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/1388249
FROM TOP: SHOBHIT SAHU; AHMAD MATAR JULY/AUGUST 2021 BCBUSINESS 67 E M I L Y D A V I E S AGE: 28 Partner Linde Equity LIFE STORY: Attending fine arts school as a child didn't foreshadow Emily Davies' career in finance, but the Fort Langley native comes from an entrepreneurial family. Her grandfather, a Swedish immigrant, bought real estate throughout the Lower Mainland–as well as busi- nesses her parents worked in. "In the household, chatter was always around business and responsi- bility and opportunity," Davies remembers. So she attended SFU Beedie School of Business, where she took part in Beedie Endowment Asset Management ( BEAM), a program that lets students run their own investment portfolio. After earning a business administration and finance degree in 2015, Davies joined RBC Capital Markets' Van- couver office as an analyst. Just before that, Teal Linde, founder of local independent investment firm Linde Equity, had asked her to write a business plan for his new fund. The Linde Equity Fund exceeded Davies' "optimistic" forecast after its 2016 debut, and Linde invited her to buy into the firm two years later, making her full partner in 2019. Davies, who notes that her industry is still more than 80-percent male, co-founded the Linde Davies Investment Challenge. The annual competition sees teams of three–at least one member of each must be female–pitch a stock for a $10,000 prize pool. BOTTOM LINE : The Linde Equity Fund posted a 25.1- percent return in 2020 and a 13.4-percent compound annualized return over the past four years. Davies, who now leads the fund, has tripled its assets under manage- ment in three years, to $96 million. Unlike many such vehicles run by national firms, the Linde Equity Fund has the latitude to buy mid- and small-cap stocks, she explains. And unlike most mutual funds, it isn't confined to a particular asset class or geography. "We can cherry-pick all of our favourite ideas from those different categories," Davies says. "We're well positioned to outper- form as a result." Private capital is on her firm's radar, too. Davies recently joined the board of Cortico Health Technologies, a Vancouver- based provider of patient engagement software in which $366-million Linde Equity is an investor. "I think there's fertile ground for early-stage capital," she says of the city's booming tech sector. –N.R. T H A M E R M A T A R AGE: 28 Founder + CEO Accessible Jobs LIFE STORY: Thamer Matar spent his formative years more or less impersonating a yo-yo. He was born in Jordan, came to Surrey for his elementary school years and went back to Jordan for high school. Uni- versity saw it swing back once again as he studied engineering at SFU. His first co-op, at telecom giant Nokia's Ottawa office, was "one of the best learning experiences in terms of what I don't want to do with my life," Matar says with a laugh about working at a large corpora- tion. "I learned a lot, and there are so many good people, but I stopped innovating and solving problems. Just became a number there." So after becoming frustrated with the parking situation at SFU, Matar founded a smart parking com- pany called Openspot Technologies in 2017. He expanded that business worldwide before selling it in January 2020 to one of the original investors. Left looking for something to do, Matar found inspiration through his cousin, a disabled software devel- oper. "She's a genius, but she had a hard time finding a job," he says. "So I asked her if she goes on job boards like Indeed and stuff like that. And she said, There's nothing that really works for us." Matar created Accessible Jobs in early 2020 to match job seekers with disabilities and employers. "Anyone with a disability across the world can use our platform," he says. "And all the jobs on our platform are for people with disabilities." BOTTOM LINE : Accessible Jobs has 23 partner associations across Canada, including WorkBC, and has seen more than 1,000 job seekers in the year-and-a-half since it launched. –N.C. 3 0 U N D E R T H I R T Y Emily Davies Thamer Matar