By Adam Castle, Director of Venture Services & Partnerships, WEtech Alliance
His car was a 1979 Chrysler New Yorker, rust brown, built in Detroit, right across the river from where he parked it. By the time I was old enough to ride shotgun – which was 7, in the 90’s if you were wondering – the whole car still ran, but none of it ran well.
The windows went down okay but getting them back up was a 2-hour process that required a coat hanger.
The soft corduroy bench seat in the front was the exact same rust colour as the rest of the car, the entire interior was, and the minute you hopped up you began the slow sinking process that made every drive extremely comfortable, and every exit an exercise in engaging your core.
Everything in that car was a little bit broken, except the CB radio, which was flawless.
He worked the handset like he’d been doing it his whole life, because he had been. We’d be out on the 401 in the dark and he’d pick it up and slide into full trucker, all the lingo, all the call signs, and I’d sit in the passenger seat sure I was being let in on some second secret life he kept idling in the background.
One night close to Christmas, a driver came back on the line to tell us he had little bells clipped into his beard. Real bells. He was so happy to be heading home to his family for the holidays that he’d gone and decorated his own face for the drive. And he swore. Twice.
To an eight-year-old, in his Pepe’s car, on the highway at night, this was, without exaggeration, the funniest thing that had ever happened in the history of the world. A grown man jingling down the 401 cursing about how much he loved his kids. I was certain I’d just been handed the keys to the entire adult world.
Mario Kart dreams come true
A few years later he handed me something closer to the literal keys. I was twelve, and again, it was the nineties, when I’m sure a fair number of twelve-year-olds I knew had steered a car down a quiet street or in an abandoned Zellers parking lot at least once. He let me get behind the wheel of that big New Yorker on a residential road between the grocery store and their apartment and asked me to drive us home.
“ME!?” It was my Mario Kart dreams come true, but I never touched the gas, not once. I just let it roll in neutral, slow as syrup, and when a single leaf blew across the pavement in front of us, I hit the brakes as hard as if a deer had jumped the curb and landed in the middle of the road. I was a cautious kid. He didn’t laugh and he didn’t grab the wheel. He just sat there, calm as a cucumber, like a boy stomping the brakes for a windblown leaf was a completely sensible way to operate a motor vehicle.
That was Pepe. Everywhere he went, the world got a little bigger and a little stranger, and he always seemed to know where the secret door was, and the exact right time to unlock it and let me through.
His name was Leonard Joseph Drouillard, and he was born in 1923, one of the Riverside Drouillards, the family with the bathing beach on the river and the Lions Head Tavern that his parents ran.
He lifeguarded at that beach as a boy, and for the rest of his life he carried a soft, yellowed newspaper clipping about the time he pulled a girl out of the water and saved her life when he was twelve. The same age I was the day I slammed the brakes for that leaf. He ran into the water. I checked the road twice. He never once made me feel like mine was the lesser kind of nerve.
He played professional hockey, and not just for a season. From the early 1940s to the end of the decade he turned up just about everywhere, a center who kept finding one more team to play for.
Windsor Abars, the Pasadena Panthers and the Hollywood Wolves out in California, the Detroit Auto Club, Windsor Gotfredson, Windsor Ryancretes, and eventually the Akron Americans down in Ohio.
And he could actually score.
His two years in Pasadena put up numbers most guys would be thrilled with. This was rough, low-budget minor-pro hockey across three leagues and two countries, the kind where rosters changed week to week and nobody was getting rich, and he kept lacing up for all of it.
“Some stories are better left exactly the way your grandfather told them.”
His favourite story, the one he told the most, was the time he got traded in the middle of a game. Right there, mid-game, sent over to the other bench, and by the time it was over he’d scored for both teams. I can’t prove that one from a box score, and honestly I don’t want to. Some stories are better left exactly the way your grandfather told them.
But the record backs up the shape of it. There are seasons where he shows up on two different Windsor clubs at once, which tells you how loose and fast that whole world was, and how willing he was to go wherever the game was.
Akron was the year it got hard. I looked the season up, because I wanted to know. They won four games the entire year. Four. They got outscored two hundred goals to a hundred and eleven, gave up their own arena partway through the winter and played the rest of the schedule on the road, and folded for good the moment it ended. He went anyway. A guy who’d already played in California and Detroit and half the rinks in Windsor, still driving down to Ohio to suit up for a team that lost almost every night. I love that about him more than I’d love a championship banner. He just wanted to keep playing.
He was a purser on the Great Lakes ships. He ran a pool hall where he refused to allow swearing, and when he tossed some kid out for it, the kid would turn straight around and go beg my Meme to convince Lenny to let him back in. He was a commercial fisherman who hauled up sturgeon the size of small dinosaurs, hundreds of pounds, prehistoric-looking things that seemed to belong to a different age of the world.
He sold sturgeon roe caviar, too, which I understand now was its own kind of problematic. But he was a man born in 1923, into a world that had almost no idea what it was doing to the water, or the air or the land they took from. Generations removed from the stewardship the people who were here first had understood the importance of living in harmony with our environment. It was a time of taking. I don’t bring it up to excuse him. I bring it up because turning him into either a pure hero or a tidy cautionary tale would be a lie, and he’s owed better than those two ends of the spectrum. He was a human being, just doing his best.
Along with the sturgeon and Caviar, he also sold Frog Legs (as a french-canadian fisherman should!) with his cousin known around his house as “uncle chuck.” His partner on most of his business ventures.
They sold to Joe Muer’s over in Detroit, which, if you know that city’s history, was no small place to be supplying. Here’s the part my mom still laughs about. The frogs came in individually wrapped, each set of legs bound up in plastic with elastic bands, and he couldn’t very well deliver them like that, so someone had to sit and undo every single one by hand. She remembers going with him to help, and it was endless.
So Pepe, being Pepe, went and bought an old wringer washing machine, the kind with the agitator, and he’d toss the frogs in and let it run until the bands and wrappers churned right off. He was always hunting for the better way to do a thing, even when the thing was frog legs.
And he worked at The Island View Tavern and Hotel, later Abars, one of the most storied roadhouses we’ve ever had in our region, a place that knew Al Capone’s people and the Purple Gang by name, back when men strapped styrofoam to their legs and walked whisky across the frozen river because Canada and the States could never quite manage to go dry at the same time. He’d park out front of Abars and point up at the second-floor inn rooms and tell me about the ghosts that bothered the staff after closing time.
Dinosaurs, Ninja Turtles, and Power Rangers.
I was an asthmatic, chubby, deeply uncoordinated kid (still uncoordinated, for the record), more interested in books and video games than in any sport ever invented. The holy trinity of my attention in those years was dinosaurs, Ninja Turtles, and Power Rangers. And I wanted his stories more than all three combined, which, if you know me at all, tells you something close to everything.
I don’t want to idolize him though, I want to be honest when I tell these stories, because he would have known if I wasn’t, and he’d have given me a look for it. He took big risks, and a few of them I don’t think he should have. He was proud in a way that masked a real insecurity about money, about brushing up against people who had a lot of it and never being one of them. My mom still tells the story of the whole family driving across to Detroit in the dead of a summer heat wave with every window rolled up tight, all of them sweating through their good clothes, so that people at the red lights would assume the car had air conditioning they couldn’t actually afford. That was pride pointed the wrong way, the kind that cost the people around him a little so strangers at a red light would think well of him.
But my mom will tell you the same pride ran the other direction too, and more often. She talks about when colour television was brand new, when their family had no chance of affording a set, and a store in Detroit started selling a “film,” a sheet of tinted plastic you taped over the screen of a black-and-white TV. The way she tells it, he came home and announced, with the confidence of a man unveiling the future, that they were getting a colour television. Then he smoothed that coloured plastic over their little black-and-white set while she and her sister sat there in genuine awe. He couldn’t buy the real thing, so he found his own version, and he was so proud to be the one to hand it to them. That was him too, maybe more than the windows were. He wanted things for the people he loved, and when he couldn’t give them the thing itself, he gave them the wonder of it instead.
He was fiercely proud of his girls, what they accomplished, and even more, in a way that was pure Pepe, proud of the people they came to know. He wanted the world to see his family the way he saw them, as people who belonged in any room.
He wanted to be better than he was and never fully got there, which, as far as I can tell, puts him in the company of nearly everyone I’ve ever met, myself very much included. None of that made him less of a hero to me. It made him a real one.
He owned a racehorse once. He named her Fearless Chips. Fearless Chips never won a single race. Not one. So Pepe did the only thing a man like him could possibly do with a horse like that. He sold it, took the money, and bought himself a heavy gold ring with a horse’s head on it. I have that ring now. I wear it on the days I need him in the room. The bet never paid out, so he kept it the only way he knew how, and somehow the whole thing ended up on my hand. I’m wearing it as I write this.
“My grandfather was an inventor.”
There’s a part of his story I didn’t understand until I was an adult, and it turns out to be the part with the most to do with the work I do now.
My grandfather was an inventor. He held a patent in the United States, number 3,526,346, and another up here in Canada, for a device he designed initially to pull a boot off your foot. The way my family tells it, he first built it for my mom, who won the title of Miss Dominion of Canada in 1972, in a stretch of pop-culture when wearing high boots was not only the fashion, but a requirement for any kind of social status. A cartoonified version of her was on every single one he sold. From there it became something more than an accompaniment to fashionable footwear. It turned into an assistive device for people with limited mobility, the kind of folks for whom bending all the way down to wrestle off a winter boot is a real and daily problem. He had a steel mold cast and made the pullers by pouring plastic into it, and he started a small company in Windsor to sell them. He called it the Miracle Boot Puller: “So simple to use… it’s like magic!”
Since 1970, we mostly stopped wearing boots big enough to need their own dedicated puller, and the world is probably fine for it. If you do require one, Amazon has a comparable product called the Boot Jack that you can buy for $19.99. But what happened to the original company is where the story stops being a charming one.
He did what so many small founders do. He trusted a deal. He licensed the rights and the mold to a partner across the border, and that partner promptly handed the mold off to a larger American company and stopped paying him. They started manufacturing his invention and selling it under their own name, a different label on the exact thing he’d designed. It took him years, and eventually a federal court order, just to get his own mold back. Then it took a long, grinding lawsuit, Miracle Boot Puller Company versus the Plastray Corporation, if you ever feel like reading it, to get a court to say out loud what he’d known in his bones the entire time, which was that the thing was his.
He won. The jury sided with him. And by the time they did, he had lost years he was never getting back, a market that had already moved on without him, and a good deal more money than a man that proud ever wanted to admit losing.
But it didn’t end clean. Plastray appealed, and a few years later, in 1978, a higher court took a hard look at the part of his win that was about the patent itself, the right to benefit from his own invention, and decided a state court never had the authority to rule on it at all. A patent, they said, is a federal matter, and you can’t bring that fight in a state courtroom no matter what you choose to call it. So the piece of the verdict that mattered most, the part that said his idea was his, got pulled out from under him on a technicality about which building the trial should have happened in. He won in the room, and then lost the heart of it on a question of jurisdiction.
The strange part, the part I think he would have appreciated even though it cost him, is that the 1978 ruling is the reason the case still gets cited at all. Law students read it. And the earlier decision, the one that said an intangible thing like the right to benefit from a patent can be converted, taken the same as a physical object, is still quoted in Michigan courtrooms today, as recently as a few years ago. Making law was never the goal. He was only trying to hold onto what was his, and the law is part of what he left behind, some of it built out of the very thing he lost.
He didn’t catch every angle, though, and my mom loves telling the one that got away. She was in the boat for this one, up in Thessalon, Ontario, with him and my Uncle Chuck. The two of them were looking at a fly-in fishing camp they wanted to buy, cabins scattered on little islands, the whole dream. They were dreaming with no real money to buy it, of course, but they set up the tour anyways. The guide told them that if they got thirsty they could drink straight from the Thessalon river, that it was pure cold spring water feeding in from all around. And Uncle Chuck turned to him and said, “Len, we could bottle this and sell it, I bet people would pay for specialty water!” My grandfather told his brother to forget it, that he was full of it. This was years before bottled water would end up on every shelf of every store in every corner of the world. They may have been in a boat at the time, but in hindsight he talked a lot about missing the boat on this opportunity. Years later, every time he’d buy a bottle of cold water for me at a convenience store, he would lament on the story.
I actually went looking, and I can’t find a single mention of spring water anywhere near Thessalon, so it is entirely possible Chuck really was full of it and Pepe dodged a bad idea that time around. That is sort of the whole point. The idea was years ahead of its time and it still might have been nothing, and sitting in that boat, there was no way to tell the difference.
I think about that boat, and I think about the boot puller, a lot when I’m working with founders. One idea he got robbed of, one idea he laughed off, and no way, sitting there in the moment, to know for sure which was which. Executing on an idea that turns into something real takes so many things breaking the right way, timing, money, the right person, a market that is actually ready, a hundred things nobody controls, that the idea by itself is almost never the thing that decides it. Which is exactly why, at WEtech, we don’t hand founders our opinion on whether their idea is any good. We’re not the judge here, and we’re definitely not the whole market. We can’t see the future any better than two guys in a boat could. What we can do is help them build a way to find out, cheaply, before they pour everything into it. We say, okay, let’s figure out how to test that assumption before you bet the house on it.
“By most measures it’s a better time to make something and try to keep hold of it than it has ever been.”
Aside from the boots, bottled water and endangered fish egg harvesting, so many other things have changed since the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. The law has moved. The tools and resources a founder has today, to file, to protect what’s theirs, to actually find out who they’re dealing with before they put their name on anything, would have looked like science fiction to him. By most measures it’s a better time to make something and try to keep hold of it than it has ever been. (Shout out to IP Ontario if you’re unfamiliar with some of these resources)
And then so much of it hasn’t moved at all. The person who makes the thing is still the most exposed person in the room, almost every time. Having a right and being able to defend that right are still two completely different things, and the gap between them gets measured in money and time and lawyers, which is another way of saying it gets measured in exactly the resources a first-time founder has the least of. A good idea, a bad deal, and a bigger competitor who can simply afford to wait you out is still, in 2026, a perfectly ordinary way to lose the thing you built. I have watched it happen up close more than once, and it never looks like a dramatic collapse. It looks like a series of small, reasonable-seeming decisions, and then one day the thing that was yours is somewhere else.
The drive that pushes a person to build something in the first place and the hurt they carry when it gets taken tend to come from the very same place inside them. You rarely get one without the other. The founders I have seen find the most success in their endeavours and the ones I admire the most are people who get knocked down and stay down long enough to understand why, who grieve the fall and touch the mat long enough to gather strength for their next attempt.
My grandfather fought his fight alone. A small Windsor shop against a company with more of everything, over something as basic as the right to benefit from his own work. As best I can tell, nobody was standing next to him while it dragged on. And I don’t think the verdict, whenever it finally landed, ever really felt like winning. You don’t get those years back. You don’t get to run the experiment a second time and find out what the company might have become if the mold had stayed where it belonged. Years later, I was having a conversation with the owner of Giglio’s Grocery Store, a staple in the University of Windsor neighbourhood since the 40’s. My Pepe’s pool hall was just a few doors down, and when I brought it up, he said he remembered my grandfather and his two blonde daughters, and then the next words out of his mouth were “he lost so much on that device of his.” I didn’t at the time, but now that I reflect on the conversation, I wish I had said, “yes, but he gained so much by being the kind of man who followed through on his dreams, and showing his family what perseverance looked like.”
Shortening the distance between a founder and the help they need
Today, I get to sit with so many founders in any given week. When you scrape away the programs and the government acronyms and the careful professional language we all use to describe this kind of work, a large part of what the job actually is, right at the center of it, is being in the room so the person who made the thing isn’t the only one holding it. Shortening the distance between a founder and the help they need before the bad version of the story gets a chance to play out. Picking up the phone for a warm handoff so they don’t have to make the hard call cold, into a void, the way he did.
A founder came to me a while back with an offer already on the table. Their first real customer wanted thirty percent of the company in exchange for running business development. On paper it sounded like a partner betting on them. We sat with it, and instead of signing away a third of everything on a handshake and a promise, they went back with a vesting schedule that tied every share to real milestones. If the work happened, the equity followed. If it didn’t, they kept their company. If there was a WEtech in 1970, who knows how things would have turned out for The Miracle Boot Puller, but I’m so grateful we get to be here today as a guide for moments like that one.
One of the things that drives me today was his pride in me, even if I never gave him much real reason to be, at least not in the ways a grandfather usually gets to brag. No trophies. No winning seasons. I was a soft kid who couldn’t catch a ball with a bucket. He didn’t seem to mind in the slightest. While he was alive, I never quite learned how to fully believe the things he believed about me, and to be totally honest here with you, I still haven’t. I doubt myself more than the people around me would probably guess. But some of what he saw must have lodged somewhere. It shows up in how I work, and in the effort I make to treat every founder across the table from me like the person matters every bit as much as the company they’re building.
He got rid of the New Yorker in 1999. By the end you had to start it with a screwdriver and a napkin, which he did like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. He would joke that he no longer could bring it to the car wash because the dirt was what held it together. He was gone himself not long after, in the summer of 2003, when he was in his seventies. I still wear his ring on the hard days, and I still tell his stories to anyone who’ll sit still long enough to hear them, which, if you know me, is constantly.
He would have hated how openly I just wrote about him. He’d have grumbled about it for a solid week, that I shared too much. He also would never, not for one second, have stopped telling people his grandson sent this out to the 12,000 connections he’d built up across a whole career, on an internet website he never would have understood.
My daughter won’t get to ride in that rust-brown boat of a car, or hear him work the CB in his trucker voice, so I’m writing all of it down while I still have every piece. This one is for her, too.
Love you, Pep.
Adam Castle
Director of Venture Services & Partnerships,
WEtech Alliance
