A high-tech wunderkind who built an e-support software company from an idea into a multimillion-dollar operation in the span of a couple of years has decided to leave the top corporate chair.

But Veer Gidwaney, the 24-year-old co-founder and now-former CEO of Control-F1, plans to continue to play a critical role in the development of the Calgary-based company he started four years ago with his younger brother Vinay.

Gidwaney said entrepreneurs need to have the willingness – and the humbleness – to go out and find people who can take their companies to the next level when required.

“I’ve gone from having 30 employees either directly or indirectly reporting to me, and really no boss except the chairman of the board, to having no direct employees and one boss, literally overnight. And it was the best thing the company could do,” Gidwaney told a meeting of the High Tech Women’s Network in Calgary last week.

Veer Gidwaney

Geoff Thompson, former president of EFA Software Services, an international capital market systems software and services firm, has been hired as CEO for Control-F1 and will oversee the strategic direction of the private company.

“As we plan to continue to grow the company, doubling its revenues every year into the multimillion range, we need to have someone who’s done that before. And Geoff in his previous accomplishments has grown organizations at that kind of rate and pace year after year consistently for many years,” Gidwaney told Business Edge in a later interview. “The sheer number of years of experience I have, just given my age, limits us to some extent in that area.”

Vinay Gidwaney, who is two years younger than Veer, remains chief technology officer of Control-F1, which supplies virtual help-desk and live technical customer support services for blue-chip clients including IBM, Siemens, Met Life, Husky and Telus. Veer has assumed the role of vice-president, business development.

“For him to step aside and allow someone else to run a company that he’s built up to where it is, is a huge emotional leap of faith,” said Byron Osing, CEO of Launchworks, the Calgary-based venture capital corporation that has backed Control-F1 since its early days.

“But Veer is still going to be driving the deals on the business development side. He’s the elephant hunter, and that is what he’s been great at to date.”

Osing said he initially had reservations when the company’s board approached him with the idea of hiring a new CEO. “I think Veer and Vinay are still the heart and soul of the company, and they basically more than doubled their revenue over last year and exited the year at a pretty profitable run rate. In the environment out there, that was a significant accomplishment,” he said.

“But with these young companies, we always do the deal with the full understanding that this will probably in all eventualities happen . . . even when a company gets to be a $100-million-dollar-a-year company, it’s a huge evolution to jump to a $500-million-a-year company. It takes a whole different skillset and personality to do that.”

The story of the Gidwaney brothers reads like a how-to success manual for young entrepreneurs – with the toughest chapter on surviving and thriving through a global high-tech crash.

The teenage brothers started their first educational software training company, called DDES Corporation, in the basement of their parents’ Edmonton home in 1998. Just over a year later, Veer left his business studies at the University of Western Ontario to join Vinay in building a new business-oriented, web-based support firm that they named Control-F1.

After moving to Calgary in the spring of 2000, the pair finalized a million-dollar financing deal after having attracted the attention of Launchworks, and later went on to win support from other vencap firms including SpringBank TechVentures in Calgary and U.S.-based Palisade Capital.

Last week, Gidwaney described the key survival and success factors of his company to the High Tech Women’s Network meeting.

“Over the last four years, it has been difficult to build a technology company, and in the two-and-a-half years since we’ve been selling our products, we’ve been in a permanent recession,” he told the audience.

He offered several tips for entrepreneurs, including creating a common set of values within an organization, managing cash conservatively, hiring the best people you can – and perhaps most importantly, being brave. “We’ve been very fortunate, my brother and I, to have gotten such tremendous support in Calgary since we’ve been here to build an organization with a worldwide client base,” Gidwaney said.

While some of the challenges in building a business have been nearly overwhelming, he added, “I believe that if you have game, as they say in basketball, that you should walk like a champion and talk like a champion. Because if you don’t do that, no one’s going to believe you and put their trust in you.”

Later, Gidwaney noted that the company has recently sealed two major deals, one with a government department and the other with a tech manufacturer. Details are expected to be released at a later date.

In the long run, said Osing, Veer Gidwaney is smart to realize that the company he and his brother built will one day either go public and get much bigger, or get bought out.

“He and Vinay will have built a solid reputation for themselves, having not only survived the brutality that very few survive, but also having made everybody a lot of money and creating a (solid) track record.”