Built for the entrepreneur who never had a room to walk into.
Ihtiwin exists because the connections, the coaching, and the business infrastructure were not always there for us. tawâw means there is room. We are building it.
How this started
I grew up watching people from my community not make it out. Not because they were not capable. Because the resources were not there. The connections, the knowledge, the infrastructure. None of it was built for us.
I built a company called Agile Industries. Six years. Cloud solutions. Profitable. And in all that time I barely saw another Indigenous person in the room. That told me something.
Then I was diagnosed with Adreno Cortical Carcinoma. While I was dealing with that, the company fell apart. Not because it was not working. Because I had built it around myself. The moment I stepped back there was nothing left to carry it forward. I had not trained anyone. I had not built the capability in the people around me. I had a business that ran on me instead of one that ran on what we had built together.
That failure clarified everything.
After beating cancer, I started Ihtiwin from a simple idea. Build things that lower the barrier for the next person and build them in a way that creates capability, not dependency. What I had failed to do for my own team, I would make the point of everything I built next.
What this built
- tawâw is free for the courses that matter most. Some courses have a cost to keep the lights on, but anything that can get an entrepreneur started will always be free.
- ISCE creates a pathway into jobs that communities have been locked out of.
- Aerglo gives communities ownership of their own data stack so sovereignty is not just a conversation, it is infrastructure.
- The consulting work funds all of it and scales into other markets so the cost to communities stays as low as possible.
The commitment
Ihtiwin hires from communities. We price work so communities can afford it. We build things open source so communities can own them.
That is not a strategy. That is the point.