Advisor Profiles

John Pickard, Advisor, Sales & Marketing

John Pickard brings experience, insight and intuition that allow him to connect successfully with entrepreneurs.

John is an established Sales and Marketing strategist with experience in senior management in the consumer packaged goods, publishing and telecom industries for nearly 30 years. John began his sales and marketing management career with global marketer Bristol-Myers, followed by a stint initiating the Trade-Marketing program for the Adams Brands division of Warner-Lambert. At the age of 31, he was named Vice President of In-Store Sales with Telemedia Publishing, then Canada's largest consumer magazine publisher.

John entered the entrepreneurial ranks in 1997 when he joined start-up Cardinal VoiceCard in the fledgling prepaid long distance market. As an equity stakeholder, John held the position of VP of Sales, Marketing and Operations, and helped turn Cardinal into Canada's most successful prepaid telephone service company. John steered the company through three acquisitions in the course of five years, which ultimately led to the sale of the company to AT&T. Following this, John founded Accolade Innovations in 2002 and developed Canada's first Mobile Virtual Network - an innovation that continues to evolve and add value (brand appeal) to mobile services.

As a result of his successful business career, John is well connected to the investment community and has been involved in securing investment for a variety of early-stage companies in the information security, web 2.0, and telecom industries. A focus of his activities has been the completion of due diligence projects in Canada, Australia, and the U.S., and he has built his own due diligence process which has been distributed to many in the information security industry. John has an extensive list of contacts from angel networks in Canada and the Southern U.S., and is viewed by his angel partners as having strong strategic analysis skills.