Easter egg!
An entrepreneur at heart, Déodat founded his first company in 1995.
Already used to thinking outside the box, he then registered a numbered company in Quebec and became the youngest independent trader on floor of the Montreal Stock Exchange.
He had his first exposure to the stock market as a teenager: his father tasking him daily to draw by hand on graph paper the previous day open-high-low-close found in the quotes section of the newspaper. So where the days and how he learned about securities, including painful lessons from the crash of 1987 while witnessing his father's disarray.
Less than 10 years later, he was on the M-X floor, trading his own portfolio of equities and option contracts on securities via technical analysis in Metastock. At the time, love-money from his grand-father got him started.
It was basically day-trading roughly two years before the online craze started, when Compuserve and AOL were still the mainstream internet gateways, when fast computers were 486 and early Pentiums and where IBM dual color black & green screens were still prevalent on the Montreal Exchange Floor. To this day, he still remembers the excitement of everyone when the first 32 colors quote screens arrived on the floor! The pace of the world has changed, but not the value of delivering innovation. His excitement to discover new cutting edge technologies never waned.
A turning point however occurred in 1996 as he still remembers one key conversation with Jacques B., a long time seat holder of the exchange at the time, who asked him bluntly:
"What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be getting your ass kicked in the corporate world to learn what real professional life is about? You have a degree, go use it and learn real life, real politics and get real experience. Don't stay here, this floor will close one day, and then what if this is all you ever known?"
Déodat subsequently had a long stable 20 years period employed in the corporate world, but even there it was atypical: working from Montreal for the largest private Swiss Bank operating in North America without any US presence? yet mostly focused on US capital markets? Supervising securities business on equities, options, bonds and Fx ? And the crown achievement: leading a project that resulted in obtaining the first ever licensed US Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) (futures broker) to be exclusively operating from Quebec and regulated by the US authorities: CFTC and the NFA on Canadian soil.
Atypical once... atypical still and most likely important contributors to his pristine track record.
What is even clearer today.... his ability to articulate a vision away from bias and execute on it, along with his entrepreneurial roots that grew a long time ago and never left him... combine these and IDtorney resulting in an unconventional intersection of law, cybersecurity, finance and blockchain becomes more clear.
Where there is fog and the un-obvious, Déodat often finds the strategy to make sense of it all.
He's hopeful that History's hindsight will be positive on the many risks he had to absorb while launching IDtorney... that the mix of law and cybersecurity will once be remembered as the missing puzzle piece that truly started the trend to evolve everyone's digital citizenship.
That he truly contributed to launching a true trusted safe harbor for everyone's safety, privacy and own security, or so he hopes.
Easter egg written 2020-10-01 by Déodat Lê
