From The Drive Magazine:

In life, the best partners are the ones you can be most honest with, where you can show your true colours, and they will stand there, unflinching, and tell you like it is. For the Goure brothers, Jordan and Joshua, this lifelong relationship has led them to the forefront of the AI tech industry, revolutionizing a system created and set in place by Leonardo di Vinci in 1482.

However, the race to the cutting edge of tech was not an expressway, it was more like a series of roundabouts in succession, in line like a natural progression—jumping from precipice to echelon—where these stalwart entrepreneurs have reached yet their latest incredible peak—Picsume.

From their humble rural beginnings, Jordan and Joshua have taken on new passions, embraced challenges, and strove for new successes, keeping family in mind, building a future for themselves, their kin, and the Windsor-Essex community.

A Couple Small-Town Boys

Raised in small-town Blenheim, home to only 4,600 residents, the Goure brothers had a humble beginning. This provincial life led them to thirst for more, to push their boundaries, think big and outside of the box. Like many small-town youngsters, when time for higher learning came, they migrated to the big city to study at the University of Windsor. This is where the entrepreneurial journey begins. They used their OSAP loans and academic scholarships to procure a house with the intention of operating their first student rental, they now just needed to pay for their studies. Through long hours of labouring in the hospitality industry another idea was formed. This one took a little more investment, so the first official business plan was made.

Business #2, The Pour House Pub was born. With Joshua 23 and Jordan 19, the two cracked into what was, at that time, still a hot market in the city—downtown nightlife. A skill of theirs that becomes more self-evident as you follow their story.

“This was a time where nightlife was still very alluring,” explains Joshua. “It’s how you could make money fast, while still having a good time and meeting people in person in a pre-social media era.”

As the brothers found both success and setbacks in the hospitality industry, they continued to grow—eventually expanding into businesses #3 through #5, including a nightclub and entertainment venue. With that growth came more staff, and soon, a flood of resumes. Their small HR team of two couldn’t keep up, and worse, those paper resumes offered little insight into who a candidate really was. The brothers recognized a problem: not just in volume, but in the very process of hiring. That realization sparked the early ideas for a better solution—but we’ll get to that later.

Brews, Vintages, Nuptials, and Businesses #6-8

Around 2010, the local economy started to slump, and the bar scene was falling off. Despite the brothers’ successes in hospitality, they knew it was time to adapt to survive. “Really, we identified that our core business was being in-charge of our customers happiest times, their recreation hours. How could we expand with this in mind?” recalls Jordan. “I was 25 and Joshua was 29, and we started our first micro-manufacturing company—which was Brew—the first officially designated microbrewery in the city.”

Brew had immediate popularity with the University crowd as they tapped into it with clever marketing, becoming a staple amongst first-time beer drinkers. Almost prophetic, in 2014, the brothers shed the trappings of the hospitality business and advanced into the red-hot world of microbreweries.

“At The Pour House, we were known for our extensive line-up of draft beer,” explains Joshua. “I wouldn’t say we can predict the future, but we have a good feel for emerging markets and trends.” The brothers learned how to make beer, trained by a brewmaster, and made it well. In a craft beer market saturated with hoppy and novelty beers, they made a beer with their popular tagline in mind—’smooth and easy drinking’. “It was easy really, we knew we would sell more beer if people could drink a lot of it—simple,” joked Jordan.

As Brew grew, the momentum didn’t stop. In 2019, Jordan and Joshua founded Vin Winery—their own wine estate and brand. However, with a keen eye for necessity and advancement, they concluded that they would continue doing better if they owned the land they operated on—a real estate play that started when they converted an old chocolate factory near Caesars Windsor into a manufacturing plant for their brewery. Always thinking about their next step, the brothers soon purchased land near Amherstburg, a mature Carolinian forest, with a novel idea—considering event venues were already big customers for their existing alcoholic beverages, why not venture into the event side once more with the large margins weddings venues enjoy.

“Rather than spending a small fortune on a single-day event being my personal wedding, we decided to test the wedding market and my wife Sarah and I became Wedding in the Woods couple No. 1,” states Jordan. Before long, Wedding In The Woods, as a business concept, was fully realized. Since its inception, over 150 weddings and events have been conducted on their property.

Rising in Real Estate

The brothers were creating a synergy between their businesses, melding the skill sets they had honed along the way—hospitality, manufacturing, and now realty. “With investing in the properties our businesses operated out of, we were starting to get into real estate development—taking an unused property and elevating it to its highest potential use,” says Jordan.

The brothers kept acquiring, setting up Goure Estates—business #9—with a primary focus on real estate investment and development. “Marketing, as well as graphic design for our brands—I love that—but I also love architectural and interior design,” explains Joshua. “With Jordan being the analytical investment mind of our duo, I’m the other side of that.” Most recently having finished building two Scandinavian A-frame houses on one of the largest private beaches on Pelee Island, as well as a golf retreat in an over 100-year-old schoolhouse in the middle of Deer Run Golf Course, bringing the brothers back to their hometown. They really have brought their skill sets to the forefront, synergizing their masteries and making their expertise work for them. Even going as far to be featured as investors on a hit HGTV show. The millions earned in real estate development afforded them the opportunity to bootstrap the next stage of their entrepreneurial journey and realize a long-established goal—entry into tech.

Picsume #10: Hiring, Redefined

As they evolved from the Pour Boys to the Brew Brothers, now the fully realized Business Bros, one thing remained constant, challenges in hiring. “Resumes are an antiquated practice that has lacked innovation since the times of da Vinci,” noted Joshua. They knew, reading through piles of them, that there had to be a better way to evaluate, and choose the best pick for the job. With Jordan’s early interest in tech, the brothers started to conceive a plan to revolutionize an outdated system—time to revamp the resume process.

Four years ago, the brothers co-founded Picsume with their lifelong friend and enterprise software guru, Nicholas Mastromattei. Nick, having worked with some of the most notable organizations in North America—ranging from Harvard to Ticketmaster—was up for the challenge. Thus, an award-winning recruitment software and AI-matching algorithm was deployed.

Picsume is a dynamic hiring platform that eliminates traditional resumes through live, skill-based work profiles. “Job seekers don’t realize the deck is stacked against them, our Picsume work profiles even the playing field as they are optimized for machine-reading and AI,” explains Joshua. “When you make a Picsume and apply to a job, you’re way more likely to get it into a hiring manager’s hands because you’re getting past that ‘robot’ first read.” For employers, their company offers custom software that empowers small-to-medium businesses and scales for large-to-enterprise level. Picsume allows a business to effectively screen and match applicants for the best fit and create a useful communication system for the interaction.

What started as just an idea that two young savvy entrepreneurs had at the start of their careers, has now catapulted with support from the I.D.E.A fund, ScaleUP, government funding, innovation awards—all validating Picsume as one of the fastest growing tech startups nationwide. “In one year, we were recognized as both the most innovative company in our region, as well as the company with the most growth potential,” mentions Jordan. “This really helped us secure our first seven-figure raise in 2024.”

Having also recently formed partnerships, post-raise, with one being the largest hospitality organization in Canada, the Ontario Restaurant Hotel and Motel Association (ORHMA), that represents 5,000 members across 11,000 locations, the brothers’ journey has certainly come full circle. “Having the opportunity to have an impact on an industry that has done so much for me at this scale really is a dream come true” adds Jordan.

With a board of advisors that range from a previous VP of IBM to a current VP of the Globe and Mail, alongside a proprietary non-bias matching algorithm developed with Google-funded engineers, and a team of some of the most talented people in tech, Picsume is poised to change hiring right from here in Windsor-Essex.

Family Matters

Windsor-Essex is home base, growing up in small-town Blenheim, the brothers know the importance of setting down roots and keeping friends and family close.

“We work with a lot of our family members and long-time partners,” explains Jordan, who says they work with a team of about 75. “Our cousin, Patrick, is our director of operations at our tech company, our dad does maintenance at our winery estate, Joshua’s wife, Alex, runs our wedding and events company and does all out coordinating for events, my wife manages all of our short-term rentals on Airbnb, and our business partner, Bronson Goodfellow, an honorary brother, runs operations for Brew and Vin. We’ve brought as much of our family into the mix as we could, based on their skill sets, as our enterprise has expanded.”

“A common rule to live by is never go to bed angry with your wife,” he adds. “I would say, equally as important, don’t go to bed angry with your business partners. That’s how we keep this business network alive that we’ve created over the past 18 years.”

Not coming from a family of means, they went out into the world with a hunger to succeed—showing that the harder you work, if you learn to adapt, if you stay hungry—anything is possible.

To see the article in The Drive Magazine, click here