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Fusenet employees encouraged to dream on company time By Nathan Howes OAKVILLE BEAVER STAFF 11 · Wednesday, July 21, 2010 OAKVILLE BEAVER · www.oakvillebeaver.com I magine a job that will fuse your idea with an investment that could turn it into your own profitable company. It sounds like a dream. But for employees at Oakville-based Fusenet, that's a real possibility. Fusenet encourages its employees to share their entrepreneurial ideas with the company by giving them company time and resources for potential investment opportunities. The Fusenet Labs model gives employees access and ownership of their ideas, leveraging `right to funding' instead of a `right to ownership' and supporting the creative projects of staff with marketing and development resources. Fusenet develops technology and processes for the creation, online distribution, and promotion of various digital media, focusing primarily on long and short form video. Fusenet resources are useful in the development of any e-commerce digital media platform. Employees are encouraged to take one day a week and focus 20 per cent of their work time on developing new web concepts. "If you work for us, we made the contract with you that once you tell us about an idea and we give you permission to work on it for ERIC RIEHL/ SPECIAL TO THE BEAVER HARD AT WORK: Fusenet employees (l-r) Scott McQuin, brand manager, Janet Bougie, marketing associate, Meaghan Sansom, Laurier co-op student, and Emily Harason, Laurier co-op student, discuss a project in the Fuse Labs. part of your time, you own the intellectual stick in the company." property associated with that idea," said Fusenet has been around since 2007 and Sanjay Singhal, CEO of Fusenet. "And at was born from an idea Singhal and his partsome point later if it becomes a viable busi- ner, Ryan Van Barneveld, developed while ness you can sell it to us or we'll invest in it working for their previous company, Simply and give the employee a pretty significant Audiobooks. Ironically, the idea came to fruition after the board at Simply Audiobooks argued that the idea belonged to the company and turned down an opportunity to invest in Singhal and Van Barneveld's idea. But they gave Singhal the green light to make a personal investment. "I had started a company (with) my partner. Ryan came to me with a software product he developed and said, `What do you think I should do?' A lot of companies at that point would have said, `Well you developed it on our time so it's ours. It doesn't matter what you want to do,'" said Singhal. He had done it on his own time. "The company decided for whatever reason not to invest, but gave me the go-ahead to invest personally, which I did and the rest is history." Once Fusenet was born, it was only a matter of time before it began to take off. In fact, it became much bigger than Simply Audiobooks and eventually Fusenet bought out Simply Audiobooks. "We bought the original company and sat down and said we're never going to let this happen ever again," said Singhal. "To have one of our staff come up with an idea, not invest in it and have (them) go off and create a monster company that comes back and buys us." Typically, an employee will spend every See Employees page 13