Early Stage Journal

Within six months of an exit, serial entrepreneur and investor Ian Crosby was already imagining what he could build next. The ideas, he says, kept swirling in the back of his mind that he started a spreadsheet. It wasn’t until he found himself prototyping in his Airbnb instead of sightseeing while in Europe that he’d get closer to the answer. When a startup that he met with recommended that he try...

Late one night in their dorm, BCIT computer science students Clayton Rannard and Kyle Dulay were scrolling Reddit when they realized they should post about the latest product they built: an app that analyzed Instagram accounts for fake followers and engagement. The next morning, they woke up to a spike in traffic and the start of a costly server bill. The thread went viral: 10,000 audits in seven...

When Ivan and Kaya Yiu went looking for storage, they never imagined they’d end up reinventing an industry where little has changed since the 1950s. After overpaying $300 a month to store a single couch, the couple realized how broken the self-storage model was, especially in Vancouver. For decades, the city has followed a system that sets the highest prices in Canada with hidden fees and builds o...

Behind any innovative idea with the potential to become a household name is rarely a single “a-ha” moment, but a trail of experiences long before what outsiders see as overnight success happens. For Felix Chen and Rudy Pham, one of those moments was an eight-to-ten-hour trek through Hanes Valley, B.C., where they tossed around business ideas as they tried to find their way back on the right path....

Getting into retail was never part of the plan for Jenny and Han Yue. Two years ago, the couple first shared their freeze-dried fruits at a pop-up after family and friends kept coming back for more. They started making their own snacks while looking for ways to make their oatmeal healthier—only to find that store-bought options were too sweet, stripped of nutrients, or simply didn’t satisfy their...

When Shawn Pang founded HashMatrix, he never imagined that it would become the agency behind popular AI products from tech giants Alibaba, ByteDance, and Insta360 and fast-growing startups like Rabbit R1, Pix AI, and Kling. As it grew, it came up against the same problem repeatedly—one that it saw big tech and startups had yet to solve: payment. Across their clients, it was often an issue when exp...