BC Business
As the lead entrepreneur-in-residence at entrepreneurship@UBC, Chang Han keeps his finger on the pulse of startup culture in the province
What makes a good mentor?
Answers to this question can vary, and seasoned mentors who are active in the field have some interesting ways of framing the responsibilities that come with the title. Chang Han, for example, thinks that being a mentor is not unlike being a godparent.
“The first mentor was a person in Greek mythology whose name, literally, was Mentor,” explains Han, the lead entrepreneur-in-residence with entrepreneurship@UBC. The program helps early-stage UBC ventures grow. “And Mentor was encouraged—was invited, was required—by his good friend and sort-of-boss, a king, a lord of the Greek Empire, to step into the shoes of his friend and boss and become the father, teacher and counsellor to this Greek leader’s son in the Greek leader’s absence when he went off to war.
“So the idea of mentorship, for me, is that there is an aspect of parenting that is ingrained in the word, in its origins, and that’s really useful to think about in the way we use the word today.”
Han has helped bring several companies to life in B.C. through both mentorship and by serving in C-suite positions. Right now, alongside his role at e@UBC, he is also an instructor at BCIT and an investor with Vancouver-based genomics research organization Genome BC.
Last year, Han became the IP executive-in-residence with New Ventures BC. He has been involved with the nonprofit for some time now—he was one of the mentors assigned to help AbCellera in 2013, when the Vancouver biotech company entered New Venture BC’s $250,000 tech startup competition.
“Even though AbCellera placed second in the contest, it’s broken a lot of records as a company in B.C. and Canada since then,” Han says. (No kidding—AbCellera currently has a market cap of over US$800 million.)
Although Han’s sense for scalability makes him well-suited to mentorship, it also makes him picky. When he met Maddie Aliasl through e@UBC’s 16-week Venture Founder startup accelerator program, he was skeptical about her company’s potential. Aliasl, who has a master’s degree from UBC in electrical engineering, and Hamid Rezaei, who has a UBC PhD in chemical and biological engineering, were trying to disrupt a relatively stagnant industry: industrial drying.
“Not the sexiest startup idea I’ve ever heard,” Han jokes.
Aliasl has worked for Iranian and Canadian companies that dehydrate food for commercial purposes. She saw firsthand how different food manufacturers—bread, pasta and pet food makers, for example—rely on slow and inefficient dehydration machines that take between eight and 36 hours to dry products. The process also removes nutrients.
Aliasl’s father, who is an engineer in Iran, helped Rezaei and Aliasl develop a solution: “We came up with an improvement to an existing technology that reduces the drying time to a maximum of one hour,” Aliasl says.
She launched CanDry Technologies in 2019 as a first-time entrepreneur. She also applied for the e@UBC Venture Founder program, which helps startups find product-market fit and paying customers.
“We were talking on Zoom,” Han remembers, “and she’s describing the way her machine would look and why it’s so different, and how she would mix microwave and other types of technologies with dehydration. And I’m like, ‘Well, that sounds like science fiction, but if that really works, I want to see it happen. That would change the world.’”
Despite his role at e@UBC, Han doesn’t accept mentorship requests easily. To take someone under his wing, he says, he needs to hear an offer he can’t refuse.
“I lay out this long, written, detailed, bulleted plan for how our mentorship is actually going to work,” he explains. “It’s not a small endeavour. Have I scared some people off? Sure… but I want to help those who I think have a real shot at building businesses that will grow.”
Aliasl struck him as a highly motivated, technical person who was passionate about what she wanted to do. Through those early Venture Founder conversations, Han got to know her as a businessperson and human being, and slowly started working with her to identify potential customers.
Initially, Aliasl planned to target the same companies that purchased drying services from her former employers. Han suggested that she put assumptions aside and start thinking about distributors, retailers and wholesalers, too. He also suggested that CanDry start selling its own products, like the irresistible pineapple chips Aliasl and her team would snack on.
“One day, Chang said, ‘Why are you guys not selling this product? If you start selling it, your technology can be known by other people.’ It was a game-changer,” Aliasl says.
The Canadian Food Innovation Network recently placed an order for 1,000 bags of the pineapple chips. CanDry also has partners like Coquitlam feed manufacturer Red Dog Blue Kat and Burnaby pet food company Rawbone on board.
A few months ago, Aliasl got a call from Han. The mentor was chatting with an investor in Langley when it dawned on him that the person could be a good fit to invest in CanDry and maybe even join the executive team.
“He called me on a Saturday, and he said, ‘Are you working today?’” Aliasl recalls. “I said, ‘Yeah, we are cleaning the warehouse in Coquitlam.’ He says, ‘If I bring an investor, a person who is trying to be a CEO, are you interested?’ I was, like, ‘Yeah, this is exactly what we are looking for.’ So, in less than one hour on a Saturday, Chang came in with the contact.”
“I care about Maddie as a person,” Han says. “I feel strongly about CanDry, the company, and I care about its success. Coming from a place of caring and having a personal stake in Maddie and CanDry’s success, I think, is an important ingredient in having a good mentor-mentee relationship of the type that I believe in.”