Executive biography: Dax Dasilva

Dax Dasilva, founder, CEO and vice-president of development at Xsilva Systems Inc., is the creative mind behind the company’s LightSpeed suite of retail tools tailored for the Mac. An entrepreneur with almost 20 years experience working on the Mac platform as a consultant and developer, Dasilva has been focused on retail applications for the Mac for more than seven years.

His first foray into retail applications came while working for a Mac retail chain in Montreal. Unable to find a suitable point-of-sale (POS) system on the market tailored for the Mac platform, Dasilva spent two years developing one that was deployed in four stores. He presented this POS system at MAUI2004, the OpenBase Developers Conference hosted by OpenBase International in Maui, Hawaii in September 2004. However, before its potential could be realized, external factors led to the retailer’s demise and the ownership of this POS application fell to creditors.

Taking stock of what he had created, and the positive feedback it sparked from employees who had used it, Dasilva set out to create a more flexible and elegant successor better suited for general commercial release and that could easily be customized for a variety of retail environments. This led to the founding of Xsilva Systems in 2005 and the creation of the LightSpeed line of retail tools for the Mac.

Prior to his focus on retail systems, Dasilva worked on numerous projects as a consultant, technician and developer, including working as project manager and lead developer at Bitmovers Consulting.