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Kim Koraca Is Teaching Real Estate AI to Notice What Humans Miss
After two decades marketing real estate software, Kim Koraca has arrived at a practical theory of AI: the useful kind should return attention to people, not demand more of it.
Noémie Julien and the Quiet Work of Making Canada Legible
Before a global company chooses Canada, someone has to turn policy, people and place into a story that travels. Noémie Julien's career shows how that work moves from the back room to the world stage.
Rebecca Pinkus and the quiet architecture of quality
Inside regulated manufacturing, trust is built long before a product reaches the shelf. Rebecca Pinkus works in that consequential middle ground, where suppliers, systems and standards have to agree.
John Swettenham Makes Big Institutions Feel Personal
From parcels to dinosaurs to a $500 million hospital campaign, the Ottawa executive has spent a career translating institutional scale into reasons for people to care.
Natalie Rumscheidt Knows a Familiar Product Can Still Surprise You
From Olympic operations to orchestra halls and the Canadian egg aisle, Natalie Rumscheidt has built a career around a deceptively hard assignment: making familiar things feel worth noticing again.
Sergii Gudkov Keeps Asking the Question Before the Framework
Across software, email and payments, Sergii Gudkov has built a career around a stubborn idea: frameworks help, but judgment ships. His recent writing turns product management into a practical study of trust, money and the questions teams avoid.
Tobi Lutke
Tobias 'Tobi' Lütke is the German-Canadian co-founder and CEO of Shopify, one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms. Born in 1980 in Koblenz, Germany, he received a computer at age six and left school after 10th grade to complete a programming apprenticeship, never attending university. After emigrating to Canada in 2003, he built an online snowboard shop called Snowdevil and — finding every existing e-commerce platform inadequate — coded his own solution in Ruby on Rails in two months. That solution became Shopify, which he launched as a standalone product in 2006. Shopify went public in 2015, and as of 2025 processes over $1.6 trillion in cumulative gross merchandise volume for millions of merchants across 175+ countries, commanding over 14% of the US e-commerce market. Lutke is known for his radical candor, his open-source roots, and his unusual interests for a tech CEO: competitive racing driver, avid skier, and serious gamer who credits strategy games with shaping his business thinking. His April 2025 internal memo mandating AI proficiency as a baseline expectation became one of the most widely-discussed corporate AI policy statements of the year.
Xe Iaso
Xe Iaso is a technical educator, open source founder, conference speaker, Twitch streamer, and VTuber based in Ottawa, Canada. The CEO of Techaro and creator of Anubis - the open-source anti-AI-scraper tool now protecting GNOME, FFmpeg, Linux kernel archives, and UNESCO - Xe built a cult following of 400+ blog posts that mix deep systems engineering with irreverent philosophy. Known for pioneering developer relations teams at Tailscale and Fly.io, and for coining their own title 'Archmage of Infrastructure,' Xe is the rare technologist who turned shitposting into a career strategy and made it work.