A Conversation with Owen Madrick, COO of Alacrity Canada
You co-founded Certn back in its earliest days. What gap did you see in the market that made you want to build it?
Background checks were slow, invasive, and stuck in a manual process that frustrated everyone involved. People were waiting days or weeks for information that should have taken minutes, and the whole experience felt like a digital strip search. Two problems really bothered me. Companies couldn’t afford to wait days for results in a competitive hiring market, and applicants had every right to access and control their own private information. Nobody was solving both sides of that at the same time. We started in Canada with a plan to build screening that worked anywhere in the world, and that gap turned out to be big enough to build a global brand.
Certn went from an early-stage startup to a $500M+ global brand. What did those first steps look like, and what role did the Alacrity incubator play in getting you off the ground?
The first steps looked nothing like the Certn you see today. When we came across Alacrity Canada, we had the idea and a group of customers telling us they would pay for a better solution if we could build it. What we didn’t have was a team of engineers or the capital to start. Alacrity changed that. They brought in three software engineers and covered a large portion of their wages, which let us build the platform and start generating revenue instead of burning months trying to hire. They opened the door to the talent and put in the funding that carried us to our first fundraising round, and when that round came together, they invested again with conviction. That vote of confidence mattered as much as the cheque.
You’ve described joining Alacrity as “coming full circle.” After the journey with Certn, what made you want to come back and help the next generation of Canadian founders?
I’m incredibly grateful for what we built at Certn. Running a company of more than 500 people, raising over $200 million, building an investor network from scratch, standing up a global brand that serves companies all over the world. Those experiences taught me things you can’t learn from the outside. Coming back to Alacrity Canada is my chance to put them to work for the next wave of Canadian founders. I love this country and I want our tech ecosystem to win. Every success story raises the ceiling for the founders coming up behind it and gives them permission to think bigger. I’m here at Alacrity Canada to help create more of those stories.
As a founder, you know how exciting and how difficult the journey can be. How does that shape the way you want to support entrepreneurs in this new role?
As a founder and operator, I know that beneath the surface every business is fighting battles the outside world never sees. Lawsuits, cash crunches, losing a client you were counting on. I’ve been through all of them, and Certn made it out the other side each time. Building a lasting tech company is a marathon, not a sprint, and in any given moment things are never as good or as bad as they feel. That perspective is one of the most useful things I can offer a founder in a hard week. I can meet people where they are, not where a textbook says they should be, and remind them to take a breath and keep going.
Looking ahead, what’s your vision for the founders and companies you’ll be working with here, and what are you most excited to build?
My vision is easy to say and hard to do. I want to help Canadian founders build companies that compete and win globally without feeling like they have to move to the Valley to do it. The talent is here. The ideas are here. What has been missing in a lot of cases is the support system that turns a promising start into real global scale, and that is exactly what I want to build at Alacrity Canada. I want founders to leave our programs with a sharper product, a stronger network, and the confidence that comes from having people in their corner who have actually done it. If we get this right, the next Certn, and the ten companies after it, get built right here at home. That’s something worth showing up for.
