Made in Canada
Meet 10 next-gen entrepreneurs smashing the status quo
“Oh, it’s a Canadian company?” This is a remark I hear often, usually following a recommendation I’ve been asked to give—something that happens fairly regularly thanks to my job, through which I’m introduced to Canadian companies all the time. Most recently, I suggested a friend stay at a Sonder hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., where I’d recently travelled. After listing some of the reasons I liked it—easy app-based check-in, sophisticated decor, central location—I added, “Plus, you’d be supporting a Canadian company.” Cue the surprise.
That amazement is a hangover from a decade ago, when the prevailing assumption was that big, global success stories came out of New York or Silicon Valley. Today, Canada is experiencing a groundswell of innovation, and roughly 10 per cent of Canadians are entrepreneurs. Sonder was started by Francis Davidson—the enterprising Montrealer on this issue’s cover— who got his start as a McGill student renting out friends’ apartments. Today, his hospitality company operates in more than 40 markets around the world.
Davidson is one of 10 business leaders featured in the third instalment of our annual “How I Made It” package (p. 30). The 2023 cohort share a kind of kinetic quality that is, undoubtedly, the secret sauce behind their success: They each identified a market gap, came up with a blue-sky plan to fill it and then stopped at nothing to make it happen.
Also in this issue is an account of the unravelling of Bridging Finance Inc., the embattled Bay Street firm currently under investigation by the Ontario Securities Commission for misappropriation and fraud. In “The Fall of the House of Sharpe” (p. 48), writer Lauren McKeon details how Bridging founders and erstwhile power couple David and Natasha Sharpe allegedly orchestrated a multimillion-dollar kickback scheme to line their pockets with the company’s investment funds. It’s the kind of twisty tale that will have you obsessively googling for updates in the months to come. (The hearing is expected to go on through February 2024.)
Finally, “Out of Office” (p. 58) hones in on an ongoing redevelopment pilot project in Calgary that is a case study for resuscitating the North American city centres that were all but left for dead after the pandemic. Writer Sarah Liss spoke to Maxim Olshevsky, one of the private developers granted municipal funding to convert abandoned office buildings into residential apartments, a two-birds approach intended to alleviate the city’s housing crisis and save its downtown. Olshevsky, who started his company, Astra Real Estate, in 2014, saw opportunity in uninspiring officescapes— the kind of problem-solving outlook that all the most innovative entrepreneurs have in common.