WORK IN PROGRESS

2001: Teck Corp. buys out the 50 per cent of Cominco Ltd. it doesn't own for $1.5 billion, forming a new mining behemoth based in Vancouver called Teck Cominco Ltd. Today it's Teck Resources Ltd.– the Cominco name, going back to the turn of the 20th century, is gone–and Canada's largest diversified miner lays claim to the best-performing stock on the S&P/TSX Composite Index since 2009. (Yay, coal!) 2002: Early in his first mandate, former premier Gordon Campbell creates a Crown corporation committed to new ways of building infrastructure called public-private partnerships, or P3s. Partnerships BC becomes ubiquitous in the run-up to the 2010 Winter Games, responsible for steering many major projects, including the Canada Line and the Sea-to-sky Highway expansion, that remain the Olympics' true legacy. 2004: StewartStew Butterfield,Butt with thenthen-wife and businessness partner Caterina Fak Fake, launches photosharsharing website Flickr; a year later, Yahoo Inc. buys it for about US$25 million. Buttbutterfield stays on with Yahoo for a few yyears, dabbles in gaming for a few more, then launches team-messaging app Slack in 2013. Slack's estimated worth today? A paltry US$3.8 billion.

2008: Online bookseller Abebooks of Victoria is sold to Amazon.com in 2008 for around $100 million. Abebooks was an early Canadian success story in e-commerce and put co-founder Boris Wertz– principal of Vancouver-based Version One Ventures, and one of North America's top early-stage investors–on the map. 2008: Riding the wave of social media, Ryan Holmes launches Hootsuite Media Inc. as a B2B platform for companies to manage their various social channels, from Twitter to Facebook to Linkedin. The Vancouver tech darling now counts 1,000-plus employees and 14 million users worldwide; a much-delayed initial public offering is expected in 2017, with some estimates pegging it at $1 billion (and don't tell Holmes otherwise!). 2008: Citing national security concerns, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper blocks the sale of Macdonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. to U.S. firm Alliant Techsystems Inc. in 2008. Through a series of stealth moves over the next few years, however, Richmond-based MDA– Canada's largest space company–is now American in all but name, with the bulk of employees, including president and CEO Howard Lance, based south of the border.