Kevin Bache and the Distance Between Code and Pyrotechnics

Kevin Bache had reached the point in his working life where he could complain about the punctuality of pyrotechnics. The software developer and Phoenix co-founder was helping make a Super Bowl commercial. There was a European location, an actor playing a general and a production schedule with rather more moving parts than a website deployment. One sentence he recalled saying deserves its own place on a founder’s résumé: “Pyrotechnics was supposed to be on set an hour ago!”

The pleasure of the anecdote is its specificity. A company can announce a brand campaign in language that makes everybody involved sound like a committee. Bache remembered the strange new sentences his job had given him permission to say. Here was a product person discovering that the distance between writing software and directing a large advertising project could be measured, at least partly, in overdue explosives.

Phoenix made its television debut during the 2024 Super Bowl. For Bache, who shares the CEO role with co-founder Gavin Thompson, the broadcast put a conspicuously public face on years of building. His career had already taken him through design, development and an earlier venture called Medistream. The commercial brought those interests into the same frame. Making something work and making someone notice it had become parts of the same assignment.

A résumé with more than one language

Bache describes himself as a product-focused CEO. His public professional introduction puts software development and design beside advertising, with more than a decade of experience across those disciplines. That combination helps explain the work he has chosen. A developer asks how a system behaves. A designer asks how a person encounters it. An advertiser asks whether anyone will stop long enough to care.

An older personal profile places him at Gamewear International and lists Carleton University. It is an unadorned little document, a reminder that careers acquire their tidy explanations later. The present-day founder’s professional links include GitHub as well as LinkedIn. There is a practical continuity here: the person talking about brands also leaves a route to the code.

Thompson brings his own development history, including work at MetaLab, TouchBistro and Apply Digital. Their partnership therefore begins with shared technical experience. Both founders know the business of turning a proposed product into something people can actually use. In an industry fond of dividing founders into the person who builds and the person who sells, Phoenix’s pairing is less conveniently arranged.

Before the broadcast, a board game

In November 2015, Bache and Ben Wong submitted Hack Mancala to the Br/eak Poverty Hackathon. Their idea was to teach game development through mancala, a game simple enough to explain without requiring an elaborate fictional universe. The project’s public code links to Bache’s GitHub account. Long before the television production, there was a small teaching experiment built with AngularJS, Node.js, HTML and CSS.

The team’s account of the project is refreshingly interested in the problem of explanation. They had struggled to choose a coding example that would be familiar, understandable and entertaining. Once they settled on mancala, the next problem was deciding how much customization to allow. A lesson can become so flexible that the beginner loses the thread. A deadline has a useful way of settling such philosophical questions.

The mobile component remained unfinished when the submission deadline arrived. The team planned to complete it afterward. That modest admission gives the project texture: an actual prototype, with choices made under pressure, rather than a retrospective claim that everything had gone according to plan. It also offers an early glimpse of Bache working on the relationship between an interface and the person trying to understand it.

The earlier pitch circuit

By 2017, Bache was taking another venture, Medistream, through the startup circuit. At a preliminary Seneca-COEP pitch competition in Markham that May, he was among four entrepreneurs who won a paid trip to India. Seneca’s subsequent account records their participation in a week-long competition involving the College of Engineering Pune. The audience had changed from hackathon judges to an international group of innovators and investors.

The distinction between the preliminary result and the later competition matters. Bache earned the opportunity to travel and pitch; the eventual competition’s named winners were other entrepreneurs. His own milestone stands perfectly well on its actual terms. He had built something that took him beyond a local room and into a different commercial setting, with a new set of people to persuade.

Medistream next appears in the Canadian Film Centre’s announcement of IDEABOOST’s eighth accelerator cohort in 2019, with Bache identified as its founder. The venture delivered curated television content into waiting rooms. That placed it at the intersection of software, screens and audience attention. His later interest in the craft of a commercial becomes less surprising when this earlier chapter is restored to the story.

A small company books a large stage

Phoenix joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch. Bache and Thompson had arrived with experience in building products and finding audiences; the accelerator added another setting in which to develop the company. Toronto remained its base. There is a particular rhythm to this career: projects, pitches, cohorts, then a business increasingly visible outside startup circles.

The 2024 advertising debut made that visibility tangible. Bache’s recollection of the production included nerves about whether the company had taken on too much. The attraction of the story lies in the gap between an organization’s internal scale and its external ambition. A broadcast does not adjust its expectations to the size of the team buying the airtime. The finished film has to make sense on its own.

Arrivals + Departures helped Phoenix make that public introduction. By February 2025, the partnership had produced another Super Bowl campaign: a 30-second television spot, supported by shorter executions and a plan to run across sports programming. Repetition gave the relationship a different meaning. The first appearance could be treated as an arrival. The next required a recognizable voice that could survive another outing.

The 2024 film also came with a working division of responsibilities. Arrivals + Departures’ media team handled the television buy, while Phoenix’s own team took on performance marketing and social amplification. Rodrigo Garcia Saiz directed, with Tudor Panduru as director of photography and FRANK Content producing. For a founder accustomed to making software, the credits map another kind of build: many specialists, a shared result and work that needs to hold together when it finally reaches the audience. Bache’s production anecdotes sit inside that larger collaboration.

“Our partnership with Arrivals + Departures has been instrumental in shaping our brand’s voice and driving our growth story.”

Kevin Bache, February 2025

The money arrives with people attached

In March 2025, Phoenix announced CA$50 million in financing. The package combined equity led by Valspring Capital, participation from existing backer Y Combinator and venture debt from CIBC Innovation Banking. The composition deserves to travel with the number. Calling the whole sum an equity investment would flatten a financing arrangement with distinct parts.

Bache’s announcement spent time on choosing partners. He singled out Yumin Choi and Amanda Zajac’s experience and described finding investors whose outlook matched the company’s. Both joined Phoenix’s board as part of the transaction. A funding announcement can look like an abstract vote of confidence. At board level, it also changes who sits in the room when the next consequential decision needs to be made.

His stated plans included expanding the team. That is a quieter prospect than a national broadcast, but it changes a founder’s work just as thoroughly. Hiring introduces more people who need a clear understanding of the product, the business and the standards expected of them. The old questions about making something understandable return, this time inside the organization.

Sharper, with fewer detours

By 2026, another piece of Bache’s work was visible in Phoenix’s rebrand and website redesign with Otherhalf Studio. Designer Jaz Fenton described the founders arriving with a clear view of the next version of the brand. The work covered the wordmark, a submark, typography, color and the website. The ambition was coherence across the things a customer might encounter.

Fenton reported a five percent increase in bookings and a ten percent reduction in average time on site after launch. Those are the designer’s reported results. Read together, they suggest a useful design ambition: let people complete what they came to do with fewer detours. Time spent on a website can be flattering to its owner and inconvenient to its visitor. The numbers ask which person the design is meant to please.

There is a pleasing return here to the mancala prototype. In 2015, the challenge was choosing the right amount of complexity for a beginner. A decade later, the setting was a company website, with a visual identity and commercial expectations attached. The scale had changed. The practical question remained recognizable: how much work are you asking the person on the other side of the screen to do?

Bache’s career gives that question several forms: code, a pitch, a screen in a waiting room, a television commercial, a redesigned website. The public moments attract attention. The quieter decisions determine what happens after it arrives. Somewhere between those two responsibilities sits a co-CEO who has learned to discuss both interfaces and pyrotechnics. One suspects the interfaces are easier to schedule.