BC Business
Kiip | BCBusiness
The good news about tech companies making the move across the border just keeps coming. Kiip, a San Francisco-based mobile advertising firm, has announced it will be opening a research and development office in Vancouver, its first brick-and-mortar office in Canada, in the months ahead. And the firm founded by Vancouverite and UBC grad Brian Wong isn’t wasting any time. The company has posted four positions already, and Wong expects the office to grow to around 10 by the middle of next year. That’s on top of the company’s staff of 55 across North America. He says being a Vancouverite himself, he knows the quality of the tech talent matriculating from the area’s universities and wants to take advantage of it with an engineering-focused office. “I think it’s the right time [to open another office] for us right now as an organization,” Wong says. “We’d like to give people an alternative to working at Hootsuite. It seems like 50 per cent of the entire city is employed by Hootsuite.” While he says the office isn’t temporary or an experiment (“not like they’re doing with Facebook”), Wong can’t put a finger on how long the office will be a fixture in the tech scene. For now, the small team will hunker down in the office of investor group CrossPacific Capital Partners (XPCP) off Water Street in Gastown.