Ottawa's tech ecosystem welcomed a rare guest this week as Kanwal Rekhi — one of Silicon Valley's most storied immigrant entrepreneurs — visited the capital to share the hard-won lessons of a career that helped reshape the technology industry.
Rekhi is best known as a co-founder of Novell, the networking software company that became a critical piece of the early internet infrastructure. After guiding Novell to a successful IPO in the 1990s, he transitioned into venture capital and became one of the first prominent South Asian investors in Silicon Valley, backing dozens of companies and mentoring a generation of immigrant founders.
From Struggle to Success
His talk drew on a life story that resonates deeply in a city like Ottawa, where a large and growing South Asian tech community has become a driving force in the local innovation economy. Rekhi arrived in the United States from India with little money and fewer connections, yet went on to build and fund companies worth billions of dollars.
The core of his message: success in tech is less about having the right idea at the right time and more about resilience, self-awareness, and the willingness to learn from failure. He spoke candidly about the mistakes he made at Novell, the deals that went wrong in his VC career, and the personal costs of chasing ambition across an ocean.
Advice for Ottawa Founders
For Ottawa's founders and startup community, the visit arrived at a meaningful moment. The city has been steadily building its reputation as a serious tech hub, with strengths in AI, cybersecurity, and deep-tech anchored by institutions like the University of Ottawa, Carleton University, and a cluster of federal research labs. Organizations like Invest Ottawa and the local venture ecosystem have been working to keep homegrown talent from gravitating to Toronto, Montreal, or south of the border.
Rekhi's advice for local founders was direct: stop waiting for permission, get uncomfortable with risk, and think bigger than the local market from day one. He emphasized that Ottawa's proximity to government and its bilingual, internationally connected workforce are genuine competitive advantages — assets that Silicon Valley simply cannot replicate.
He also pushed back on the idea that founders need to relocate to succeed. Some of the most durable technology companies, he argued, were built by people who stayed rooted in their communities rather than chasing the Valley's gravitational pull.
A Model for Immigrant Founders
Perhaps the most powerful thread running through Rekhi's remarks was his identity as an immigrant builder. He was blunt about the barriers he faced and equally blunt about the opportunities those barriers eventually created — a hunger and a chip on the shoulder that he credits as fuel.
For Ottawa's large population of newcomer entrepreneurs navigating the Canadian startup landscape, that message carried particular weight.
Rekhi's visit was part of a broader effort by Ottawa's tech community to bring world-class voices into the local conversation — to remind founders here that the distance between Ottawa and global relevance is shorter than it looks.
Source: Ottawa Business Journal
