Dax Dasilva

Dax Dasilva is a Canadian tech entrepreneur, author and philanthropist. Dasilva founded the e-commerce company Lightspeed in 2005, which went public in 2019 at a valuation of $1.7 billion. He was CEO of Lightspeed for 16 years, until stepping down in February 2022. Dasilva is the author of the 2019 book Age of Union about leadership, culture, spirituality, and nature. He is also the founder of two nonprofit organizations; the arts and culture organization Never Apart, and Age of Union Alliance, which funds conservation projects around the world.

Early life and education
Dasilva was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia to parents who had fled the regime of Idi Amin in Uganda as refugees in 1972. Dasilva became interested in computer programming at age twelve, and learned to build program interfaces on an Apple Macintosh given to him by his father. At age thirteen, Dasilva began apprenticing for a software developer.

He attended the University of British Columbia, where he studied computer science before changing to art history and religion.

Career
In 2005, Dasilva founded Lightspeed, a Montreal-based e-commerce company. Dasilva conceived of Lightspeed to assist small independent businesses competing against larger companies.

In 2015, when the company had 500 employees, Dasilva moved its headquarters from a warehouse in Montreal’s Mile-Ex neighborhood, to Place Viger. Dasilva took Lightspeed public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in March 2019, described by the Financial Post as the “most successful initial public offering by a Canadian technology company in almost a decade”. He was one of few openly gay leaders of a major Canadian company. In February 2022, Dasilva moved to the role of executive chairman of the board from CEO in order to concentrate on environmental and equality projects for the company.

Author
Dasilva authored a book titled Age of Union: Igniting the changemaker that was published in 2019. The book, which is partly a memoir, deals with change, leadership, culture, spirituality, and nature.

Community involvement
In 1993, Dasilva participated in the Clayoquot “War in the Woods” protests in Vancouver to oppose old growth forest logging and clearcutting.

Following the movement of Lightspeed’s company headquarters in 2015, Dasilva converted the Mile-Ex warehouse that had previously been its headquarters into a nonprofit cultural and arts space called “Never Apart.” In 2021, Dasilva donated $40 million to found the non-profit “Age of Union”, an organization that focuses on global conservation and climate change efforts, with projects in Canada, Peru, Indonesia, and Congo. Dasilva’s Age of Union also funds efforts to protect international marine biodiversity.

Personal life
Dasilva came out as gay at age fourteen, and has credited the assistance he received at the time from LGBTQ support centers in Vancouver for helping to frame his philanthropic aims. He was an ambassador for Montreal Pride in 2015.