"Let's build something meaningful and enduring".

My Bio

Hi my name is Ernest Yap. I am a husband and father.

I studied geomatics engineering at University of Calgary. After graduating, I got a great job travelling around the world, and really learning how to empathize with customers and honing sales skills. I feel that travel really opens the mind when you get to talk to different people and understand why they do what they do. My wife and I were fortunate to be able to travel often; now, we try to bring our children as much as we can.

Tiring of nine years of business travel and wanting to start a family, circumstances gave me an opportunity to start my first tech company, and I dove right in. This led to starting more companies and building a variety of software products across different industries.

Wow, what a rollercoaster and an acceleration of learning!

It's one thing to learn concepts in a school, but it's a totally different level when you're learning by doing and yours and your team's financial situation depends on it. Recently, I made a list of my key learnings, and even though I learned a lot in my nine year sales career, my list is more than three-times longer in my years of entrepreneurship. I feel I learnt a lot in regards to leadership of people and product management. How do you put all that on a resume? you really can't on two pages.

Even though I talk a lot about entrepreneurship, it doesn't mean I'm against big companies. In fact, I think the best companies foster intrapreneurship and teach people how to think big and grow. I worked for one of the biggest, and working there taught me how to scale teams. For me, I'm bought in if I believe in an organization's big transformative purpose.

Regardless, I love to learn, and I love to teach what I've learned so that other people can accelerate their own journeys. I've put together My Playbook, which you can access at https://playbook.covarian.com. Also, My Playbook serves as a guide to what I expect from my teams. After all, the best leaders train their own teams on their expectations.

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Give me a shout if you want to contact me.

Find me on LinkedIn.

Quick Timeline

2005 - Started my career as a customer support engineer for Applanix Corporation, a Trimble subsidiary. Travelled the world installing airborne camera systems and training.

2006 - Survived a plane crash in Kentucky during a systems verification flight.

2007 - Became a regional account manager for North and Latin America.

2012 - Became a worldwide account manager.

2014 - Began entrepreneurial journey. Completed the Founder Institute tech accelerator program.

2014 - Officially co-founded Shapetrace Inc with Julien Li-Chee Ming to prevent constructions errors using augmented reality.

2017 - Founded Shapetrace mobile and web agency.

2018 - Founded Covarian for tech consulting.

2019 - Amazing contract opportunity to design and manage a large team, to develop a credit card underwriting system for TD Bank, one of the world's largest banks.

2020 - Stepped into the world of insurance using machine learning NLP for risk engineering documents.

2021 - Moved to Taipei, Taiwan to learn and write Mandarin Chinese.

2021- Stepped into the world of clean energy and carbon markets! Joined the founding team of Rewatt Power leading product management and product development.