Jeffery:
Welcome everybody for joining us today and as we do, we have Ask an Angel and today we are working with Dennis. So, Dennis before I kind of jump in and start shooting out questions, maybe you can give us a quick intro to yourself; Who you are, where you’re about, where you came from, and what you’re doing now and then we can jump into everything else.

Dennis:
Sure, sure so my name is Dennis Reich. I live in Sudbury Ontario, Canada. I’m a physician, entrepreneur, or entrepreneur physician, and started graduated in 2000 effectively, 1999 and then immediately, you know went into doing practice but at the same time started off with a business I got that you know, in my jeans from my parents uh who came from Italy and started up a shoe store. So, the entrepreneurialism is right there, so we started an app that allowed physicians to schedule online scheduling and trading this was before the cloud was- the cloud we were basically allowing physicians to trade and keeping track of hours and stuff like that which was a big issue back. Then ended up selling that company five years later because we just weren’t getting- we weren’t getting attraction that we wanted to because we were a bit ahead of the curve and in healthcare which you know you learn the hard way that healthcare is way behind on the curve in terms of implementation of technology, so we basically sold that company, you know basically pay back all the investors and ourselves didn’t make a huge amount of money, but we reinvested the money that we did get and started another company with the tech folks that we had it was called “concept share.” We ended up selling that to dell tech a number of years later and then we’ve reinvested again in a company called time hero which is a really cool. Scheduling and all-around task management, project management software that’s on the direct kind of you know, what have i done myself in terms of creating companies and then all throughout that I acted as an investor in other companies encouraging entrepreneurs. I act as a mentor in our local regional innovation center here in Sudbury called Norcat and eventually culminated to being on the board of the northern Ontario angels which is one of the largest angel groups in the world actually in North America. In particular they’re first in deal flow and first in the amount that’s invested which is pretty incredible for a northern Ontario angel fund. So yeah, so I’ve just always been involved in companies and helping companies mentoring companies. You know giving advice where I can so it’s been a great road and doing medical stuff in that as well working with you know, pandemics h1n1 planning, working with the pandemic, plan the portal, so basically back in the day and now with COVID assessment centers, we’re heavily involved in that so it’s a lot of fun. And we’ve got a family, got three kids, living in balmy Sudbury – it’s finally starting to warm up here so I’m gonna enjoy the summer.

Jeffery:
That’s awesome! You almost forgot about the real job that you had. You were talking so much about the exciting startups and you’re like ‘oh yeah and I do run a practice’ and but it’s interesting that when you get into the startup space how exciting it gets, you’re like ‘well we made this company, we sold this’ and then ‘oh yeah I still do this other job but man.’ I really like this start.

Dennis:
Yeah well, that’s why I kind of, you know, I said entrepreneurs slash physician that I love being a physician, it’s great. One of the things that I often tell people is like being a physician it allows me to kind of help and be an instrument for kind of positivity in you know, perhaps two- three thousand people’s lives. An entrepreneur, you have the ability to kind of affect change globally. So, one of the things I started about five years ago was a company called – well it was with a partner who had invented a product. It was a polymer resin that absorbs hydrocarbons so it basically sucks up in water on the ground and in the air so it actually takes ultrafine particulates out of the air and that’s been a challenge but boy like if you could take smog out of the air, that’s something worth spending a bit of your time on and that’s the kind of stuff that just, you know, although I love med – you know I love medicine I love – I just get really inspired by business.

Jeffery:
That’s amazing and that sounds like a pretty cool product as well they’re working on a bunch of stuff in Calgary Alberta where they have these big engines that are sucking in air and cleaning it as well and pushing it out the back side and running it through some tanks. It’s pretty sick too!

Dennis:
That’s the CO2 absorption. That’s incredible – yeah, that’s a hard thing to do you know, we- what we would do is we would actually remove the ultrafine particulates that would clog up those fans so at some point I will give them a call and ‘say hey you know, are you having an issue with this’ because what you want when you’re capturing co2 is you want just the gases you don’t want any ultra fines when you burn