About Steve

I’ve spent my life prospecting—for gold in the Canadian wilderness, for breakthrough technologies in Silicon Valley's cleantech boom, and more recently, for wisdom on a 500-mile walk across Spain.

Born in Chicago and raised in Canada, I come from a family of explorers. My ancestor Charles Parry was a legendary botanist who traversed the US Rockies in the 1800s—Parry's Peak in Winter Park, Colorado, is named after him. That restless spirit runs deep in our family of entrepreneurs, social justice advocates, and people who've never been content with the easy path.

I graduated from Queen's University (1977) and the University of Western Ontario (1979) before spending three decades as a prospecting geologist—first across Canada, then internationally. The stories from those years taught me hard lessons about survival, decision-making, and what matters when everything's on the line.

In the early 2000s, I pivoted from rocks to technology, joining California's first cleantech venture capital boom. I later returned to Canada to launch public companies and build my own venture portfolio. Today, I serve on multiple boards, including as Chair of Waypoint Centre for Mental Health, a foundational mental health institution in Ontario.

In recent years, I've discovered the pilgrim community and walked Spain's Camino de Santiago—twice. What began as another expedition became a transformation. The Camino cracked open my mechanistic worldview and taught me that not everything can be explained by spreadsheets and physics.

This website brings together my current work: researching the societal transformation driven by what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls the Singularity—the demonetization of everything through artificial general intelligence—and sharing what an ancient pilgrimage route teaches about navigating radical uncertainty with wisdom and grace.

My book Bear Proof Tree, chronicling my journey from prospector to pilgrim and the lessons learned along the way, launches summer 2027.

What is The Last Prospector?

This was the name of a newsletter column started by a group of geologists in Timmins, Ontario, Canada in the 1990s for the Save Our North activist campaign in Northern Ontario. From an inauspicious start with a case of beer and some pizza, Save Our North grew to be a powerful voice of change in favour of Canada’s mining communities. The Last Prospector was used in the newsletter to allow individuals, mainly in government, to speak candidly about issues for these communities. In a matter of weeks, we successfully raised tens of millions of dollars and brought attention to the waning level of mineral exploration- the lifeblood for any mining community.

It seems appropriate for The Last Prospector to put his backpack on once again in this time of profound change, where the Last Prospector, or The Last Nurse, or The Last Auto Worker is a real possibility with the emergence of AI.