I'm a Nova Scotian boy. I took off to Boston to do a degree in physics and biochemistry at Harvard in the mid to late 1990s. Instead of going to med school, I ended up in IT in Boston in the late 1990s period, in the heyday of the dot-com era.
I built up a portfolio of client relationships and started a dot-com in health care IT in the late 1990s.
The bubble burst. My wife was pregnant with our first kid, and I managed to trick her into letting me start another company as long as it was north of the border, where we didn't have to deal with visa issues.
Back home to Nova Scotia we came. We brought a lot of our client contacts with us and started doing IT services work for customers I already knew out of the U.S. Most of those were in the corporate space. IBM was a big contact for us.
I did a lot of work building out corporate learning and software systems with a very small team here in Nova Scotia and a co-founder in the U.K.
I realized we were building scalable, interactive software in the early 2000s in a way that very few other firms were. I saw there was an opportunity to do that, not just in the corporate e-learning sector but in entertainment, in media, in gaming, in banking, in health care. There were a lot of sectors where rich interactive software that was built in a way that allowed it to scale to an enterprise-quality level was unique and rare. There weren't a lot of companies doing that.
If you combine that with the cost base of doing it from Nova Scotia, we actually had a pretty good global business. We kept our heads down and we hired a bunch of people slowly over time here in Nova Scotia. We have done very little work for Atlantic Canadian companies, very little work for Canadian companies. Most of our work is export-driven, bringing work into the region, employing 65 or so people here in Halifax and 15 or 20 abroad.
We've evolved by word of mouth, largely. We don't have an active sales force. We do interesting work that has an engineering component that's attractive to large companies and to a lot of partners in marketing and branding, and in creative industries, where there's a lack of understanding about how to build good software. We're largely software engineers, and that skill set has made us a valuable partner to a lot of companies that are trying to adopt technology quickly and trying to find creative ways of doing that in an affordable way.