Prior to founding the fabless semiconductor company formerly known as PMC-Sierra  — originally Pacific Microelectronic Centre pre-merger —Greg Aasen cut his teeth as both a product and design engineer, and later a VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) design manager at various telecom businesses. The 68-year-old graduated from UBC in Electrical Engineering before beginning his career at Mitel.

Entrepreneur, strategic advisor and most recently author are just three of the many hats Jeff Booth wears. He co-founded addy, a website and app that allows people access to invest into commercial real estate, and helmed BuildDirect, a top online destination for building materials for 20 years. In January of 2020, he published The Price of Tomorrow explaining how future innovations in digital technology will drive revolutionary societal change.

A veteran of the financial services world, Ward Chapin was vice president of IT operations at HSBC Bank Canada and then director of IT operations at HSBC Bank France. A particularly notable entry on his resume is CIO of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. Hired as the first technology employee for the landmark event, Chapin managed 1,400 full-time staff members and av $350 million budget.

Developing and launching significant new products is in David Demers’ DNA, having done just that for 12 years at IBM where he assisted in the design of everything from the first laser printers to the first email system in Western Canada. In 1995 Demers co-founded and took on the CEO role of Westport, which creates alternative fuel, low-emissions technologies allowing engines to operate on liquified natural gas, for example.

Gordon English’s early love of radio and communications parlayed into a career in Signals with the Canadian Army at the end of WW II, before he returned to civilian life and became employed by BC Forest Service and BC Rail. English eventually founded Westronic, now a network alarm management business, and later became regional director of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Before leading Pivotal Corporation, a provider of customer relationship management and eBusiness solutions, to global prominence, Norm Francis co-founded Basic Software Group (BSG) in the late 1970s — the makers of wildly successful ACCPAC and Simply Accounting. He holds a computer science degree from UBC and is a Chartered Accountant, and awards annual scholarships to at-risk youth and students at his alma mater Southern Okanagan Secondary.

As the vice chief of CopperLeaf specializing in decision analytics software, Judi Hess is currently focused on leveraging innovative business and product strategies into expansion opportunities. In the early 2000s she worked various roles within Eastman Kodak, like general manager of workflow and prepress equipment and vice president, and even became head of Kodak Canada. Hess is a member of the Premier’s Technology Council of BC.

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Managing partner of Vanedge Capital, Moe Kermani and his team invests heavily in the areas related to cloud computing, infrastructure software and security. He gained valuable experience and became an expert in these serving as president and CEO of Bycast, a leader in storage visualization solutions for large-scale digital archives. Kermani sits on several boards including Echodyne Corp that makes high-performance radars for industry and government.

Now retired, Dr. Julia Levy founded QLT Inc., an innovative photodynamic therapies company responsible for pioneering fledgling B.C.’s biotech sector beginning in 1982. One of its greatest achievements happened under her watch as president and CEO in 2000 when the QLT Visudyne medication for treating age-related blindness became FDA approved. The author of many published scientific articles, she has received seven honorary doctorates from Canadian universities.

After coming back from WWII where he piloted Anson and Lancaster bomber planes, Gordon MacFarlane attended the Electrical Engineering program at UBC. He joined BC Tel, now Telus, in 1950, and following a stint at Automatic Electric in Brockville, Ontario returned to BC Tel in 1977 as chairman and CEO. In addition, MacFarlane helped start Microtel Pacific Research (MPR), which was responsible for the creation and success of many leading tech companies in the province.

Amos Michelson held the title of CEO at digital printing hardware and software makers Creo from 1995 until 2005 when Eastman Kodak assumed control. During the decade-long period he grew the staff to over 4,000 people, and revenue to $650 million USD annually. Prior to Creo Michelson was at the reigns of Opal, a semiconductor equipment company, and Optrotech, a manufacturer of optical and imaging systems.

With a collective 20 years of time spent in gaming and tech, East Side Games co-founder and general manager Josh Nilson has steered the mobile games studio to a three-year-revenue growth of 262 per cent. Identifying as Métis, he grew up in Northern B.C. and started in hospitality before going back to school for IT. His proverbial foot-in-the-door was securing a technical support position at Relic Entertainment, then known as THQ Canada, in 2006.

Growing in Tehran, Shahrzad Rafati had limited access to things like cable TV and other content sources until she moved to Vancouver at the age of 17. Her background proved a source of inspiration in launching BroadbandTV, a media-tech company enabling creators to distribute, manage and monetize their content. In 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Rafati as the Canadian representative on the G20 Business Women Leaders task force.

Born in Orillia, Ontario and having obtained an MD from the University of Western Ontario in 1957, Dr. Don Rix interned at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver and began his medical career as a general practitioner. He founded and became the chairman of MDS Metro, the first private lab to computerize in the 1970s, and the predecessor to LifeLabs Medical Laboratory Services BC.

For 10 years, Laurie Schultz was the president and CEO of Galvanize that builds security, risk management, compliance and audit software. Following the April 2021 sale to Diligent Corporation, she became the first female CEO in Canada to lead a technology company to unicorn status. Schultz is currently a board director of UserZoom, a UX solution designed to help teams gain actionable insights into customer behaviour.

Appointed as the B.C. Innovation Commissioner in 2020, part of Gerri Sinclair’s duties is to facilitate partnerships and promote innovation across the province. Prior to the role, she was a managing director at Kensington Capital in charge of the $100 million BC Tech Fund aimed at mitigating the local Series-A gap. Founding web content management vendor NCompass Labs in 1996, it was sold to Microsoft in 2001 for $36 million USD.

After graduating from UBC with an electrical engineering degree and PhD, Ken Spencer embarked on a career as a design engineer at Macdonald Dettwiler and Associates in 1971. By 1979 he became vice president and general manager. Moving on to co-found Creo, initially an optical tape recorder device manufacturer eventually sold to Eastman Kodak in 2005, Spencer was also heavily involved in post-secondary education and taught a management course at SFU in the 1980s.

Morgan Sturdy served as the president of Dees Communications Engineering, which provided call centre solutions, from 1985 until being acquired by Israel-based NICE systems in 1997. At the time of his joining, Dees was a 10-person operation supplying telecom peripheral equipment to BC Tel (Telus) evolving into a major player in USA call centre markets. Since 2016, he has been on the Discovery Foundation board overseeing the delivery of educational support to several tech organizations.

A child of immigrant parents from Uganda escaping military unrest, Shafin Tejani followed the footsteps of his entrepreneurial father and uncle and launched his first business from a university dorm room at 19. Now he has over 40 start-ups in 24 countries under his belt, collectively employing more than 350 people, through his Victory Square venture that focuses on the web, mobile, gaming and film spaces.

The former founder and CEO of Class Software, Ralph Turfus developed successful community service management software used by agencies around the globe. In 2004 California-headquartered ACTIVE Network acquired the company to bolster its own activity and participant management tools. An engineering and MBA grad, he continues to fund technology start-ups on the west coast.

Alan Winter is B.C.’s first innovation commissioner and has wide experience acting as president and CEO in both the private and public technology sectors including at genomics researcher Genome BC, New Media Innovation Centre in Vancouver and BC Tel (Telus) incubator MPR Teltech. His most recent appointment is adjunct professor at the University of Victoria Gustavson School of Business where he provides career advice and mentoring to students as a guest lecturer.