When I first started at Hint Innovation almost 4 years ago, the office was a tiny room of about 90 square feet. Four people could fit in the room, each with its own rather small desk with just enough room for a laptop, a monitor, a keyboard and a notepad. The room was rented by the very useful Centre d’entrepreneurship Poly-HEC-UdeM. The center rents rooms at a low price to technology startups to help them postpone the overhead of owning a full-sized office while cranking up the development of the product. It also provides coaching and classes to entrepreneurs.

The standard office equipment is also provided by them, including those unsuitable-for-office-work red chairs.

4-legged red fabric chair

Fortunately, the chairs were eventually replaced by very comfortable ergonomic chairs (the Allsteel #19) and moved to a permanent office. The red chairs, however, have always remained in my mind as the symbol of the beginning of Hint Innovation and the company has gone a long way since then.

Last Friday, May 13th, I left Hint Innovation to go broaden my experience with a different company. As a token of gratitude to my former employers, I managed to acquire one of the old red chairs and gave it to them as a symbol of how the company started and how far it had come along since then.