Once upon a time, Ward had his heart
set on becoming a doctor. But in the late
1990s, when the age of the Internet was
starting to run in high gear, Ward as a high
school student became fascinated instead
with coding. “Somebody made the mis-
take of paying me to make a website,”
Ward joked. Soon afterwards, having been
bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, dreams
of medical school went out the window.
Ward was a self-taught web developer and
designer, but he was good enough to at-
tract clients. At only 16 years of age, he
registered his first business and consulted
in the evenings and weekends for clients
building websites. Immediately following
graduation, a job proposal from Edmonton
landed neatly in his lap. A year later, oppor-
tunities called him to Silicon Valley, where
he spent three years working with high-
tech startups. Then in 2001 in the midst
of the dot-com crash, Ward and his wife,
Robyn, were two of the tens of thousands
of people leaving the San Francisco Bay
area. The Wards moved back to Canada.
THE RISE OF THE
THUNDERBIRD
“After coming from a very materialistic and
capitalistic environment, when I moved
back to Canada I could see that many In-
digenous organizations wanted to get
online, tell their story and make connec-
tions,”Ward said, and this propelled him to
go back into business. In 2003, he found-
ed Animikii Inc. to deliver Indigenous-fo-
cused technological solutions. Since then,
the company has been almost exclusively
supporting First Nations communities,
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