Charles Plant

Worth knowing

Charles has sat in nearly every seat a growing technology company needs filled: co-founder four times over, board chair four times, CFO of more than a dozen emerging companies, with earlier years in investment banking, venture capital and corporate banking. He has also measured, company by company, what separates Canadian firms that scale from those that stall, and he argues the gap is marketing and sales.

Story

Charles co-founded Synamics and ran it as CEO for 15 years, selling mass calling platforms to telcos. In 2016 he took that operating experience to the Impact Centre at the University of Toronto and began the research that became The Narwhal Project, a running study of Canada's innovation economy and the firms inside it. He has since taught undergraduates at the Faculty of Arts and Science and written on Canada's productivity problem for the C.D. Howe Institute and the Globe and Mail. Today he is back on the operating side as co-CEO of ExactBlue Technologies, where nanotechnology is used to detect water contamination quickly, and he chairs the board and serves as CFO at Steadiwear, the Toronto company making gloves that reduce hand tremors.

Highlights

• Founder, The Narwhal Project, tracking the scaling of Canadian tech firms (2016)
• Co-founder and CEO, Synamics, telecom software, 15 years
• Senior Fellow, Impact Centre, University of Toronto
• Board Chair and CFO, Steadiwear Inc., Toronto (2020-present)
• Author, "Triggers and Barriers: A Customer Perspective on Innovation" (2018)