Few entrepreneurs in Ottawa understand the ups and downs of scaling a tech startup in a post-pandemic world better than Mike Potter.

Rewind’s co-founder and CEO has led the company to a prominent position in the capital’s tech scene, but the path has not been without obstacles.

Rewind, The company makes data backup and recovery software for Shopify merchants, QuickBooks customers and users of other cloud-based software platforms and has been one of the fastest growing companies in the capital since its founding in 2015.

The company has raised more than $80 million in venture capital and last year was named to CIBC Capital Markets’ list of Canadian technology companies most likely to become global market leaders The assessment is based on criteria such as ability to raise capital, number of employees and personnel growth.

But Rewind was not immune to macroeconomic headwinds that have plagued the technology sector over the past two years. In March 2023, the company laid off 37 of the then 135 employees after customers began cutting spending in the wake of the global recession.

Still, the company remains one of the National Capital Region’s best chances to become a global market power in its field. In this episode of Top of Mind in Tech, Potter shares his thoughts on the ever-present threat of cyberattacks, the opportunities presented by AI, and why the global economic outlook may be brighter than some people think.

The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

“Cybersecurity is the biggest threat to people today. Obviously, with our tens of thousands of customers, that’s always a big issue for us. We’re entrusted with some really important data from customers and we need to make sure that we protect that data and that it’s safe and secure. We continue to make it clear that every company has all the necessary security processes in place, all passwords are set up, multi-factor authentication is enabled where possible. I think the CrowdStrike incident a couple of weeks ago was a wake-up call for everyone when something like this happens. People are just taking another look at what (cybersecurity measures) they have in place. Companies are announcing data breaches every day. It’s definitely something that a lot of people are concerned about. We’re definitely seeing more interest in (cybersecurity) than we did a year ago.”

“AI is definitely the most important thing. What can you do to leverage AI either in your company as a product that you sell or through your employees using AI to become more productive? We have initiatives on both fronts. We have an internal project where we’re trying to figure out how we can leverage AI to build the integrations for our backup products faster, and we’re also actively encouraging our employees to leverage AI in their day-to-day work to be more effective. In Q2, we actually had a contest where there was a prize. Everyone presented how they used AI in the quarter, and people were doing some really, really interesting and innovative things. I was experimenting with it from a social media perspective. Developers were using it to write code. It was really cool to see. Basically every department was using AI in some way. The use cases for it are so broad. We found that people really need very concrete examples of how other people are using it. We did that by promoting that internally with this contest.”

“Are we going into a recession or are we not going into one? We’ve seen a slight increase in customer churn over the last four months and customers have become a little more price conscious. We’re starting to see signs this month that things are getting back to normal. It seems like concerns about the economy are starting to subside. There was a little panic in the stock market last week but then it recovered and is now at higher levels than before. There’s some good data coming out of the U.S. that shows consumers are spending more and are less worried about (the economy). That’s good news.

“Capital was so easily accessible two years ago and money was really, really cheap. Now money is more expensive. (Companies) are very cautious about what they spend their money on. I wouldn’t say business is going down. But we also have newer products and we don’t necessarily have the experience that (more established technology companies) have with over a decade of software sales. Some of our products are relatively new to the market, so we’re still trying to figure out what demand is like when the economy is thriving. It’s encouraging for us that if we’re able to sell at the levels that we’re selling now when (money) is expensive, when interest rates come down and money gets cheaper and wallets are a little more open, we think we can really drive those sales even further. That’s the exciting part.”