In the crowded market for content management systems where names like WordPress are the standard, a made-in-Ottawa solution is standing out for its emphasis on security. QuickSilk CEO Garry Brownrigg joined Techopia Live this week to share how personal challenges helped him forge a career in software.
While he was working for Royal Bank of Canada around 1990, Brownrigg found his voice began to deteriorate to the point that he could no longer speak at a regular volume. Years of consultations with dozens of doctors eventually led him to a diagnosis of laryngeal dystonia, a rare disorder that causes spasms in the vocal cords and affects the ability to talk.
“It got bad enough for me that I had limited to no speech whatsoever. With this disorder, you can scream, you can whisper, but you can’t talk,” Brownrigg recalled on Techopia Live.
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While his voice eventually returned, for 15 years, the career banker found he was unable to work at his old job.
Over email, however, Brownrigg’s disorder was invisible. He began a new career in tech, learning coding and working from his home office as a consultant in desktop publishing.
“I could share my knowledge and share my experience through the internet,” he said.
That new path led him to start QuickSilk, a content management system with a client list that includes the World Bank and Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Office.
While page builders such as Wix and Squarespace occupy the lower end of the CMS market and the likes of Adobe provide the bulk of high-end solutions, open-source solutions such as WordPress end up as the go-to mid-market. Brownrigg said QuickSilk looks to disrupt that middle ground with an affordable and easy-to-use alternative to WordPress that stakes its reputation on the security of its application.
“We’re not against open source, I want to be clear about that from the start,” Brownrigg said. “What we have an issue with is software that’s ineffective and not properly managed.”
To hear more about how QuickSilk is building a brand in the competitive CMS space, watch the video above
