Matt O'Grady

This article was originally published in our March issue, before the COVID-19 pandemic came to Canada. When BCBusiness last caught up with venture capitalist Stephen Sidwell, it was the spring of 2014, and Sidwell had just brought in Christine Day as...

Last November, more than 100 people gathered in Microsoft’s airy downtown Vancouver offices to learn about the future of artificial intelligence. They listened as the panellists—Tim O’Brien, Microsoft’s GM of AI programs; Maya Medeiros, an intellectual property lawyer at Norton...

In every election, including the one just past, Canadians put health care at the top of their political priorities. We have a love-hate relationship with this country’s system: love that it’s (mostly) free and (mostly) equitable, but hate the waiting...

This fall, we’re promised, ride-hailing will arrive in B.C. after many years of obstruction and obfuscation. In fact, you may even be reading this column right now from your mobile phone, seated in the back of a Lyft or Uber...

Discrimination against persons with disabilities has been outlawed by Canada’s Human Rights Act since 1985. Over the past three decades, attitudes and laws have continued to progress—with a new British Columbia Accessibility Act, coming into effect this fall, enshrining the right to barrier-free...

If you ask Zena Harris why she launched Green Spark Group—a Vancouver-based consultancy, focused on sustainability in the film and television sector—you won’t hear phrases like “reducing our carbon footprint,” “greening our industry” or “saving the world.” What you will...

Growing up in northern B.C., Teara Fraser had a rather limited horizon. The family bounced from town to town, and her single mother from job to job (her Métis father died when she was three). Fraser left Quesnel for Vancouver...

In the early 1970s, a Montana professor by the name of Jess Lair published a book, I Ain’t Much, Baby—But I’m All I’ve Got, considered one of the forerunners of the self-help movement. Among the quotable quotes attributed to Lair: “If you love something, set it free.” Jeff Kroeker isn’t much of...

When Dave Curtis calls in early February, it’s the seventh time our interview has been rescheduled over the course of three months. The CEO of Viking Air has been a very busy man—and, if truth be told, a bit worried about talking to the media in the wake of his...

Back in the spring of 2009, Karn Manhas was doing what law students do best: argue. His latest venture, a tech consulting firm named Karyon Group, had recently folded in the wake of the 2008-09 economic crisis, and the Port...

When Brenda Irwin was invited by a friend to a Vancouver pitch event in the summer of 2013, she had no intention of investing in anything. The native of Mount Elgin, Ontario, had only left her job with Business Development...

When Stephanie Bertels walks into the fourth-floor boardroom of SFU’s Segal Graduate School of Business in downtown Vancouver, the diminutive scholar is in full outdoor apparel, wearing a tuque and winter jacket, and seemingly shrinking into her woollen cowl. It’s...