Nick Rockel

1. What is your role? To be a champion for innovation in B.C. That means how do we get more investment, and it’s really through three different ways. It’s developing partnerships with the federal government, encouraging international investment here and making...

We know, we know—you want an update from Telus Corp. on the delicate situation with Huawei Technologies Co., its key supplier for next-generation 5G wireless. But first, let’s hear it for Telus, which again claims the No. 1 spot in the Top 100. As of May 31, the Vancouver-based telecommunications...

It sounds old-fashioned, but Finning International got to be the world’s largest dealer of Caterpillar equipment by building relationships. The company kicked off its global expansion in the 1990s, after moving into Alberta to supply the oil and gas industry. In Chile, president and CEO Scott Thomson notes, Vancouver-based Finning...

If your audience isn’t getting any younger, start looking for ways to stay alive. That’s one of the key takeaways from our sixth annual ranking of B.C.’s favourite brands, which includes five new names, bringing the total to 70. Besides creating separate Brand Love scores for three age groups—18-34, 35-54...

Life Story: When Cicely Belle Blain launched her Vancouver-based diversity and inclusion consulting business early last year, she quickly attracted customers, thanks to connections she had made as an activist. Changing attitudes helped, too: “My clients are from so many different...

Alicia Close has loved math since she was a child, when her father, a self-employed financial adviser, would have her solve tough problems during car rides. Close, who was born in North Vancouver and raised near Toronto, earned a BBA from Wilfrid Laurier University, majoring in finance and international business.

Willson Cross calls his latest venture a startup lab. Launched late last year, Pattern Labs is a Vancouver-based fund that tests consumer technology ideas in industries from travel to home services to food. “We will build an enduring company around the winner, and that’s a product that will improve the lives of millions of people,” Cross says.

Returning to her hometown of Langley after completing a BBA at SFU’s Beedie School of Business in 2015, Melissa Quinn took a maternity leave HR contract that turned into a much bigger job. At Maple Ridge–based Left, she quickly moved into corporate development with the tech outfit, which had worked in the web domain name business but was turning its attention to blockchain and cryptocurrency.

What’s an Ivy League economics grad to do? In 2016, Matthew Segal appeared to be headed for a career in investment banking after leaving Yale University, where he rowed First Varsity for four years. But several job offers later, Segal decided his heart wasn’t in it. Back in his hometown of Vancouver, he also chose not to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, prominent developers Lorne and Joseph Segal–for now, anyway.

Maxwell Webster got the idea for Hastings Overland when he took a break from work in 2016 to spend six months touring Russia, Asia and the Middle East. “I kept finding myself gravitating toward overland travel–renting vans or rickshaws or motorcycles,” says the Nanaimo native, who started his first business, a dog-walking service, when he was six and co-founded a clothing company at 18. “I realized this was an underserved market in B.C.”

Rather than follow his dad and his twin brother into medicine, Langley-raised Andrew Hansen earned a business administration degree from Trinity Western University in 2013. Soon he was an operations manager for the resources and transportation division of Vancouver-headquartered construction giant Ledcor Group.

Since growing up as the “token Asian guy” in Tsawwassen, Alex Wan has capitalized on his knowledge of East and West: “I always found myself enjoying educating my friends on Chinese culture, which is a natural precursor to what I do now.” Wan, whose family immigrated to B.C. from Taiwan when he was five, never planned to be an entrepreneur.