meet the team
Colin Holowaychuk
Colin has over ten years of experience in international payment processing, and 18 years in marketing and startup businesses.
He was one of the first employees, VP Marketing and Sales, N. America and Senior Product Advisor at Neteller (now Neovia/ Optimal Payments). Within 4 years Neteller raised a seed round of $200k, grew revenues from $1 million to $20 million per month, IPO'ed on the London AIM and achieved a market cap of over $2 Billion.
Colin was President of ProBilling, where in less then 3 years he built a team that leveraged the unique value proposition of guaranteed online payments and recurring subscriptions in international markets to attract over 5500 merchant customers and tens of thousands of websites.
Colin consults with businesses, helping them achieve and manage growth, smooth out the confusion of international payment processing and the complexities of subscription management. After seeing businesses of all sizes suffer through the ongoing pain of dealing with payments, Colin lead the creation of the Simplified Ecommerce platform.
Michael Sikorsky
Michael is an active angel investor who has raised more than $10 million over the course of his career for a variety of ventures. Currently he spends the majority of his time working on all things iPhone and iPad in his company Robots and Pencils Inc.
In 2011, Robots and Pencils developed an iPhone/iPad (iOS) App which became the #4 Top Grossing App in the North American iTunes App Store ( World Explorer made for Minecraft). Michael was also proud to be selected as one of Alberta’s 50 Most Influential People in August of 2011.
In 2010, Michael was also honoured as being selected Top 40 under 40 in Calgary, became the Entrepreneur In Residence for the University of Alberta Engineering Faculty, developed a #2 hit iPad App across the UK, and his company Robots and Pencils won the Innovation/Leadership award from Digital Alberta for their iPhone/iPad (iOS) work.
In previous years Michael won the Great Canadian Pitch-Off at the Canadian Venture Forum, sold a company to ThoughtWorks , was named Canada’s Internet Revolutionary by Profit magazine (2007) and spoke at Cyberport Hong Kong, Harvard Business School , MIT, and Stanford.
Arizona Bay
Colin and the Arizona Bay Partners have worked together over a span of 10 years. Jeff was the original Architect of Neteller’s product and Jay lead the development for proBilling and key modules of the Neteller product and marketing systems.
Dave Graham
For more than a decade Dave has been building and operating tech and e-commerce companies. Dave works hands-on with entrepreneurial start-ups on strategic development, investment and operations. He is tireless in championing the little guy in his fight for start-up capital and knows how to effectively manage the seed money when it has been sown. The BA from the University of California at Los Angeles and the MBA from Columbia has helped along the way, but the real-life creation and shaping of companies make shinier badges of honor. Dave is a founding partner of Greenstart.com
Jeff Natland
Equally comfortable in technology and business, Jeff has started several technology-focused businesses, helped manage and grow dozens of others, and is an active angel investor, board member and advisor. Previously serving as the Chief Information Officer at Neteller (now Optimal Payments). Jeff was an early angel investor and advisor at Quirky.
Jay Gibb
Jay is a veteran of payments technology and worked at Neteller to build the technology that ran that business. He is CTO of Arizona Bay and is an advisor on the direction and strategy of the technologies used to design and implement solutions for Simplified Ecommerce. Jay is the cofounder of Samurai, a payments gateway by FeeFighters (acquired by groupon), Lead Architect at PhoneTag (acquired by Ditech Networks)and sits on the Board of Directors of CloudSponge
