2017 30 Under 30
They may be in their 20s, but the talents in our fourth annual ranking are accomplished beyond their years. Beer canner, footwear disruptor, art adviser, concussion scientist, smart candy maker, hydrogen power visionary—they’re changing how this province does business
Life Story: Officially, Robyn Wilson is COO of Venue Kings Ticket Brokers, a seller of tickets for sporting events, concerts and theatre productions across North America. Unofficially, she’s the North Vancouver-based company’s chief everything officer. In October 2010, Wilson had...
Life Story: Andrea Palmer grew up in Port Moody and studied mechanical engineering with a minor in commerce at UBC. In her final year, as part of a course for commerce and engineering students, Palmer had to design a business...
Life Story: Joshua Krenus took a winding path to becoming an insurance entrepreneur. The Surrey native has been a Junior A hockey goalie, a construction worker for his family’s company and an actor at New York’s Circle in the Square...
Jessica Thomas Cooke started her career as an account executive at a public relations firm in Sydney, Australia. After moving back to Vancouver in July 2013, she kept thinking about a former boss who had started an agency that represented bloggers.
Born and raised in Sri Lanka, Shanil Gunasekara moved to Canada in 2011 with a B.Sc. in biomedical engineering from the University of Southern California. As an associate at Lumedica Consultants Inc., a Vancouver-based adviser to medical device developers
Life Story: Annee Ngo was born in a refugee camp in Hong Kong and grew up in East Vancouver. After studying political science at UBC and marketing at the University of Toronto, she returned to Vancouver in the summer of...
In 2013, Saschie MacLean’s 17-year-old sister, Chantal, was killed in a car accident. The loss uprooted MacLean’s life: “It was, and still is, devastating,” she says. Clips of dance routines on Instagram were an escape from her grief.
Life Story: While completing a dual master’s degree in international business and economics from Queen’s University and Maastricht University in the Netherlands, John Merkley co-founded a company that transformed waste plastic at facilities in Holland and Berlin into reusable industrial...
Khallil Mangalji calls Burnaby home, but he lives in constant motion, bouncing between B.C., Ontario and California. No matter what’s on his plate, he’s always starting something else. When Mangalji was a Grade 8 student at Meadowridge School in Maple Ridge, he sold copies of Halo to his video-game-obsessed classmates.