2016 Delegate Profile Name: Danny Williams Personal Motto:

“In order to be a part of the future, you must first anticipate it.”

Location: Dartmouth, Nova Scotia Twitter: @dannyjpwilliams LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannyjpwilliams

My Company

Name: Norex Founded: 2000 Website: http://sitebynorex.com/

Life as an Entrepreneur The Trigger: Why did you become an entrepreneur? What prompted you to take that first step? How did you develop the concept for your business? Ever since I was a kid I always wanted to be one of two things; A mechanical engineer or an architect. Reason being, I always had an innate curiosity for creating things and solving problems. Naturally, I enrolled in engineering at the start of my university career. After a year in the program I realized it wasn’t what I had thought engineering to be. As a result, I made what I thought at the time was a practical decision and changed my degree to commerce. While studying commerce, I quickly realized that not only do you still create and build things in business, but it was a lot more fun! Your hands are constantly in a number of places and each problem needing to be solved is different from the one before. Describe your greatest accomplishment/most rewarding moment of your career as an entrepreneur? Competing at the Stu Clark Investment Competition as an undergraduate student. This international, graduate level competition selects 16 teams from around the world to compete and is an entry point to the Global Venture Labs Investment Competition at the University of Texas. BioMer the biotech startup I was building at the time, was accepted to compete based on the merit of its business plan and was only granted eligibility because I convinced a graduate student at Saint Mary’s University to temporarily join our team as a technical advisor, given their background in pharmacology and medicine. Simultaneously, my team had an opportunity to compete at a regional undergraduate competition. The decision to compete at Stu Clark over the other competition was made to challenge ourselves by competing at a higher level of competition.

The experience gained from Stu Clark may not have come with a podium finish, but did translate to a 1st place finish at the BoyneClarke Innovative Ideas Competition the following weekend. I parlayed this experience into an invitation to attend the Innovative Ideas Competition the following year as a guest panelist, where I shared my experience, insight and methodology with startups and within the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Atlantic Canada. Please describe your next challenge or plans for your business or for yourself as an entrepreneur: I’m constantly looking for new problems to solve and to work with driven, ambitious people. However, I intend to launch my next venture within the internet of things. What problem the company solves, I cannot say for sure. But I know it will leverage the convergence we’re seeing in machine learning and sensory networks.