James Dean tried his best to retire in 2015. After building and selling two clean tech companies, the BC entrepreneur redirected his energy to climbing every peak on Vancouver’s craggy North Shore.

He was hiking solo because most of his friends were still working, recalled Dean, who has piercing blue eyes and still sports an athletic build. “Doing that gave me time to think.”

As he climbed, he started kicking around the idea of using the heat exchanger technology he had developed at his previous company to build high efficiency, low-profile building ventilation systems.

Dean couldn’t help himself. He put retirement on the backburner and found a partner with engineering smarts to form Oxygen8, a company that produces ventilation systems to supply filtered fresh air for buildings across N

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