With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1332052
Smartphones, laptops, tablets– when it came to cybersecurity, Jake King had seen plenty of innovation for mobile devices. But server infrastruc- ture? King and his business partner, Milun Tesovic, spotted a gap. "We hadn't seen the same innovation in the cloud," recalls the Australian expat, who was lead security engineer at Vancouver-based social media management company Hootsuite before founding cybersecurity startup Cmd with Tesovic in 2016. "There was a marketable opportunity to defend the systems where everyone's data is stored, and no really leading vendors." Vancouver-headquartered Cmd's customers, most of which are in the U.S., include cloud services company PagerDuty, a provider of alerts and disclosure for problems with digital systems. "We help them defend their systems because they're a target of a JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 BCBUSINESS 33 M I N I N G J ewel P ur p ose POWER PLAY The world's biggest plasma injector at General Fusion's Burnaby HQ It's no accident that Lucara Diamond Corp. has, over the past seven years, unearthed a third of the world's dia- monds in excess of 300 carats. Granted, the Vancouver-based, Toronto Stock Exchange–listed company's Karowe mine in Botswana is extraordinarily rich in such rocks. But where other diamond miners may have accidentally crushed their big stones before they ever got to the sorting room, Lucara adapted X-ray transmission technology developed for the recycling and food processing industries to spot the dia- monds' atomic signatures and extract them from only gently crushed ore. Lucara, which has 544 staff (the vast majority in Botswana), also experimented—not always successfully—in alternative ways of marketing its giant stones rather than going through the clannish network of brokers, cutters, polishers and auction houses centred in Antwerp, Belgium, that has long controlled the diamond trade. It launched a blockchain- based sales platform, Clara Dia- mond Solutions, that lets retail jewelers bid directly on uncut diamonds from producers. Instead of producers paying cutters and polishers to fashion a gem for them and put it on the market for the highest bidder, now a customer can potentially buy a rough diamond and have it custom cut for their pur- poses. Co-founder, president and CEO Eira Thomas believes the system could end up being more valuable than Lucara's diamond production. This past July, Lucara also struck a deal with Antwerp- based manufacturer HB Group to sell diamonds larger than 10.8 carats on the basis of their estimated price after polishing. Though COVID-19 has crushed the mainstream market for diamond jewelry, the demand for large stones has stayed strong as investors use them as a hedge against volatile stock and bond markets. "Each of these pieces has taught us that challenges can lead to opportunities. You just have to have an innova- tive outlook," Thomas says. "Business up until five to 10 years ago, for a lot of smaller companies, was around, Look, let's not invent something new here. Let's do something that's tried and true. And quite frankly, the banks wouldn't finance you unless it was tried and tested. I think now we've seen this real shift toward innovation where the mandate is about, OK, we can't keep doing what we're doing. We have to do something differ- ent, and that does involve a certain amount of risk, but by the way, there's a huge upside if we get it right." –M.M. IN THE ROUGH Lucara workers sort diamonds at Botswana's Karowe Mine C Y B E R S E C U R I T Y Cloud C over lot of international crime syndicates and all kinds of different adversaries," CEO King says. "But most press- ingly, we help them achieve a lot of the compliance standards that they have to achieve to sell into large organizations." Cmd, which raised $19 million from GV (then Google Ventures) in 2019, made Forbes' list of 20 cybersecurity startups to watch last year. As demand for its enterprise and free products grows, King expects the 48-employee company to expand by "orders of magnitude." Although the shift toward working from home has shone a spotlight on identity verification, he thinks the COVID-19 pandemic also changed businesses' security priorities. "A lot of companies started to look at physical access to systems or disk encryption," King says. "We've got thousands of laptops floating around the planet now, and they're all in people's homes." Post- COVID, the security industry will see a resurgence as organizations slowly uncover breaches related to remote work, he reckons. "People are going to find pretty significant gaps in their infrastructure." –N.R.