Bill previously worked at Dow Chemical as a technical consultant and at Nortel Networks as Manager, Web Marketing. He completed undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Toronto, McMaster University, and studied in Boston, Moscow, and Kyiv.

Inspired by working part-time at the Encyclopedia of Ukraine at the University of Toronto, he wrote a verb conjugation dictionary 501 Ukrainian Verbs. In 2001 he founded the Sunflower Scholarship at the Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto. In 2003 he sponsored the Ukrainian translation of Charles Taylor's "The Politics of Recognition".