The Lists
Life Story: Born in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, and raised with a younger brother in Vancouver, Ilya Brotzky tends not to see borders. His parents moved the family first to Israel, in 1991, and to Vancouver two years later. In 2010, after earning a bachelor of business administration from Cornell University, Brotzky...
Life Story: Patrick Tolchard went back to school to help finance his business. A year after graduating from Medicine Hat College with a bachelor of science in ecotourism and outdoor leadership in 2013, Tolchard, who grew up in Pitt Meadows, moved to Radium Hot Springs. His boyfriend had bought the...
Life Story: Born in a landlocked town in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh to government worker parents, Samarth Mod was out of his element when he moved to Victoria at age 25 to pursue an MBA at UVic’s Peter B. Gustavson School of Business. With experience developing mobile...
Life Story: For someone so young, Connor Meakin has led a few different lives. The Vancouver native played 45 games for Canada’s national field hockey team while completing a psychology degree at both UVic and UBC in 2012. When Meakin hung up his cleats, he took an internship at a...
Life Story: Brianna Blaney’s business acumen is evident from her first venture: a community newspaper she started with one of her five siblings and a couple of her cousins when she was 11 years old. The crew wrote the papers and forced them on their North Vancouver neighbours by dropping...
Life Story: Karine Samson has big plans for Optimal Efficiency, the Vancouver-based startup she founded in 2015. The company, which makes project management software for construction, mining and energy-sector firms, aims to capture a sizeable chunk of its multibillion-dollar market. It’s a bold ambition that is grounded in facts and...
Life Story: Growing up in Vancouver, Dana Stephenson helped out with his dad’s car-repair business, but he moved on from transmissions to tech. Today he runs a web-based service that brings industry, educators and post-secondary students together for experiential learning opportunities in the U.S. and Canada. Stephenson and Riipen co-founder...
Life Story: One year into a business degree at the University of Calgary, Kerryn Cooper felt uninspired. “I was getting really discouraged,” the South African–born entrepreneur recalls. “It was dry; I wanted to be more creative.” At her mother’s suggestion, Cooper, who had immigrated to Victoria with her family at...
Life Story: Felix Böck, who hails from a tiny alpine village in southern Germany, was headed for a career in carpentry after leaving school in Grade 9 to study the trade. But Rosenheim University of Applied Sciences, near Munich, gave him the chance to earn a degree in wood technology...
Life Story: Dara Djafarian was accepted to medical school but opted for business instead. “As much as I love medicine, I always enjoyed the opportunity to bring businesses and ideas to light and make them commercially viable and real and interesting and applicable to society,” he explains. When Djafarian was...