Life could have been so different for Yadle cofounder Eric Aubertin, a Montrealer-turned-San Franciscan.

Just over 30 years ago he was one of Quebec’s most high-potential young defenseman playing junior hockey. The Montreal Canadiens drafted him, he was roommates with Habs royalty Patrick Roy and he even represented Canada nationally in 1988-89 (that was back when professionals couldn’t play in the Olympics).

But he followed his heart and chose business. Despite Roy’s protests all those years ago Aubertin told the future legendary goalie, “I don’t love hockey enough to stay, but I’ll be richer than you one day.”

“And I’m still working on that,” laughed the 48-year-old serial entrepreneur.

Yadle is a startup that helps people quickly find and send files across devices and in the cloud. It’s a handy platform that makes it easy to manage files and add file tags and comments.

Aubertin came to the Valley a few years ago to join his partner, David Lundberg. But these guys are not wide-eyed twenty-somethings with an idea and a pack of ramen noodles. Rather, they’re established, tested veterans in tech.

From left, Lundberg and Aubertin

During the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, Aubertin and a cofounder re-invented fundraising with a patented web-based email system, eFundraising.com. They sold it for $27 million on an original $500,000 investment around 2000. After that he founded OneBigPlanet Corp., which exited in 2012. Then he created a concept for a hyper-local Social Application Offer Network, called Zippler, which was sold for $2 million.

Finally after that, Aubertin started an accelerator before ultimately joining Lundberg in the valley to work on Yadle. Lundberg, meanwhile, has led the engineering team for an Apple/IBM joint venture and has managed teams of over 160 as VP Engineering.

Aubertin seems hell-bent on getting Yadle acquired.

“Our clients call us the Google for files. It’s the ability to index all your files wherever they are, in dropbox, on the server, on individual devices,” he told MTLinTECH. “We collect all the metadata and index all your files so you know where they are and you can easily share them.”

“We collaborate and we have files in so many places, and sometimes we don’t know where they are. It’s about knowing what you have, who’s working on what and the ability to get all kinds of information on what’s going on in the company so everyone’s more productive,” added Aubertin.

Yadle raised about $400,000 from friends and family, and will likely raise more money in early 2017.

On moving to San Francisco for a startup, Aubertin cautioned that there will be an adjustment period and, simply, it’s expensive. He said Montreal is a great place to start a venture with the low cost of living and all the government grants available.

However, “if you have a big idea, you want to change the world and go big you can move to the Valley and become more financeable.”

With Yadle, Aubertin is hoping for much the same luck as he had in hockey over 30 years ago and with eFundraising in the l;ate 1990s - early 2000s.

“I’ll be excited if I have the hockey story and the big exit story,” he said. “We had a nice exit with efundraising, but I’d really like to knock Yadle out of the park. One of the top three in the industry is looking at it already and now we’re accelerating.”