Founder spotlight: Jade Choy on navigating Silicon Valley and how to be a CEO
When Jade Choy (BAFM ’17) co-founded Epoch alongside her brother Keith Choy (BAFM ’16, MAcc ’16) and close friend Michael Miller, she hadn’t envisioned herself as an entrepreneur. Like many of her Accounting and Finance peers at Waterloo, Choy was on a more traditional career path — aiming for a future in management consulting. However, a side project related to non-profit work sparked a much larger idea, one that would eventually evolve into Epoch.
“We were working on internal programs at my brother’s previous job, and that got us thinking about how companies handle social impact and internal events,” Choy says. “It was a side project initially, and I thought I’d pursue it for a bit before starting my full-time job. But the more we worked on it, the more potential we saw. That’s how Epoch started.”
The company’s mission is to streamline and centralize internal event management, from planning to insights, boosting employee engagement through meaningful programs — essential for hybrid and remote work environments. Launched in late 2019, with support from Waterloo’s flagship incubator Velocity, Epoch quickly gained high-profile clients like Reddit and Asana.
