BCBusiness

July/August 2021 - The Top 100

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.

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LEFT: CONNOR MCCRACKEN JULY/AUGUST 2021 BCBUSINESS 63 JULY/AUGUST 2021 BCBUSINESS 63 I did," Kwok says. "But I think my family is learning as we go. And so am I." –N.C. C A L E B B E R N A B E AGE: 25 Co-founder + CEO VINN LIFE STORY: Vancouver Island native Caleb Bernabe wanted to be a doctor–and an architect. Finishing high school a year early, Bernabe headed to Vancouver, where he studied life sciences at UBC and business development remotely through Athabasca University. But after meeting some physicians-in- training, he decided that medicine wasn't for him. "I couldn't see myself spending the next 15 years in a purely academic environment," he says. "I like being able to make decisions and iterate quickly." So Bernabe headed back to the Island and switched gears, getting accepted into the Royal Architec- tural Institute of Canada's fellowship program. To pay the bills, the car enthusiast landed a job as director of marketing and business develop- ment for one of the country's largest auto dealers. He quickly concluded that when it came to consumer satisfaction, the sales model was broken. "Why are customers so dissatisfied with this process when you know there to be good people behind it, generally?" Seeing a gap in the market, Bernabe launched VINN in 2018 with co-worker Chet Flanagan. Their Victoria-based platform (its name riffs on "vehicle identification number") uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to match people and cars online, with help from a team of vehicle experts. Business took off during the pandemic as buyers began avoiding auto showrooms. BOTTOM LINE : After serving almost 6,400 customers last year, VINN expects to see that number surge to 100,000 nationwide in 2021. The company, which has about 20 employees, plans to enter the U.S. by early next year. So far, VINN has raised capital from investors includ- ing Vancouver-based Conconi Growth Partners and Yaletown Ventures. "Online purchasing is becoming a major, major player in the space when it comes to auto transactions," Bernabe says. "We've been fortu- nately timed as well as strategically positioned to meet the customer demand correctly." –N.R. M I C H E L L E K W O K AGE: 22 Co-founder + CEO FLIK LIFE STORY: Ever since Michelle Kwok can remember, her parents wanted her to be a doctor. "On my eighth birthday, they gave me a stethoscope and anatomy cards and were like, You're going to be a doctor when you grow up. Congratulations, Dr. Kwok!" the Vancouver native recalls of her real estate developer father and doctor mother, who both grew up poor in Hong Kong. "Every single time I got a gift, it had to do with medicine." So all was good when Kwok got into medical sciences at Western University in Ontario. But her heart wasn't in it: "It was just the same things over and over again, and I didn't really want to do that." She reached out to some start- ups while at university and ended up working closely with B.C.-based Northam Beverages, developing marketing plans and introducing Hey Y'all Hard Iced Tea to the Ontario market. "I thought the startup world was so cool," Kwok says. "You can pretty much build your dream team and dream job." She ended up graduating a year early and deciding not to go to med school. "My parents didn't really understand; they basically held an intervention," she recalls. Instead, she was accepted into Next 36, a prestigious Canadian entrepre- neurship program. Kwok and her roommate, Ravina Anand, realized there weren't many people in the program who looked like them. "There was this gap that needed to be filled," she says. "The female founders of today definitely need help, but they can also offer help to the female founders of tomorrow, and there aren't that many opportunities to help that mentorship run deep." In January 2020, the pair created a digital platform called FLIK (Female Laboratory of Innovative Knowledge) to help pair women entrepreneurs with budding female founders and students across the world. BOTTOM LINE : FLIK has nine staff and some 8,000 users across 55 countries and has matched about 2,000 women to apprenticeships. As for her relationship with her parents? "They're proud of every- thing I've been able to accomplish, and it's still difficult for them to understand, because they grew up in a very different culture than Caleb Bernabe Michelle Kwok 3 0 U N D E R T H I R T Y

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