THIS WEEK IN TECTORIA

Local technology entrepreneur Rasool Rayani is our Tectorian of the Week.

While Rasool recently gained provincial recognition in September by appearing in BIV’s 2014 Forty under 40 list, us locals have long known Rasool to be the quintessential Tectorian.

In 2001, Rasool co-founded Metalogix Software, which won North America’s largest new venture competition in 2002, went on to experience triple digit organic and profitable growth and took on private equity financing in 2008.

Tectoria’s own Metalogix is now the leading provider of enterprise collaboration and infrastructure solutions to some of the world’s largest companies.

But Metalogix was just the beginning.

In 2009, Rasool began investing in early stage technology firms as an active angel investor.

Rasool works with any number of notable Victoria-based tech companies, including Tapstream and Victoria’s own Accelerate Tectoria graduates SendWithUs.

SendWithUs received a lot of attention recently when they became the first BC company to be accepted into the prestigious Y Combinator startup incubator program in Silicon Valley.

Of course, Rasool has pitched in and lent a hand with other tech companies that have caught the imagination of the global tech scene.

This who’s who of notable BC tech startups include include Backstage Software, Mediacore, Bet Smart Media, Versly, Unbouce and Solegear.

Rasool is a volunteer coordinator for the Victoria ALS Walk and he also volunteers his time as a mentor and advisor to young start-ups, and serves on the VIATeC board or directors.

New superstar VIATeC BoD member and Victoria returnee Elizabeth Dutton is our Tectorian of the Week.

Elizabeth Dutton may be most well-known for leading local ecommerce company UsedEverywhere.com, the popular network of free classified sites known (and loved) locally as UsedVictoria.com.

Since 2011, under Dutton’s leadership, UsedEverywhere has grown from 65 sites to over 90 sites in 3 countries. The online shopping has become the go-to place for finding whatever it is you need in your life, quickly and efficiently.

Dutton is also a talented Tectoria returnee: she grew up in Victoria and went to Ontario to attend Queen’s University.

She then spent eight years as a strategy and implementation consultant in Toronto and the UK helping her clients increase revenues by focusing on their customers, often through the use of online strategies.

When Dutton returned to North America, she was recruited to work at Amazon in their books division where she negotiated with many of the top publishers during the growth of Kindle and ebooks.

And now Elizabeth Dutton sits on the VIATeC Board. We’re pleased to welcome her, and forward to working with her for the next two years!

Our Tectorian of the Week is Aidin Tavakkol, co-founder of Victoria ecommerce startup LimeSpot.

Tavakkol represents all of Victoria’s latent potential as a place to launch and grow a technology company.

What has Tavakkol built here in Victoria?

Tavakkol and his team have launched LimeSpot, a personalized web experience that is intended to “bring the social back to social media.” For starters, LimeSpot’s technology creates a more efficient shopping experience by instantaneously displaying products that customers are most likely to buy.

A software engineer by trade, Tavakkol had already spent a decade helping build Iran’s second-largest software company before deciding to head to Victoria to do something new.

Tavakkol says achieving success back home, he felt his calling was to explore the world in order to accomplish something even bigger.

So, Tavakkol took a chance and joined his sister here in Victoria.

Like many Tectoria tech entrepreneurs, Tavakkol was attracted by Victoria’s great weather and a variety of high-powered, world-class university programs.

Tavakkol received his MBA this past spring from the Gustavson School of Business. At the same time he was completing his studies, he was busy building LimeSpot.

While studying at UVic, Tavakkol encouraged his friend and future LimeSpot co-founder Majid Ghaffari to join him.

At UVic networking event, the pair’s startup idea caught the eye of Paul Summerville, a business professor and mentor at the the Gustavson School of Business.

“I was giving a presentation, and I noticed Aidin standing off to one side,” says Summerville. “We talked, he explained his idea, and I was hooked.”

Like Tavakkol, Summerville, who has enjoyed a stellar career working in investment banking and has served as chief economist with two major multi-national financial institutions, is also a talented transplant who has chosen to call Tectoria home.

Soon after connecting with Tavakkol an Ghaffari, Summerville was on board as the third co-founder and LimeSpot was incorporated in April 2013.

Fast forward just over a year: LimeSpot today has 15 employees around the world and has successfully raised a healthy dose of seed financing from private investors locally, in the United States and the UK.

Tavakkol and his teammates at LimeSpot have used this time to apply their software engineering expertise to patent a powerful “personalization and recommendation engine” that is powered by an individual’s social network profile.

The end result is to provide a personalized web experience that provides highly relevant results and recommendations. Improving ecommerce and online shopping is an obvious match for LimeSpot’s technology.

And people are starting to take notice.

So far, Victoria-based LimeSpot has inked agreements with major ecommerce players including Shopify, PayPal, and Bigcommerce.

A lot has changed in the 18 months or so since  and his co-founders launched LimeSpot.

Tavakkol and his team have raised enough equity to develop and launch their first commercial product offering. They have beefed up their in-house technology, have created a US subsidiary, and have established a global sales engine. LimeSpot has also hired a CEO, tech veteran Bob Bell.

In this whirlwind of activity, it’s easy to forget that when Aidin Tavakkol decided to do something big, he decided to do travel to Tectoria to do it.

We’re excited to see what LimeSpot does next.

What makes Insight, Design, Sustainability, Innovation, and Sociability so critical, and why should your brand harness these key guiding principles?

According to Tectoria’s own Marc Stoiber, these questions form the five pillars esssential for “future proofing” brands keen on seizing the future.

Marc’s book on future-proofing brands is due to launch this fall. To start things off, Marc is going to help us launch Fort Tectoria by speaking at Experience Tectoria next week:

A familiar face at Royal Roads University, Marc writes on brand innovation for Huffington Post, Fast Company, GreenBiz and Sustainable Life Media. He also speaks on the subject from coast to coast, and has been featured at TED.

His work on Mr. Clean earned his team the Procter & Gamble Worldwide Turnaround of the Year Award in 2005.

A Royal Roads instructor, Marc consults for clients including British Columbia Government health care and BC Hydro. Before embarking on consulting, he was vice-president of green innovation at Maddock Douglas, founder of Change Advertising, National creative director of Grey Canada and creative director of DDB Canada.

These days, Marc Stoiber works with our friend Jude Brown as a creative strategist, entrepreneur, green brand specialist and writer, building resilient, future-proof brands.

“I don’t deal with accomplished creative directors of national agencies on a daily basis,” says Jude Brown. “The best thing about Marc is he likes to share. He has a wealth of experience in marketing and business, connections all over the place and sound advice – he hands them all over freely.”

This is important, because Marc advocates building a “global expert network.”

According to Marc, a global expert network is, as the name implies, a network of smart, specialized idea people you can call upon to guide your thinking. In Marc’s case, his global expert network is at the C-suite level, generally entrepreneurial, with strong brand experience.

In short, Marc helps people all over the world forge a more enlightened path forward and helps them guarantee the continued viability of their business.

And he does it all from right here in Tectoria.

We’re so excited to hear him speak next week!

Hootsuite’s VP of Beards & Business Development Greg Gunn is our Tectorian of the Week.

Why Greg Gunn, and why now?

For one thing, Tectoria veteran Gregg Gunn will be returning home to speak at our brand-new space on Fort Street at the upcoming Experience Tectoria extravaganza on September 11th, 12th and 13th:

The topic of Greg’s speech? “Finding The Next Whale.” Greg will be discussing how Hootsuite is searching for “the next Hootsuite” from within the very walls of their Mount Pleasant offices over in Vancouver.

And what a whale it is: Hootsuite has been speculated to have a value of anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion following its record-breaking $165 millon Series B funding round last year. The company is also looking to fill 100 positions by the end of this year at its new 27,000 sq ft HQ2, an awe-inspiring building located in Mount Pleasant in East Van.

While just a ferry ride away, Hootsuite is a long way from Greg’s beginnings working with early stage, high-growth companies at Vancouver Island Tech Park in Saanich.

A passion for people, technology and data

Now “Chief Harpoonist” and VP of Business Development, Greg Gunn launched the sales team that has made Hootsuite the key tool that major enterprise-level companies such as Coca-Cola, H&M, Tifffany & Co., IBM and more use to manage and measure social media engagement.

It’s all part of what Greg calls his passion: people, technology and data.

“Greg is an energetic and talented leader,” says Anthony Sukow. “He has a great business mind and a pragmatic approach to making money.”

Sukow is well-known in Victoria as one of the founders of Terapeak, like Hootsuite, itself another indispensable software tool used by millions of people all over the world. And Greg Gunn was one of the first employees

“Greg worked with us on developing our business relationships with eBay, growing key enterprise customers, and working on high value projects, services and initiatives,” says Sukow. “We hired Greg right out of UVic and he stuck with us in the early days.”

Today Terapeak has moved to the foot of Fort Street (with offices in the Bay area and Toronto) is the leader in ecommerce market analytics, helping online merchants grow their business and become more profitable.

There’s a bit of Greg Gunn in TeamPages, another technology story that got its start in Tectoria.

And along they way Greg has travelled far himself. He worked for Idea Builders, a Nigerian based NGO focused on poverty alleviation through entrepreneurship and agriculture.

During his time in Nigeria, the UVic Commerce grad forged local and international partnerships to expand programs including micro-credit programs, primary agriculture education, and an award winning “Women Mentoring Women” program.

Coming back to Tectoria

And now Greg Gunn returns to his roots in Tectoria. We’re happy Greg will join us to celebrate the launch of our beautiful new HQ at 777 Fort Street in mid-September.

We hope you come out to welcome Greg back, too!