One would think that working in the volatile technology sector might prove a gut-wrenching roller-coaster ride, but John Masters, the visionary and booster behind the scenes in the Calgary tech sector, has taken it all in stride. In fact, he's having so much fun he doesn't want the ride to end.

While the tech sector has been on a wild ride in Calgary over the past decade, Masters has helped keep it on an even keel in overseeing the industry as chief executive of Calgary Technologies Inc. (CTI).

And, under Masters' direction, CTI has flourished and grown in its role of nurturing and promoting a tech industry with a growing footprint in a city dominated by the oilpatch.

To Masters, who joined CTI in 1994 and became CEO in 1998 with dot-com mania nearing its pinnacle and before the tech bubble burst, it has been anything but a turbulent ride. To him, it's just the best job in town.

Mike Sturk, Business Edge
Calgary Technologies Inc. CEO John Masters has experienced the dizzying highs and depressing lows of the industry.

1. Were you interested in high tech as a kid?

"No, I wasn't interested in tech. I was interested in being a kid - playing sports, playing golf and enjoying myself."

2. Where did you get your technology experience before joining Calgary Technologies Inc. (CTI) in 1994?

"I didn't start my career in technology. I landed a job in 1973 as an assistant to a Conservative member of Parliament, a backbencher from Moose Jaw, Sask. (Doug Neil). I dabbled there until about 1977 and then I joined a multinational technology company called Burroughs that later became Unisys. I then moved to Honeywell, where I spent 15 years. It was that job that eventually brought me to Calgary (as regional director of operations). My interests and strengths were more on the client, customer management and operations side. Given the space I'm in today, many people assume that I have a very strong technical background, and I don't. My particular strengths are more on the people management and client management side than on the technology management side."

3. Why did you leave Honeywell to join CTI (then the Calgary Research and Development Authority)?

"I'd reached a level in that organization where there didn't appear to be many other opportunities. I was looking at various technology companies for a sales and marketing management role, and this opportunity appeared in a newspaper ad. The organization was just beginning to grow and they didn't really know what they were looking for. My application, which was probably one of 300-plus applications, happened to arrive on somebody's desk near the end of the process. They had matched some of their requirements with some of my background experience, and it sort of fortuitously appeared to be a match. If I had put the application in earlier, I might not be here. One of the biggest ironies was that when I was going through my career transition phase, I had lots of time to develop the perfect resume, and the book says you should only have a two-page resumé and only identify what relevant experience you've had in the last 10 years.

The resumé writer said that my experience on Parliament Hill was not relevant. When I showed the resume to (late wife Elizabeth), she said, 'That (political experience) is part of who you are.' So I put it back in. When my resumé hit the desk here, one of the assets they were looking for was somebody who had some public service experience."

4. What was it like overseeing the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and the crash thereafter?

"What Calgary experienced was what every other major city in the world experienced in terms of the euphoria, the high market valuations, the multiplicity of public offerings with stock values going through the roof and there appeared to be no end to the rainbow. Opportunities and money were flowing and maybe it was similar to the 1980s when the price of oil was going to be $100. There was a lot of pent-up demand and lots of hype and lots of emotion in the marketplace. And that was great. But the organization (CTI) and our fundamentals never really changed. Our focus was to help startup technology companies, to get them off the ground and, whether it was a boom environment or a post-boom environment, we sort of stuck to our knitting. We didn't get overly zealous about where this worldwide phenomenon was going and we clearly knew that we were not at all in control of this supercharged technology global marketplace."

5. How has your role changed in serving the tech marketplace, compared to the tech boom days?

"As a result of the moderation in the post dot-com environment, we spend more time now actually trying to improve the investability of the business plan. We try to help our clients improve their business plan to make it more investor-ready because capital is much more risk averse and, given what everyone experienced during the dot-com phase, you've got to have a much more solid investable business plan than you did in the late 1990s. The difference now is that it's not a technology push environment, it's a market pull space. The technology is not the end-all, be-all. Your market application is much more important than your technology by itself."

6. What do you think was the biggest mistake technology companies made when the tech market was on fire?

"Everybody got caught in the frenzy of the high overvaluations in this global phenomenon and probably sold their position based on global markets and made gross estimates about the size of the market. And, more importantly, they were assuming that if they could get, say, one per cent of that marketplace, they would still be a $100-million-plus company. So it was not good market intelligence in terms of who would actually buy the product. It was a case of assuming that it's got to be good because it's technology and there must be a buyer for this technology."

7. How would you characterize the current state of the tech sector in Calgary?

"I would say it has a very strong foundation. What we see is that some of the bigger players have gotten smaller in the downsizing and rationalization in the global market. But our focus has not been on the big players, but on trying to develop indigenous startup companies within Calgary. What we find is that when some of the larger firms downsize, the people that have been working with those larger firms have a high interest in staying in Calgary. So they don't go off looking for another opportunity in another geographical area, although they're probably from somewhere else. They and their families have found the quality of life to be great in Calgary, and so they try and create opportunities to start up businesses and stay within the community.

"So the greatest thing about the Calgary technology sector is that, although it doesn't have some of the big-name players that maybe some other cities do in North America, it has a lot of small and medium-sized technology companies that give us a fairly strong foundation and a great degree of diversification."

8. How many people are currently employed in the technology sector in Calgary and how does that compare to five years ago?

"Our estimates on the technology sector is that we have over 3,000 companies and approximately 80,000 people employed in the technology sector here. That would represent about a compounded annual growth rate of approximately 12 to 14 per cent. We didn't fall as far as some other cities fell in terms of technology because we didn't have as many of the big companies. When the giants (companies) took some steps down (in terms of cutbacks), it was a hard fall. But for us in Calgary it wasn't as hard of a fall. Did we go through a downturn? Yes. But have we come through that downturn and grown? Unequivocally."

9. What is the market like now for tech startups?

"We're currently working with about 250 startups. Sometimes those startups are one-person companies and sometimes they're larger than that."

10. What's the biggest obstacle the technology startups face these days?

"Access to risk-tolerant capital. Money. It's availability of risk-tolerant capital. Most of these companies are in a pre-profit and pre-revenue stage. So they're looking to raise early-stage capital. This is usually not venture capital or institutional capital, but this is usually angel capital (from private interests) that is at the very early stage. Our value proposition is that we try to assist the startup companies to build a more investor-ready business plan. On the other side, we go to the investor and say, 'Instead of seeing a hundred opportunities and missing the one diamond in the rough, what you're going to see from us is less quantity and higher quality.' Our value proposition is to mature the business plan to make it more investor-ready. The public market still does not have a significant appetite for early-stage tech companies in Calgary. There are probably other investment opportunities with less risk that the public market would go after."

11. What facet of the Calgary tech sector has the most potential?

"I think one of our most solid bases in Calgary that continues to grow is in the wireless sector, and that's a result of the critical mass that was originally formed around companies like Novatel, Nortel, General Dynamics, Hughes and Raytheon. While most of those companies have come and gone, the human capital has stayed in the community, so we now see people starting up their own wireless companies. And wireless has been the fastest-growing sub-sector of the technology marketplace globally. So we're well positioned to take advantage of that global growth in the wireless sector."

12. Are you pleased with the growth of your organization and the progress it has made?

"We've certainly come a long way. In 1981 (the year CTI was established), all of the money to fund our organization came from the City of Calgary. Today, 10 per cent of our money comes from the city. We've grown from a little organization with one person to an organization with 20 people. Our revenues have grown tenfold over the last 10 years. We have a strong foundation and we're building incrementally. We're not trying to reinvent ourselves day in and day out. Our (annual) budget is in the order of $5 million. One of our biggest new opportunities is the transformation of University Research Park. We've just developed a vision for its transformation into the University Innovation Park, meaning that we want to create more of an innovation-park environment in concert with the university and transform the park into a much higher-density technology node."

13. What are you personally proudest of from your time with CTI?

"In 1998, without knowing about the coming dot-bomb environment, we went out and decided that we were going to double our footprint at our incubator. We had 60,000 sq. ft. and we said that we were going to go out and raise $7 million and build a new facility. We did that on time, under budget and raised $7 million. And from the day we opened the doors (of the 120,000-sq.-ft. Alastair Ross Technology Centre at University Research Park) on July 1, 2000, we have had 100-per-cent occupancy in our combined facility. That would be my No. 1 proudest achievement and the second would be the increased profile we've enjoyed in the community."

14. How would you describe your leadership style?

"Inclusive. A team player. I let my people do what they want to do. I'm not a control freak and I empower my people to do their jobs and then I get out of their way and let them do their jobs."

15. How many e-mails do you get a day?

"I can tell you, I've got 450 e-mails in my inbox right now. I probably average in excess of 100 e-mails a day. When my 84-year-old mother, who lives in Ontario and is a computer granny, sends me an e-mail and I don't respond, she phones me. I'll say, 'Mom, I get a hundred e-mails a day so sometimes I can't respond.' So now we've got this protocol where I tell her that I've gotten her e-mail. It's fun to be able to communicate with my mom utilizing the technology that all of us have access to now."

16. Do you think we rely too much on technology for communication at the expense of personal communication?

"I think that you can over-use and under-use anything, especially in technology. But I have a better form of communication with my mom in using the Internet than I would by letter writing or telephoning. So using the Internet as a medium to communicate with an 84-year-old mother in Ontario is more effective for our relationship than less effective. That's one side of it. The other side of it is if you start sending e-mails to somebody down the hall instead of getting up and having a chat with them. That's where it is not an effective utilization of communication. And, given you're not in a dialogue mode, some (e-mails) tend to get a little aggressive because you're not in an instant feedback situation, and that can be an ineffective use of technology to communicate. You've got to be sensitive of how it's used and when it's used and just having an e-mail relationship in a business-to-business environment I don't think is the end-all and be-all."

17. Do you plan to remain with CTI over the long term, or do you have other aspirations?

"I think that I'm in the best place I have ever been. I love the job. I love the people I work with, the team I inherited and the team I've built. I believe in the phrase about being comfortable in your own skin. You can afford to stretch that skin, and you should. But you still have to be comfortable. And if the suit fits, wear it. And, what I have is the best job in Calgary."

18. Who has had the greatest influence on your career?

"It was Bill Croft, who was the president of this organization for 15 years. He hired me, became my mentor and is still my mentor. Bill is an individual who takes small steps but knows the direction he's going in, has a plan and most importantly executes the plan. And at the same time he's a very humble individual. He's practical and action-oriented. You don't have to know everything to get the job done. Action and execution are of equal importance as the insight and intellect you have in solving the problem."

19. How has the passing of your wife Elizabeth in 2003 affected your life?

"My wife passed away of stomach cancer in May of 2003. She was diagnosed three years prior to that and we went through a very challenging time. I've learned a lot from that journey. I've learned a lot about who I am. I've learned a lot about valuing what I have. I learned that we all have challenges of some order of magnitude. I consider that I am a better person for having gone through that experience. I appreciate that in life we have very little control of outcomes and we have a modicum of influence. In Elizabeth's health challenges, I had no control of the end outcome. I had a modicum of influence over the care and love and support I could provide her with over those three years. Elizabeth was a very grounded person who had an immense care for mankind. She was a very down-to-earth, caring individual and she had a (strong) will to live and valued life. She, like Bill (Croft), kept me grounded in a very positive way sometimes when I thought I knew more than I really did. Her energy and optimism and her will to live were phenomenal."

20. What are some of your personal aspirations?

"I am 54 years old now and I don't see myself ever retiring. I see myself being engaged in some form of business activity for the next 20 years. I think that creates a healthy, energetic person. I get a lot out of being in this role and I can contribute something back to the community. Through CTI, we've been involved in a project working with Mustard Seed Calgary, the Calgary Drop-In Centre and the Salvation Army in assisting them to try to get technology to assist them in their operations. I got to see the difference these organizations make to individuals who face a lot more challenges than I have ever faced. And that comes back to some of the influences Elizabeth passed on to me - in terms of the message that it's not just all about business, but business has a responsibility to contribute back to the community. This organization was founded by the late Alastair Ross, who was in the oil and gas sector and had the foresight to say that we needed a more diversified economy. He spent thousands of hours helping get this organization off the ground and that was all as a volunteer giving back to the community. So I would want to continue to contribute to the community in the humanitarian and social space."

John Masters

* Title: President/CEO, Calgary Technologies Inc. (CTI).

* Born/raised/age: Ingersoll, Ont./54.

* Education: Carleton University (Ottawa), bachelor of arts, political science and public administration.

* Family: One son.

* Career: Prior to joining CTI as director of the INFOPORT program in 1984, Masters spent 15 years with Honeywell, where he was a regional director of Western Canada operations at the time of his departure. He has been CEO of CTI since 1988.

His career also includes a stint as a special assistant on Parliament Hill.

* Accolades: Masters has been a recipient of the Alberta E-Business Leadership Award.

* Favourite escape: Vacation home at Invermere, B.C.

* Pastimes: Hiking, cycling, downhill skiing, golf.

* Last book read: Here Be Dragons, Peter Newman.

Calgary Technologies Inc.

* Profile: CTI is Calgary's economic development agency for the advanced technology sector. The joint partnership of the City of Calgary, Calgary Chamber of Commerce and University of Calgary works with technology and life-sciences companies and entrepreneurs to develop and expand their operations in Calgary. The not-for-profit agency, formerly known as the Calgary Research and Development Authority, was established in 1981.

* Home base: CTI's showcase facility is the 120,000-sq.-ft. Alastair Ross Technology Centre at University Research Park.

* Stated mission: To diversify Calgary's economy by attracting, growing and developing research and knowledge-oriented organizations that produce science and technology-intensive products and services.

* Website: www.calgarytechnologies.com

* Address: 3553 31st St. N.W., Calgary, T2L 2K7.

* Phone/Fax: 403-284-6400/282-1238.

(Gyle Konotopetz can be reached at gyle@businessedge.ca)