Hi, I’m Shaun Passley, CEO of ZenaTech (Nasdaq: ZENA).
I’ve spent my career building and scaling technology companies, solving real problems through hardware and software to help people and organizations overcome challenges that actually matter.
My Early Years
I grew up in Chicago in the 1980’s. I’ve had a particular quirk since childhood: if I don’t understand something well enough, I learn it relentlessly. Where others follow a process, I question it, connect the dots, and keep improving the system.
I got my first taste of computers around age eight, tinkering with the Apple II my brother had been given. A couple of years later, when he left for college, he handed his Macintosh to me, and I taught myself Painter and early Adobe tools on it.
I’m fortunate to have had family alongside me through all of it. My father was a home-based business owner who passed down entrepreneurial wisdom I couldn’t have found anywhere else. My older brother, Craig, was a construction engineer and has contributed his experience to my companies, taking on formal responsibilities including serving as a part-time director and Corporate Secretary. My aunt was the first investor in my business, right after the dot-com crash nearly ended it before it started.
Before I Learned to Build
The biggest takeaway from my dad: It’s not about how much you make; it’s about how much you keep.
I saved diligently by working part-time jobs since I was legally able to: such as bagging groceries at a grocery store and as a computer technician. On the side, I ran small ventures of my own: selling phone cards, printing recipe books, offering computer services, whatever a teenager with some hustle could put together. By college, I’d already been running small businesses for years and saved up my own capital along the way.
I have a clear objective: graduate ASAP and focus on entrepreneurship. In my freshman year, I built software called College Plan in my dorm room that used historical course data to generate an optimal class schedule. It worked: I graduated in two years instead of four, founded my first company, and formed my software team that same year.
The dot-com crash hit right as that company was getting off the ground. I lost my entire team overnight and spent the following year completely alone, struggling to finish a master’s degree in information technology while keeping the business running myself. My aunt’s investment, along with support from other family members, is the only reason there was still a company left to save.
I had a clear objective: graduate ASAP and focus on entrepreneurship. In my freshman year, I built software called College Plan in my dorm room that used historical course data to generate an optimal class schedule. It worked: I graduated in two years instead of four, founded my first company, and formed my software team that same year.
The dot-com crash hit right as that company was getting off the ground. I lost my entire team overnight and spent the following year completely alone, struggling to finish a master’s degree in information technology while keeping the business running myself. My aunt’s investment, along with support from other family members, is the only reason there was still a company left to save.
In the years that followed, while finishing that degree, I repurposed the college portal into a business portal by adding new features. That shift attracted our first business clients, improved our cash flow, and gave us the capital for our initial acquisitions.
Why I Kept Going Back to School
My PhD dissertation explored how blue-chip technology companies achieve growth objectives through analysis of their founders, product development and investment stages. The existing academic model described three growth paths (build, borrow, and buy) and I proposed a fourth: expanding abroad once the market calls for it. One of the more interesting findings along the way was that most founders either never finished college or left their jobs entirely to start a company.
I went the opposite way: I finished my BA, hold four master’s degrees and a PhD. Each credential has made me a more holistic decision-maker: IT gave me the technical foundation. The MBA taught me how acquisitions create revenue. Product development came as we crossed twenty employees. IP law taught me to read contracts once I was negotiating every deal myself.
My dissertation named something I’d already been doing consistently for a decade: build what you can internally, borrow capability through partnerships, buy it outright when that’s faster, and expand abroad when the market calls for it. I was writing down the playbook I’d already been running since I was a college student with four clients and two thousand dollars.
Where the Acquisition Habit Actually Started
What most people don’t realize is that ZenaTech’s acquisition strategy goes back much further than the company itself.
While still in college, juggling four clients and a full course load, I put together two thousand dollars and bought a small company outright, I would call it my first acquisition, years before I had any real capital. By year seven, cash flow supported a team of twenty. By year twelve to fifteen, revenue had grown into the low millions. We made our first major acquisitions in the early 2010s to expand our cloud-based software portfolio, and the habit never stopped since.
In 2021, I moved the company’s home base to Canada giving us the environment to build the business efficiently and establish meaningful revenue at the early stages before U.S. capital markets would gave us the platform to pursue growth on a much larger scale.
From Software to Drones
The idea of designing our own drones came from a software test we ran in Ireland, where we found that most available drones had to be flown manually and that training a farmer to operate one took real time and difficulty. The ZenaDrone 1000 was our answer: originally built as an autonomous agricultural drone, now pursuing the certification pathways needed for commercial and government use, including work toward Blue UAS cybersecurity validation, alongside our NDAA-aligned manufacturing and supply chain.
What We’re Building Toward
Global defense spending hit a record $2.887 trillion in 2025[i], and the trend has continued since. Facing that pressure, the Pentagon is pushing for faster procurement, reliable supply chain and domestic industrial base, exactly where we’ve focused our efforts.
Our objective is straightforward: build our autonomous systems platform and sell it into commercial, government and defense markets. NDAA-aligned manufacturing and Blue UAS certification is what we are working on to earn direct access to government buyers.
We are also build up our Drone as a Service (DaaS) business through acquiring legacy service businesses such as land surveying and inspections, and adding drones, which serves commercial customers as well as many levels of government. We have locations on four continents now.
The idea around DaaS is that we provide a subscription-based service and make it easy to preform and improve many manual and low-tech processes using drones. Customers don’t need to own the drones, find pilots or worry about regulation, and we automate these jobs adding drones to workflows providing better data and analysis, faster completion, and more safety for workers.
I look forward to sharing more about what we’re building, and how my team is working toward AI autonomous, data-driven solutions for a new era.
Citations
[i] Global military spending rise continues as European and Asian expenditures surge. (2026b). In SIPRI. https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2026/global-military-spending-rise-continues-european-and-asian-expenditures-surge