Bliinx

Fred Melanson built his network by bartending at a high-end restaurant in downtown Montreal while at McGill, on the explicit theory that it was the fastest way for a student to meet the executives he would need later. Asking those customers how they kept track of their own contacts produced the same answer every time — manually, and never in the CRM they paid for. Bliinx aimed at that gap, aggregating a company's interactions with a contact into one timeline that lived where people already worked. He and co-founder Stephane Melanson validated the idea with prototypes before writing code, which is how they recruited CTO Nathan Larue away from Google. Melanson raised his first angel cheque before graduating.