Johann Starke’s professional journey could be titled From the Rust Belt to the City of Glass.
The CEO of Vancouver digital advertising agency FCV Interactive founded the company as False Creek Ventures 10 years ago at a kitchen table in a Yaletown apartment. That, he is fond of saying, was before the invention of the iPhone, which revolutionized digital advertising.
Now, after 10 iterations of the world’s leading multimedia device, FCV’s headquarters are located closer to Coal Harbour than to False Creek, and its corporate footprint stretches all the way to the East Coast.
Not bad for a kid from Youngstown, Ohio, who says his family had to struggle to make ends meet as heavy industry declined.
“Northeastern Ohio is definitely the Rust Belt and a part of the U.S. where sometimes the people that live there feel that luck has passed them by,” the 42-year-old Starke said. “The unemployment rate was definitely in the double digits after the collapse of the steel industry. There just weren’t a lot of opportunities for young people.”
He had a glimpse of the future while in Grade 4, when his next-door neighbour, a high school computer science teacher, taught him how to use a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A personal computer.
“That really piqued my interest in computer science and programming,” he said.
Almost a decade later, Starke fulfilled a dream to go west and attend the University of Colorado Boulder to earn a bachelor of commerce degree in finance and computer information systems. That led to jobs in Denver at Ernst & Young and then Accenture. In 1999, he came to Vancouver to work for Sierra Systems as part of a federal pilot program clearing the way for foreign software professionals to work in Canada.
“Other than knowing Canada was a beautiful country and coming here on vacation, I was new to Canada, so I used to grab a cup of coffee every day at the corner of Yew and Cornwall’s Starbucks, and every day I would buy the Globe and Mail or Vancouver Sun and read the newspaper before I hopped on the bus to head down to work,” Starke said. “I did that for six months straight. It was informative. I learned about Canada, about how things are spelled differently, the culture and the province.”
That lasted a year before he returned to the U.S. for a job in Seattle at Amdocs, a company handling digital rights management for online music and micropayment for newspaper websites. The boom-and-bust nature of the business led to layoffs. The next four years, he said, were pivotal. In his senior business development role at the burgeoning Expedia, Starke oversaw the private-label side of the business, such as the booking websites of Starwood Hotels and WestJet, before moving to Expedia’s destination activities team.
“Working with a group of people that were really bright, building something that would transform the travel sector, one that would survive the dot-com bust – it really transformed an entire industry. That was an experience that was second to none.”
After media and Internet company IAC acquired Expedia from Microsoft, Starke decided to start his own travel and technology consulting business in Vancouver, just in time for the Canadian Tourism Commission to move to the West Coast in 2005.
“We just kept growing; we were not exclusively focused on the travel sector,” he said. “That was low-hanging fruit.”
FCV grew with clients in transportation, tourism, financial services, consumer goods and health care, and expanded services beyond websites and mobile app development.
Starke is a member of the BC Technology Industry Association, mentors graduate business students at the University of British Columbia and is an adviser to Kitsilano online public engagement company PlaceSpeak. PlaceSpeak CEO Colleen Hardwick calls him a reliable and forthright businessman with a winning combination of imagination and ambition.
“Maybe it is in part because of coming up from the U.S. – maybe he has a little more of that entrepreneurial spark,” Hardwick said. “What I found is that in the U.S., entrepreneurs are looked up to; in Canada they tend to be derided. He’s managed that very well coming into Canada.”
Starke also likes to say FCV began as a tech startup but now includes 130 “subject matter experts,” mostly in Vancouver and Victoria, including his wife, human resources vice-president Marcia Starke.
“I find it truly rewarding to be working on things that are making life better, so we didn’t set out to exclusively focus on well-known brands the way that you more typically see in the advertising industry,” he said. “We would consider ourselves to be a digital transformation agency. To do the kind of complex, comprehensive work we do, we end up working with a diverse set of clients.”
Those clients include the Vancouver Canucks, Best Buy (Nasdaq:BBY) and Scotiabank (TSX:BNS), as well as government departments of various political stripes in Alberta, Ontario and B.C. He recently got caught in the crossfire of B.C.’s notoriously heated legislative debates when the NDP slammed the BC Liberals for prematurely activating a liquefied natural gas jobs-promoting website built by FCV. Starke acknowledged the $8,000 in personal and $20,000 in corporate donations to the BC Liberals (but none since June 2014), but he said his intention was to help promote the industry.
“We’re working with public servants and we’re focused on delivering solutions for citizens and improving citizens’ services delivery. We’re not political as an organization and don’t want to be,” Starke said. “Unfortunately, it’s very difficult for any of us in the tech sector to participate in any business or community event with any MLAs without receiving a donation receipt for the events we attend, unless the event is made free or until there is reform to ban corporate or union donations, which is something I would support.”
When FCV needed more space in 2010, it moved out of a Yaletown studio above Rodney’s Oyster House to a tower across from Waterfront station and Harbour Centre. Its 10th-floor offices once housed Bodog, the online gambling company. Starke said the space was an empty shell when FCV moved in, but the landlord included a lease clause barring another online gambling operation.
FCV engaged in something of a gamble itself when it opened offices in Toronto in early 2013 and Victoria in mid-2013. Last September, it expanded to Halifax. Starke admitted it was a big risk, but he is glad that he took it.
“The first office that you open, if you’re the entrepreneur, you’re there every day; you’re the cheerleader, you can work morning, noon and night, and you come with a lot of energy, but you’re always there,” he said. “When you open a second office, you can’t be in both locations.
“Transferring culture, that energy and your business process is something that is challenging, and a lot of companies don’t make that leap.” •
