The co-founder of the newest Canadian corporate superstar-in-waiting is the long, tall son of an Edmonton high school principal. Big Wayne Karpoff spits arcane facts faster than an AK-47 spits lead, and he’s so cranked up on adrenaline that he has trouble sleeping nights.

Karpoff glanced with vague longing at the fully programmable massage chair installed by his company, YottaYotta Inc., to allow its busy R&D techs a few moments of chill time.

Sadly, Karpoff’s too big to fit.

“Guess I’ll have to program it for my elongated form factor,” Karpoff said, wistfully gazing at the $8,000 US feel-good chair.

Al Popil, for Business Edge
Co-founder Wayne Karpoff says his company has to be on top of its game to go after the competition in a $20-billion market.

One of the nicest people you’ll meet in the shark-infested waters of Canadian business, Karpoff is in the midst of an adventure which occasionally threatens to overwhelm him.

“It feels,” he nodded, “a little surreal at times.”

The product in question sounds mundane: storage. But no, YottaYotta isn’t trying to steal market share from Calgary Cargo Containers.

This is data storage. Karpoff and his partner, YottaYotta CEO Steve Mattioli of Kirkland, Wash., are preparing to sell more data storage space than an average, non-Einsteinian brain can comprehend.

With the company still three months from achieving its goal of $100 million US raised in venture capital, the corporate customers are already lining up.

Karpoff did his best to illustrate the data explosion in straightforward English. “A U of California (Berkeley) study says, in the next two-and-a-half years more unique elements of data will be created than in the last 300,000 years,” he tossed off one of those facts.

E-mail, he reminds us, began streaking around the globe in easily chewable byte-size bits. Before you could blink, its volume expanded to kilobytes.

“Then somebody got the bright idea of putting graphics inside e-mail. Now it’s megabytes, and people are sending audio clips around,” he continued.

“Next thing is video, and we’re into tens and hundreds of gigabytes. Every two years, the nature of data increases by three orders of magnitude.”

Enter YottaYotta Inc., and its patent-protected NetStorage technology for the yottabyte, equivalent to one trillion terabytes.

How much is that? It’s one of those unknowable facts, like, say . . . the earth weighs 602 yottagrams. OK, prove it doesn’t.

It’s big. So are the eyes of this company, as Karpoff, Mattioli & Co. stalk the industry’s heaviest players.

They’re up to 138 employees (the 14th hired was a full-time patent writer), and keep hopping around Edmonton as the R&D end of the company strives to find enough space to house its people.

Things are cooking. Yet YottaYotta won’t have a general release product until later this year.

Karpoff is the former president of Myrias Computer Technologies, an Edmonton-based company formed in the late 1980s, and a pioneer in parallel super computers.

“Steve was president of Seek (storage) Systems. Seek had the vision that something revolutionary was required,” to keep up with the industry’s ballooning storage demands, Karpoff explained.

“They had the vision . . . but not the expertise.”

Which is where he came in. He brought a team of wizards with him from Myrias, and the result has been a compatible marriage between storage technology and parallel super-computer capacity. Karpoff borrowed a term from Harvard guru Clayton Christiansen to describe the product: “disruptive technology.”

That means, if your competitor has it, and you don’t . . . you’re outta business. “We’re going after something a little bigger than Edmonton’s used to,” Karpoff said.

Specifically, they’re going after the competition, which is a race of giants. Fattest target in the field is EMC Corp., which pulled in $8 billion US last year, is looking at $12 billion this year, and which Karpoff calls “our 800-pound gorilla.”

Other players include IBM, Hitachi and Hewlett Packard.

Karpoff keeps an eye on industry developments via a web of sources.

He gets 10 megabytes of e-mail daily, mostly corporate intelligence.

“It’s such a hot space. It’s very well tracked,” Karpoff said.

“The square we’re trying to dominate is a $20-billion US square. This is an untypical Edmonton kind of exercise.”

A proud home-town boy, Karpoff is betting his company will help to drag Edmonton into a higher technological league. He’s a major promoter of local talent and claims his town produces trained technical personnel of the highest calibre.