Stephen
Parslow

Design is bigger than aesthetics. I think of it the way Bruce Mau does: as the deliberate act of shaping everything we live inside: software, businesses, systems, cities. At that scale, it stops being decoration and starts being a superpower.

Most technology fails not because it’s built wrong, but because nobody translates between the people building it and the people it’s actually for. That translation is what I do.

I believe in zero to solved, not just the idea or the code, but the whole thing. From the team to the product, the customers and the business that sustains them.

Creativity is an amplifier. Applied to the right problem, it doesn’t just solve it multiplies.

And I’ve never believed you have to choose between doing well and doing right. The companies worth building leave more behind than they extract.

I’m a technical founder with over twenty-five years of experience taking things from zero to solved. I’ve been writing code since I was nine. I studied architecture at university and it changed how I saw everything: the idea that the most important thing about a space is how it makes you feel when you walk inside. I brought that thinking to software and I’ve never been able to let it go.

My first company was PeerStream, I was twenty-two. The music industry was tearing itself apart over piracy and we built the infrastructure that turned file sharing into something the copyright holders could actually work with. A million in ARR by twenty-three years old. That's when I learned I'm better at building things than fitting inside them.

After that, I ran a design and development agency. Hundreds of projects shipped for people who needed things built. That's where I learned that what matters most is the people and helping solve their pain-points.

I run salonMonster, a digital toolkit for independent stylists and small salons — booth renters, solo estheticians, the people every big platform ignores. No contracts, no lock-in. Our average customer has been with us for over ten years, in SaaS two is normal.

When a stylist moves to a new salon, their clients, their history, their whole book comes with them. People still write to say thank you, that has never gotten old.

I also co-founded BetterCart, Canada’s largest private grocery price database. Seven billion data points across five thousand stores. Ask a question in plain English about food prices anywhere in the country and get a real answer. Ranked in the top 1% of Canadian AI startups, with research presented at Mila and AMII’s Upperbound conference.

I live on a one-acre farm on Vancouver Island with my wife where we grow garlic and vegetables and sell them at the Saturday market. I run trail ultras and love to mountain bike on our local trails. I create art and music in my spare time, and sit on a couple of local community boards.

I love building things, software is just one of them.

The best things I've built started with a conversation. If you're working on something that should feel as good as it works, I'd like to hear about it.