“I love sharks,” Haivision founder and CEO Mirko Wicha says straight away when asked to explain how the Montreal-based streaming solutions provider came to be named.
“I wanted to find a cool name that was related to sharks. That’s why the company logo is a shark,” says the entrepreneur from Central Europe.
Wicha, who has some knowledge of the German language, explains that he wanted to play with words. “Hai is the German word for shark. And sharks are known for not having very good eyesight. Many rely on their senses,” he says.
Mirko Wicha says he wanted to use a figure of speech with seemingly contradictory terms while making a nod to the word “eye” in the English pronunciation of the company’s name.
Originally, however, instead of using the letters “HAI” to make up the company name, he used the letters “HAJ” as a nod to the expression “Hi-Tech” – meaning “high technology” – and thus came up with the name “Hajtek Vision”.
Unfortunately, I quickly realized that people were pronouncing the “J” when they said the name. The CFO of Verizon, when we were pitching as a new provider at the time, asked if we were a Middle Eastern company. I was asked if I was Muslim, even though I am Slovak.
Mirko Wicha, founder and CEO of Haivision
The term “hajj” is used to refer to the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
Faced with the confusion this seemed to cause, he changed the way the name was spelled just two weeks after the company was founded. Thus the “J” was replaced with an “I” and the name became Haivision.
PHOTO MARTIN TREMBLAY, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Mirko Wicha poses in front of a painting of the company’s iconic shark at Haivision’s Montreal offices.
Moreover, initially all of the company’s products were named after a shark.
The company’s first product was called the Mako, which is the name of a species of shark also known as the shortfin mako. “It’s the fastest shark in the ocean,” says Mirko Wicha.
The company later launched a product called Piranha, named after a voracious predatory fish that can be seen in fresh water as a threat like a shark.
Then there were products called Stingray, Mantaray, Barracuda and Kraken. The company also used the name Makito for an encoder. “A lot of people thought it was the name of a baby Mako. But it’s not. We invented the name! Makito is our most popular product today,” says Mirko Wicha.
This theme led the management to award shark prizes (shark awards) every year to employees. These are special awards given for best performance, most amazing things, contribution to customer successes, etc.
These small trophies are distributed in the form of rubber sharks. “They are everywhere in our offices,” says Mirko Wicha.
Over the years, the shark has become the company mascot and employees are affectionately called “Sharks.” Management likes to say that like sharks, Haivision employees have everything it takes to create quality video technology: agility, power, speed and perseverance.
The CEO’s affection for the “lord of the deep” is such that Mirko Wicha decided to get a shark tattoo on his arm in February to mark the 20th.e Haivision anniversary on the occasion of a trip to Costa Rica.
The company was founded in 2004 after purchasing certain assets from Miranda Technologies, a Montreal company that had previously been listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Haivision, in brief
- Year of foundation: 2004
- Head office: Montreal
- Founder: Mirko Wicha
- Activities: Solutions for real-time video streaming
- Number of employees: 365
- Market value: 120 million
- Turnover: 140 million