revenue. Investors who looked at the company did not understand a services business, so growth stayed organic, around 30% a year. Then came a change of structure rather than a change of idea. The consulting work, vulnerability assessments, turned out to be a doorway into something customers would pay for every month: round-the-clock watching of their networks. Recurring revenue climbed from about half of the business to more than 90%.
About eight years in, he hired J. Paul Haynes as CEO, and the company raised roughly US$1.5m from Canadian investors. Revenue went from US$1m to US$10m in about three years, which Sprickerhoff credited to a clearer story for buyers who were not technical. Against the big vendor SecureWorks, he said, eSentire won about 95% of head-to-head deals by offering a customised burger instead of a standard Big Mac.
The price of that growth was control. Warburg Pincus bought in during 2017, a recapitalisation that let original investors cash out, and Sprickerhoff sold a majority stake and kept a small piece. Kerry Bailey became CEO in 2018. By February 2022, after a US$325m raise led by Georgian and CDPQ, eSentire was valued above US$1bn, with recurring revenue above US$100m and a plan to hire 400 more people.
The first cheque was his own risk and his own house. For a founder with more nerve than business training, that may be the only credential that counted for the first seven years.