David Gluzman.

I started programming at eleven, the year the University of Calgary invited me into a computer science program. I got online on a 2400 bps modem, logging into BBSes and exploring IRC on EFnet, all the while learning how to build.

Around the same time I was fixing computers and writing software for schools. I was also dabbling at building them for friends and neighbours. By high school I sold my first code.

Bike racing took me around the world. I left home at fifteen. You grow up fast that way.

By the mid-nineties I was publishing on the internet. From 1995 I kept a website that reported each season as it happened, and my father kept the results in binders. Both are restored at The Boy Cyber Cycle, with the letters from Italy alongside.

On the track I won two Canadian national titles, the pursuit and the points race, and set the Canadian record for the 3000m pursuit.

I rode for the national team in 1996, 1997 and 1998, regularly placing in the top ten at World Cup races. For a stretch I lived in Europe and raced for Italian, French and Belgian teams.

My first entrepreneurial lessons came from chasing sponsors. I learned 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 kept building and publishing on the internet throughout.

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 was, without realizing it was a beginning.

One of my first jobs off the bike was selling cell phones and computers at Future Shop, the Canadian electronics chain Best Buy later bought. I was one of the top three salespeople every month from the month I started. It taught me how to talk to people professionally, how to close a sale, how to work to a goal and what good customer service looks like.

I had no idea how much I’d use those skills for the rest of my career.

Before the agency years I was consulting, building websites and dabbling with a digital asset management platform for the entertainment industry. For a while I also ran our own website hosting platform. It was a nightmare. Don’t do this.

I launched R4NT in March 2001 and published it every month until October 2010 without missing a deadline. Eight versions of the site, the first few on CMSes I wrote myself.

Long interviews ran from Chuck D of Public Enemy in 2002 to Coldcut in 2006 and Fink in 2007. Three years of press passes at Springfestival in Graz: shooting until four in the morning, back at the keyboard by eight, then writing up the night and publishing it.

My early career was product management and design, with the engineering underneath it: front-end, back-end and database work. I did it agency side, at Critical Mass among others, for clients including Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Dell, Ikea and Rolex.

A tech meetup that brought together a mix of builders, designers, investors and students. Founders stood up, demoed what they were building and asked the room for what they needed. No slides at all, raw demos only. It ran until 2015.

On R4NT, a contributor moved from covering bands to wine, and Wine Wednesday became a regular column. Then a question came in: where can I actually buy these? That question became WineCollective.

We pitched a wine club at DemoCamp in February 2009 and launched in March, deep in the recession, with close to fifty subscribers in the first month.

Selling and shipping alcohol involves rules most startups never meet. We had no licence at the start, so we partnered with a licensed retailer, and that carried us for years. Eventually we had to buy our own liquor store, and we ran it and our warehouse ourselves. That meant a lot of pieces to run and scale, and a lot of people and process.

WineCollective grew to serve most of Canada, everywhere the law let us, and from nothing to millions of dollars a year. By the mid-2010s it was Canada’s largest monthly wine club, shipping ten tonnes of wine across the country every month. We tried to do the same for craft beer with Canada Craft Club.

I left WineCollective in 2019 to run Wine Folly.

I co-founded BlackSquare in 2010 and stayed until 2019, when I moved on to Wine Folly. I started as CTO and built the technical function myself. Then I hired an engineering lead to own it and moved to product and design as Chief Design Officer. The team grew to more than 70 people.

BlackBoxx was SaaS for direct-to-consumer ecommerce, built specifically for the alcohol industry. It went live with Poplar Grove in Naramata, British Columbia, its first winery, then grew past 100 wineries and carried ventures with Diageo, AB InBev and Vivino. Its markets were Canada, the US, Europe, Australia and Hong Kong.

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.

Avenue Calgary named me to its Top 40 Under 40 in 2014, the year we presented BlackSquare in London. Sharp Magazine ran a feature the next year. In 2016 the Calgary Chamber gave BlackSquare an award at Small Business Week, and I gave the speech.

Inside BlackSquare we quietly built a separate venture: a single source of truth for the industry’s data, gathered from producers around the world. Many sources, no shared keys, one reconciled record everything downstream could rely on.

In 2019 I carved the Global Wine Database out of that business and merged it with WineFolly.com to form Folly Enterprises, now Wine Folly Inc. I was CEO for seven years.

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 courses on a learning management system, 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.

The education line ran at close to 99% gross margin. As the mix went digital, revenue grew and the company’s gross margin rose from roughly 50% to 80%. The team stayed lean the whole way: the headcount did not have to grow with it.

When AI went into Wine Folly’s products, it read from Global Wine Database records. Where the data was sensitive, the models ran on our own infrastructure.

I moved to Kelowna, wine country in the west of Canada, to be closer to the Wine Folly team and to the wine industry without leaving the country.

I learned my new home one trail at a time. I still spend most weekends on a bike, on backcountry trails now rather than a track.

In 2022 I joined the board of the Mountain Bikers of the Central Okanagan (MTBCO) and rebranded it, modernized it and professionalized it. The first year was plumbing: a new brand and website, real communication tools, finances you could read and the society’s first corporate credit card.

From 2023 I was President, across three municipalities and provincial land. 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 sign off first and the finished work meets provincial standard. Get either wrong and it is somebody hurt with no coverage behind them, or finished trail torn back out.

On that watch Lake Country and West Kelowna amalgamated in, the Gillard network got its climb trail, West Kelowna’s trails were rebuilt after the fire, Lake Country got a bike park and Kelowna got its first paved pump track. I stepped down in fall 2025, after four years on the board.

I rebuilt the archive from a 2008 SQL dump, a 2015 blog backup and a folder of recovered uploads. 669 articles, kept as a record of writing from before AI.

A training tool on sixteen years and more than two gigabytes of my own riding data, with a local model writing the ride debrief.

After stepping down as Wine Folly’s CEO, I turned to CTO and product work for companies with old systems to modernize and AI to bring in. I write the plan, then stay to build it alongside the team, doing the product and design work myself. I take on the products other people find too tangled to start.

A campsite finder for British Columbia. It reconciles ten public sources into one record for every place you can legally spend the night, and it took about a hundred hours with agents working from specs I wrote.

A private recipe network for friends, with AI scanning metered per user, live and selling subscriptions. I built every part of it. Friends were posting plates two days after the first commit.

The apps are mine to build and mine to get wrong. They are all built with AI in the loop from the idea to the live product, which is the same work I take to clients. A couple more are in progress.

The constant was the data underneath. A data layer earns its keep by what you can design on top of it.