Mike McDerment, President and CEO of FreshBooks was kind enough to give up some valuable time to come to the Accelerator Centre last week to talk to a group of students from the University of Waterloo VeloCity Program. Mike's main message was to make sure you find the right partner or partners to dive into your start-up endeavour. FreshBooks is currently looking to expand their employee base and are looking for some great people to fill those roles. The following excerpt has been passed on to me, and I am happy to forward this message out to all of you.  

"One of Toronto's best-known and most successful young software businesses is in growth mode again, with 14 new jobs posted on their hiring page (http://www.freshbooks.com/careers/) right now.

If you don't know the FreshBooks story already, it's worth checking them out.  Always innovative, the FreshBooks team have taken something seemingly dry and boring (billing and bookkeeping for small businesses) and created a great business fuelled by passion and a clear taste for doing things differently. You only have to Google them or run a quick Twitter search to get a sense of how people respond to what FreshBooks does - how anyone can make invoicing sound like so much fun I have no idea, and their customers love them for it.

FreshBooks are already a great home-grown success story and with their latest alliance with Google, as part of the Google Apps Marketplace launch (http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/), they're clearly on an accelerated trajectory. We don't know what they have in store, but it's clear from the number of people they're hiring they've got big plans.

Growth for one young Ontario tech company is great news for all of us.  Who knows which of the Accelerator grads might be the next FreshBooks? Or if you're not quite ready to start your own thing yet, but want to get a couple of solid years of experience working with like-minded people in a high-growth entrepreneurial workplace, FreshBooks is definitely worth looking at."