Employee Spotlight: Francis Pelland - Minion at Heart

Francis Pelland, Technical Operations at Avanti, was born in Oshawa, Ontario, where he grew up with his two brothers. A true entrepreneur, Francis started his first company at the age of 16, funded by the Ontario Government. He pursued his passion for technology and graduated from Carleton University in 2010, with a BA in Law and Computer Science. While in University, he continued to work on his own and developed 3 apps which ranked in the top 25 largest apps on Facebook at the time, with over 10 million users combined. The apps got funded by fbFund, which is operated by Facebook, Founders Fund and Accel Partners.

“What I’ve learned by experience, over the years of building out my own products and working with small agile teams, is that there are no shortages of challenges. A huge factor in what keeps me going is seeing customer satisfaction while solving some of these challenges”.

Francis joined Avanti in July of last year to automate various cycles within Avanti and improve output and quality, while making new versions of Avanti Slingshot immediately available to customers. In turn, this has helped improve communications and support. He thrives on turning large amounts of generated data into human readable and actionable content.

“Having solved many of those problems in the past, I saw these as opportunities to contribute innovative solutions that would help Avanti in a meaningful way”.

Prior to Avanti, Francis developed technology that was used to help automate the building of large and complex software products. Products like advertising platforms, live TV shows, online games, and high velocity voting. It used real-time analytics and logic to determine how these products should react.

Since joining Avanti, his role has shifted into solving larger, more complex challenges. It includes a large amount of research, and interactions with various teams and customers, to launch some of Avanti’s future offerings. Many of these products will help customers better understand their data to find answers to their questions. This all ties back to Avanti’s tagline “we have answers”.

According to Francis, from an operation’s perspective, the goal for all our customers has been shifting towards having more automated processes and deeper understandings of their business. Customers are relying more and more on information generated; quality and ease-of-access is now crucial.

“My goal has been, and will continue to be, to ensure that all departments at Avanti can achieve our customers’ happiness”.

Although he is admittedly a “technology geek”, what most people don’t know is that Francis has been a jock for most of his life. He played baseball and swam at competitive levels, training as much as 30 hours per week. 

Oh…and he has a passion for minions; his favourite movie is, of course, The Minion Movie! When not pursuing his love to technology (and minions), or maintaining his workout regimen, Francis enjoys cleaning and working on his 2014 Camaro. He’s also in the process of upgrading his house. It’s no surprise that he is working on controlling his entertainment system and lights by remote, voice and sensors.

Not bad for a “minion at heart”.