Sector: Technology
Principals: Ethan Clark and Gura D. Gladeau
Year launched: 2023
Unique selling proposition: Building technologies that can essentially unblock investability for Indigenous communities, enabling them to achieve sovereign economic development and self-determination.
Strategy: Essential to building new economies for Indigenous peoples is ensuring that information is protected, via blockchain DAO’s (decentralized autonomous organization).
Website: nationsfirst.io
Ethan Clark sees the big picture. It wasn’t always that way. Growing up in East Vancouver and attending Van Tech (Vancouver Technical Secondary School) — “I was definitely not a star student,” he recalls — the teenager wound up running with the wrong crowd. “I was, what you call, patched in.”
Then he got a pointed shot of perspective.
“I found out that I was going to be a father, and so immediately I said, ‘All right, so I gotta leave.’ ”
Two-and-a-half years later, the 22-year-old Clark now calls the Beecher Bay area of East Sooke home. In a recent interview at a café in Vic West, the Coast Salish (on his father’s side) entrepreneur shows just how much of an attentive multi-tasker he can be. He gently, and repeatedly, says to Zyaire, his fidgety two-year-old son, “awa,” or “no” in his S’klallam language, while discussing the cutting- edge tech company he says will help Indigenous peoples realize their economic potential.
Nationsfirst Technologies is that company, the brainchild of cofounders Clark, who is chief executive officer, and Gura D. Gladeau, its Vancouver-based chief marketing officer.
It utilizes blockchain technology — a digitized accounting ledger that is decentralized across a computer network, and whose transactions are transparent to everyone in a public blockchain or to all members of a private blockchain — to help Indigenous communities build real-asset wealth through consensus-driven decision making, a hallmark of their traditional culture.
Back to the future, as it were.
Nationsfirst, which focuses on the resource sector, has nine officers/directors and 12 developers serving six primary clients and 1,100 wallet users, says Clark — with more to come. Primary clients include Spirit Rock Resources and the Tsay Keh Dene Nation-owned Chu Cho Environmental, both B.C.-based businesses, but also extend as far afield as New Mexico Community Capital and Indigenous government interests in Hawaii.
As for the future?
“We want to decentralize the access to opportunity and investment for real-world assets for Indigenous peoples,” Clark says. “I want to get us into ultimately really building that sort of financial infrastructure, whether that be for investment, for management, for banking.”
