David Gluzman.

I take on the products other people find too tangled to start. Beverage alcohol, where the licensing, tax and reporting change at every border. A wine data model nobody had structured. A content business scaled well beyond a blog, running on revenue that moved with the traffic.

Since mid-2026 that has been a fractional practice: CTO and product work for companies modernizing and putting AI to work, alongside a handful of apps I’m building myself. Before it I ran Wine Folly as CEO; before that I co-founded BlackSquare and built WineCollective.ca into Canada’s largest monthly wine club. The constant was the data underneath. In 2019 we merged the Global Wine Database with WineFolly.com to form Folly Enterprises (now Wine Folly Inc), creating a single trustworthy standard for wine data. That standard is what I build on now. A data layer earns its keep by what you can design on top of it.

I started programming at eleven, the year the University of Calgary invited me into a computer science program. Around the same time I was fixing computers and writing software for schools. By high school, I was selling my first pieces of code. By the mid-nineties, I was publishing on the early internet.

Bike racing took me around the world. I left home at fifteen; by my twenties, I was racing professionally in Italy.

Design and aesthetics ran alongside the racing, with photography as one expression of that. Wine showed up in the same chapter. The cycling team housed us in a monastery for a stretch, where the monks poured wine at lunch and dinner. That’s where I started to learn what wine actually was, without realizing it was a beginning.

My first entrepreneurial lessons came from chasing sponsors. I had to learn to pitch myself fast, to people who owed me nothing, then hold those relationships together season after season so the support kept coming. The same pitch I’d use later in business, at much smaller stakes. I continued building and publishing on the internet throughout. By the time racing ended, the foundation for what came next was already in place.

The first decade in tech was focused on engineering: front-end, back-end and database work. I launched R4NT in 2001, which I maintained for nine and a half years across eight self-built CMS versions. Agency work brought me clients including Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Dell, Ikea and Rolex.

I co-founded BlackSquare in 2010 and was President across the nine years it ran. I started as CTO and built the technical function myself, then hired an engineering lead to own it and moved to product and design as Chief Design Officer. Sold to producers as BlackBoxx, the platform grew past 100 wineries and carried ventures with Diageo, AB InBev and Vivino.

Most of that decade was regulated product. Licensing, excise and sales tax, shipping limits, labelling and reporting all change at a border and again at a provincial or state line. We built those rules into the platform rather than around it, across markets on four continents. A rule missed is not a defect you patch later. It is a market you cannot legally operate in.

In 2019 I carved the Global Wine Database out of that business and merged it with WineFolly.com to form Wine Folly Inc, where I served as CEO.

Wine Folly came in as a content brand: a website, best-selling books, years of teaching material and a large audience with thin, traffic-dependent revenue underneath it. Traditional wine education was the opposite problem, in person, expensive and slow. Formal certification people could take online sat in the gap, and being all-digital it could run on the data and the audience the company already had.

So we built it. The website, the books and the existing material became Wine 101 and Wine 201 under Wine Folly School, with a library of region guides alongside them. Delivery grew up in stages: PDFs first, then formal courses on a proper LMS, then our own tooling so the learning carried on inside the Wine Folly+ app. Whole Foods Market piloted Wine 201 across 50 stores. Mandarin Oriental, Barcelona put its staff through Wine 101.

Platforms built on that data reached 20 million people. The education line ran at close to 99% gross margin, and as the mix went digital the company’s gross margin moved from roughly 50% to 80%. The team stayed lean the whole way, which is the part I care about: the output grew and the headcount did not have to.

The pandemic moved me here in 2020. I joined the board of the Mountain Bikers of the Central Okanagan in 2022 and served as President from 2023 to 2025.

That reads like a volunteer line and it was not. Putting riders on public trails means waivers, insurance and the authority to run the ride all in place before anyone turns a pedal. Cutting new trail means the landowner and the province have signed off first, on public and private land both, and that the finished work meets provincial standard. Get either wrong and it is not a paperwork problem. It is somebody hurt with no coverage behind them, or finished trail torn back out. Four years of that across three municipalities and provincial land, on top of the brand, the systems and the finances I built for the society.

I still spend most weekends on backcountry trails.