INSART has partnered with North Forge on multiple occasions, so it’s an honour to bring you this featured interview with Joelle, one of the organization’s co-founders. Ten years ago, a handful of Manitoba organizations were locked in competition for the same slice of government funding. Rather than continue competing for limited resources, four organizations made the uncommon decision to build something together. That choice didn’t just change their future. It helped reshape Manitoba’s innovation ecosystem. That decision became North Forge, and Joelle, one of its four co-founders and now its President and CEO, walked us through how a two-month negotiation between rival nonprofits turned into Manitoba’s leading technology incubator.
From Rivalry to Founding Team
“There were organizations in Manitoba that were all competing for the same funding,” Joelle explained, describing the landscape in 2016. Since nonprofits rely on some sort of government funding, the fragmentation wasn’t sustainable. So the organizations got everybody into a room to ask a question: how could they combine forces into one pot of money and make a bigger collective impact?
Of all the groups at the table, only four organizations agreed to move forward after two months of negotiation. Those four became North Forge’s founding team, and together they built the organization from scratch.
“The whole mandate of North Forge was to help businesses build technology and create a business around it,” Joelle shares. From there, the organization brought in outside leadership, cycling through two presidents over about four years, while Joelle left to launch the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking in Calgary. She returned to Winnipeg to take the helm herself as President and CEO.
Her timing coincided with a period of explosive growth. “During COVID, we grew 300%,” she said. “It was crazy.” What began as a response to unprecedented circumstances ultimately opened North Forge’s doors to founders across the country, proving that innovation doesn’t stop when the world does. The pandemic forced North Forge to move everything online, and the organization built a fully virtual offering — the Founders Program in what felt like an overnight transformation. The response surprised even her: the uptake was incredible, with founders joining from across Canada, drawn by the fact that North Forge was one of the few incubators across Canada that were offering this. Today, six years on, North Forge has narrowed its focus back to Manitoba, even as the broader incubator landscape has caught up.
Inside the Founders Program: Four Stages, One Mountain
Asked what made the Founders Program so successful, Joelle described it as one of the most comprehensive offerings of its kind at the time, built around a four-stage structure modeled loosely on climbing a mountain.
The first stage, Pathfinder, is aimed at people who have an idea but haven’t tested it. Over ten weeks of master classes, participants are pushed to do something many early founders skip entirely: talk to real customers. “So many startups talk to their friends and family,” Joelle said, “and as friends and family, we are extremely supportive, and we’ll say that sounds like a good idea, but is it a great idea?” Pathfinder forces founders past that comfortable feedback loop and into actual customer interviews — and the results are often sobering. By Joelle’s estimate, “75% of those startups don’t move forward in their original form.” Most of the time, the idea isn’t wrong, it just needs to pivot. We help founders find that shift early, before they’ve sunk years into something that needed to change. We encourage that, we support that, we celebrate that. .” She’s blunt about what’s at stake for founders who skip this step, noting there are “players in the ecosystem across Canada and the U.S. that will take advantage of those companies,” charging fees to founders whose businesses were never going to work as conceived or when an early pivot could have set them up to succeed.
Founders who make it through Pathfinder move to Basecamp, a 12-week stage focused on operational validation, including refining their business model, pitching sessions, and developing cash flow projections, that includes working with CPA’s.
From there, founders must pitch their way into Ascent, North Forge’s formal incubator, which accepts only four to six new startups a year. A panel of industry experts vets each pitch, and successful founders are paired with entrepreneurs-in-residence (EIRs) drawn from across Canada, working through gap analysis and MVP development. Joelle noted that this stage is currently under review: North Forge is looking at strengthening the final stage — the accelerator, North Star — with an eye toward compressing timelines that can otherwise stretch anywhere to a year to a couple of years, and towards being a bit tougher with founders, without discouraging them along the way.
That last point matters to her. Delivering hard feedback to a founder, she said, is “like parenting” — you can’t just tell someone their idea (or, as she put it, “their baby”) isn’t working. “It’s beautiful to them,” she said, “but you have to make them recognize that maybe they have to relook at it and pivot.” The key, in her experience, is getting founders to arrive at that realization themselves.
Beyond the four-stage Founders Program, North Forge has also built WiLab, a Women in Innovation Lab. The team is 71% women and they recognized a significant gap in the Manitoba market, too few women were starting tech-enabled and innovation driven companies. In Canada overall, only 13% of tech companies are founded by women. Underrepresented groups is a massive focus for North Forge, a commitment that’s earned the organization two diversity and inclusion awards.
North Forge’s reach extends beyond its own programming through signature events like RampUp Weekend, now run 17 times and one of the organization’s premier events and a genuine differentiator in the ecosystem. INSART, a North Forge partner, took part and became one of the sponsors for the Startup Award, joining a weekend built around a high stakes startup competition that captures the same collaborative energy North Forge cultivates throughout its programs. .North Forge will be expanding these weekends to two a year starting in the Fall due to the demand.
At North Forge, success isn’t defined by having the perfect idea on day one. It’s defined by the willingness to learn, adapt, and keep moving forward.
What Separates Founders Who Make It
Asked whether there’s a pattern among the founders who go on to succeed, Joelle didn’t hesitate: “The biggest thing is coachability and emotional intelligence. Founders who receive strong, excellent advice, but refuse to act on it — who still think that what they’re doing is correct — tend to be the ones who fail pretty fast. Some founders who weren’t very coachable ultimately did a 180, and once they began checking their egos at the door, their businesses took off” — what Joelle called “the hockey stick.”
She spoke about the importance of creating an innovation ecosystem where everyone feels they belong. While some parts of the startup world have historically been associated with a more “bro culture,” she believes that technology entrepreneurship is evolving. “There is still some of the bro mentality vs a startup mentality which keeps some women away from the table entirely. Our goal is to create an environment where people can lead authentically, collaborate, and succeed on their own terms.”
Why Community Isn’t Optional
North Forge’s public materials lean heavily on collaboration and community, and Joelle explained why that’s more than branding. No single mentor or advisor can cover everything a founder needs: “I’m limited in what I can give advice in,” she said. “Founders need access to people across disciplines, because no one person or one team is going to have all of that. The strongest companies aren’t built in isolation. They’re built through conversations, shared experience, and a community willing to challenge and support one another.”
For women in particular, she sees community playing an additional role: visibility. “If you see somebody that is doing something incredible, that gives you the confidence to do that or be that as well.”
The Mistakes Founders Keep Making
Asked what problem founders should tackle first, Joelle didn’t mince words about the most common misstep: founders arriving convinced that “we need to raise money right now.” North Forge has deep relationships with angel and VC investors, but as Joelle put it, “we cannot put a founder in front of somebody without them being ready, even though everybody thinks they’re ready.”
The real first step, in her view, is validating the target market, and doing it properly. Too many founders lean on frameworks and AI tools instead of direct customer contact: they’re “putting it in ChatGPT and saying this is my customer and this is how much money I think I can make,” rather than picking up the phone and talking to real people. The founders who do the legwork are the ones who come back with epiphanies, realizing where the real problem sits, and adjusting course accordingly. Only after that validation does North Forge start building out a pitch deck with founders.
Joelle said North Forge also actively encourages startups to build diverse teams — “diversity of thought, ethnicity, experience, and gender” — because, in her observation, “the teams that do that are growing faster.”
Beyond fundraising and validation, Joelle flagged human resources as a recurring blind spot. Many founders have “barely even been a manager, let alone hiring a whole team,” and the resulting gaps (missing founder and employment agreements, equity structure, , undefined IP, absent NDAs) have real consequences. She pointed to one company that completely dissolved because co-founders couldn’t reach agreement without proper legal structure in place. Financial literacy is the other recurring gap: “understanding cash flow is really important,” she said, and while a founder can hire an accountant, you have to understand it yourself. A good CEO, in her framing, “strives to understand absolutely every aspect of a business and never asks a team member to do anything that they wouldn’t do themselves.”
Where the Real Shift Happens
Asked when founders experience their biggest mindset shift over the course of the program, Joelle pointed to Ascent, the incubator stage. Structurally, she noted that a tech business can technically start with one person, but it’s far more workable with two — often one partner keeping a full-time job while the other builds the business. North Forge doesn’t pressure founders to quit their jobs prematurely, but there is a turning point: “Once you do leave your job and focus full time on the business, that’s when it really starts to grow.” That full commitment, concentrated in the incubator stage, is where she sees the deepest change in how founders think.
If Joelle could wave a magic wand and force one thing on every founder, this would be it: “Gather the startup’s ideal target market, a minimum of 30 people, in a single room. Bring in an outside facilitator to walk them through the business, while the founder listens from behind a wall, out of sight, like you see in some of those movies. Then comes the hard part: taking in the feedback without getting defensive. Really lean into the advice that they hear, and implement that,” she said.
The founders who thrive are the ones willing to listen, adapt, and keep learning. That philosophy has become part of North Forge’s DNA, and it’s why so many of the companies that walk through its doors leave stronger than when they arrived. It’s a deceptively simple prescription for a much harder discipline — the same thread running through the entire conversation: validate before you build, listen before you defend, and check your ego at the door.
