September 2020 – We are excited to welcome Vancouver BC-based Matidor as a new member of NEBC! Meet Co-Founder Sean Huang and learn about Matidor below.
What is your educational background? I graduated from the University of British Columbia with an undergraduate degree in chemistry. I am currently enrolled at Smith School of Business at Queen’s University working on a master’s degree in management innovation & entrepreneurship.
What drew you to working in the environmental sector? I respect this industry a lot and I believe all the professionals in this industry have a diligent role in keeping the environment intact which is important in ensuring the safety and health of not just our generation but our future generation as well.
In one word, describe yourself. Persistent.
How do you balance your career and family? This is a hard question as I believe finding balance is a very subjective thing, as an entrepreneur, it is hard not to blend the lines between work and personal but throughout my years I have been honing this by dedicating time off work to read books, spend time away from my phone, and do more outdoor activities such as camping or hiking to wind down.
What’s your favorite place to visit in the Northwest? My favorite place to visit would be Portland since it has a more rustic and laid-back vibe to it.
What are your interests outside of work? Outside of work I like to take part in activities that really challenges my intellect such as board games like “Go” which is an ancient and complex game involving capturing more territories than your opponent and in the process, it shows a lot about a person’s business and personal outlook on life. This game has deep roots from ancient China, Japan, and Korea with many professional players around the world. I also do a lot of running, hiking, and biking when the weather is nice.
What’s one interesting fact about you that most people don’t know? I have worked in China for a while with my first venture in Shanghai. It was an interesting experience since it was such a fast-paced environment and you get to see a lot of new and innovative ways on how people lived. Mobile payment was a big thing in China before it was popular anywhere else in the world and the convenience of transportation and catering was something that I feel was lacking here in North America.
What companies do you admire? And why? I admire Tesla and SpaceX a lot, peeling back from this I personally respect Elon Musk on many different levels from his persistence to his work ethics and his vision for the future has inspired me to think outside the box.
What’s the best life advice you have been given? Enjoy the process and not the results, I think being an entrepreneur you have to enjoy the actual ups and downs of starting a business and embracing failure rather than focusing on the end result.
What are three words to describe your company? A map-based collaboration platform.
What drove you to start Maditor? I was finishing up with my first startup in the mobile virtual reality space after landing the company in Shanghai through a cross border accelerator program and decided to come back to Vancouver to pursue my next venture. I had known my business partner, Vincent Lam, for a while, and he came to me with this idea to help better manage location-based projects for the environmental sector using an intuitive map-based platform that is outside the conventional GIS tool. I took up the opportunity to work with Vincent as I believed in his vision and at the time it was a problem in the market where projects were still being managed using spreadsheets and archaic legacy software.
What sets Matidor apart from others in the environmental sector? Working with environmental consultants, operators, and project managers it has been a recurring problem where sharing data is cumbersome and still, for many companies, managing field projects with a lot of moving parts is a challenge. The process of accessing tabular and spatial information requires too many steps and involves too many people, making it frustrating, slow, and costly. Matidor’s map-based interface uniquely meets the needs of field companies: tasks and information relating to a physical location can be readily seen and understood by both technical and business audiences due to this interface. With fewer people and less time tied up distributing information, Matidor powers more informed decision-making reduces project risk, increases efficiency, and makes every day more productive and successful.
What has been your favorite project at Matidor so far? Currently, we are partnering up with several technology partners and data providers to build a pandemic and disaster monitoring platform. Our unique expertise in geospatial and mapping has garnered interest to be included as a key component in making sure this platform allows authorities to better coordinate and share the most up-to-date data regarding potential hazards. Unfortunately, we cannot disclose the partnership in detail due to the ongoing nature of the project but will soon announce publicly once the platform is live so stay tuned!
What is on your wish list for the next 5 years for the industry? My wish for this industry in the next five years would be digitalizing a lot of the current workflow and project collaboration.