Wes Hall

Wes Hall was born on 6 November 1968 in rural Saint Thomas, Jamaica. He was raised by his grandmother in a plantation worker's shack, with 13 siblings, and learned entrepreneurship by watching her work several jobs. He moved to Toronto as a teenager, and by 18 had started a string of jobs while putting himself through university, working as a cleaner, a security guard and a chicken catcher.

His path led him to the mailroom of a law office on Bay Street, Toronto's financial district. He worked his way up in business, including a period at the media group CanWest, and from the mailroom he saw opportunity. In 2002, at 34, he founded Kingsdale Advisors with a loan of about $100,000 from the bank. It grew into Canada's pre-eminent shareholder advisory firm, working on some of the country's largest corporate deals and contests.

Hall has said that he was never invited into the boardroom, so he had to create his own. He was repeatedly named one of Canada's most powerful people by Maclean's, the Globe and Mail, Canadian Business and Toronto Life. He also founded WeShall Investments, a private equity firm that backs mostly BIPOC entrepreneurs, and taught a first-of-its-kind course on Black entrepreneurship and leadership at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

In June 2020 he founded the BlackNorth Initiative, which challenges Canadian businesses to acknowledge and end anti-Black systemic racism, using a business-centric approach and asking corporate leaders to sign a public pledge. In 2021 he joined CBC's Dragons' Den as an investor for its 16th season, and he has written a bestselling memoir and hosted the podcast Between Us with Wes Hall.

Hall serves on the boards of the SickKids Foundation, TIFF and Pathways to Education, was named Canadian Business Leader of the Year in 2022, received the Ontario Chamber of Commerce's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021 and holds six honorary doctorates. He is Chancellor of the University of Toronto, the first Black chancellor in its nearly 200-year history, and a member of the Prime Minister's Council on Canada-U.S. Relations.