Corporate & Business History

4:21 p.m., January 22, 2018

Somewhere in Gatineau, Quebec

“Hey. What’s up?”

What is up is that Ottawa is in the depths of one of its hellacious blizzards.

Adam Miron is on the speaker in his car, headed down Autoroute 50 out of the Gatineau farmland around Masson-Angers and back to his home in central Ottawa. But, being Canadian and given that a blizzard is a weekly occurrence from December to March, he is on the phone to his colleague Julie Beun, speeding a little in his clapped-out Mazda 3 and doing business anyway. In this instance, however, there’s something electric in his voice.

“Yeah. How are you? I’m good. You got a minute?”

Small talk is not Adam’s strength when he’s excited, so he blows past waiting for an answer.

“Listen, I just have to tell someone. Today is the day we became a billion-dollar company. Any way you cut it… we have 218 million fully diluted shares outstanding at $4.95. That’s $1.08 billion. Today is the day.”

She can tell he is grinning down the phone.

“We did it.”