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For 22 years TOPS Knives has been generating hot knife designs with a relentless passion few other manufacturers can match. Simply look at their catalog. Case closed. The sheer volume of offerings boggles the mind. In 1998 this fledgling Idaho company set out with a dream to provide our military troops with affordable tactical fixed-blade knives to fight the enemy abroad. TOPS caught on like wildfire and the flame is still red hot.
Idaho proved to be fertile ground for TOPS. “The reason we’re in Idaho is that Mike Fuller, who ran TOPS for many years, was looking for a place to settle down.” TOPS’ General Manager and Marketing Director Craig Powell tells Handgunner, “Idaho Falls just spoke to him and that was that. Of course, some of the criteria that made Idaho and Idaho Falls in particular attractive as a place for the company is that cost of living is low and, in general, freedom for businesses and individuals is high. There is definitely a reason there are a lot
Posted: Jan 06, 2021 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: January 6
Trent Johnson, centre, has been able to attract Jim Gray, left, and Mark Little, right, to invest in his startup.(Scott Dippel/CBC, Kyle Bakx/CBC)
Trent Johnson remembers the late 1990s when it was effortless to get wealthy Calgarians from the oilpatch to invest their money in the tech sector. At the time, oil prices had sunk to just $12 a barrel and the dot-com boom was underway with internet-related stocks skyrocketing in value. I was getting stopped on the street by people saying, How do I get into the tech sector? said Johnson, the founder of liveweb.io, which embeds live video messaging services directly into websites.