MEREDITH COLOMA

Owner COLOMA GUITARS Co-founder and co-producer VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL GUITAR FESTIVAL AGE: 27

LIFE STORY: Blair Mirau is working on a one-man band. The Prince Rupert native is teaching himself to play guitar, harmonica, foot tambourine, cajón drum and egg shaker, all at the same time. This multitasking feat seems simple compared to his day job as CEO of the Gitmaxmak'ay Nisga'a Society. The non-profit provides educational, cultural and recreational services to roughly 1,600 Nisga'a First Nation people, and operates an economic development corporation that runs a garden centre, a landscaping company, a charter bus service and a public event venue. It's also building a commercial salmon smokehouse. These operations employ band members and invest their profits back into the society. Besides heading all of them, Mirau moonlights as a Prince Rupert city councillor, a post he has held since 2014. “No two days are ever the same,” he says.

Mirau graduated from the University of Winnipeg in 2011 with a degree in international development. But he soon realized he wanted to apply his knowledge—and entrepreneurial skills honed as a teenager running his own lawn-care business—in his hometown. He began his career as a researcher and grant writer for the City of Prince Rupert, but he soon started a company teaching non-profits how to find funding. In 2013, then–gitmaxmak'ay Nisga'a Society chief executive Greg Grayson approached Mirau to become an economic development officer. The organization's businesses grew under their direction, and when Grayson left in 2016, the board quickly found a ready replacement in Mirau.

LIFE STORY: After completing degrees in psychology and law at SFU and Cardiff University in Wales, respectively, Taran Ghatrora was in the midst of a master of law degree at UBC, ostensibly on the way to her dream of becoming a human rights lawyer with the United Nations. Imagine being her mom and dad when she called them to say she was dropping out of school to sell organic tampons. “I feel like they were unwaveringly supportive,” remembers Ghatrora, who grew up in Surrey to parents from India and the U.K. “I knew I had their unconditional love if I failed.”

THE BOTTOM LINE: That hasn't happened: the business that Ghatrora started in 2014 with her sister, Bunny, and friend Jessica Bilmer was selected by Hootsuite's The Next Big Thing accelerator. Recently rebranded to Blume from Ellebox, it has sold more than 200,000 organic tampons and pads through online subscriptions, good for annual recurring revenue of $360,000 in 2017. Blume has four full-time staff and customers in every province. Ghatrora says she and her partners hope to raise awareness of self-care in addition to growing the company. “We really want to expand the educational aspect of our business in a relatable, authentic way through women's stories, not just clinical information.” –N.C. LIFE STORY: Mohammad Akhlaghi has three birthdays, as he says is custom in his native Iran: the day he was born; the day six months previous his engineer father and dentistry professor mother moved his birthday to so he could start school a year early; and the day in the lunar year, which is based on the moon's rotation rather than the sun's. He shares the latter birthday with the prophet Mohammad, hence his name. “In none of those I'm 30,” Akhlaghi insists. “Not even on the moon.”

Akhlaghi came to Vancouver from Tehran after high school to attend SFU, where he earned a degree in electronics engineering with a minor in business. The latter compelled him to start three companies with varying degrees of success before co-founding Parkizio Technologies in 2016 with Ali Mohazab, who holds a PHD in theoretical mathematics from UBC. The company “brings parking into the 21st century” by linking parking lots to other infrastructure, like traffic lights, allowing planners to more effectively control the use of cars in cities.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Parkizio has partnered with Easypark in a bid to make Vancouver's parking lots interconnected. Right now, all of its revenue—the company hit the high five figures for 2017, 60 percent of it profit—goes back into developing its technology. Parkizio's two founders are its only current full-time employees. –N.C.

LIFE STORY: Sanctuary AI was spun off from robot developer Kindred Systems Inc.'s artificial general intelligence division in January. “The day-today goals for me are aligned with our previous work,” Olivia Norton observes. “We continue to tackle the same hard problem, with a mandate to create synthetic humans that are indistinguishable from us.”

Norton was born and raised in Calgary, where her mother worked in geoscience and her father was an architect. She received a BSC in computer engineering with a specialization in biomedical engineering from the University of Calgary in 2011. Norton then stayed in her hometown to work for Quorum Business Solutions Inc., which creates software for the energy industry, until moving to Vancouver in 2014 to attend While she was completing a master of engineering in electrical and computer engineering, she was hired by Kindred, where she led the development of an AI system that can enable machines from full-sized humanoid robots to kitten-sized quadrupeds to learn complex tasks.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Kindred, which will maintain a minority ownership in Sanctuary, raised more than US$44 million in venture capital from investors including Data Collective, Eclipse Ventures First Round Capital, Google Ventures and Tencent Holdings Ltd. –F.S.

LIFE STORY: Holly Peck is a native Vancouverite whose father is a Chartered Business Valuator and whose mother, now retired, was Lululemon Athletica Inc.'s first PR and marketing director. One of her first jobs was helping her mom at Lululemon, and she used to fold clothes with JJ Wilson, son of founder Dennis (Chip) Wilson. “Very Vancouver through and through,” she acknowledges.

Peck, who attended Little Flower Academy for high school, enrolled in Princeton University as a math and economics major but graduated in 2012 with a BA in anthropology. A highlight of her studies was participating in an archaeological dig of a Neanderthal butchering site in France one summer, unearthing denticulated hand axes created by entities “on the fringes of humanness.” Asking questions about what makes us human led to her current role developing cognitive architectural systems for inhouse humanoid robots at Vancouver-based Sanctuary AI.

After completing a web development program at the Flatiron School in New York City in 2016, Peck became frustrated with the male-dominated engineering meetup scene back home. In January 2017, she launched a Vancouver chapter of Women Who Code. Based in San Francisco, Wwcode is a global non-profit that supports women in the tech industry. Peck invited Suzanne Gildert, co-founder and then chief science officer of Kindred, to speak at the Vancouver chapter of Wwcode, and wound up being hired as an artificial intelligence engineer. When Sanctuary was spun out of Kindred this January, Peck became employee one.

THE BOTTOM LINE: In its first year, the Vancouver chapter of Women Who Code grew to some 1,500 members. –F.S.

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 and industrial engineering. While becoming the first member of his family to graduate from university, Böck worked in Ethiopia as head of product development for a startup creating bamboo-based alternatives to wooden building materials. In 2012 he returned to Germany; after he joined an engineering firm connected to the wood industry, UBC recruited him to do a PHD as part of a research collaboration on structural bamboo with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge.

Böck, who has worked all over the world as a consultant, found it tough to connect his bamboo research to Vancouver. But when he learned that each year in the metropolitan region, as much as 600,000 tonnes of wood that could be reused for construction end up in the landfill, he knew he had to do something. The aha moment came one night over sushi with his girlfriend, who told him to start small. “We had these chopsticks in our hands, and that's when it clicked,” he remembers.

In mid-2016, Böck launched Chopvalue Manufacturing as a side project. Chopvalue collects used bamboo chopsticks from local restaurants and transforms them into household items such as shelves, side tables and wall tiles. The Vancouver company has recycled more than 3 million chopsticks and is moving into making building materials, says Böck, who still does the collection himself and plans to defend his PHD this spring. “The most surprising thing is that we are cash-flow-positive after year one.”

THE BOTTOM LINE: In February, Chopvalue's recycling program was preparing to scale up to 300 Metro Vancouver restaurants from about 65. Next year the eight-employee business expects to double its almost $1 million in annual revenue. Plans for 2018 include expanding its entire concept— recycling, design and manufacturing—to three major North American cities. –N.R. 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 age nine, enrolled in the makeup artistry program at Vancouver Film School. After completing the one-year course in 2007, she freelanced on film sets in Vancouver, but her career took a detour a couple of years later when she saw a friend sporting eyelash extensions. Intrigued, Cooper got certified in applying extensions herself, a move that paid off when she moved back to Victoria in 2012: there, she was one of only two people offering the service. Launching Heartwood & Co. the following year, she worked out of a small space at the back of a friend's clothing boutique until she had a large enough clientele to open her own salon.

In a larger storefront, Cooper solidified her brand; in 2016 she brought on her first business partner, stylist Jen Li. Last May, Heartwood moved into its current 4,200-square-foot multifunctional space. The company's services now include a hair and beauty salon, a beauty academy, a community and event space, and a catering bakery specializing in wedding cakes—the latter run by Cooper's newest business partner, her sibling, Megan Cooper.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Heartwood employs 20, monthly revenue exceeds $100,000, and Cooper plans to open a second location in another Canadian city within five years. –J.W. 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 Dave Savory conceptualized the business when, as part of a Uvic entrepreneurship project, they discovered that many of their classmates were struggling to join the job market. “We started to think, `What more could we do to prepare ourselves for the transition to the workforce?'” Stephenson says. “What it came down to for us was more real-world experience.”

After graduating with a Bcomm in 2012, Stephenson worked as a sales manager for a roofing company while helping run Vancouver-based Riipen on the side. The platform, which struggled with an initial strategy of enrolling businesses, lost both of its software developers after the first year. Stephenson and Savory quit their day jobs and began targeting post-secondary institutions, where priorities are shifting to experiential learning. “We realized if we use professors as the catalyst and the school's name to attract the companies, all of a sudden it would work,” Stephenson recalls.

Once Riipen had signed up 16 schools, it raised $180,000 in seed capital on Frontfundr, a Vancouver equity crowdfunding platform, and rehired a developer. In 2017, the company secured $1.8 million in its first financing round. Now working with 150 post-secondary institutions across North America, it plans to expand to Australia, New Zealand and Europe this year.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Academic institutions pay Riipen $25,000 to $100,000 annually, based on student enrollment. Industry partners are charged $500 to $1,000 per project, or they can buy a package for $15,000 to $50,000. Riipen generates 75 percent of its revenue from industry partners and the rest from schools. Revenue climbed from $100,000 in 2016 to $740,000 last year, and Stephenson reckons it will reach $2 million in 2018. –J.W.