Today, our company celebrates its 10th anniversary, having incorporated on August 14th, 2014.

I want to share a little bit about our journey and how we got to where we are today. As with many startups, our evolution throughout our formative years was anything but straightforward!

The early years - not an agency

From 2014 until the very end of 2016, our team mostly worked on an internal project - a social photo app called Copycat (subsequently rebranded to Verse). We raised some pre-seed capital to fund the development of the product, and from there we onboarded our very first developer and designer, team members 001 and 002; for the first time, I was no longer trying to build everything by myself.

At that time, I was still very much a software developer masquerading as an entrepreneur. Until mid-2015 I continued to hold on to my day job as a Software Architect at a Fortune 500 financial institution, where I had worked since 2010.

2016 was a busy year for us. We ran many events and campaigns at UBC in collaboration with several of their student and faculty associations. We filmed commercials, ran marketing campaigns, gave away prizes, and built B2B features for local businesses. Our 3-man development team (which included myself) did the best it could with limited resources and no experience in commercializing a new product; despite moderate user base growth and a monthly uptick in overall usage, our bank account was rapidly depleting and it soon became apparent that we wouldn’t be able to achieve takeoff before running out of funds.

I am, of course, leaving out a lot of detail. I went on multiple business trips to Asia - Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, multiple times each - spun up various side businesses in crypto, personal care products and other industries, and went through a lot of early stage business drama. But let’s stick to the main thread that spawned Convergence.

Towards the end of 2016, we were forced to make a decision: raise additional funds to keep the ship sailing, or pull the plug and pivot. I was so personally invested in the project that if left to my own devices, I would probably have raised more money and kept on going. Fortunately, my mentor advised me that it was wiser to appreciate that the market had spoken - and to pivot. I say fortunately, but let me tell you that at the time it felt like I was throwing away a couple years of my life; it was super tough. I am definitely understating how tough it was. I kind of hate looking at photos from those years because I can see how much effort I and the team put into something that ended up being shelved.

The pivot to professional services

In Q1 2017 we decided to become a professional services firm, and pivoted. As technologists - designers and software developers, specifically - we were all quite experienced, so it actually became a far more comfortable world for us. We were amateurs in business, not amateurs in our core disciplines; thinking of it this way, it's fair to say that we went back to doing what we actually knew how to do. With no funds left in the company, we went on the hunt for business - paying clients that were looking to engage a small team to build a software product.

It didn’t take long. Within 2 months - February 2017, to be exact - we had signed our first contract. In the healthcare sector, no less! Barely into the 5-figures, it wasn’t much - but it was something, our first dollar, and it meant everything to us. An hourly wage for team members 001 and 002 - though not for myself. That would have to wait until later.

By mid-2017, the projects and contracts started to get bigger. Mid 5-figures, and entering different industries. We were still a handful of contract based part-timers, sans office and without the trappings of a real company, but our portfolio was starting to grow, and it was becoming easier to convince prospective clients that we could execute on complex software builds.

2018 was a transformative year for us. Our very first 6-figure contracts started to arrive; several of them, in fact. At the beginning of that year, we sensed that our coffee shop days were over and that we needed to take the plunge into committing to fixed overhead: our first office.

Our first home

February 2018, my very first office. I’ll never forget those days; it felt like we had finally made it! Sure, it was in a dirty building in a sketchy neighborhood (Gastown, sorry not sorry), but it was our dirty office. Fun fact: our office tower, the Dominion Building, was, at the time of its completion in 1910, the highest building in the British Empire, until it was surpassed by the nearby Sun Tower - also in Gastown - which was completed in 1912.

Our first office could fit a half dozen staff, had green carpeting, no air conditioning, a single shared keyed bathroom for the entire floor, and the ground floor lobby was often filled with “interesting” folks that our staff and clients had to tiptoe past on their way up to our office. None of this mattered, though, because we now had a home.

By mid-2018, the honeymoon period had worn off.

It’s funny, in hindsight, how quickly the charm of having our first space faded. Our clients were becoming increasingly "corporate", and I was starting to feel ashamed when I invited prospective clients into our grungy little office. I vividly remember attempting to sell an engagement to a particular prospect at our office in July 2018 - a gentleman with an impressive corporate background - and watching him sweat profusely due to the sweltering heat in our non air conditioned office.

We did not end up getting the contract.

I recall this as being the breaking point for me personally, with respect to tolerating the Gastown office; if we were going to reach the next level and climb the corporate food chain, we needed to be in a better part of town.

Becoming a real company

In October 2018, we moved into our new space at 777 Hornby. A gorgeous, centrally-located corporate tower in the very center of Downtown Vancouver. Not the same suite as our 2024 one, but in the same building. We subleased a suite on the 19th floor from a certain multi-billion dollar resource company, and were fortunate enough to inherit an entire office’s worth of furniture.

This move was a slightly dangerous one for us - an all-in gamble that completely depleted our funds. To be honest, the lease was overkill for our startup - at that point we were only up to a half-dozen contractors - and funding the lease was entirely dependent on things going our way and attracting the business that we hoped to attract. We were punching above our weight class, and I was very grateful to our landlord for giving us the opportunity to eventually grab the title lease on that first 19th floor unit.

We achieved all of our goals, and more, in 2019. Our annual revenues hit 7-figures for the first time. I would call this year the year that Convergence officially transitioned into being a real company: our contractors all became salaried T4 full time employees (every last one of them), we introduced a comprehensive health care plan, and we built out many of the managerial, administrative and corporate processes that didn’t really exist up until that point.

Making a bet on AI

2019 also marked the beginning of our newest service practice: our Artificial Intelligence R&D division. Betting that AI/ML was soon going to be something that our clients would engage us to deliver, we onboarded our very first full time AI Engineer employee. This bet paid off, and this differentiation in the marketplace - Convergence as a leading AI R&D agency - ended up generating millions of dollars in AI-related client contracts in the years that followed. Our bet on AI was so all-in, in fact, that in 2019 we actually signed a new lease and opened up a second office on the same floor: Suite 1960!

Suite 1960 - which was funnily enough on the opposite side of the floor from our main office at Suite 1910, and so the two offices were not connected - was branded as Convergence AI Development Labs. We built out and wired an entire new office, commissioned a new sign, spun up a distinct online brand presence - the whole works.

By the end of 2019 we had grown to two separate offices and had 15 full time employees working between them. Our profile in Vancouver continued to grow, and times were good. I must have spent up to 60 hours a week working in those offices in 2019 - onboarding and managing clients, building up a management layer to run all facets of the business, and (literally) setting up every desk, running every cable, mounting every TV, building every PC, and obsessing over thousands of immaterial details on the 19th floor.

Around this time, we introduced the concept of Team Leads to our company; we had appointed a Development Lead - then our biggest team by headcount - a Design Lead, a Project Management Lead, and an AI Lead. Each Lead was tasked with building out a roadmap for internal skill growth in their division - a practice that continues to this day.

Throughout all of this, I had also built up a so-called “Team Japan” at Convergence; a 4-person team of native Japanese speakers, full time employees all, which I eventually flew to Tokyo, along with myself, in a lengthy 2019 exploration of opening up a 3rd office in Tokyo. It was - and continues to be, not-so-secretly - a dream of mine to operate a business that spans both sides of the Pacific. Japan and Canada just happen to be the places I love the most.

The world collapses

And then March 2020 happened. The world fell apart, and most of our plans collapsed with it. I think, dear reader, that you can imagine how stressful it was to have signed a title lease for a second piece of prime downtown commercial real estate - I'm referring to our AI Development Labs - only a few months before the pandemic started. Fun times!

Looking back on it, there is definitely a world in which Convergence died during the first year of Covid. Incoming private sector business was non-existent for a long while, and a significant portion of our active clients paused or terminated their projects. We were fortunate to have a small handful of solid, enduring clients that continued to fund their ventures, allowing us to survive until the recovery era - that, along with some assistance from the Government of Canada (for which we are grateful).

In the second half of 2020, we decided to consolidate our footprint into a single - and much larger - space on the 15th floor: Suite 1500. We signed the deal, and commenced yet another move - our 4th in as many years - towards the end of 2020.

From here, heading deeper into the pandemic era, we doubled down on our efforts in the public sector. While being awarded with government opportunities was always a nice-to-have for us, our passion was always in the private sector; in the covid era, these priorities were reversed. Public sector work became an island of stability for us, and while we continue to serve our corporate and startup clients, our government practice is here to stay and we take it very seriously.

Recovery, maturation and growth

I’m going to move along more quickly now.

2021 to present (2024) can be best described as a maturing of our capabilities, portfolio and processes; we’ve since worked with notable clients in public healthcare, the federal government, numerous provincial ministries, public educational institutions, and other public organizations that have a high barrier to entry.

We spun off our UX Research and Design practice as an independent studio and brand, Pixel Ramen, in 2022.

In 2023, with the covid era in the rear-view mirror (though not its economic aftereffects), we entered the world of community building and event organizing - after all, with such a central and well-appointed space to our name, it seemed a waste to not take full advantage of it, in the post-Covid world of semi-hybrid work. We’ve since hosted, managed and/or organized dozens of events in collaboration with organizations such as Vancouver Tech Journal, Vancouver Startup Week, AWS User Group Vancouver, Google Developer Groups, GetFresh Ventures, eFund, VANTEC Angel Network, and many others. Our event program has become so active, in fact, that the East-facing side of our floor has become a semi-permanent event venue, home to between 3 to 8 events per month!

We’ve also spun up our Advisors In Residence (AIR) program, the Spaces program, and our redesigned MVP program within the past 12 months. In the same timeframe, we’ve also added dedicated team members focusing on Public Sector relations, Business Development & Strategy and International Sales.

What's next?

In our 11th year, we aim to deepen our relationships with public institutions and larger businesses. On the startup side, with our three pillars now in place to support entrepreneurs - the Advisors In Residence, Spaces and MVP programs - I’m hoping to better position Convergence as an accelerator of sorts; a place for startups to get off the ground. We have all of the ingredients ready for such an evolution to our business model. This would not be an evolution that distracts our team from the work we do for our public and private sector clients; rather, this would be a separate and distinct practice that we have been contemplating for some time now.

Fun fact - the very first domain that we purchased for Convergence 10 years ago was ConvergenceAccelerators.com - a clear nod to our initial plans for the Convergence entity at that time!

It takes a village

We’ve hired well over 100 individuals over the past decade; employees, contractors, co-op students, advisors and consultants included. Having gone through multiple “generations” of staff over that time, most of those folks are working elsewhere now; I want to acknowledge that each and every one of these people have contributed to the foundation of our business and culture. It’s crazy to think of all the people that I and Convergence have onboarded over the years - throughout our many iterations and periods of figuring things out.

To all of those colleagues, past and present: thank you.

On the client side, each project is an opportunity to learn. The lessons never stop. I’ve put my signature on over one hundred client contracts, and each and every one of them have taught us something; client relations, accounting, costing strategy, development techniques, design practices, team structure, development operations, contract drafting - I can go on and on. Some lessons were expensive to learn, and some were dramatic at times.

These days, the lessons tend to be geared towards optimizing how we work with an increasingly complex client profile - subtleties that just aren’t obvious from our past experience. I expect this trend to continue. After all, if you’re not learning something from each agreement that you enter into, then you’re not really in the business of innovation, are you!

Many startups have engaged us over the years to turn their vision into a reality. We're proud of everything we've built - although our clients' business execution is typically entirely out of our hands. We've had clients - for whom we developed their foundational platform - get acquired for millions of dollars, complete multi-million dollar funding rounds, win industry awards, and become revenue generating businesses themselves. These successes - which I am by no means claiming as our own - are the crowning achievements of what we do. Of course, not all startups are successful. We've had startup clients cease operations, cancel their projects, fail to raise funding, or otherwise experience one of the Great Filter events of the startup world. These events, while unfortunate, are part of the business of servicing startup clients.

To all of those clients, past and present, that put their trust in our team, whether it was smooth sailing or otherwise: thank you.

Signing off

I’ve written too much, and promise to make this shorter for our next milestone write-up.

Here’s to another 10 years, and I’ll see you at the office!