David MacLaren and the business hiding in the filing cabinet

David MacLaren’s father lost his glasses while canoeing. His son responded with a floating strap. At 12, MacLaren had found a business problem with an unusually clear specification: whatever happened next, the glasses ought to stay above water.

Decades later, he would be working on another retrieval problem. This time the things at risk of disappearing were photographs, buried inside the growing archive of a company he had founded. The remedy would eventually persuade him to sell that company and become the chief executive of a software business.

The distance between a canoe and enterprise software looks considerable on a résumé. In MacLaren’s case, there is a recognizable habit connecting them: notice an inconvenience, take it seriously, and see whether other people might pay to have it removed.

A useful thing that floats

His early sports accessory business was called Fluorescence. Later came an economics degree at the University of British Columbia and work at the Bank of Nova Scotia, where he dealt with companies and their financing. Before MediaValet, there were businesses in digital images and multimedia, including Realworld Images and DNA Media.

It is a career that moved between the commercial and the visual. The banking work involved understanding businesses through their financial needs. Photography required understanding what an image could do for a customer. Both would become relevant when the photographs themselves began creating an expensive operational problem.

In January 2000, MacLaren founded VRX Studios. The company worked in photography and content for travel and hospitality. Hotels needed images that could travel much farther than their guests: pictures for the websites and distribution channels through which people chose where to stay.

A hotel room has a limited number of beds. Its photographs can be sent almost anywhere. Running the business that supplies those photographs means taking responsibility for what happens after the camera is put away.

The archive takes over

By the end of that decade, VRX was managing roughly 20 terabytes of digital assets and serving thousands of hotel customers. A search for suitable asset management software had failed to turn up an affordable fit. MacLaren and chief technology officer Jean Lozano assembled a team to build their own system on Microsoft Azure.

In his later account of the decision, MacLaren described a company spending too much effort managing its output and too little on taking photographs. The internal tool attracted interest from other organizations over the following years. A solution for one company was beginning to look like an opportunity beyond it.

He separated the operations, sold VRX Studios in 2014 and concentrated on MediaValet. The choice meant leaving a business he had spent years building. He has described the move as going against advice, and as bringing back an excitement he had missed.

There is a pleasing inconvenience in this origin story. The photography company succeeded in producing enough work to need a different kind of company. Its next opportunity was hiding among the things it already owned.

A bigger address than Vancouver

MediaValet’s early cloud decision changed the scale of the undertaking. Azure supplied the infrastructure; the team could concentrate on the application. MacLaren brought experience in producing, managing, licensing and distributing media. Lozano and the technical team helped turn that experience into software other organizations could use.

At first, travel and hospitality were the obvious customers. Then inquiries arrived from businesses outside those industries. The archive problem proved less attached to hotel photography than its origins suggested. Many organizations were accumulating media faster than they could organize access to it.

By May 2012, MediaValet was operating as a stand-alone service with infrastructure across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. For a Vancouver company, the practical attraction was considerable: reaching customers abroad did not require building a separate physical installation wherever they happened to work.

That helps explain MacLaren’s shift in attention. A picture of a hotel belongs to a particular place. A system for finding and distributing pictures can have customers almost anywhere.

Fewer clicks, more use

MacLaren’s account of MediaValet 3.0 makes his product preferences unusually plain. Better user experience, he argued, should mean making actions more intuitive and easier to complete. Additional features needed a reason to exist. A workplace application had to meet expectations shaped by the simpler software people used in their personal lives.

The project ran through 2014 and into 2015. His description emphasized faster common tasks, a simpler interface, more attention to the assets and access to the platform’s functions through an API. Behind those choices was work with customers across different industries and countries.

The customer examples made the demands concrete. Brand USA, responsible for promoting travel to the United States, had a collection of 50 terabytes to manage. Its marketing team needed a way to organize, locate and share photographs, video and brand material with partners around the world. The work also required protecting the collection and making sure people could use it without a cumbersome deployment.

For a founder coming from travel photography, that was familiar territory with a larger cast. An image might pass from the people commissioning it to a marketing team, then to outside partners. Each handoff created another occasion to lose track of it. Helping those people work from an accessible collection addressed a problem that a better photograph alone could never fix.

The emphasis matters in a business whose basic promise is to save people effort. A system that requires its own elaborate search expedition risks becoming a second archive problem. The filing cabinet should not need a filing cabinet for its instructions.

His public marketing advice followed a similar concern with use. In a contribution about 2017, he described a five-part approach: plan the content, make it, organize it for further use, reuse it and track what happens. Making something was one stage in a longer commercial life.

By 2019, he was predicting a greater role for marketing teams in customer success, adoption and retention. That view fits an entrepreneur who had moved from selling images to helping customers keep getting value from the images they already had. The work continued after the initial delivery.

Coffee first. References too.

Software was only part of the job. As the company grew, MacLaren also had to decide who would build it with him. In his January 2023 conversation with Oz Rashid on Hire Learning, he discussed hiring for the relationship between a person and a role.

“I’m looking for that true self … I’m looking for personality.”David MacLaren, on hiring

He described talking with candidates over coffee, letting the conversation move beyond a résumé and listening for what interested them. The candidate’s own account of their working life mattered. So did whether their interests suited the actual work available.

There is room for warmth in that approach, but his discussion also covered reference checking and hiring misses. An engaging conversation can create confidence quickly. Asking other people about a candidate gives the decision another basis. Enthusiasm still has to survive further questions.

This is a useful companion to his founder story. Following a new business opportunity requires conviction; choosing colleagues requires curiosity about someone else’s experience. A growing company puts both demands on the same desk. MacLaren’s public discussions suggest he recognized the need to look beyond the polished presentation.

When the archive holds six decades

In July 2022, MacLaren joined Carolyne Pelletier on Ask AI to discuss MediaValet’s work with the Jane Goodall Institute. The subject was how artificial intelligence could help extend the value of research materials collected over more than six decades.

Goodall’s insistence on narrative observation had produced a rich record of chimpanzee lives. The institute’s interest in technology included preserving that material and finding further insights within it. The archive had a purpose beyond storage: it could support continuing research and advocacy.

For MacLaren’s story, this is a revealing extension of the original business problem. The collection at VRX contained material made for commercial customers. Here, the collection held observations accumulated across generations of work. Both raised the question of how people could gain access to what had already been recorded.

Keeping a file is only the beginning of keeping it useful. The more a collection grows, the more its future depends on the people who can navigate it.

The founder’s chapter has dates

On February 28, 2023, Rob Chase succeeded MacLaren as MediaValet’s President and CEO. Chase had worked alongside him for eight years. At the transition, the company credited MacLaren’s leadership with taking the business from startup to nearly $15 million in annual recurring revenue and nearly 500 customers.

The company continued into another ownership chapter. On April 2, 2024, an affiliate of STG acquired MediaValet’s outstanding common shares for C$1.71 each. That transaction came after MacLaren’s CEO tenure. Founder and current chief executive are different jobs, and the chronology belongs in the story.

His earlier decisions remain visible in what the company does. He came to software through the daily demands of making and handling pictures. He chose a technical partner, pursued a problem beyond his original industry and eventually committed his attention to it.

The floating glasses strap makes a good beginning because it is so specific. Something valuable had become difficult to retrieve. MacLaren thought there might be a useful thing to make. Years later, among the photographs, he found another.