What happens to a rocket scientist whose rocket blows up, killing all aboard?

Sounds like a kid's riddle. But just such a tragedy actually occurred under Sofia Passova's watch in the early 1980s in the then Soviet Union. In the aftermath, along with tears and recriminations, she says there came the kernel of an idea that might have prevented the crash. But it only bloomed in another era and another country.

Then, Passova was in charge of computerized planning in a military lab where top-secret space and marine vehicles were designed and tested. Now she is president and chief scientist of Sofea Inc., a Toronto- and New York-based software development company she founded two years ago.

What happened between the crash of the rocket and the launch of Passova's company is about as inspirational a story as could ever be told about a Canadian entrepreneur.

Ken Kerr, Business Edge
Sofia Passova drew on her experiences as a developer of military space and marine vehicles in Russia to start Sofea Inc.

Today, according to venture capitalists who are eagerly backing the company, Sofea is headed toward major international success, while Passova herself is a shoe-in to become a legend in her field. Says one investor - Michael Diamond, president of M.P. Diamond and Associates Ltd. - "Dr. Passova sees things other people just don't see. She simultaneously thinks outside and inside the box and she's brilliant to boot."

The arc Passova would eventually travel began when she was a little girl in Leningrad. Recognizing an uncommon intelligence beneath a tangle of dark curls, her grandmother would often wake her up at night to give her pop quizzes. "She would ask me how much makes eight times seven or 15 times nine," Passova recalls, uttering the sentence in her idiosyncratic English.

Granny was right about little Sofia's intelligence, because she whipped through her school career. Particularly astounding was her aptitude for math, which catapulted her to national success in what she calls "the mathematical Olympic Games.”

After which she scored off the charts in her entrance exam for a top technical university.

Graduating with an electrical engineering degree, Passova landed a good job working for the major state military research institute, which developed control systems for rockets and submarines. The computer revolution was well under way by then, although she says acceptance of its advances didn't sit well with everyone in the then all-important Communist Party. "(This) was actually written in textbook: 'Cybernetics is prostitute of imperialism.'" Passova worked in the military lab for 15 years, advancing rung by rung until hitting the top, where she was in charge of 20,000 people. Better still, she says, was being among the best scientific minds in the country. But everything changed with the advent of perestroika and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

Things became "ugly and dangerous," she says, when Russian criminals began muscling in everywhere. Not only was there fear and wholesale firings in her field, but her husband Vlad's large construction company was similarly affected. Then, when criminals shot and killed their family doctor in the elevator of their apartment building, the couple began to think about leaving what was once again called St. Petersburg.

Nevertheless, while still working in her lab, Passova launched a small company of her own that she called Arcadia "because it means country of happiness.”

She hired a group of scientists who'd been kicked out of top positions and concentrated on developing her innovative theory about testing via simulated computer models.

When the crime rate became so bad that Passova was afraid to leave home, she and her husband and their then-teenage son Stan decided to start over in Canada. Because of Passova's credentials, which now included a double PhD, and because Arcadia had by then completed several contracts for Canadian-headquartered Union Gas, the family was whisked to the head of the immigration queue.

They arrived in Toronto in 1995 with high hopes, but little else. Then, in the all-too-familiar scenario of highly qualified foreign professionals whose talents are allowed to go to waste when they immigrate to Canada, they hit bottom.

At first, their only home was a shared motel room on Lakeshore Boulevard. Vlad found humble work as a labourer while Stan pumped gas. But the pre-eminent scientist in the family looked in vain for work for a year and a half.

Part of the problem was her lack of conversational English. Although she had been taught to read and write the language, she says the Soviet authorities deliberately omitted speaking lessons to prevent citizens from "being corrupted" by contact with visiting foreigners. So, while pounding the pavement in polyglot Toronto, Passova tackled the problem by chatting up everyone she encountered.

After 18 months of slammed doors, Passova finally landed some consulting work in the IT field. Then, partly because the combined income of the three Passovas was barely at subsistence level, but mostly because she wanted to help her fellow Russian immigrants, she started a computer training school.

In a tiny rented room with a few leased computers, she taught computer coding to her first eight students. All found related jobs within a few months. As word of mouth spread, newcomers were so keen to follow suit that Passova remembers finding them lined up at her door at five in the morning. Over the next seven years, she and her husband trained more than 700 new Canadians.

In 2003, Passova launched Sofea after perfecting and patenting the testing technology that now has so many business leaders so excited. Among Sofea's clients to date are CIBC, Canadian Tire and Bank of America.

What's driving their interest? It's partly the newly minted opportunity to correct what Passova says is an estimated 70-per-cent failure rate in North America of software and Internet-based application projects when they go into use - adding up to annual waste estimated at $100 million. Sofea's software also promises shortened time to market of new applications and a reduction in the cost of software development of 10 to 25 per cent.

In lay terms, what Passova's rocket-scientist brain produced is a program whose name - Profesy - precisely captures what it does - which is literally seeing into the future, says Doug Hewson, managing director of Sofea's principal investor, Ottawa-based Axis Capital Corp.

"In simplified language, what Profesy does is capture a customer's true business requirements in a sophisticated simulation," Hewson says. "That is then used to validate whether what's been designed really matches what's actually needed."

That makes Passova's technology the first-ever solution to a problem that has plagued computer testing since Day 1, adds another investor, Andrew Talpash, CEO of Toronto's viDesktop Inc. "No matter what business context you're talking about, there's always been a huge communications gap between the management people, whose job is to identify a particular need, and the IT people, who are assigned to meet that need.

"Profesy can almost read minds on both sides of that equation, so it links them by enabling real communication, which is a huge improvement," Talpash says. "That's why there is such tremendous potential for Sofea to become an international giant."

Just back from a conference in Los Angeles at which she lobbied for more computer outsourcing to be assigned to Canada, particularly in the testing field, Passova says she and her staff of 20 are more than ready for that eventuality.

Her merry countenance and the rollicking black curls that are still intact give little hint of the brain power that's wowing her growing legion of fans. But her expression darkens when she's asked whether her Profesy technology could have prevented the rocket explosion that obviously still haunts her.

Ever since it happened, Passova says she has thought repeatedly about how it might have been averted. A few thousand algorithms later, she made the quantum leap that led to the Profesy technology.

"What was real problem? Was that tests used for control systems was wrong, yeah? If you use low-quality testing, something terrible could happen."

(Terry Poulton can be reached at poulton@businessedge.ca)