Gian — young man with a vision

Twenty-year old Gian Wilson is just like any other young man his age, juggling a University education with trying to have a personal life. However, one thing sets Wilson apart from his peers. He is the CEO of  his own e-solutions company, which he formed in 2001 while at Queen’s Royal College. Cataphysic Limited is the brainchild of Wilson and business partner, 23-year-old, Brian Smith. Located in a small office on Queen Street, Port of Spain, Cataphysic has just begun to live up to the expectations of its founders. Lounging on the leather armchair in the company’s office, Wilson, who also holds the title of Director of Strategic Services, recalled his early days pre entrepreneurship. The Wilson family migrated from Trinidad to England when Gian was only 14 months old. However, in January 1998 they moved back to the island and a 14-year-old Gian was enrolled at Queen,s Royal College as a form three student.    

Knowing that his son had access to top-of-the-line computers, the elder Wilson, who then owned his own company - “Let’s Talk Productions,” which dealt with programmes aimed at youth, asked Gian to create a website for the company. Gian recalled, “At that time I didn’t have any knowledge about the Internet simply because we had just got the computer. So I basically went on-line, read some tutorials, looked at some other websites, saw things I wanted to put into the site and kinda built it from there.” One thing led to another and Gian’s work spoke for itself, resulting in him being asked to create another site, this time for the diplomatic organisation for which his father worked. The scale of the project led Wilson to recruit some of this fellow classmates and the G-Whiz site was born. The money from that project was used to pay those who helped and the rest was re-invested for the purchase of more computer equipment. “In Lower Six,” said Gian, “through a mutual friend I met my current business partner, Brian, who was interested in opening a web-development company. “He had his ideas and resources, I had the experience and some networking, so we basically came together and launched Cataphysic in 2001.”

Staff at the company at present numbers 10, inclusive of a networking engineer who also does web-mastering, three programmers and two graphic artists. Gian’s mother holds down the fort as Managing Director. “Daniel deals with acquiring the business,” Wilson maintained, “while once the client is acquired, I make sure that the project goes smoothly.” Smith is currently pursuing his business degree at ROYTEC, and is hoping to finish his degree in Canada in 2004. Wilson is at the University of the West Indies (UWI) as a student of Computer Science and Management. He noted that his biggest challenge now was successfully managing both school and his job. He said, “Trying to balance everything is quite a task. I don’t get to sleep as much as I would like to, but because I enjoy what I am doing, it is not as daunting as if I was just thrown into it.” Strangely enough, Wilson maintained, despite his age he has not met with any skepticism on the part of clients or prospective clients. “It has never really come up when negotiating the contract,” he said, “but informally they would ask questions about how I got into it. “It really has not been a hindrance. I think our work speaks for itself,” he added.

Thus far, Cataphysic Limited has been instrumental in the creation of a number of sites, including trinifest.com, which carried live streaming of Carnival events in 2001 and soundvillage.com, which was launched earlier this year. “This site,” Wilson explained, “is a local entertainment site - a portal for various soca artists. “We are basically trying to give them a professional image,” he said. “We realise that a lot of websites that were out there for entertainers weren’t of the quality that the artists wanted them to be. “So we called everyone together and felt that networking as a unit would help us to market it better internationally,” said Gian. He went on to note that local sites carried a stigma which distinguished them from international sites. This was something that Cataphysic, as a unit, was trying to do away with. “We want our sites to be on par with anything international,” he maintained. “The whole way we develop sites,” he continued, “is that we just don’t do what we call a brochure site. We use a lot of ASP and database technology to develop management systems, so that you just don’t have a website. You have a powerful engine so that updating is done quickly and the website is useful as a tool and not just as a pretty picture on the Internet.” Wilson’s dream is to see his company expand to fulfill its mission of becoming the premier e-solutions provider in the Caribbean and a household name regionally.

However, he noted, for this to become a reality the local telecommunications sector needed to be opened up to outside competition. The monopoly on services, he said, did not provide companies like Cataphysic with the necessary leverage to develop their services. An open telecommunications market would provide for improved connectivity for consumers and allow more companies to take their business online. “Meanwhile,” he continued, “The future of the local Information and Communications Technology sector lay in the hands of the youth, as Wilson noted, they are ready and more than willing to embrace technology. “They are more than ready to take up the baton,” he said, “they just need the tools to do it,” he concluded.