Brendan King and the business hiding inside the business

Before Brendan King sold software, he sold colourful shorts. He was at university, his father worked at a factory, and the university clubs made a ready market. The shop had a name that did some of the advertising for him: Son of a Beach. An enterprise with that name ought to come with a complimentary pair of sunglasses.

The money arrived quickly. It departed quickly, too. King’s first venture gave him an introduction to the distance between having customers and having a durable business. Years later, with Vendasta selling technology through agencies and other business advisers, he would still be interested in that distance. A product can attract attention, collect users and look very promising while the business underneath it requires further work.

That is a useful place to begin with King, the Saskatoon-based co-founder and CEO of Vendasta. His career contains physics, retail, real estate software and several revisions of the original plan. The changes are part of the story. He has repeatedly found useful demand somewhere adjacent to the business he thought he was building.

The physicist leaves the mine

At the University of Saskatchewan, King studied physics and geophysics. He liked understanding how things worked. His early employment included painting radio towers, an occupation that lends a rather literal meaning to career advancement. After university he became a mining geophysicist at Eldorado Nuclear, a predecessor of Cameco.

Time away from the mining job gave him room to start Delron Computers. In 1989 he left Eldorado to concentrate on the company. By his own account, the decision disappointed his parents. A scientific education followed by a mining job offered a fairly legible career. Selling computers introduced rather more variables.

Delron reached $15 million in revenue, King has said, and became part of the CompuSmart franchise in 1995. He sold his half to his business partner in 1999 and joined Point2. Hardware had given him a business; software was becoming the next question.

There is a practical education running alongside the formal one here. Retail places a person close to the buyer, the budget and the complaint. An owner asking for new software may also need help changing the way the business works. King’s later insistence on understanding the customer’s problem has the familiarity of someone who has stood on the other side of a shop counter.

A useful detour through real estate

At Point2, King worked with John Fothergill, who would later help found Vendasta. Fothergill built a prototype for real estate agents: a website they could manage themselves, with listings distributed to property sites. Agents could publish without retaining a webmaster for every change. The appeal was easy to understand.

King helped grow Point2 Agent into an international service. Vendasta’s leadership biography credits him with building membership beyond 185,000 agents and brokers in 85 countries. The numbers describe his Point2 work, rather than Vendasta’s customer base. What interested him was the ability of a useful product to travel well beyond its home city.

Point2 also supplies a connection that runs through the rest of the story. King did not arrive at Vendasta alone with an idea and a laptop. He brought experience of software distribution and relationships with people who had already built together. Behind the founder portrait is a working history shared with colleagues.

The customers picked a different company

Vendasta began in 2008 with a proposition aimed at homeowners. The service, MyFrontSteps, was meant to help people share ideas about their homes and find service providers through people they trusted. A recommendation for a plumber or painter could become part of a wider network. It was an appealing plan, launched into an inhospitable housing market.

The homeowner concept struggled. Meanwhile, free tools for the service businesses attracted thousands of sign-ups. Those tools helped businesses handle their online listings, reviews and social presence. Customer interest had gathered around a different part of the project.

Vendasta changed course. Newspapers and directory companies could sell the tools to their existing business advertisers under their own brands. The distribution relationship gave the software a route to customers and gave those sellers something digital to offer. A feature of the original idea became the basis of the company.

King has since described starting both Point2 and Vendasta around economic upheavals. His point is about the need to adjust. A founder may remain energetic about a problem while changing the commercial arrangement for solving it. The original pitch is allowed to lose an argument with the customer.

Why the middle matters

Vendasta’s model puts a local expert between the software vendor and the business owner. An agency can supply several products through one platform, keeping the customer relationship under its own brand. Software makers gain distribution; the agency gains a broader offering; the owner has someone to ask for help.

That middle layer attracted Foundry. The investment firm came to know Vendasta through its purchases of Yesware and Broadly, both Foundry portfolio companies, then joined Vendasta’s 2023 financing. Its investment explanation singled out the reseller channel as a reason the company had been able to reach a difficult market.

For a small business, choosing software is only the beginning. Someone has to connect it, teach people to use it and respond when it fails. A vendor with another dashboard can easily create another job. Vendasta’s wager is that the existing adviser can make the collection of products useful as a whole.

King’s own advice is to “fall in love with your clients’ problems”. It is an unusually inconvenient instruction for a seller: understanding a problem takes longer than reciting a feature list. It also gives the customer a reason to return when the next difficulty arrives.

The bell he chose not to ring

In 2021, Vendasta was preparing an initial public offering. Then King changed course again. The company took a private financing of C$119.5 million instead. Lugard Road Capital led the round, with other investors including Nicola Wealth and the Canadian Business Growth Fund.

King acknowledged the attraction of ringing the bell as a public company, but said the private transaction made more sense for Vendasta and its shareholders. The company had kept its options open and found investors it wanted to work with. The ceremony could wait.

Two years later, another financing brought C$20 million and the conversion of a C$52.5 million debenture into equity. Foundry partner Brad Feld joined the board. By the end of 2023, King was talking openly about a market that rewarded profitable growth and the need to adjust the business accordingly.

He was also learning what acquisitions ask of a leader. Combining businesses required shared plans and clear expectations. The company could add products by buying them, but getting people to work together remained a separate piece of work. That distinction matters in a career often described through growth figures.

A loud personality, a small table

King’s personal website describes him as “intense, boisterous, imaginative.” The description is refreshingly untroubled by the possibility that someone might prefer a quieter meeting. Jean Parchewsky, Vendasta’s people operations leader, has described an accessible CEO whose office door was open to employees.

In 2022, Waterstone Human Capital named him a Canada’s Most Admired CEO award winner in the Growth category. The award evaluates culture alongside leadership and business performance. In October 2023, the Saskatoon Chamber’s SABEX awards named him Industry Leader of the Year. Both recognitions place his work in a wider community of employees and local businesses.

There is also foosball. King likes the game enough that, when the office offered no opponents, he took his table home and taught his daughter to play. Vendasta’s culture guide later listed him among the office’s resident foosball players. The CEO is available for competition at a scale considerably smaller than a software market.

His other enthusiasms are agreeably specific. He has talked about barbecuing and smoking food throughout the year, including in below-freezing weather. Saskatchewan provides opportunities to establish how seriously a person means “throughout the year”.

“Keep moving forward and leave it better than you found it”

Brendan King, on a possible title for a book about his life

Now he wants the software to finish the job

King’s recent writing returns to the same owner whose attention is divided between customers and administration. In October 2025, he laid out an approach in which AI handles execution while people direct it, check its work and decide when intervention is necessary. His description assigned 80 percent of investment to execution and 20 percent to the oversight layer. That is his stated allocation, rather than a measured productivity result.

The oversight matters. His argument includes a warning against treating AI as something a business can simply install and forget. Agencies would still need to define the customer’s requirements, train the assistant on the business and set rules for passing work to a person. Automating a handoff makes the design of that handoff consequential.

On September 17, 2026, King sharpened the argument in an essay about moving from asking AI questions to assigning it work. A drafted answer still leaves a person to complete the transaction. His proposed alternative gives a system responsibility for an outcome, such as handling an incoming inquiry and arranging an appointment, with humans accountable for how the system operates.

It is an ambition, and its usefulness has to be established in the ordinary life of a business: a call answered, a booking recorded, a customer helped. King is asking his company to make technology take more of that work off the owner’s hands.

The distance from colourful shorts to AI receptionists is considerable. The recurring concern is easier to recognise. People have work they want to do, and other work that keeps getting in the way. Brendan King keeps building businesses around that interruption. The next version will have to earn its place the same way the earlier ones did: by proving useful to somebody with a business of their own.