About Us

We are a group of coaches and mentors passionate about the lean business canvas model. Coming from various technical, management, operational and human resources backgrounds, we work with founders and their management teams to build their foundation for international success. Our ultimate purpose is to enable global expansion to startups that have proven their business model in their home countries.

Our Founders

Emre Akkaş

Comfortale with the uncomfortable

Emre founded the technology services company Globalme, grew it to be one of the top 100 Tech companies in British Columbia and exited in 2020. He has extensive experience in enterprise sales and marketing, technology development and scaling a founder-run business. Currently, he coaches and mentors founders to realize their full potential.

Gökhan Başaran

Partnership builder

Gokhan is an entrepreneur, mentor, and a business consultant with international experience in business development and product marketing. With hands-on experience launching new brands and products globally, he has mentored various scale up companies at Empowered Startups and Creative Destruction Lab West in Vancouver.
Gökhan is passionate about e-commerce and cleantech.

Our Mentors

The strength of Sea To Sky Labs comes from the combined experience of our mentors. Diverse business backgrounds can be found in many teams. However, the ethnic and cultural variety of our mentorship team provides a unique strength given the startup niche that we serve.

Carlton Chen

Angel investor, Strategic Alliances, IP Protection and Licensing Expert

Carlton is a business and employment law attorney at Kurien Ouellette LLC in West Hartford, Connecticut USA. He also is an entrepreneur, an angel investor in medical technology and life sciences companies, and a co-founder of two startups, one doing US-China cross border transactions in healthcare, and the other involved with sleep technology.

Hanna Gołota

Corporate Culture and Human Resources Champion

Hanna co-founded and grew one of Vancouver's top 100 technology companies. Her passion is building high-performing teams where every member is deeply engaged in the company's culture.

Yash Gupta

People Leader & Operations Professional

Yash is a seasoned operations professional with more than thirteen years of experience in leading large-scale operations across e-commerce, retail, transportation, manufacturing and service sectors. He is a proven people leader and has led large cross-functional teams towards organizational goals and objectives.

Dr. Chang Lu

Blockchain Researcher, Ecosystem Builder

Chang Lu is an experienced blockchain researcher, educator, Web3 venture and ecosystem builder, and commercialization strategist. He has been a co-founder/top management team member in three blockchain startups, and he manages a top blockchain research institute in Canada.