BCBusiness

downtown Vancouver oce and provides soft- ware and web solutions to 60,000 realtors throughout North America. Flint believes the company's success in the years ahead will require thinking outside the Nanaimo bubble. "When I -rst arrived at REW, they were com- paring themselves to other Nanaimo-based employers, but we've rede-ned ourselves as a high-tech employer, and this has played a pivotal role in shaping a more tech-like culture at the com- pany," he says. "We are the big -sh in a small pond in Nanaimo and had to do a bit of a reality check when we opened our oce in Vancouver, joining 100 other tech employers -ghting for talent." Lifestyle also sold Chris Davis in 2015, when he was searching for a place to relocate with his family and launch his latest cybersecurity startup, Hyas Infosec. The Nanaimo native, who spent his teenage years as a hacker in the base- ment of the family home, geeked his way into a successful Internet security career in the U.S., working for big names like Dell and Damballa before starting Defense Intelligence and later Morrigan Research. For his third venture, Hyas, Nanaimo -t the bill: close to extended family, a•ordable and o•er- ing most consumer conveniences without being too big, even if he knew it could pose extra chal- lenges to attracting venture capital and talent. Two years in, Hyas employs 10 full-time sta• and -ve contractors. This January the company launched its debut cybersecurity platform, named Comox; its client list includes American Express, the U.S. government, investment houses and two major accounting -rms. In March, Hyas released its next software product, Salt Spring, which Davis says got an early boost thanks to "a pre-order from the cyber intel team at Deloitte HQ in New York." A few blocks away, Ron Hartman, co-founder of i DUS Controls, sits at a desk at Square One, a coop- erative, open-concept workspace next to the sto- ried Queens Hotel, which has been serving pints of beer since logging and coal formed the resource foundation of Nanaimo. The decade-old business is another homegrown success story. The company, whose software and hardware let farmers monitor soil moisture content and adjust irrigation, has cus- tomers across the globe, including food technolo›y heavyweights like Monsanto Co. and Syngenta. The business could have located anywhere, but in Nanaimo, Hartman lives in a heritage house blocks away from a quaint downtown of brick and stone buildings, rides a bike to work and walks from Square One to his sailboat. It's as if to say: Put that on a billboard, why don't you? Alongside Nanaimo's IT pioneers, the city has a small but diverse cleantech sector. In green ener›y, there are SRM Projects and Barkley Proj- ect Group, which both specialize in run-of-river hydropower development. For 25 years, Canadian Electric Vehicles (CANEV) has been designing and making electric vehicles in rural Errington, north of the city. The company's ¥agship product is the Might-E Truck, a light-duty, electric-powered ser- vice vehicle found in the ¥eets of airports and of municipalities like To-no and Ucluelet. In early 2017, founder Randy Holmquist sold CANEV to Alberta mechanical engineer Todd Maliteare, but he's staying on the payroll at least until the end of this year. CANEV's production vol- ume is modest: in 2018, the company will roll out a dozen of its Might-E Trucks from Holmquist's backyard shop. Still, you need much more than lifestyle perks to declare yourself a technolo›y hub, like some Nanaimo boosters tend to do these days. Accord- ing to one industry insider who spoke on condi- tion of anonymity, if you walked into a venture capital mixer in Palo Alto and touted Nanaimo as a tech centre, "you'd be laughed out of the room." It took decades for Vancouver and Victoria— the latter now home to roughly 300 -rms gener- ating a combined $4 billion in annual revenue—to make that claim. Kelowna also has a booming tech sector that has grown roughly 30 percent since 2015 and is leading the charge in the Okana- gan, where more than 650 such companies do business. By comparison, Nanaimo is still a dia- mond in the rough. "Over the past few years, it has been very exciting to see several local and regional tech- nolo›y startups break through the early stage," says Graham Truax, acting executive director of Innovation Island, which services Vancouver Island (outside of Victoria) and the Sunshine Coast, and belongs to a network of tech incuba- tors established by Crown agency the BC Innova- tion Council. "Tech is starting to measure here, slowly but surely. The challenge for most of these companies is that the tech sector is a global mar- ketplace.® This means competing for capital, cus- tomers and talent with larger centres that often have far more resources." "Tech is starting to measure here, slowly but surely. The challenge for most of these companies is that the tech sector is a global marketplace. This means competing for capital, customers and talent with larger centres that often have far more resources" —Graham Truax, acting executive director, Innovation Island BCBUSINESS.CA jULY/AUGUST 2018 BCBusiness 49

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