January/February 2021

In this issue
Smartphones, laptops, tablets–when it came to cybersecurity, Jake King had seen plenty of innovation for mobile devices. But server infrastructure? King and his business partner, Milun Tesovic, spotted a gap. “We hadn’t seen the same innovation in the cloud,” recalls the Australian expat, who was lead security engineer at Vancouver-based social media management company Hootsuite before founding cybersecurity startup Cmd...
When Vancouver corporate flagship Telus bought Montreal-based Emergis in 2007, the latter’s electronic medical records (EMR) business presented an intriguing growth proposition: a platform to spearhead the digitization of patient files across Canada. Telus Health is now the country’s leading EMR provider, with 1,800 employees and relationships with 94,000 practitioners. ■ SAY “AHA!” If the medical profession has been slow to...
It’s no accident that Lucara Diamond Corp. has, over the past seven years, unearthed a third of the world’s diamonds in excess of 300 carats. Granted, the Vancouver-based, Toronto Stock Exchange–listed company’s Karowe mine in Botswana is extraordinarily rich in such rocks. But where other diamond miners may have accidentally crushed their big stones before they ever got to the sorting...
Burnaby-headquartered General Fusion has achieved a few firsts in its decades-long quest to harness the as yet untapped power of nuclear fusion, such as building the world’s largest plasma injector. (Plasma is the ionized hydrogen gas that fuels the emission-free reaction, which is roughly the reverse of what happens in a conventional nuclear fission plant.) Already counting Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos...
Starting a company when you already have a full-time job is no easy task. But Emma Reynolds and Shannon Edlington admit that it’s not quite as hard when you and your co-founder live in the same apartment building. The two met three years ago, soon after Reynolds, who was raised in Japan and did a master of international business at the...
When COVID-19 reached B.C.’s shores in early 2020—and society as we know it ground to a halt—the disease triggered the greatest public health crisis in living memory. Several months into the pandemic, we have a better sense of the risks to human health, but the longer-term impact on the economic health of our communities looks less certain. “We are arguably in...