Tobyn Sowden and the value of what’s already there

Tobyn Sowden bought a piggy bank for $5. It came with $11.27 inside. Growing up in Chemainus, on Vancouver Island, he resold garage-sale finds, sometimes repairing them before finding another buyer. He also kept different denominations in different pockets, a small piece of theatre that let him produce the amount he wanted a seller to see. The piggy bank was an unusually cooperative investment: the assets were literally rattling around inside it.

Years later, running Redbrick in Victoria, he returned to that purchase as a way of explaining acquisitions. A buyer can estimate what is inside a business, but the eventual value takes time to reveal itself. The arithmetic has grown more elaborate. The curiosity is familiar.

His other childhood enthusiasm has survived, too. On a trip with his future wife, Sowden insisted on visiting the original Legoland in Billund, Denmark. A workshop awarded him a beginner’s certificate. He requested the advanced challenge, completed it, and framed the resulting diploma in his office. Some people collect qualifications. Sowden went on holiday and negotiated an upgrade.

Eight months for a lock

Before Redbrick, there was an engineering placement and an inconvenient discovery about how Sowden liked to work. As a mechanical engineering student on a co-op term at a nuclear power plant, he helped develop a specialized lock for fuel basket operations. The approval process stretched the work across eight months. Meanwhile, he wrote scheduling software that removed hours of manual data entry. The smaller project gave him a more immediate sense of usefulness.

That experience sent him toward software. He graduated from the University of Victoria with a BSc in 2009, having studied computer science. The placement had done what a placement should do: let a student discover, through actual work, which direction to take.

It also left him with a view of junior colleagues that would later shape his company. Give people a consequential task early, and they can find out what they are capable of. In his own case, the work that changed his direction was a practical fix for the scheduling team. A career can turn on something considerably less glamorous than a grand invention.

A business built between lectures

In 2008, while still at university, Sowden started RedWillow Media, a search marketing business. He subsequently sold it to performance marketing company Neverblue and stayed there for a little more than a year. Entrepreneurship and employment overlapped; the next venture did not have to wait for a ceremonial starting gun.

In 2010, he launched Couvon, a daily-deals service focused on Victoria. It acquired a competitor, GOYAdeal, before Sowden sold Couvon to Island Daily Deals in 2014. The sequence already contained several activities that would become familiar: start something, buy something, combine operations, decide when to move on.

Redbrick emerged during that period, founded in 2011 to help desktop software businesses market and distribute their products. It brought users to other people’s software through advertising and earned money through performance-based arrangements. The company’s name came from its first office, a red-brick space in Victoria’s Market Square. Naming a technology business after the walls is refreshingly economical. The place would matter more than the colour.

When the useful tool becomes the product

Running a distribution business taught Sowden something about the limits of a successful model. Customer acquisition could fluctuate, making revenue hard to predict. By 2016, he was turning Redbrick’s internal technology into DeskMetrics, a desktop software analytics service. A tool originally used to run the business could become a business itself.

The same practical instinct helped produce Shift. It addressed a problem inside Redbrick: managing multiple email accounts. In an early conversation with interviewer Nathan Latka, Sowden described building it partly to demonstrate Redbrick’s analytics technology. People wanted the application in its own right. A demonstration had acquired customers and, with them, a reason to keep developing.

Shift’s subsequent direction shows how far an internal fix can travel. A July 2025 release introduced a browser interface with drag-and-drop layout customization, movable controls, and separate Spaces for different parts of a user’s life. Templates provided starting points. Redbrick’s shared team contributed design, copywriting, and project management while Shift’s team worked on the product. The original nuisance of juggling accounts had become a broader question about how people arrange their working day.

The work that happens after the handshake

Sowden eventually reorganized Redbrick around a portfolio of businesses. The parent provides shared finance, People & Culture, marketing, and creative resources; the operating companies develop their products. His present leadership group includes CMO Marco Pimentel, Chief People Officer Christine Tatham, COO Rory Capern, and CFO Kevin Dam. Buying a company brings a team and its habits into the arrangement. The organizational work begins before anyone gets to admire the combined revenue.

Leadpages joined in March 2020. Delivra followed at the end of 2021. Animoto, the video creation platform, arrived in August 2023. These purchases assembled tools serving different parts of an entrepreneur’s working life: generating leads, communicating by email, and producing video. Redbrick announced that the Animoto transaction brought it to $100 million in annualized revenue and nearly 200 team members.

In a 2023 interview, Sowden set out five-year ambitions of 10 portfolio companies, 500 employees, and $250 million in annual revenue. Those were goals. His advice to his earlier self was shorter: “be patient.” The tension is familiar to anyone who has run a business. A long-range plan still has to survive the next ordinary Tuesday.

“be patient”

Tobyn Sowden’s advice to his earlier self, 2023

Email, audiences, and another return to publishing

Paved joined Redbrick in March 2025. At acquisition, its newsletter advertising platform connected more than 3,000 publishers with advertisers and a combined subscriber base of 253 million. The number describes the network’s newsletter subscriptions, rather than a count of unique people. What Sowden bought was a way to match advertising with audiences that publishers had already gathered.

The following month, Redbrick acquired Quartz and The Inventory from G/O Media. It was another entry into publishing, an area Redbrick had previously explored through Assembly. The company’s own history records Assembly’s sale to St. Joseph Communications in 2022. Sowden’s career has room for building an operation, selling it, and returning to the same industry through a different door.

The connection between software and publishing is fairly concrete here. A publication needs readers; a newsletter needs advertising; a small company needs ways to reach customers. In his 2023 marketing interview, Sowden argued that AI could reduce the effort needed to make professional content, while businesses still had to supply their own creative judgement and knowledge of their brands. The tools can do more. Someone still needs to decide what is worth saying.

Give the new person something real to do

Sowden has written publicly about hiring co-op students as colleagues with useful work to deliver. His phrase for the early expectation is “one week to value.” Students should contribute to a real project or commit code during their first week, rather than spend a term on work destined to be discarded. The advice comes with the memory of his own placement: an employer helps determine whether a student leaves excited about the field.

By June 2026, Redbrick reported having hosted more than 120 co-op students, including 19 in 2025, and hiring nearly 40 percent of them after graduation into part-time or full-time roles. That creates a practical route from university to employment in Victoria. A student can test a profession, and an employer can see how the person works before making a longer commitment.

The effort extends beyond recruiting. Redbrick’s 2026 employer retrospective describes giving leaders in acquired companies greater responsibility while keeping a shared foundation for employee experience. Teams retain their differences. The parent has to make those differences workable. It is a less picturesque part of acquisition than the handshake, but it is where people discover what the deal means for their daily lives.

A different sort of balance sheet

In 2024, Sowden received the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Pacific Overall Award. In March 2026, VIATEC named him the recipient of its Colin Lennox Award for Technology Champion. The latter recognized a record that included more than 35 companies launched or acquired and over $1.3 million in early-stage investment in Victoria startups. It also pointed to his support for Power To Be, Our Place, TEDxVictoria, and university initiatives.

The awards describe two connected aspects of the career: the growth of businesses and what that growth makes possible nearby. Redbrick became a Certified B Corporation in 2024, formalizing social and environmental responsibilities alongside commercial ones. Certification introduces assessment and accountability into ambitions that might otherwise remain a statement of intent.

In February 2026, Sowden signed Redbrick’s commitment to the Synergy Climate Action Partner Program. It calls for annual emissions assessments, identifying reduction opportunities, taking feasible action, and communicating progress publicly. These are commitments to measure and improve, with the work continuing over time. For a founder accustomed to tracking customer acquisition and product use, the additional measures expand the questions the business asks about its operations.

The next project has a street address

On June 22, 2026, Redbrick announced its forthcoming proposal for Westholme, a hotel at Government Street and Pandora Avenue, in collaboration with local developer Aryze. The site is a few blocks from Sowden’s first office and close to Redbrick’s current headquarters. The project was in preliminary development. Its announcement described ambitions for visitor accommodation and spaces that would also serve people living in Victoria.

The original Westholme Hotel opened in 1911. Later known as the Century Inn, the property occupies a corner with a history that predates every software business in Redbrick’s portfolio. Redbrick purchased the site and is preparing a hotel proposal. It intends a lasting presence in the city as an operator and employer. For now, the future tense matters: the hotel is a project taking shape.

On his personal website, Sowden describes enjoying travel with his wife, Katrina, and their three sons. His stated ambition for Redbrick is to keep growing the team and work with people whose company he enjoys. The hotel proposal brings another kind of gathering place into that picture. After years of arranging businesses around shared resources, he is considering what an existing corner could offer its neighbours. The question still begins with looking at what is there.