Dom has small, tired blue eyes. He has tattoos on his arms and even on his neck. He sports a pinch and a beard a bit like Van Dyke, hipster without having tried. Sitting, he has a paw that shakes ; standing, always a hand that is going. In meetings, he shows up with a cap. He will not stop himself from swearing at a conference if he feels like it. He is a big boss, multiple times CEO, but he just seems like a casual guy, with whom one would go have a beer.

A notch above my next-door neighbour all the same. Forgive the use of anglicisms that would send shivers down the spine of any informed journalist: we might as well shamelessly assume this atypical momentum!

Talented slasher since forever

Nothing predestined Dominic Gagnon to live this dazzling career. Although. Coming from a modest family, having grown up among the blueberries of the Lake and other hunting and fishing enthusiasts , he was "the little annoying guy who didn't play outside enough". Instead, he hid in front of his screen, learning to program. And to hack, a fun challenge . "At twelve, I had cloned about $300,000 in credit cards. I always knew I was different." Indeed, the link is quite obvious.

At fourteen, he founded not one, but two companies. A record label, which became the largest producer of punk-rock shows in Saguenay, and a website creation agency. He had employees on the payroll full-time while he went to school.

A week after starting university, already jaded, he bought four Segways and founded Piranha with some friends. Like Steve Jobs. Dom had only one goal in mind: to revolutionize advertising! Four years later, the mobile marketing agency became the first of its kind in the country and established itself in Quebec, Montreal, Toronto and Paris. It grew to sixty employees and had a turnover of ten million. At twenty-three, Dominic was at the top.

From where he falls precipitously. "I was in entrepreneurial euphoria, on all the stands, with an oversized ego, I won one prize after another," he admits without embarrassment. After discovering a fraud, he quickly pulls up the reins, in survival mode. From failure, he learns, and especially about finances. He straightens out the company and leaves, hair blowing in the wind.

With a partner, he launched Connect&GO, which has been enjoying fame for over a decade. Semi-permanent tattoos to pay with your skin for the SuperBowl, access controls with private facial recognition, and other cashless and frictionless payment methods. Enter, Pay, Play . There are even sunglasses to enter and pay at the Olympics and a virtual currency for the Olympic park that finally solves the problem of different currencies! Dominic is constantly pivoting. To ensure better recurring revenue, he is moving from events to permanent installations, such as ski resorts, museums, zoos and amusement parks. "We've had about ten business models!" he says happily, seriously.

At thirty-six, he has the future ahead of him. Slasher , polymath, multi-potential, Dominic charges wherever he wants: "Nothing is impossible". He has his sights set on the health sector, but also retail. "The best way to predict the future is to invent it": this is the title of the conference he gives throughout Quebec to stimulate innovation.

Hyperactive, ADHD or Zebra?

All at once! “You have to be crazy to be an entrepreneur, I often say that!” To a Harvard Business School study, “75% of entrepreneurs suffer from mental illness,” Dom adds: “and the other 25% just don’t know it!”

With his family, Dom is a dad like any other. Giftedness is largely hereditary.

At twenty-four, Dominic had received his first diagnosis: a nice cocktail of attention deficit disorder and physical and mental hyperactivity, with dyslexia, dyscalculia and high oppositional disorder. This finally explained his questionable behavior to his wife! "I felt like I could explain everything with my ADHD: my hyperemotionality, my hyperesthesia (acuity of the senses), my desire to circumvent senseless rules, my impatience or procrastination at work, etc."

Like Elon Musk, who has often been labeled autistic, Dom had begun to think that he might also have Asperger's. It was in France that he heard about giftedness. A second diagnosis confirmed that he was very close to the profile of Very High Intellectual Potential (THPI, 0.2% of the population). "That was a real turning point! Understanding where my gap, my discomfort, my frustration came from, was half the battle. Did you know that a fifth of people in prison are gifted? That explains organized crime, and even my hacking!"

Dominic was rejected from college three times because he was somewhere else and not interested or stimulated. Gifted, really? At school, he was told he wouldn't do anything good in life. But he knew how to beat the odds and turn them to his advantage. And he's far from being a bundle of trouble!

Zebra, the perfect entrepreneur

"The other 50% of the way is in self-motivation, doing what you love, finding your fulfillment in it. Otherwise we fall into self-pity, procrastination, frustrations, doubt." Like all these visionaries, leaders, artists who are passionate, emotional, perceptive, chaotic, obsessive, depressed, and exceptionally talented. Poorly tamed, this type of extraordinary intelligence does not always rhyme with success.

"For zebras, there is an extremely strong link between motivation, performance, ambitions and doing what you love. Today, I have given myself the privilege of doing only what I love."

"It's weird for a CEO to say this, but I'm not a team player. The image of the unifying athlete who slows down to push his teammates in the back is beautiful, but I just don't have the patience and I want to win. So I created my own role. I no longer have a dozen people reporting to me, but only one, who is also my antipode! I delegate processes, repetitive tasks, things in which I find no meaning and which would end up not being successful with me! Even leadership, someone else directs the troop where I want to go."

“Entrepreneurship saved me. It’s choosing what I want to do, being constantly busy and taking on challenges. Not to mention my shrink, sports and meditation, to channel my energies, keep my creativity alive and calm my brain!”

For me, the zebra is naturally an excellent entrepreneur, but I think he is not necessarily a good manager. » Alert, 80% of his decisions come from his intuition; his feelings and his ability to quickly collect various data serve as his rudder. He knows when it will not work and where the company must go, even if he does not always manage to convince his team!

Dominic would like us to better understand these atypical profiles. High intellectual potential is a different way of thinking, not a superiority. Genetics plays a big part in it, but also the psycho-social environment. "Depending on your background, you won't experience being gifted in the same way, for example. The word itself carries so many prejudices!" A little for himself, but also for his children, and for everyone else, Dominic wrote the book "I Love Zebras" to explain and democratize giftedness, a subject that is still taboo in Quebec.