Their destinations may differ, but they all began at the same place. A look at alumni stories of success that started at Ivey.
Tell us a little bit about yourself
I grew up in Simcoe, Ontario, a historic town of about 15,000 near Lake Erie and Port Dover. As a young teen, my family moved to a horse ranch between Simcoe and Delhi, then tobacco country, and I rode a bus an hour to high school in Brantford. Nearly everyone I knew was tied to farming. I studied political science at Western University, finishing my degree from Japan, and spent years in Japan and Taiwan before building a career in marketing, media, and technology across Asia. I completed the Ivey EMBA in 2013. Today I live in Jakarta, Indonesia, with my Indonesian wife, Siska, to whom I have been married for 18 years, and our sons Justin, 16, who loves building rockets, and Liam, 6, who loves golf. I am the founder and CEO of ChatBar AI and Managing Director of TWOMC Digital.
What led you to your career and how has it evolved over time?
I planned a year in Japan for overseas experience before returning for graduate school. I never really went home. Asia gave me, as a junior team member, responsibilities I would never have touched in Canada, from writing communications copy to representing the company with clients. I learned some Japanese, carried shrines in matsuri festivals, and even entered a sumo tournament. After a year, I moved to Taiwan, where I ran a small video production house that helped pioneer out-of-home formats for the first large LED displays in malls. That led to Cocktail Cool, a marketing consultancy helping premium spirits brands, mostly Diageo, reach Taiwanese and Chinese consumers. Cocktail Cool ran events and promotions, and we paired them with video production to create DVDs featuring professional mixologists and a bartender textbook, which helped spread cocktail culture when pro bartenders were scarce.
Who inspired you?
For management, my father. He was an executive at Stelco, Canada's second-biggest steel company, and something of a legend because he did not just go to war with the United Steelworkers every four years at the bargaining table. He kept a friendly relationship with their leadership all year, often over breakfast, listening to their issues, so by the time bargaining started, he already understood what they wanted. I took from that a lesson I still use: when you negotiate or disagree with someone, be a good listener first. He and my mother also loved do-it-yourself projects, whether it was renovations or building small aeroplanes in his shop. It sometimes looked like chaos, but I learned you can get almost anything done if you have the vision, the plan, and are willing to see it through and learn along the way.
How did Ivey play a role?
I already had about 10 years of management experience overseas when I married and started my family, and TWOMC was really my indie consulting brand at that time, working across industries from a media conglomerate in Jakarta to a management training company in Toronto. After I graduated from the Ivey EMBA, I took a director role at Burson-Marsteller in Jakarta. That experience showed me a real gap in the market and pushed me to get serious about TWOMC, which became TWOMC Digital. More recently, about two years ago, I helped start ChatBar AI.
Why did you choose the EMBA program specifically?
I self-funded my graduate school, so I needed to keep working while I studied, and the EMBA made perfect sense. My wife and I researched options carefully. As a Western graduate, I figured I might end up at Rotman or another school, but Ivey had a great reputation, and I had met several graduates in Asia who had done their EMBA at Ivey’s Hong Kong campus. They were impressive. I ultimately studied at the London campus.
What personal or professional accomplishment are you most proud of?
I am proud of TWOMC Digital. Among many global clients, we worked with Telstra, Telkom, and the Singapore International School Group, helping it grow enrolment during the pandemic. We leaned toward high-tech, from VR for Shell Singapore to anti-terror work for the Indonesian Air Force Special Forces. Our last project for Shell Singapore put their downstream energy operations on a 3D hologram table to manage turnarounds (plant shutdowns), which can often cause multi-million-dollar costs if the plant needs to be shut down for a few extra hours. The company loved it, but the engineers did not know how to use it, so they did not. At a company retreat in Canada, we realized an AI retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tool could fix that, and that the same solution could serve any business with a website, which is most of them. That became ChatBar AI, my proudest contribution, built with great partners and a scrappy team.
What do you like to do when you are not working?
I read a lot, usually alternating between historical fiction and tech every other month. I also write, and despite everything I have built, I still think of myself as a writer first. I do not use AI for emails or anything important, because writing is a craft, and if you stop practising a craft, you lose it. Currently, I'm really enjoying sharing our dev team's take in our LinkedIn newsletter: The AI Arms Race.
What might someone be surprised to know about you?
I learned to fly a plane before I learned to drive a car, because my dad had his private pilot's licence and took me up in a Cessna 172 every weekend. As a farm boy, I have driven almost every piece of heavy equipment there is, and I paid for my undergraduate education by working in heavy industry factories, so I still love the science of production lines. I also produced and directed an indie film, BoyBrand, a Spinal Tap-style satire of a fictional boy band (boy bands kind of annoy me, so I wrote it with a friend). I have a bartending textbook you can still buy on Amazon, and a novel based on some crazy things I experienced in Taiwan. Stay tuned; I’m working on another film project about global migration in my spare time.
What is your favourite memory from your time at Ivey?
My strongest memories are the ones that shaped my career. Derrick Neufeld's breakdown of failed ERP and CRM software case studies helped me dodge more than a few bullets later on. Murray Bryant's view that a manageable amount of pressure on company leadership is a good thing has stuck with me, and almost every professor had gems to share. I also loved the Socratic method. I thrived in that setting and sometimes wish my whole education had been taught that way.
What is the most important takeaway from your Ivey experience?
When a development or software challenge lands on my desk, I immediately look for a project management solution rather than throwing manpower at it. The Mythical Man-Month still sticks with me: the more people, the more management challenges. Jim Collins' line about getting the right people in the right seats on the bus is great, but Ivey gave me the context for how to actually accomplish that, and for understanding that it is never finished. Things change, and you are always adapting.
Are you still connected to the School in any way?
Yes. I stay in touch with friends from the EMBA class of 2013 and share ideas with professors on LinkedIn. When ChatBar AI was ready, Derrick Neufeld, my information systems professor, was the first person I contacted for his take. I knew he would accept zero hype and look for real value, as he does not suffer fools or vapourware. He introduced me to the team at Ivey Publishing, and from there the work had to stand on its own merits. Today Ivey Publishing uses a ChatBar AI-powered search to help people explore its library of more than 170,000 business cases: iveypublishing.ca/s/ai-search. It is a Canadian AI story, hosted in Canada, and because ChatBar AI works with any language model, Ivey can switch to an open-source or custom model whenever it chooses.
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