Podcasts about techto

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO unpacked the latest headlines including: - KOHO's massive raise - Fable continuing to make strides in accessibility with their latest round - and more takeaways for today's Founders on how to fundraise right now Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss a minute or a new episode: www.techto.org/newsletter

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO are back to breakdown some highlights and top headlines from across Canadian tech. Today they offer insights into some of the top headlines, including: - The biggest Canadian software venture round ever! - How to raise BIG in this market - Is AI in Canada keeping up? - And a pivot and customer-focused approach that helped this company find exponential growth Want to weigh in and share your takes? Like and subscribe and make sure you DM us to leave a comment. We want to hear from you!

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO return to breakdown some of the trends, stories, and headlines from the past few weeks in Canadian Tech. Today, the duo chat and debunk a few headlines including: - The massive shift in Canadian tech talent - 6 transactions that are worthy of conversation - And a company we haven't spoken about in a while is back in the headlines What does this all mean for you? Tune in and listen to the full breakdown. Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you watch or listen to your news, and make sure you share your takes with us. #QuickTakes #Podcast #Subscribe #CanadianTech

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO return to breakdown the top headlines of the past week in Canadian Tech. In today's episode, they chat through an array of topics including: - The importance of disclosing rejection - What it means to stand out in your vertical (FinTech specifically) - Some important raises to highlight in our lightning round Like and subscribe and make sure you share your takes on the news and trends with us. For more information about the events mentioned in this episode, visit our events page at: www.techto.org/in-real-life-event #TechTO #QuickTakes #CanadianTech #News #Analysis

Today's episode is sponsored by Humi - learn more about their solutions at 15:09 Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO are back to break down some top stories from the last week. In today's episode, they chat about: - The Billion dollar AI package (all hype or the real deal?) - DeathTech is in the news (finally) - Is more privatization coming? If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. #TechTO #QuickTakes #TechNews More on Eirene: In today's episode, we discuss Eirene's recent raise and how they are re-inventing the funeral industry through a modern, tech-savvy approach. CEO Mallory Greene spoke at a recent TechTO. Watch here to learn more

Today's episode is sponsored by Humi As a TechTO community member, you can get access to their exclusive offer: 25% off, with no implementation and base fees – plus 30 days free. Learn more about Humi and how they can support your business at www.humi.ca/techto  Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO are back to break down the headlines from the past few weeks in Canadian Tech. Today, the duo chat through: - A lightning round of deals to unpack - The future of Techstars Toronto (and why it may have failed) - Staying Golden with the big news from Golden Ventures - The bright future of Canadian Tech The team also calls upon you (our listeners) to share your thoughts on the series. Comment if you'd like to see us put out episodes once a month with more content, or you enjoy our current cadence.  Aside from the takes and headlines of the week, do you want us to dive into other things? More frequently asked questions, US news, industry-specific topics? LET US KNOW IN THE COMMENTS!You can also email us at info@techtoronto.org to share your thoughts You can also register for all upcoming events mentioned here:  Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you're watching or listening to this series.      

Today's episode is sponsored by Humi As a TechTO community member, you can get access to their exclusive offer: 25% off, with no implementation and base fees – plus 30 days free. Learn more about Humi and how they can support your business at www.humi.ca/techto Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO are back to break down the headlines from the past few weeks in Canadian Tech. Today, the duo chat through: - Two recent rounds and the significance they hold for the community - How new and experienced founders can build and leverage relationships to raise capital The team also calls upon you (our listeners) to share your thoughts on the series. Comment if you'd like to see us put out episodes once a month with more content, or you enjoy our current cadence. Aside from the takes and headlines of the week, do you want us to dive into other things? More frequently asked questions, US news, industry-specific topics? LET US KNOW IN THE COMMENTS! You can also email us at info@techtoronto.org to share your thoughts You can also register for all upcoming events mentioned here: www.techto.org/in-real-life-event Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you're watching or listening to this series. #TechTO #QuickTakes #TechNews #Analysis #Founders #Podcasts

Today's episode is sponsored by Humi As a TechTO community member, you can get access to their exclusive offer: 25% off, with no implementation and base fees – plus 30 days free. Learn more about Humi and how they can support your business at www.humi.ca/techto Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly return to break down the latest stories from the past few weeks in Canadian Tech. In today's episode, they break down:- Two new acquisitions making headlines- They weigh in on their 2024 predictions and see how they've held up so far- Spellbook raises a second round in less than a year- and more on the latest from Beatdapp and what they're doing for the music industryIf you enjoyed today's episode, like and subscribe and leave us a rating or comment. Share your takes with us and what you'd like to hear us chat through next time. Available wherever you watch or listen to your podcasts - like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. - Look back at our initial 2024 predictions and compare yours here #QuickTakes #TechNews #CanadianTech #Podcasts #Subscribe

Join us on the latest episode, co-hosted by Jared S. Taylor and Leila Yari! Our Guest: Saeju Jeong, Co-Founder and Executive Chair of NoomWhat you'll get out of this episode:Insights into how Noom is revolutionizing the healthcare industry with technologyJeong's personal motivations and the impact of his father's legacyThe evolution of Noom from a weight-loss app to a holistic wellness platformPerspectives on current trends and the future of healthcare techTo learn more about Noom:Website: https://www.noom.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/noom/Guest's Socials:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saeju-jeongOur sponsors for this episode are:Sage Growth Partners https://www.sage-growth.com/Quantum Health https://www.quantum-health.com/Show and Host's Socials:Slice of HealthcareLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sliceofhealthcare/Jared S TaylorLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredstaylor/Leila YariLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leila-yari/WHAT IS SLICE OF HEALTHCARE?The go-to site for digital health executive/provider interviews, technology updates, and industry news. Listed to in 65+ countries.

For the final episode of 2023, Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO team up for one last edition to break down all the news, trends and analysis as we head into the new year. Today, Alex and Alex chat through: - KOHO's news and the optimism it brings for 2024 - Are we finally seeing fundraising return for Canadian startups? - And we run through the hot topics from 2023 and our takes on the trends for the coming year Thanks for listening and sharing your takes with us this year! Make sure to let us know what you'd like to hear more about in 2024! Like and subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. We'll see you in 2024! #QuickTakes #TechNews #Podcast

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO return with a new episode of TechTO: Quick Takes. In this series, Alex and Alex break down the latest news, trends, announcements, and analysis from the past few weeks in Canadian Tech. In today's episode, we discuss: - How a business can navigate turbulent times - A new strategic partnership for BetaKit - Look ahead to 2024 - And the pillars of success for startups in today's market If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. Don't forget to share your takes with us on the past few weeks in Canadian Tech. #TechTO #TechNews #Analysis #QuickTakes

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO return with a brand new episode of TechTO Quick Takes. They are breaking down the latest news, trends, and analysis from the past few weeks in Canadian Tech. Today, Alex and Alex discuss: - How to raise pre-product, and what we can learn from the DeepSky raise - Potential trends for 2024 - Ranking the Canadian banks on the Evident AI Index - Did too many companies go public on the TSX during the boom? - Will we see a trend of more tech companies 'delisting' - And an acquisition we are Certn about If you enjoyed today's episode, leave us a review. Don't forget to like and subscribe so you never miss out on future episodes. Share your takes with us and let us know what you'd like to hear about next! #TechTO #QuickTakes #TechNews

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO return with a brand new episode of TechTO Quick Takes. They are breaking down the latest news, trends, and analysis from the past few weeks in Canadian Tech. Today, Alex and Alex discuss: - How AI and Robotics are helping to solve the housing crisis - The Hyatt brothers recent investment and why it's significant - Upcoming community events to attend - Benefits of capitalizing on the AI chip shortage If you enjoyed today's episode, leave us a review. Don't forget to like and subscribe so you never miss out on future episodes. Share your takes with us and let us know what you'd like to hear about next! #TechTO #QuickTakes #TechNews

Today's episode is brought to you by Float. Learn more about Float and how they can support you and your business at https://floatcard.com/ Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO are back to break down more of the latest news, trends, and analysis from across Canadian Tech. In today's episode, Alex and Alex discuss: - Tips for raising in today's market- What's been working for founders in terms of gaining traction with investors- How Clearco completely pivoted and showed what it means to be resilientLike and subscribe wherever you're watching or listening and don't forget to share your takes with us! Follow us across social and subscribe to the TechTO Newsletter to get analysis like this, right to your inbox! www.techto.org/newsletter

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO return to breakdown the latest news, trends, and analysis on this brand new episode of Quick Takes.Today's episode answers burning questions for the rest of the year and offers more clarity and takeaways for the Canadian Tech Ecosystem.Alex and Alex chat through: - The biggest topics for the rest of 2023- Will AI actually take our jobs?- Should we be worried about the slowdown of acquisition news?- What can we expect for the rest of the year?- What startups will emerge on topLike and subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. Subscribe wherever you listen to your news and podcasts.Connect with the team on LinkedIn or leave us your comments below.#TechTO #QuickTakes #News #Analysis #CanadianTech

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO are back to break down more of the news, trends, and analysis from the past few weeks in Canadian Tech. On today's episode, Alex and Alex discuss:- Why AI startups are thriving - More on the recent Sun Life acquisition of Dialogue- How VCs are adjusting to the current market Plus we chat through our upcoming events and Alex Norman shares his perspective on the current marketLike and subscribe wherever you're watching or listening #TechTO #QuickTakes #TechNews

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO return to break down the latest news trends and analysis from the past few weeks in Canadian Tech. Alex and Alex chat through: - How the access to tech talent is improving - How the province, and country plan to retain tech talent - Why these two companies are facing headwinds after raising large rounds - A larger-than-normal round of funding news and announcements and what this means for the ecosystem Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you're watching or listening We'll be back again in 2 weeks with more TechTO Quick Takes.  Don't forget to leave us your thoughts and reviews on what you thought of our takes! #TechTO #QuickTakes #TechNews

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO return to break down the latest news trends and analysis from the past few weeks in Canadian Tech.Alex and Alex chat through:- A rumour that actually turned out to be true - Data moats are helping vertical AI companies scale- Building on someone else platform can lead to success- And for our Lighting Round they chat through more news and announcements from the past few weeks in techDon't forget to like and subscribe wherever you're watching or listeningWe'll be back again in 2 weeks with more TechTO Quick Takes. Don't forget to leave us your thoughts and reviews on what you thought of our takes!#TechTO #QuickTakes #TechNews

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO return to break down the latest news, trends, and analysis from the past few weeks in Canadian Tech.  A special guest also joins the podcast today to discuss a recent raise and how it all came together.  Scott Stevenson of Spellbook discusses their recent news and all the learnings and takeaways for the community.  Alex and Alex also chat through:- A large round from Hostaway and the recovery of the travel industry (Marcus Rader of Hostaway spoke at a 2019 TechTO, watch it here: https://lnkd.in/gWVrdRR8)- Today's current market- Events you should keep on your calendar for the coming months- BenchSci's nearly 100m dollar Series D, and what it means for others Learn more about Spellbook at www.spellbook.legal  Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you're watching or listening#TechTO #QuickTakes #TechNews

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO return to break down the latest news, trends, and analysis from the Canadian Tech Ecosystem.On today's episode, Alex and Alex chat through:- Breaking news as Shopify cuts 20% of global staff- A raise that "may or may not happen"- Super.com has a supersized raise- More bad news (but we promise there's a positive outlook)- Our takes on the recent announcements out of the ecosystem Listen LIVE across the TechTO channels, or catch up later wherever you listen to your podcasts. Don't forget to like and subscribe so you never miss an episode!SPOTIFY: https://lnkd.in/gxWsXrxYOUTUBE: https://lnkd.in/eD-E5RH APPLE PODCASTS: https://lnkd.in/gHKrXu2z#TechTO #QuickTakes #TechNews #CanadianTech

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO return to break down the latest news, trends, and analysis from the Canadian Tech Ecosystem.On today's episode, Alex and Alex chat through:- The new Canadian consolidators club expands- The benefits of changing trends- Everything you need to know about a "clean room platform"- How to spin technology out of Canadian universities- More raises and announcements making news from the past couple of weeksListen LIVE across the TechTO channels, or catch up later wherever you listen to your podcasts. Don't forget to like and subscribe so you never miss an episode! Today's episode is sponsored by our friends at CPSA: You're passionate about your tech solution, we're passionate about helping you sell it. Learn proven techniques for prospecting, negotiating, pitching and client-relationship to close more business and grow your market share with membership in the Canadian Professional Sales Association.  Start your free trial today (no credit card required). Plus: Listen to Kurtis McBride of Miovision at a past TechTO event: https://youtu.be/hmoNS4C8oEk Learn more about Miovision and check out their product demo here: https://youtu.be/sNIxkjWFT_w Checkout Aspect Biosystems recent conversation at our past TechTO event in Vancouver: https://youtu.be/hg4G3zyzYC0 SPOTIFY: https://lnkd.in/gxWsXrxYOUTUBE: https://lnkd.in/eD-E5RH APPLE PODCASTS: https://lnkd.in/gHKrXu2z #TechTO #QuickTakes #TechNews #CanadianTech

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO return to break down the latest news, trends, and analysis from the Canadian Tech Ecosystem.On today's episode, Alex and Alex chat through:- The return of Funding news, and the revival of the Funding Market- Tourist investors, the pros and cons - More raises and announcements making news from the past couple of weeks- What's coming up for our communityDon't forget to like and subscribe so you never miss an episode! SPOTIFY: https://lnkd.in/gxWsXrxYOUTUBE: https://lnkd.in/eD-E5RH APPLE PODCASTS: https://lnkd.in/gHKrXu2z #TechTO #QuickTakes #TechNews #CanadianTech

Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO return to break down the latest news, trends, and analysis from the Canadian Tech Ecosystem.On today's episode, Alex and Alex chat through:- The next consolidators in Canadian Tech- A pandemic pivot gone wrong - More raises and acquisitions making news from the past couple of weeks- The glow-up of the travel industry (and why this is great news for you)- Plus: our projections for acquisitions this year 

On today's breaking news episode of Quick Takes - Jared Gordon of TechTO is joined by Andrew Hennigar of BLG, and William Lam of Jeeves to break down what the future looks like after this latest news rocked the tech world. Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you are listening to your podcasts. We'll be back with a brand new episode of Quick Takes next week on March 23. #TechTO #BreakingNews #TechNews #SVB

Welcome to TechTO Quick Takes. Alex Norman and Alexandra Reilly of TechTO meet to breakdown the latest new, trends and analysis from the past week in Canadian Tech. It's Thursday November 17th, 2022 and today we are talking about: The new reality for startups and what this normal means Some major raises were announced recently, and we breakdown why this is big for the Canadian Tech Ecosystem Catch up on past episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also check out our upcoming events at www.techto.org

Building company culture through a screen is a challenge more and more organizations are facing these days. The benefits of remote work will not go away, so how can organizations adapt and evolve to build a culture with everyone spread out? Our guest today is Jason Goldlist, CEO and Co-Founder of Venue, a remote-first meeting software for culture-obsessed companies. We talk about Jason's dedication to community throughout his career working at amazing companies like Wealthsimple, and how he got Slack's Founder, Stuart Butterfield and Accel Partners to back his startup.About Jason Goldlist:Jason Goldlist is the Co-Founder and CEO of Venue, he has been an operator with strong ties to community-building for the last 15 years. Prior to Venue, Jason was Head of Marketing and General Manager of Wealthsimple. He also Co-Founded TechTO, one of Canada's most prominent tech communities. He began his career at McKinsey and did his undergrad at the University of New Brunswick and his MBA at INSEAD.A word from our sponsor:At Ripple, we manage all of our fund expenses and employee credit cards using Jeeves. The team at Jeeves helped get me and my team setup with physical and virtual credit cards in days. I was able to allow my teammates to expense items in multiple currencies allowing them to pay for anything, anywhere at anytime. We weren't asked for any personal guarantees or to pay any setup or monthly SaaS fees.Not only does Jeeves save us time, but they also give us cash back on our purchases including expenses like Google, Facebook, or AWS every month. New users can earn up to 3% cashback for their first 90 days.The best part is Jeeves puts up the cash, and you settle up once every 30 days in any currency you want, unlike some other corporate card companies that make you pre-pay every month. Jeeves also recently launched its Jeeves Growth and Working Capital initiative for startups and fast-growing companies to enable more financial freedom for companies. The best thing of all is that Jeeves is live in  24 countries including Canada, US and many other countries around the world.Jeeves truly offers the best all-in-one expense management corporate card program for all startups especially the ones at Ripple and we at Tank Talks could not be more excited to officially partner with them. Listeners of Tank Talks can get set up with a demo of Jeeves today and take advantage of our Tank Talks special with a‍ $250 statement credit after the first $2,500 in spend or a $500 statement credit after the first $5000 in spend. Lastly, all Jeeves cardholders receive access to their Lounge Pass program and access to over 1300 airports globally.Visit tryjeeves.com/tanktalks to learn more.In this episode we discuss:02:37 Jason's journey into tech04:45 Why he leans towards counterintuitive decisions06:30 Lessons Jason took from working at McKinsey09:23 Working in sub Saharan Africa10:57 His experience working at Wealthsimple13:30 Judging his early career in terms of experience in the moment and in retrospect15:29 Jason's first role at Wealthsimple and how it grew19:18 How he worked on Culutre at Weathsimple20:05 Origins of TechTO23:17 What TechTO has accomplished27:25 How the pandemic and the TechTO events schedule inspired Venue30:18 Steps Jason and the Venue team took to help define the problem32:18 Why 2x2 analysis can sometimes deceptive34:20 Building Venue's MVP37:46 How venue is helping build culture and community in the remote world39:58 ROI casestudies for Venue43:09 How Venue's $4M seed came together47:21 The long-term vision for VenueFast Favorites*

It's Thursday September 8, 2022 and here are today's headlines: COVID changes seem to stick enabling LumiQ to raise On the flip side, not all COVID changes stick as Roblox acquires TriplePlay Finally - are embedded tech and e-commerce the future? We discuss Want to make sure you never miss an episode? Give us a follow on Spotify and YouTube. You can also subscribe to the TechTO newsletter at techto.org/newsletter to get new episodes right to your inbox! Give us a shout on social or send us a message and let us know your takes on the week in Canadian Tech! **Special thanks to Smith School of Business at Queen's University for sponsoring this episode. Learn more at smithqueens.com/aidegree to get involved in their program!

It's Thursday July 28, 2022, and here are today's headlines: We chat through more layoff news as Shopify lays off 10% of staff We'll meet another Insider from the TechTO Community And finally, are professional service firms the new acquirers in tech?

It's Thursday July 14, 2022 and here are today's headlines: Knixwear defines a category PE's love PointClickCare We introduce a brand new segment on Quick Takes More ways to raise in the current market With Knixwear making news in this episode, we want to showcase more content from the Founder and CEO of the brand Joanna Griffiths. Check out some of her discussions at past TechTO events: How to leverage customer centric design to win faster 5-7 things I wish I knew before starting out We also discuss PointClickCare and Mike Wessinger's Founder journey. He was a guest on our recent Three Comma Club Podcast. You can catch his full episode here

TechTo's 2022 Canadian Rocketships List. Watch, listen or read today.

Last Wednesday, Apr 27 2022,Nimer and Kirt sat down with Diego, CEO of Strap.tech in an Ask Me Anything (AMA) webinar. The webinar was open to individuals who had placed pre orders for Ara. Nimer and Kirt asked some tough questions. We also took the opportunity to ask questions from individuals that placed their pre orders. Individuals from the audience were able to ask their questions as well. We learned a lot from this session, and we hope you will, as well.To learn more about Ara, or to place your pre order, please check out strap.techTo watch the video of the event, or to subscribe to the BlindTechAdventures YouTube channel, please check out https://youtu.be/UOTkc6w-fbA----------Did you know that we pay more than $50/month to bring this content to you? If you enjoy and value our content, please consider donating. Any contribution, no matter how small, helps us give you more app demos, device reviews, and tips to help you make the most of your technology.You can make a donation in any amount at paypal.me/nimerjSupport the show

For this, the 40th episode of the StartWell Podcast we sit down with Jason Goldlist (co-founder), Laura Backman (Insiders Manager) and Alexandra Reilly (Growth Marketing Manager) to talk about TechTO – the largest startup focused community organisation in Toronto. The session was recorded during our first TechTO-StartWell coworking day, launching monthly drop-in coworking for the […]

Daily Standup 07 - Alphabet Earnings, The Othership Community & TechTo In-Person Events. Check the audio, video or transcript!

Kood/Jõhvi is a coding school in northeast Estonia which was established by several Estonian startup founders, including Martin Villig and Taavet Hinrikus. Today we are joined by it's Co-director Karin Künnapas as well as two students - Gunta Klava and Georgi Suikanen.In this episode we talk about the history and reasons behind the establishment of the school, the practicalities of getting admitted, student life, professional growth as well as the future of the school and its funding model. We also talk a lot about making the leap into coding at different points in our careers.The topics covered in this episode with Timestamps[03:20] - THE ORIGINS OF KOOD/JOHVI SCHOOL8 Estonian founders set out to solve lack of tech talentSchool with no teachers and no classesThe learning methodologyRemote vs. on-site studyingChoice of school locationHow the school is defined[09:45] - STUDENTS SHARE WHY THEY DECIDED TO JOINCoding school vs. university for high school graduatesJumping into coding from a different careerCombining Kood with full-time job[15:40] - LEARNING TO CODE CAN BE A CAREER CHANGEVarious backgrounds and previous experiencesAll ages welcome above 18Multiple coding languages and platformsSpeed of studies[19:05] -  LIFE OF A STUDENT AT KOODTeacherless studiesReal-life like study processMatching of flexible schedules between studentsCampus atmosphere[23:45] - HOW TO GET INTO KOODFirst step - game/testSecond step - 3 weeks selection springPersonality fitDemand for women and international students[28:45] - WHY THE SCHOOL IS FREESchool is free for studentsStudents pay for food and accommodation40+partners pay the school to hire students at graduationPossible to work also not for the partnersExpected salary for graduates[32:50] - HOW SOON CAN YOU CODE SOMETHINGGetting to practical tasks from day 1Main mission and side questsEncouragement for other studentsReinventing yourself during increasing length of careers[39:00] - FUTURE OF KOOD AND ROLE OF ITS FOUNDERSExpanding in size and geographyContinuous support for regional developmentHow Karin got to become Co-Head of KoodFounder engagement - heart project[44:15] - PRACTICAL DETAILS FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO APPLYWebsite: https://kood.techTo reach out to Karin use: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kunnapas/Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/ Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/Support for this episode comes from Venetor > https://www.venetor.co/ ===See the video content exclusively on Linkedin > https://www.linkedin.com/company/pursuit-of-scrappiness/ Questions/suggestions? Join our Telegram group > https://t.me/pursuitofscrappiness 

@Metalandz on TwitterWebsite: Metalandz.techTo book airtime with The Blue Couch podcast - TheBlueCouch.net

It's Thursday, December 16th, 2021, and today we have a very special episode where we are taking a look back at 2021 and asking ourselves: What were the biggest trends of 2021? Is Alex Norman psychic? The predictions he got right and wrong in 2021. What did the TechTO community read, watch and listen to this year? We'll reveal the highlights from our best performing content in 2021.

This is Part 2 of my interview with Stuart Wood (CEO of Caravel Law). Part 1 here. In this part of the interview we talked about how one goes about marketing professional services firms. Stuart marketed both the leading firm in Canada, and now oversees a “start-up” law firm. There are some similarities and some real differences in how marketing is done in these environments. I hope you enjoy this - it is a little different than our normal discussions on Marketing BS. Transcript:Edward: This is marketing BS. This is part two of my interview with Stuart Wood. Today we're going to dive into his experience overseeing marketing at two Canadian law firms, Caravel and Torys. He was CMO at Torys and CEO now at Caravel. You were CMO at Torys, which is a very, very established law firm in Canada. Now you're CEO of Caravel, which is a much newer law firm, relatively new. How do law firms differentiate themselves? What makes someone choose one law firm over another?Stuart: It's a challenge for every law firm, I think. Because what you'll see, if you look at law firm marketing, there's a lot of the same language, a lot of the same descriptors that they're trying to use for themselves. There's a lot of generic terms that are used. You'll see a lot of advertising, which are things like chess pieces and these strategy images that they think are going to really differentiate their firm, but it really is a lot more and more of the same.We try to differentiate ourselves in a few ways. But one of the keys for us is to try to differentiate through innovation and our business model. We've taken a lean approach to legal services, the same way that I applied lean principles to different businesses when I was a consultant, playing them here at Caravel as we take out everything that doesn't add value to the client as a way of trying to get the costs as low as possible.We practice in a different way where our lawyers—well before COVID hit—all practiced remotely as a way of eliminating the cost of a large expensive office on Bay Street. That means that we attract talent—great lawyers that have 15+ years of experience and just for whatever reason are looking for the flexibility of being able to work remotely.Nowadays, that's something that all law firms are trying to do, but for the founders of this firm 15 years ago, it was a pretty innovative idea to get rid of the office and have all the lawyers practicing remotely.We try to essentially implement legal technology in a way that actually delivers value for the client as opposed to just looking good in a press release. We use contract automation software and different things so that it feels different when our law firm is working with you versus when you're working with a traditional firm. We're not trying to just be a less expensive version of a traditional firm. We're trying to feel different from the client when we provide our services.Then lastly, I think law firms really try to differentiate on service. It's hard for me to compete with a big firm that has a team of staff on a client floor—the art collection, the filtered water, and everything like that that gets delivered.We have a director of client happiness and another person who works in our client happiness department. We really try to distinguish ourselves in the way that we care about our clients and pay attention to what's going on in business and how we can be helpful.Edward: A lot of those things sound like great ways to make your clients happy and to keep your clients from churning, from sticking with you. They don't sound like top-of-the-funnel ways to get people to even know about your firm, to consider your firm, or to select your firm when they're deciding which firm to choose. How does someone know? Do you do marketing to let them know that, hey, we have a different model, come and check us out?Stuart: Yeah, we do. Some of that is through the types of work that we do. We really try to grow through referrals. We try to do as much as possible to have our existing clients help us grow and be a part of building the firm, but we try to market ourselves in different ways as well.We have a podcast, which is called Business Decisions where I talk to entrepreneurs and speak with them about their businesses, how their businesses are evolving, and the kinds of challenges and business decisions that they're facing. Then, I talk to one of my lawyers about one of those business decisions and the legal implications of that. So bringing together the startup world and the small business world with the legal challenges that they have to deal with.One of the ways that we try to reach that audience is by showing that these are the kinds of clients that we work with and the kinds of things that we help people with, and hope that that resonates with people.Edward: Does that work? There was a company here in Seattle called Avvo that was basically a marketplace for lawyers, but where they did fairly well were these Q&A things where people would post questions and lawyers would answer those questions. The reason why lawyers are answering those questions for free was the idea of someone who would read that answer and be like, oh, that's the problem I have. I should go and talk to that specific lawyer who answered that question. Is that what you're trying to do with the podcast?Stuart: Yeah, a little bit. Most law firms are trying to do content marketing as much as possible. It's one of the things that lawyers are particularly good at. This has just happened, this development and this new legislation. Here are what the implications are for you. That's one of the things that all law firms try to do and what we're trying to do with our podcast, but also with some of the things that we put out.We try to really think about it from the perspective of the clients and what actual business decisions they're facing right now. In particular, if you look at the COVID-19 situation, there were a lot of questions at the beginning, which were not huge legal challenges but I don't think I'm going to be using my office for quite a while. Can somebody help me understand what my options are for my commercial lease? If I have to renew my lease in the next little bit, how should I be thinking about that, one of those challenges are?We tried to show up at TechTO events. We sponsored one of the TechTO events and had four lawyers there just to answer questions from entrepreneurs. We created a free legal help desk for people to contact us with COVID-19-related legal questions, which were largely employment, real estate, those sorts of things, and contract analysis. What does this mean? Just things that people hadn't considered until they were forced to consider them due to the circumstances.We'd really try to just put ourselves in the shoes of our clients. What are they wrestling with? What's top of mind? What do they need help with? How do we put something out that's helpful and useful to them?Edward: Does that work? Have you been able to track that top-of-mind awareness you get from doing that type of work through a new client coming in the door?Stuart: I don't really try to get all that granular with my tracking on some of these things so I couldn't tell you specifically which of these initiatives is working.The firm is growing pretty quickly. In particular, in 2021, it has been a pretty dramatic growth year for us. It's an endorsement that the things that we're doing are working. But if you were to ask me how much of that comes from the podcast, how much of it comes from the client's happiness efforts, and how much of it comes from the monthly newsletter that we put out and the content that we share to try to be helpful to our client base? I couldn't tell you what percentage belongs to each, but they all add up to a recipe that's working well for us.Edward: When a new client comes in the door—not expanding on an existing client, but a brand new client comes in—do you ask them, how did you hear about us?Stuart: Yeah. It's almost always from someone. Hiring lawyers is a little bit different. There are certain types of law where maybe you're going to go onto Google and just type in personal injury lawyer or something like that, and maybe you get leads that way.In general, what we're really trying to do is make sure that we are a law firm people have heard of that have some familiarity with it so that they'd speak to one of our clients and they hear what a great experience that client is having. That we're not a name that they've never heard of or a firm that they're not familiar with. That we're in the consideration set already so that when they hear more about us, they'll reach out and get in touch.Edward: Stuart, do people even hire law firms? Going on a little bit of a tangent, are they hiring law firms or are they hiring the individual lawyers? We talked about this referral, I've heard of you. Are they hearing about Caravel, or are they hearing about an individual lawyer at Caravel?Stuart: It's definitely both. It's a little bit different than other professional services businesses. In consulting, people generally will talk about the firm and will mention the firm name. You see a lot of lateral hiring in law firms of lawyers moving from one firm to another, and the clients go with them to their new firm because the loyalty is really to that individual lawyer as opposed to the particular firm.Sometimes it is, but a large part is the relationship with the person who's actually doing the work matters a lot more in legal services than it does potentially in other professional services for sure.Edward: How do you do that as a running marketing for the firm? Are you trying to reduce the amount of marketing to the lawyers, or do you increase it and then leverage it for the firm?Stuart: At the firms I've worked at—in particular at Torys—I started an initiative where we did video podcasts. We were the first firm to do that. That was really to get my lawyers out in front of people. They could see them, they could hear them, and they could see that they're not intimidating.Torys is a pretty strong brand in legal services in Canada. In some cases, it can be an intimidating brand, so I really wanted to put people front and center so that you could see our people, hear them talk, and hear what it's like to have a conversation with these people. I think that was very effective at humanizing the firm and getting some inbound interest in the firm that way.We would do dinners with CEOs to try to get and have speakers come in as a way of getting exposure so that more people who talk to one of my lawyers had a chance to see that they were both excellent lawyers but also excellent people to work with in difficult situations. I thought that was really important.We do the same thing at Caravel. I have just an amazing team of lawyers. I just want more people to know about them and to have a chance to listen to them or see them in a video, at a conference, or something like that. Because the more exposure people have to my lawyers, the better the firm is going to do because we have an incredible group of lawyers.Edward: Is the idea then that you have to have a group of lawyers at a time? It's almost like you're going to sell them as a bundle rather than as individuals. I can imagine that if you start raising the profile of any given individual lawyer, they can take that with them. That brand equity takes the elevator down from every evening at 5:00 PM.Stuart: Yeah. To a certain extent, you have to rely on the culture of your firm and the firm that you're trying to build, that you give them a reason to choose to practice with you as opposed to going someplace else.Certainly, you can read all these stories in The New York Times about partners that are moving from one firm to another for what I think seems like outrageous sums of money. They're worth it because they bring all that work with them.That's certainly something that you have to be mindful of. I had one client that said to me, I'm sure you have a basket full of stars at your firm. I just don't know who any of them are. That's going to work against you if you don't put your people upfront and give people a chance to see that you do have excellent legal talent that can really help them, and that would be thought partners, real support, and trusted advisors for those clientsEdward: Are all these top law firms priced the same, or is it significantly different from law firm to law firm?Stuart: There are definitely differences. Caravel is a lot less expensive than a traditional Bay Street law firm in Canada. It depends on the market. The rates are different in Vancouver than they are in Toronto, for example. To a certain extent, people want to feel like they're getting great value more than they want the cheapest lawyer for sure. I think legal services have signaled quality through rates.How do I know this woman is a great lawyer? It's because she charges $1000 an hour. She must be a great lawyer to be able to charge that much for her time. That's a really important signal that they send to the market through their rates.I'm not sure that clients want to find a lawyer that has the lowest rates because they will associate that with lower-quality either work product or service. What they really want to find is that person who feels like an excellent value. I'm getting that lawyer who's a great lawyer and who I know is going to do a fantastic job for me. I feel like what I'm paying is fair.Edward: How does Caravel get around that? You guys are cheaper than (say) Torys. Does that signal that you're lower quality? How do you manage that?Stuart: I don't think it signals that we're lower quality. I have a huge amount of respect for the big traditional law firms. Having spent time in one for a long time—six-plus years—I feel like I have a real appreciation for all the things that they are very good at.There are the types of files that big, traditional, national law firms can handle that we would not be the right fit for. But I do think it means that we have to explain and share with people what is different about us and why we are at the rates that we're at. That is different than just lower quality because I tell all of the clients that I speak to that I don't want anybody to be holding us to lower standards than they hold their traditional law firm to just because we're less expensive.We think that we provide as good or better service than all those firms, and our lawyers are all experienced great lawyers who have relevant industry experience and exceptional training. They are every bit as good lawyers as what they would find elsewhere. You have to do some education to make sure that people don't just see that it's a lower-cost law firm, but a different way of practicing.Edward: How much of your marketing has to go towards lawyers rather than clients? I imagine, to your point, what you're selling as a business is effectively the people that are working for your business as a service firm. Having really strong lawyers is really, really important. Is marketing a part of that to make sure you can attract really strong lawyers?Stuart: Absolutely. There's certainly a virtuous circle that gets created. The best clients attract the best lawyers, and the best lawyers attract the best clients. Once you get that virtuous cycle going, it's a nice flywheel effect that you end up with.The matters that you're handling, the financing rounds, the IPOs, and the M&A deals that you're doing, people notice that and you end up attracting talent as a result of being seen as being in the mix and serving the kinds of clients that people want to serve.The nice part about Caravel is we serve a lot of innovative leading startups across Canada. In a lot of cases, the fact that we serve some of these technology companies or what have you that have garnered headlines and attention over the last decade is a vote of confidence from one of those startups. It carries a lot of weight with other clients that then consider Caravel to assist them.Edward: I see that. If you go and say, hey, we serve Google, Facebook, and Apple, that's a really good signal for clients to be like, oh, I want to go and be with a law firm that serves those guys. It's also a good signal for the lawyers to be like, hey, I want to go and work for the guys that serve those guys.Are there other other types of things that don't have that flywheel effect? Is there a trade-off? Is there marketing that you can send out to be like, hey, this is going to be good for the clients but bad for the lawyers, or bad for the lawyers but good for the clients?Stuart: There's always the tension in a professional services firm that jumping through a lot of hoops to make your clients happy can often come at the expense of the consultant who's asked to travel more than you would say is a reasonable amount or late nights for a lawyer that may affect their work-life balance.To a certain extent, if you're trying to market to both at the same time and you're sending a message out to lawyers that, hey, we have a flexible model that allows you to practice from wherever you are, you have to be mindful of how that message is going to be received by any clients who are seeing that marketing.If you are talking about what exceptional lengths to go to to provide service that goes above and beyond to your clients, that may have an effect on lawyers thinking, well, that sounds like long nights that maybe is not what I'm looking for. You do have to manage that trade-off for sure.Edward: It's interesting. Google doesn't have that problem. Google can advertise that they have free lunches, pedicures, massage therapists, volleyball courts, and laundry on site—all these employee benefits. But that doesn't make me be like, oh, their staff is going to be coddled, therefore, I'm not going to use their search engine.Maybe I do that if it's a lawyer who talks about, hey, we have all these special things that make people super relaxed and so on on-site. That doesn't make me want to use those lawyers anymore.Stuart: When you hear all that, oh, that's going to be expensive might be the first thing that comes to mind. You do have to manage that.To a certain extent, as you are out there in the market trying to tell clients about your services, it certainly is always in our mind that the people we want to come work with us are also reading those ads, reading that content, and are learning about our firm at the same time. We do always have both audiences in mind with whatever our marketing efforts are.Edward: Which is more important? If you had to choose between marketing to lawyers or marketing to clients, which one wins?Stuart: I generally think of most of my marketing as being towards the clients, but I am always aware that if I don't have lawyers, I have no business. I really try hard to make sure that I'm always respectful to my lawyers and trying to create an environment where they feel appreciated and respected for the skills that they have and the hard work that they put in.Then, I rely a lot on the fact that my lawyers have all been practicing for a long time. They know a lot of the people in the market. In general, if a lawyer is considering coming to work at Caravel, they're most likely going to know somebody that works at Caravel and are going to call that lawyer and ask them what it's really like to work here. I expect that a lot of the marketing or the representation for the firm is happening without me knowing anything about it or being aware that it's even happening.Edward: It seems like referrals are extremely important for your clients, but also extremely important for your lawyers. It feels like that's the number one marketing channel for both sides.Stuart, before you go today, tell me about your quake book or quake article. What quake content have you read that has fundamentally changed the way you think about the world?Stuart: In the startup world—which I came to later in my career—I would say one of the books that really had the biggest effect on me was The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. I actually take a great deal of comfort from the fact that it's supposed to be hard. I think that's true at the law firm as well.The challenges that we've talked about today are all challenges that all the law firms face for sure. Law firms are unique businesses maybe because of the nature of the services that we provide, but they're at the core of their businesses.We have to take care of clients, and we have to take care of our talents to make sure that they are there and ready to do a great job for our clients. We have to market. We have to worry about pricing, where we are, and what our competitors are doing. We have to think about innovation, technology, and everything like that.A lot of times, it seems very hard, and there was a part where I took a great deal of comfort in the message that it's supposed to be hard. That's actually a sign that we're on the right track.The piece that I always go back to and I share with people the most is this Fast Company article from the '90s which was by a world champion juggler. It was all these lessons from juggling that he shared in the article, which I thought was really insightful. It was all the things like you touch something, you let it go, and then you have to trust it's going to come back into your peripheral vision at the right moment to deal with what agony does, and then you have to let it go again.This idea of, how do you manage all the things that you have to manage when you're a CEO or when you're running a team—as I was early in my career of a couple of hundred people? You can't watch things all the way into your hand and watch that because everything else will fall if you try to do that. You have to trust your process. You have to trust that you'll see things at the right time and have the right systems in place. You have to trust your team to do good work and manage those things.I've shared that article with probably 40 or 50 people, I would say, in the course of my career.Edward: That's a great way to end it. Thank you so much, Stuart.Stuart: It's a pleasure. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com

Jason Goldlist (BPHIL'06), graduated from UNB with a Bachelor of Philosophy in Leadership from Renaissance College and is currently CEO and co-founder of Venue, an online platform for virtual special events that inspire and engage. He's also co-founder of TechTO and has an impressive resume, including as Head of Marketing and General Manager of Wealthsimple.   In this episode:  Lessons learned from consulting in Africa and then jumping to work for the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver  Jason's philosophy around choosing career moves to intentionally build the right skills and follow the right people  What's needed more than flashy websites and ads to be successful as a company  The Superbowl ad that helped Wealthsimple burst onto the scene  The story behind TechTO and what's needed to grow tech startups in Canada  The origins of Jason's new company, Venue  Jason's advice for anyone wanting to build an idea into a venture   Links and resources:  Venue: https://www.venue.live/  Wealthsimple: https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/  TechTO: https://www.techto.org/  Wealthsimple Super Bowl Ad - Mad World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd3MMysL2NE  Wealthsimple - Take care of yourself (Ping Pong - Super Bowl): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2yDAuDZijY  Jason's LinkedIN: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/goldlist  Thanks to:  Our alumni hosts, the AAA Team: Arsham, Arash and Armin Ahmadi https://www.unb.ca/alumni/alumni-news/unb-alumni-podcast.html  Music by alumni artist, Beats of Burden: https://music.apple.com/ca/artist/beats-of-burden/1451387846  Our alumni Affinity Partners, TD Insurance, Manulife, and MBNA Mastercard: https://www.unb.ca/alumni/benefitsandservices/index.html 

It's Thursday May 6th 2021, and today we're talking about: Wealthsimple raises the largest Canadian private round ever, Sonder is checking-in to a SPAC, BuzzBuzzHome moves into a new build with Zonda, and this week in early stage funding: AgTech is sprouting, with raises from Precision AI and Carrot Ventures. If you haven't already tried out Wealthsimple, they are a proud supporter of the TechTO community and you can use the link to get started with a special offer: wealthsimple.com/promo/techtotrade

It's Friday April 16th 2021, and we've got a trio of 9-digit deals to cover from the past week: Loopio accepts a proposal for $200M USD, Perpetua needs to perform for $250M USD, and goeasy and LendCare unite in a $320M deal Photo of a young Adam Epstein and the TechTO x Tab Payments Tromba Tequila bar at TechTO in 2015: https://youtu.be/2_jXnFhebTE?t=889

It's Thursday April 1st 2021, and today we'll be talking about: Clutch fills up the tank with $60m, The Ontario Securities Commission cracks down on crypto, Dapper Labs runs it back with $305M, and Getty Images takes another dip into Canada with Unsplash. Photo of a young Alex Norman and Dan Park drinking a beer at TechTO in 2015: https://youtu.be/8iQYZ26gx60?t=90

This Part 2 of my interview with Alex Norman, co-founder of TechTO. Today's episode dives into how he grew TechTO into the leading tech-events company in Canada. This episode has background music added in. Feedback so far on the background music is negative and I will discontinue it after this podcast if I don't get overwhelming feedback in the other direction.Subscribe to the podcast: Apple, Sticher, TuneIn, Overcast , Spotify. Private Feed.TRANSCRIPT:Edward Nevraumont: This is part two of my interview with Alex Norman. Today, we're going to dive into his experience as Managing Director of TechTO. First, Alex, can you describe what TechTO is?Alex Norman: TechTO is an organization that helps the Canadian tech ecosystems improve. And what I mean by that is we're a member-based organization that helps members meet other like-minded people, learn from each other, and advance their career in technology, either as a founder or as an employee.Edward: Traditionally that meant events, right? You guys started with a monthly event and then added more and more and more of these in-person events.Alex: That's correct. It started off with a monthly event and then March, 2020 I think the previous 12 months that we had a hundred events. Anything from a small dinners to 1,000 people showing up to the event.Edward: And obviously COVID has made that a lot more difficult. Basically you're running an event company with hundreds and hundreds of events, and then all of a sudden events dropped to zero within like a three-day time period. How did you guys manage?Alex: So I'd say there's two parts to this. One is going back to what I said yesterday about you should always be doubling down on what works and have experiments on the side. I think the year before we started experimenting with a digital membership, so not digital events, but a membership and community. And how do we make the community exist beyond events and online? So we had some learning about what we have to do from a community perspective online to make this still a vibrant community add value to our members. So we were prepared from that perspective and had some knowledge there. So we ramped that up quickly.The other thing is, I remember March 10th, I think we had an event and then both Jason and I were supposed to go on vacation because March break on March 11th. March 12th we decided that there's going to be no events for the next year. Let's figure out how to do online events and what that meant, what technology can enable us and how our events could represent something similar to what we do. What will work that we used to do, what won't work?And so I think the next five or six days we tested like 30 platforms. We started learning limitations of what could be done, what couldn't be done. And we did a test event, I think on March 18th or 17th, with just some of our members. And then March 24th we did our first event and then basically did an event, I feel like it's every weekday, since then. And it was constant iteration and improving how to improve experience and how we could deliver value.And I'd say from March until now, being August 2020, probably done 150 events, a bunch of different formats. And we're actually now thinking we have enough impetus strategically about how do we take it to the next level. Assuming there's no events for another year in person, what do we have to do to actually deliver value for members? And how do we have to change, for lack of a better word, our product. But we have now enough data, enough insight, enough interactions with people to build a fact-based hypothesis versus we went live and started iterating and we had enough of community and brand to experiment online.Edward: I read somewhere recently that in order to win in quality, the way to do it is to massively increase quantity. Does that match with what you guys are doing?Alex: Yeah. I've never heard that before, but I fundamentally believe in that. Again, maybe there's vision, product-driven founders and people out there that can see the end product. And maybe that was what Steve Jobs was, but the way I've always more than likely got the best product is doing hundreds of experiments. And sometimes experiments are hypothetical and sometimes they're building a product and putting it out there and seeing how the world reacts. So it's been a lot of quantity, we had a quality level we had to keep, but now we have an idea how to take the quality level, make it three times better.Edward: I want to dive into some of your more significant marketing channels. Let's start with meetup.com. How did you start using Meetup to grow TechTO at the beginning?Alex: So originally we used Meetup. We came to Meetup. We said, "Okay, this might be interesting way to get distribution," but it was more of tool for functionality. It's an easy way for people to register interests, show up. We could use their ticketing. They had some ticketing built in. We could use it to administer our initial events. And initially we didn't think of Meetup as a distribution channel, but we quickly found out after doing the first few events, seeing a lot of people were just discovering and joining our Meetup group, not necessarily events on Meetup. We said, "Okay, this is actually a strong distribution channel." Because a. Meetup gets lots of organic traffic. You find out that they get ranked pretty high in some SEO terms. And if you could basically, for lack of a better word, figure out how their recommendation engine recommends groups, you could probably drive a lot more traffic.So I don't know if it was three months in, nine months, but I spent a lot of time researching in and playing around to figure out how you set up a group and how you set up events. How you can basically take advantage of organic traffic from Meetup. So I'd say we optimized how we did everything on Meetup to basically optimize the flow of people to join our Meetup. And then we experiment a lot with how do we communicate with people to get to them to attend events. And I'd say at the peak, when doing offline events for some of our, and we have different committees, for some of our committees it could be 30 to 40% of our initial interaction. And coming to our event was from Meetup. It could be lower for some. It's just like search is optimized for Google or YouTube. You could do that for Meetup.Edward: And how did you do that? So how do you search engine optimize for Meetup if you're not going to give away any secrets?Alex: So I think it's changed over the years. So I think the first thing was what terms. You could say, I think 10 or 12 terms that you associate a group with. It could be how many events you have listed on there. So is it a regular event? Are you listing two or 10? The more regular frequency and the more events you have listed and the right hashtags, the right wording... And so we could find also how we did research. You could look at like New York Tech Meetup group. You could click on it. They have 50,000 members. I think they were the biggest Meetup group at one point. You could see what they were hashtagged for. Then you can then use those hashtags.You can search those hashtags. They tell you how many people are members. You get metrics, you can basically navigate around Meetup to find metrics and tags. You could figure out which groups or you could just reach our communities. We had different meetup groups, we'd start measuring the growth of them and try to figure out what was working or not. We tried to research articles and there wasn't much out there, but it was just exploring Meetup and basically trying to backwards engineer how they were recommending stuff.And we'd test results and we'd see. Because we tried different things with different communities and you could see the growth rates and we'd see our biggest group was growing twice as fast as our smallest group. So what are we doing different? So it was just a lot of analytics, a lot of backwards engineering, also experimenting. It's also doing great products. So I think what we also believed is if you have a lot of people attending and a lot of repeat attendance to events and people come looking for you, Meetup would recognize that as a quality event. So it was just basically observing what would make a difference and we could see by the rate of people joining our group.Edward: You even put a bid in to buy Meetup when WeWork was divesting it, is that right?Alex: Yes, we did. Our belief with Meetup is it's a great brand. It has tons of organic traffic, but it doesn't know who it wants to serve. And then there's a few different types of groups that leverage Meetup and that can either build different products for different groups or could just focus on one. So we believed there was a lot of value in Meetup but it hasn't ever really figured a way to unlock it for itself or for its organizations. And there was an opportunity to potentially buy that asset and just make it much more powerful.Edward: Your other big channel is organic social, which is primarily Facebook and LinkedIn. Now I've always thought that companies overvalue organic social, but you seem to have found something that drives more than a quarter of your business. What are you doing that's working so well on organic social?Alex: Let's be clear, I think it's changed over time and we've sort of zigged when everyone zagged. So I think Facebook was doing a way that you got the people attending events to interact with content for them. So a lot of pictures, a lot of videos, a lot of content that... We have a Facebook group, but that gets no distribution anymore. So we probably took 200, 300 pictures of an event. And even though there's 700, 800 people, we would try to tag all the people in those pictures. We would have postings after, which were interactive. And so when people interacted with it, their friends see it and hopefully a lot of them have like-minded friends that'd be interested in the same thing. And then that would translate into people signing up for us and coming to events.I think Facebook was good by leveraging our community, to get distribution and get like-minded. So you didn't need a huge amount of distribution because you had the right members and they would attract like-minded people. We started off with using Twitter a lot. I think Twitter is a great for awareness, but Twitter is like pissing in the wind. You put a tweet out... Every time we did an event, we'd be number one trending in Canada because we just had huge engagement. We have 800 people, huge engagement. We do our events on Monday night, it'd be us or NFL Monday Night or the Bachelor. So you're talking about good awareness, but the distribution of any one tweet's not huge. It disappears after a few seconds. And once you start trending you also get lots of spam that paws on to take advantage of that.So it gives you [inaudible 00:09:48] metrics, which give you credibility and gives you a bit of awareness because people that aren't at events seen an event's going on and they want to interact with that. But we're interacting a lot with Twitter but we de-emphasize it as a marketing channel because we saw it's great for the community. It's a great communication app, but doesn't really do anything. My hypothesis at one point was LinkedIn has become more of a social network. And I can't remember when this was about two or maybe three years ago we said, people aren't leveraging it like they would leverage other social networks, so let's experiment with LinkedIn and see if that can make a difference because you're not going to get necessarily the person that wants [CentreTech 00:10:21] but you might get tech leaders that are trying to recruit.You might get potential partners that look at LinkedIn and no one's really filling their feed. So we started doing a bunch of experimentation on how to get distribution, and LinkedIn's horrible from an analytics and distribution perspective, but we started de-emphasizing Twitter from a social stream to LinkedIn. And it actually paid off because we got to activate a different customer set that we were targeting. It builds a brand and gets people out. And they introduced LinkedIn events, I think 10, 12 months ago. So we were being quick to try new tools. So we got a lot of initial bump there because no one else was using it or experimenting with it. So you adapt for the channel, but you also take learnings from other channels. And I think our approach to LinkedIn was early and different than other people's. So it helped us grow our communities.Edward: Tell me more about what you were doing on LinkedIn. You weren't just posting, "Hey event having happening tonight" or, "Here's some pictures of the event."Alex: No, I'd call them two buckets of content. One is just interacting with the overall tech ecosystem. Just being a source of information, but I think more importantly we'd have Jim McKelvey speaking. He's not good example. He was co-founder of Square. So once we have Jim McKelvey speaking we do content around that beforehand. "Hey, here's Jim, you may not know him. He started a company with Jack Dorsey. It's called Square" and do stories. And then maybe we'd say, "What would you like to ask him?" So a bit of information about upcoming events, but not advertorial. It was more information about why this is relevant to you. And then maybe try to engage with the audience.And then post event we'd have postings that would be like, "You may have missed an event, but here's the three key takeaways from Allan at Wattpad." Or we do member stories. "Here's a member that joined TechTO and she found her first job." Or a perfect one was, "Here's a member, she attended TechTO three years ago. She loved the founder that was talking, she reached out to him. Now she's the CEO of that company." Highlighting stories and highlighting takeaways and what was going to community. So building awareness by providing two, three paragraph insights and then engaging with the community and-Edward: And you're doing that daily?Alex: No, we found daily's too often, but it'd be once every couple days. We experiment a lot. I think anything more than once a day in LinkedIn's too much just because it's the exact opposite of Twitter. Stuff stays up there long. We never really spent too much time figuring out how everything works, but we just knew that if you do more than once a day, I think LinkedIn seems to hide your postings. So one thing we did learn is if you have quick reactions on LinkedIn, it gets spread faster. So in the first 10 minutes 10 people give it a like, or whatever they call it, it would be more likely seen by your wider community. So you have Facebook equivalent, your company can have followers? We never even focused building that on LinkedIn because it's just enough other ways to get distribution on there.Edward: I want to loop back a little bit to your Facebook comment. You were trying to tag 700 people. How did you manage something like that?Alex: Dedicated team. The thing is everyone has name tags on them and usually your name tag's in the picture. So maybe you get a Tammy or a Jessica but even in the group of 800 there's five Jessicas? Either the team would know her or we had a group of volunteers and team members that we'd try to do it with. We weren't 100% successful. But if you have just five people in the picture and you get one person, usually the other people come tag themselves. So you need like a 60% success rate to make that strategy valid.Edward: That's incredible. So now that COVID's happened and you switched from in-person events to online events, has that changed the marketing channels that are working for you?Alex: Yes. And I don't think we were well aware of it at the beginning. So I've always been overly worried about the margin channels we work on because it's not our platforms. One of our biggest marketing channels we didn't discuss. We have an email list of members, which is 50,000-plus strong. So that's something we own. And other channels we rely on are all the channels we don't control. So the email channel still works, but I'd say we are over-relying on three channels before and two which don't work the same way. Who goes to Meetup today? You go to Meetup because you want to see an in-person event. They're doing digital events, but just my guess without knowing anything is their traffic's probably down 80 to 90%. Because people aren't inherently going out to go look for, "Hey, I want to go to a tech conference" or "I want to go meet a bunch of bicyclists."And so the activity on Meetup has significantly dropped. I think the other channel, which we're aware of never really quantified, but I think it's actually significantly hurt us is I think we had a unique word of mouth. And what I mean by that is, someone goes Monday morning and goes, "Hey, I'm going to TechTO tonight" to their colleagues. Maybe they go themselves the first time. Next day they go for coffee. He says, "Man, I had a great time at TechTO. You should come to it." And then three weeks later, when the next TechTO or let's say your FinTechTO in two weeks comes along, someone goes to buy a ticket. And they say, "Hey, I'm buying a ticket. I'm going to TechTO next week."And then they say, "Why don't you come out with us?" And they pull their friends. The word of mouth was actually dragging friends that enjoy social experience together in person. And I think we still have strong word of mouth, but it's not nearly as impactful because when there's a point you have to schedule to go see something in person together, you make plans around it. It becomes part of your social activity. And when you think it's good enough for your friends to enjoy, you'll suggest it and you'll go to it together. And then they become advocates and come together.What I noticed online is no one does, "Hey, I'm going at 7:00 online to this event tonight. Why don't you come join me?" And then there's a couple of things that happen. I think when you want to go to TechTO an event in person, you actually have to plan your day around it. At 7:00 you have to be at RBC WaterPark for a TechTO event on Monday or 6:00, you're going to plan that Monday not to work. Maybe you have an issue with the babysitter. Maybe you got work and you don't come, but you're usually buying your tickets ahead of time. What I've noticed online is, "Hey, we have an event at 7:00 on Tuesday." People are like, "Oh, let me see what's happening and I'll register at 6:55."So first of all, people don't plan. And I think second of all, this shared social experience online right now is not like a shared social experience in person. You're not going there. You're not laughing together. You're both in your own rooms or your houses. So I think we still get strong word of mouth, but [amplifier 00:16:48] where people drag their friends along, it doesn't happen. And I think that's a significant impact on us. So Meetup as a channel is not working and word of mouth is not working. So we've relied a lot more social. We rely a lot more email and we're still trying to experiment because I think lots of people have had the marketing channels changed, not just events, but retail and stuff like that. So I think it's a lot more crowded and there's a lot more volatility and noise in lots of channels right now. So it's not clear to me which ones will scale up in the near future.Edward: This has been awesome, Alex, thank you so much. Thanks for being on the show. Before you go, tell me what comic book we should all read next.Alex: I haven't read it but I've enjoyed the Netflix series Umbrella Academy so I want to actually pick up the comic books and read them. But I haven't read any good comics in a while. If you want a classic, it's the Sandman series. It's written by Neil Gaiman and it's about the mythology of the character Sandman: Master of Dreams. It's not what you expect from a comic book. Go read it.Edward: I think ending on the Master of Dreams is a fantastic way to end. Thanks, Alex. Really appreciate having you here today. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com

This is the second Marketing BS podcast. Alex Norman is an old friend who co-founded TechTO, the leading tech-event company in Canada. He is also a partner with AngelList, co-founder of HomeSav and runs a micro-seed venture fund. In Part 1 we talk about Alex's career. Tomorrow in Part 2 we dive into how he grew the TechTO business. (Note: Originally the interview this week was going to be with Nick White, head of marketing for Osano, but due to some issues with the transcript I am pushing that episode to next week)This episode contains a new experiment using background music. Please let me know what you think of it. Engaging? Distracting? Comment or just hit reply.TRANSCRIPT:Edward Nevraumont: My guest today is Alex Norman. Today's episode covers his career, McGill university, Lehman Brothers, Simply Business, McKinsey, HomeSav. He's now Managing Director of Tech TO and a partner with AngelList and N49P among other things. Alex, the first time you oversaw marketing was when you were running HomeSav and you got that opportunity by starting the company yourself. How did you go about making that company happen?Alex Norman: Yeah, that's an actually really good question. I want to break it down to two things. Why did we start this company? And how I was in a position to start this company? One is I had recently been at McKinsey and I felt giving other people advice is great, but I like building something and I started looking for opportunities. My co-founders and I were spending time looking at money, different opportunities, looking at acquiring companies. Over six months we realized we all had a similar problem, finishing our houses. It sounds silly, but we all realized you buy more furniture and home decor than you think you do over your life and you constantly buy it and it was really no good solution. The brands out there were all retailers. It's a huge category with very few leaders. You had Ikea you have like a couple other like restoration hardware, but the whole process of what you buy and how you buy, it's pretty crummy experienceThen we saw there was an opportunity to change how people buy furniture and home decor and to leverage, we thought people were now becoming comfortable with the internet for purchase like this. So we found this opportunity the problem we had, we saw that there was an interesting way to insert ourselves in the value chain and use a changing environment.Now, Why I was able to set myself up to do this is a couple of things. One is, I was already 10 to 15 years in my career and I'd never, lived at my means. What I mean by that is, when I was working at McKinsey, you make a decent salary, decent bonuses. But I was consciously keeping a lot of dry powder cash there in case I ever needed it. So when it came time to starting a company, investing in a company and living with no salary, I had six figures liquid saved up. So I could deal with that immediate casual pressure. Second of all, my experiences gave me insights on knowing what starting a company looks like, the challenges that I'd face and the skills that we would need and I had found the right co-founders to do it with. So one was finding the right opportunity. The other was positioning myself in a career that I could actually jump in on the opportunity when I saw fit and also knowing what to do or believing. I knew what I needed to do.Edward: When you were there you grew the business to about 350,000 subscribers before you sold it. How did you know what you were doing on the marketing side? Because you didn't have a lot of traditional marketing experience going in.Alex: So I think some of it is intuitive. I've been around marketing functions for a long time. I had previously worked at startups in the States and UK. Where I wasn't responsible for marketing, but I was close to marketing strategy and I was building into my product, so I understood and saw what they did and watched the approach. I did a marketing major in my MBA, whether or not that's practical or not. It gives you a framework and how to think about it. Also did some marketing projects at McKinsey. So I was aware, of let's say the frameworks and strategies to use. But I think it was more just customer development and intuition are saying how the internet works. So my approach was, it was doing customer development and also from marketing channels to build a bunch of experiments in a portfolio approach.Sorry, let's take a step back and say, there was two things we had to build. We have to build a brand and awareness and we had to build, actual get transactions, either people, micro transactions to sign up, to be subscriber or to actually purchase, and I think the, transaction building the list, that was much more natural to me. We figured out who our target customers are or we had hypothesis, we test it with a bunch of different campaigns to refining to figure out a customer. Now we did research and it was 28 year old to 42 year old women living in metropolitan areas who had a white collar job and had limited time and was interested in home decor.So we figured out where we believe this woman was, what our habits were and then we did a bunch of experiments to reach out to her and run a portfolio of, different distribution channels and messaging and figured out which ones are the right ones to double down on. When we had something that was working, we put 70% of our efforts and have a portfolio of other activities that we'd keep on testing. From the branding perspective, we took a bunch of different activities and I would say that was a lot less measured. So you'd probably be disappointed in how I ran that. But it was more of, how do we get awareness and credibility by leveraging off brands that, would resonate. So we had a BizDev approach where we'd go partner with people like House & Home or Styled Home or approach not and try to do BizDev where we'd get our national post even.We'd get opportunities to get our brand in front of people and get distribution. And it was really the ability to consistently show certain type of product, a certain value proposition. We have partnerships that wouldn't necessarily drive people to sign up through email or to do purchases, but we'd give people comfort that when they saw something else and are deepen our channel they'd feel comfortable to interact with us. How do I learn to do this? This is just read a lot. So my past history taught me some of the frameworks and how to think about it and an experimenting a lot and just looking at the data, looking at what's happening and just quickly iterating and talking to a lot of other people. because there's, a lot of people doing startups that you could just reach out to for help.Edward: How did You come out of the HomeSav experience different than when you went in? Like, what did you learn there that set you up for growing free future businesses?Alex: So I think a couple of things, one is trying and understand the high level game you're playing. So this is not applicable necessarily to marketing, but we usually try to bootstrap, bootstrap, his business. People say, don't look, all your competitors are doing, but I think it's understanding the value chain and who you're competing with and what your ultimate goal for that business is in planning a bit more backwards. So, the One Kings Lane existed, they were competitor to us and there's a few others emerged like FAB, pivoted into our space and they had a lot more capital play and act a lot more irrationally. So while you don't really want to worry about your competitors, normally. The actions of people that were much significant, more well-funded to us caused us to go raise money and, change our game at the game we were playing.So I think understanding the value chain, who the competitors are and where you can compete differently. So like, what's your unique accesses and how you can compete and how that lets you either compete completely differently or where do you have to overlap and value proposition and what the implications are? I'd build a much stronger hypothesis at the beginning. I think the second thing is, a team perspective. I think strategically mistakes we did is we kept a few people that were excellent performers, but bad culturally for too long. And so they create some ill will in our culture that hurt the productivity of other people. So we had some people are excellent. They were like, they're 10 times their former at half the cost. But what we didn't realize is by having them in the company too long they infected another five, six people and hurt their, ability to deliver value.I think, the third thing is I think in the marketing channels, we did the right thing by focusing what's winning and keeping portfolio activity, because every channel or message eventually changes. The ultimate vision stays the same, the ultimate positioning stays the same or can be changed over time, much slower than the channels and distribution. So I think we did the right balance of 70% investment on what's working in 30% in experiments. I think for some of the core business, we probably should have done less experiments and double down a bit more while it was working.I think those are high levels from running business. I think it's a lot and as you scale, it's all about the people, because we got to 45 people, 50 people at one point, it became either about recruiting, about setting the culture or about handling people issues. So I think realizing that as a business scales, you want to get the right leadership set that helps. I think as leaders, the CEO or founders, you're always going to be responsible for that, but the level of the, bench strength of the management team faster, would it have been helpful.Edward: That's helpful. So I want to go back on how you got there. So I have a theory that the things people do when they're in junior high school or early in high school affect their entire lives. How did you spend your time in junior high? What were you passionate about Back then?Alex: Comic books, reading, sports. Wasn't a big athlete, but I was a big fan of the Blue Jays and the Maple Leafs.Edward: What drew you to those things? Was it the math behind the baseball? Was it the money behind the comic books? Was it the Superman jumping over buildings? What, what drew you to those things?Alex: That's a good question. So two things which I think drew to most of my activities in my life, and I wouldn't say necessarily for comic books but is, I have an inherent desire and this is something I've realized later in my life is, that I like taking stuff apart, figuring out how they work and putting it together. Not necessarily physical things, but I like understanding how things are interrelatedly work. I just have an innate curiosity to figure things out. I say I'm numerically logically inclined, but it's not necessarily like, I'm not like someone who needs to do deep calculus. I think for comic books and reading I think and just reading. I was an avid reader, comics is just, was a great way to escape. It was fun to read. Just different ways of thinking, I guess, a bit of fantasy.I think just like reading in general, just to see in different perspectives. Reading in general is just a great way to explore a world without leaving and I think comic books as a kid was something that let you do it and it was superheros, but eventually as I got older, it was like stuff like Sandman, which was, it was more mythology. So I think it's a bit of escapism, I think that it's a bit of creativity. It's just a bit of ways to see the world differently and then eventually I started buying and selling comic books and that was, it was almost as much a challenge of as much enjoyment of reading. So originally started off to pay for my comic book collection because it was spending way too much. But then it was also a way to just figure stuff out, figure out, make the business work for lack of a better word.Edward: Those skills carry forward, the stuff you developed back then, how did that affect things later in your career?Alex: So, and this is a nature versus nurture question. Most people today, especially in the tech world, don't believe there's anything as business skills. They just think that, inherently you can learn everything and I, feel that, there's like business common sense, which I think I've naturally had and this helped me, nurture it and help me bring up sooner, faster. So like I understand clearly supply and demand. Like I went there and I had these words, I understand arbitrage. I would understand basic marketing. So it taught me lots of skills. People learn in college. It taught me a lot of just experiential experiences, with a lot of concepts that are important to business. I didn't have any experience with managing team, but like at this time this was before the internet and so I would see arbitrage opportunities by reading local newspapers, for example.So I'd buy stuff in Toronto and put them for sale in the States. Vice versa, I'd see stuff for under price in the States and sell them in Toronto. I had a whole business, so I had to understand profit and loss. I had to understand, I understand supply demand. I can understand, so I think there's a lot of basic business skills that I picked up that I had advanced learning. But I also think if I look at my career, I think I just have an innate understanding of some like common sense when it comes to business.Edward: Now you went to university in Montreal, McGill. How did you come out different from that experience than when you went in?Alex: Much more global view. I think, if you asked me before McGill I'd have probably said, I'm going to be right back in Toronto, probably may, my career mission, maybe being an accountant like my father. McGill had a, it still has a very international student body. It was just eyeopening to see people from all over the world and with all different ambitions and spend time with them.Alex: I had a roommate that just moved from Delhi a few years ago, years before McGill, I spent two years living with him. I like, one of my friends originally from Hong Kong, also people from small town Ontario, which didn't have the perspective I had growing up in Toronto. So I think you go there for the education supposedly. But I think with the education you get is from your peers and they change your perspective and they change how you view the world. I went right to New York after that. If I didn't go to McGill and didn't meet the people I met, I wouldn't have had, lack of a word ambitions our desire to go to New York and I wouldn't have gone into finance. So it, it changed my whole career trajectory.Edward: So let's talk about that. So let's say you went to York, the local university in Toronto, instead of going to McGill, how do you think your life would have been different?Alex: Well, probably lived at home for those four years. So right away. That's a whole different experience because living on your own, you have to do adulting. You have to clean your house. You have to be responsible for rent. Like basic life stuff, but you're not sheltered by living home and second aspect of not living at home is you spend a lot more time doing social stuff. Like my parents really didn't care what time I came home or not but like I had car, I'm sure if I came home a few nights at three o'clock in the morning, it would have been an issue. But when you live by yourself, you are responsible of yourself. You have your own social calendar. So I think, you get a bit more responsible taking care of place and budgeting and everything like that.I think it also gives you more Liberty to do what you want without any oversight and again, I'm the oldest of five so my parents just really didn't care about me because they thought I was responsible but I don't know. But I still think there's self pressure that it opens up. I think also I do think York, two things, it doesn't have an international group of people. It's a bigger university I think student body wise, but more homogeneous and how they think and it doesn't have, also one benefit of McGill's as an international alumni base and reputation, which also has benefited me, which I think York has is a strong school, but its reputation is probably limited to the Southern Ontario region.Edward: Where would you have ended up, like you wouldn't have gone to New York, you think you would have gone and taken a job as an accountant in Toronto?Alex: Like I probably go on accounting. Maybe I'd gone to one in the Bay Street, which is okay, I think. But Bay Street it's probably better destination out on the was 20 years ago at best would have been at Bay street, but probably been an accountant or, some professional service job.Edward: After you left Lehman, you went to San Francisco and then less than a year later, you went to London. How much of that was chasing the good opportunities and jobs and how much, what was the allure of new cities in places?Alex: I'd say it's more cities and places than a good job. To give context. So this was 2000, 2001. So as a Lehman doing Tech M&A, it's funny I didn't believe in the valuations of dot-coms, but what I saw was technology was going to change how business was done. So I wanted to get close to it and at that time, the experience you get as a 22 year old at working for these dot-coms was way beyond what you'd get historically. They come in and say, run a division, run marketing. So start off, I left Lehman to go to the company in New York, which wasn't working out and there was an opportunity that came to me via several contacts to say a couple of people I knew were, moving to San Francisco once said Hey, there's a great startup that I'm going to work at why don't you apply?So I went for that job and I wanted it because it was the ability to be close to where the actual what's happening and then you have to be honest, I was a bit disappointed with San Francisco at that time from, again as going for the experience of the startup, but also experience of being somewhere other than New York and other than East coast. And it's funny, I was, it was more at that time, San Francisco was more middle America and New York is. I think it's now much more like New York than it was in 2000, 2001. So we'll come in. I was working at, I was failing for a couple of reasons. One being the CEO and founder got really sick and so she was going to basically resign and the investors want to take the money back because it was a big bet on her.So when I knew that was going to happen, I said, you know what? I want to go outside of States. I want to see a bit of the world and I actually literally reached out to a colleague of mine, a senior VP of mine that worked with me at Lehman brothers in London. He was about to start a company and one of my friends from McGill was in Hong Kong and I asked them both what opportunities do you know? A week later I was in London interviewing with this ex former senior VP from Lehman brothers, learning about his company, meeting his founders and I left London with an offer and I was there two weeks later. So it was an ability to get out of North America, see a bit of the world, get a different culture. It was also another opportunity to continue working in tech and actually a more senior role and they had an interesting idea, which was worth pursuing.Edward: It sounds like that you were at a few different places that didn't work out. What were the biggest failure points in your career? Where did things not go as expected?Alex: I guess maybe I have a growth mindset. I don't think anything was really a failure, there's companies I worked for that don't exist and didn't work. But they weren't my companies. So I think the activities I did, I think in those companies were successful, but though either a strategy wasn't right. They didn't have enough funding and I learned a lot from them. Like if I look at companies that fail, so I worked one in New York, they were the first B2B marketplace and they raised a ton of money from a bunch of notable investors. I just think the timing was off and they were trying to do too much because they raised like a hundred million dollars, but we were trying to cover 30 markets and you'd have people raise $30 million just to cover excess apparel inventory. So we were trying to do a hundred markets with not having any traction anywhere.We have competitors doing every single market and, I just want some for market, for sub markets and even when I had everything that looked like it was ready to be in place. I had supplied and a man lined up at all those things, ready to create that market. The timing wasn't there.So like I remember they did a deal with Stanley works. Stanley works is going to put $400 million of excess goods on our marketplace, we're going to help them sell it and we're going to clear it, go to implement the steel with the CFO and CTO at Stanley Works. Drive up to I think it was Connecticut. They said, "Yep, we're all for this. We know we have $400 million of excess inventory. We don't know what it is or where it is". Their technology systems were not ready and then the people that like the jobbers or buyers that are brokers are going to buy stuff still will want to do stuff offline. So half the time we even did transactions, we've done offline and recorded online. The timing was not right and we were just too spread thin to actually to make it work. So that company didn't go there.Edward: So if that company had succeeded. What would have happened to your career? You've had a very different experience going forward, what would it happen?Alex: I don't know. Like even if I stayed at Lehman instead of going there, like the good thing is every change has a compounding impact on my career. If that worked out hypothetically, I could be much wealthier than I am that. Think about it, you have a startup in 2001, let's say it works out. The IPO out of had probably enough money to make some money that, and more importantly would have been an early person that has an exit or an IPO you to be in the flow with people and that ecosystem that could have probably invested and had many more opportunities based on that. I don't know what I'd be doing. Like, I don't know if I'd be a market builder because I was responsible for four different markets here and I was getting supplies, getting demands, some partnerships to build awareness and get, I guess I was doing some marketing that I think about there.So maybe it'll start something sooner. I don't know. It's hard to know. That, interesting is also if that company was started in 2008, instead of 2001, there was a hundred employees when I was there. I'd be probably in touch with those people because I think right now, occasionally I hear from one of the people, but there wasn't a social network. You didn't have personal emails. So it would have been completely different, if I say the Lehman Brothers, I could've be there till it went bankrupt and I could have still walked away with a lot of money. I'd have probably been in New York. I'd probably had a complete different perspective on what gets me excited, probably be an investment banker for so long. Your justification life is, how much money you make, which money is important but it's not the end all be all measuring stick for my life right now. So culturally I would have been different and opportunity to be different. So it's just hard to know.Edward: Let's, jump ahead. You went to business school, spent four years at McKinsey, came back to Canada, started HomeSav, you sold it. How did you figure out what to do next after HomeSav?Alex: So I had silver bronze handcuffs. So which means, I had incentives to stay at the choir, but once you get acquired, you have pressure to perform, but it's not the same as being a founder. So that was the time to start figuring it out. I actually thought I'd just start another business by now. That's actually the first thing I started doing, I found new co-founders. I thought I had problems and I tested some ideas. So one of the key learnings also, I guess, going back to the question about HomeSav is, after being a first time founder and selling something, you realize it's a 10 to 20 year journey for a really good outcome and building a real sustainable business. Every day you can get hit in the face or I have a huge celebration within 10 minutes and so I started exploring other ideas.I went through two or three different ideas where I got a team together. We explored it and I was much more critical about what information I have to learn to make a no go or go decision and how much passion I have to have. So try to ideal around providing technology for early education like kindergartens and Montessori schools. I did another idea, can't even remember what the other, second one was? Then as a third one, which is like class pass for hair salons, you can look at my hair, you can see I'm definitely a customer for that, but actually that, that, one's actually funny. I have four sisters, a wife, a daughter, my co-founder. They're also like just, we start off with doing classical blow outs and that one actually looks successful, two months in, we had 5,000 customers paying us a hundred bucks a month.You know the accounts were horrible though and we actually got offered venture funding and I think we did for another month and a half and said, like we're not passionate about this and we don't believe fundamentally you could have a create something that delivers values for all the stakeholders. You always, having leakage at one part of this business model. So we actually put a bullet in it. So I thought was start another company right away over a series of a year, the three companies, they put bullets in all of them. I started advising startups. So it wasn't clear and then, I sort of organically found what, I had the luxury of time to figure out what I wanted to do and I followed what I'm excited aboutEdward: You ended up, Managing director, co-founding Tech TO and then becoming a partner at AngelList and then launching your own VC fund. How many more jobs are you planning to do? Can you consider being the CEO of a social network and a payments platform for them simultaneously?Alex: I'm only goal is to be as talented and connected as Jack Dorsey. It's weird because I think a lot of people believed the only way to be successful is to have a clear end set of where you want to get to and build towards it. I do believe that increase your chances of success significantly. I think the other thing with the path I follow, which makes it more difficult is if I were inherently interested in doing stuff I enjoy and doing stuff where I believe adds value and which will eventually pay for it, pay for itself. So all these things are connected and I think by giving a lot to others without expecting, anything in turn has helped me build this career path. So like Tech TO was started when Jason who we both know, Jason Goldlist came back to Toronto, said had, I'm working remotely.I'd like to get involved with the tech ecosystem, I said, here's some opportunities. There're some things you can do to help improve the culture, the Kane or the Toronto tech ecosystem and we had both experiences, he'd be in Seattle, I've been in three other startup ecosystems. What do we bring the best from organizations we saw there? We just started doing what we thought would be best for the ecosystem that got, for lack of a better word product market fit. It wasn't planning on being an organization. I was planned on me like a three hour per month give back to the ecosystem and it's grown into something much bigger. We can get that later. So I started doing that is actually what happened was the timing was before I started Tech TO I was, actually going through a series of startups that I was seeing if I want to start one up, I advising a bunch of startups.So I started doing this three hours a month and then it start getting traction. So okay let me figure out what we can do to have a bigger impact and bigger impact that continue to grow. And because of that, and we've been advising startups, eventually AngelesList was looking for someone to launch a candidate and reached out to me. I wasn't looking for anything. So if you look at Textron, we're trying to help the ecosystem by helping people get knowledge faster, learn from others, faster, meet people faster and build awareness of what's going on in Toronto. One thing I never explicitly touch was we believed it was more capitalism ecosystem, but we didn't think this organization was well positioned for that. Angels reached out to me, spent like three months talking to them, their mission as an organization, as a company, it was very aligned with what I'm trying to do with Tech TO.They had the ability to bring capital and SQL system. So there was a natural fit there and to sort of live the mission I'm trying to live in and help him with another organization. So that's why I took on the role at AngelList. Then in that draw, I'll take up both of these.I started as an angel investing and I found I had good deal flow, good judgment and I had well positioned myself again. Love say the strategic. Maybe, if I was forced, I'd say this is what I'd like to do with my life. I would have strategically taken both these roles and built these up, but it wasn't. So I said, okay, here's an opportunity for me to further align myself with the companies I'm investing in by bringing more capital, more connections to them. So I've raised the venture fund based upon the leverage, basically all the different networks and all the different skill sets and learnings I've had and have a bigger impact on the ecosystem. So while it looks like three different jobs, they're all very correlated. They have synergies for lack of a better word. Do I want to take on more roles? No. Am I taking on too much right now? Probably will there be a shift in how I allocate my time between all three? Probably there's been shifts over the last few years. It'll probably be more shifts over in the next six months.Edward: Awesome. Thanks Alex. We're going to dive into more into Tech TO when we do part two of this interview, which should be released tomorrow. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com

This is the first “beta” podcast for Marketing BS. I would love your feedback as I refine the interviews and the production quality. These interviews are all in two-parts. Part I covers the CMO's career - how they got their first head of marketing role, and how they have pushed their career from there. In Part II we dive into one specific business they have overseen to talk about growth levers.Transcript below:Edward: My guest today is Jason Goldlist. Today's episode dives into his career. How he got his first CMO role and beyond. University of New Brunswick, McKinsey, INSEAD, A Place for Mom operations, and then Strategy, and then Head of Marketing at Wealthsimple. Today's co-founder of TechToronto or TechTo, among other things.  Jason, we know each other quite well, but I don't think I know the story of how you got your first Head of Marketing role at Wealthsimple. I know you're working for me at APFM leading strategy, you've done some work on television, but how did you get a marketing offer to run the whole thing?Jason: Well, thanks for having me, Ed. I do owe a lot of my success as a marketer to you. You have been a manager and also a mentor to me over the course of my career. Quite a self-serving question, Ed, because the answer is going to be due to your guidance. But it comes down also to the people that I've met along the way. You mentioned McKinsey in my biography. I did start my career there and I had the opportunity to meet a lot of incredible people that have served me well over the course of my career. One of those happened to be the founder of a Canadian fintech startup called Wealthsimple. As I was working with you in Seattle, A Place for Mom, I wanted to make that transition back to Toronto, back to Canada where I'm from. I reached out to some contacts, including Mike, the founder of Wealthsimple, and told him I was coming back, and he was excited to share with me that he was looking for someone to lead marketing there. It just happened that the relationship that we'd had over many years at that point, it was a good fit for me to come on board and give it a go.Edward: Were they looking at any other people or just your personal relationship was what got you the job?Jason: At the time, they actually had an original marketer who joined the team, and that marketer didn't really have that third way about him. It was more of a traditional marketer who had come from a larger organization and didn't have that scrappy, thoughtful, counterintuitive thinking that the team really wanted. They did get rid of the first marketer and were looking for someone else. They had started a search and in fact, if I remember correctly, Mike's original way of finding me was to ask me if I had any referrals for him. He said, "Hey, we're looking for a marketer," and then he described someone that sounded a lot like me and maybe looked a lot like me and had a lot of my experience, and I said, "Oh, sounds really cool. Let me think about a couple ideas for you and then I'll bring them back to you." Then a few weeks later, we sat down and said, "Okay, I've got a couple of names for you." He goes, "Oh, yeah. I don't really want those names. I was hoping that it will be you."Edward: Obviously, he wanted you. He knew you and he trusted you. Why put you in a marketing role and not in a strategy or an operations role where you arguably had more experience?Jason: There's something that I've read from you, Ed, and that is marketing is everything. When the best leaders, the best founders are putting together their leadership teams, I think they recognize that. So my background is a little eclectic. I have done work in strategy, I have done work in operations, I have done work in product, I have done work in marketing, and especially for an early-stage company that had really big ambitions, more so than usual (I think) you had to pitch in and do everything.I think Mike recognized that was a good background for him and for what the company needed at the time and was something that I was more than eager to do, which was more than AdWords analytics, but actually anything that the company needed to grow and be successful.Edward: It was almost less of a marketing role and more of a ‘grow the business anyway you can' role.Jason: Sure. I would argue that when it comes to an early stage company, in that time the company was 10 people. It had raised under $2 million Canadian in funding, had a couple of hundred consumer clients, and had its sights set on being what it is today and beyond, which is the leading fintech company in Canada with over a million Canadians as clients, managing billions and billions of dollars with the team of over 300 people. We needed to grow. I would argue that it's actually everybody's responsibility in an organization to grow. The marketer is maybe just the one that's watching the metrics every day and making sure that all the activities that everyone's working on are adding up to the growth that we want to see of the company.Edward: You have that job, the job you came in on for a little less than 18 months before you were promoted to GM. How did your job change post the promotion? Or did it?Jason: It did change a lot and I think it changed more so with the growth of the company than it did with necessarily the kind of work that we're doing in marketing or in general management. I think what's really neat about joining a fast-growing company is that there are so many opportunities everywhere to contribute and to get impact. Something that I learned working with you is that it's much more fun to have 800% growth than just to have a 0.8% growth. Even though there are many opportunities where maybe working at one of the world's largest companies, 0.8% growth can represent a lot more dollar value than 800% growth. But in terms of a fast-growing startup, when there's that kind of growth and that kind of excitement, there's a lot of opportunity for impact. The kind of things that I would work on started at (I would say) traditional early stage startup channels, like how do we get earned media? How do we find our communities online that want to be early adopters of our technology? How do we go participate at local events and win customers one by one? That ended up turning really quickly into what new products do we need to introduce to keep our growth, sustain, and accelerate it? What are our customers telling us that we need to build and fix? As an example, what are the other skills we need to add to the team to grow and deliver the brand on the product promise that we've delivered with our brand?Edward: I want to go back a little bit. I want to talk about the path that got you to the place where you got that offer. I have a theory that the things people do when they're in junior high school ended up affecting them their whole lives. Let's go back to that time when you were in junior high. What were you passionate about back then?Jason: It's funny you mention it. When I think about my junior high experience, I was not super studious. I was not booksmart in junior high. I was the kid who was hustling his classmates in the hallways to buy from his latest venture. I remember one of the things that I built in junior high was, you'd call it today a direct-to-consumer clothing brand. Then, I just called it ugly wear and I sold very ugly sweatshirts to my friends at school. I had a paper order form that they would use to customize. I found in the Yellow Pages, a tailor that would come and actually stitch custom logos onto the blanks that I would buy in Chinatown. I think the total cost of one of my items was like $50, which was a fortune for a junior high sweatshirt, and I probably sold it at $51 or something.Edward: Why did you do that? Did you need that dollar that you're making? I can't imagine that was the motivation. What was the motivation?Jason: I thought it was cool and I think that's driven a lot of the things that I've done in my career is that I find it interesting and I want to learn more about how it's done. At the time, I think the core insight to me was everyone's wearing the same clothes, everyone's looking the same. There's got to be a way to express your personality more. Why can't we order custom clothing? That just turned into a bit of a self-directed research project to figure out how it could be done. Then once it was done, how to let others do it as well.Edward: What broader elements did you learn? You learned obviously how to make a sweatshirt. Did you learn anything that was more broad than that?Jason: I think that's one of the earliest examples that I can remember of something I kind of live my life by now, which is GTD. How do you get things done? And how do you ship product? How do you make decisions? And how do you not necessarily delegate and outsource things, but just go and do it yourself? I think that was a really important learning that I had from doing that. It wasn't like there was a turnkey provider who did it. It was every step of the way thinking through the process, finding out how these things get done in the real world, and then going out, getting driven around by your mom to go and do it.Edward: You outsource nothing except for the driving of the car? Jason: You know what? I wish we had more lax driver regulations here in Canada. I could have done it myself then. Maybe I would have Uber'd if that was around back then.Edward: Jumping ahead to your university experience. Who's unusual? Tell me a little bit about where you went to college and how that happened.Jason: Part of it is because it was cool, I think applies here, too. A part of that is also sort of thinking against the grain. For me, a lot of my classmates in high school were all going to the same colleges and studying the same things. I had been successful or interested in things that ran against the grain a little bit.I wanted to do something different and I found that at a small college in the Maritimes in Eastern Canada called the University of Brunswick, where they had a 20-person program that focused on interdisciplinary studies.It was a philosophy degree that helped you think about the world and instead of putting you in a large auditorium and giving you a multiple choice test, they sat 20 people around a piano in an old Victorian home and had discussions with the different deans of the faculties. You were sort of ranked and rated based on learning outcomes. There were no numbers involved or attached. It was really about the impact of your thinking, the quality of your discourse, how you interacted and pushed the thinking forward together with your classmates.Edward: How did you come out different from that experience than when you went in?Jason: They talked about different types of programs. One that accepts great people, there's no transformation, and they come out the same. Of course, you have the stamp of approval from the program. You've got all other programs that bring in certain people and then transform them into something different.I do think that this one was a transformational program. For me coming into it, I think I lacked perspective on how powerful those skills would be. I think I've still thought that perhaps you needed a high score in math to be successful or you needed to study engineering to know how the world works. I think what happened is when I came out of that program, I learned really the way that we interact with each other, the way that we solve problems together, and it's not just about what you know, but how to learn and how to know is more important.Edward: Do you think that your career and the kind of the rest of your life would have been different if you'd taken a different route if you'd gone to the University of Toronto? How would things have been different for the rest of your career?Jason: I think it would have been really different, actually. The reason is that I think that in any other program, if I hadn't gone against the crowd, I think I would have fallen in with the crowd. I think I would have thought the same way. I think I would have studied the same things. I think I would have coveted the same graduate roles as everybody else. By striking a little bit of an alternative path for the time, it let me think in a different way and question myself, just because other people are doing it, do I need to as well?I'll give you a great example. A very common path for people from my high school was to go in, do a college degree, go straight to a law program and practice law. Very common path for my friends, one that most of my peer group did, and those are higher-earning jobs. Those are people who have comfortable lifestyles and are able to provide for their families very well. For me, that wasn't interesting, and I think if I hadn't made that choice, I think I would have fallen into that path. For me, instead, coming out of that program, I was really interested in the world. Part of the program included sort of a domestic internship anywhere in Canada and an international internship anywhere in the world. Through my program, I was exposed to all sorts of different things. Having gone to the West Coast for an internship, a marketing internship, and then gone actually overseas, going to Switzerland and spending a summer there. I was curious about the world in a way that was different and I wanted an opportunity not to go to law school after I graduated, but to learn more about how the world worked.Edward: And yet, your first job after college was at McKinsey, which many people would argue is the epitome of the traditional path for high-performing young people.Jason: It's funny looking back at it now. It certainly looks the case and I have to agree with you. At the time, I had no idea what McKinsey was and I have to say, my family, my friends, my peer group, my school, for God's sake, do not know what McKinsey is. I did not go to a feeder school where there was on campus recruiting. I had never even heard of it. In fact, the way that I discovered it is also quite interesting. I was doing an internship in Ottawa after I graduated and I just struck up a random conversation with someone in the community and had mentioned to them that I did that internship in Switzerland. He said, "You know what? You remind me of my nephew who's actually working in Switzerland right now for a company called McKinsey. You guys should connect." In fact, I made that email to Rob Charon, who was in fact, finishing his second year as a business analyst in the Toronto office of McKinsey. He encouraged me to learn more about it and apply, helped me with the interview process, and helped me find that job.Edward: If you'd gone to University of Toronto, do you think you would have ended up McKinsey anyway, maybe even without doing the internship in between?Jason: Certainly not. I think I would have been on the path. I think I would have kept the blinders on, put my head down, and ended up following the path to the world of law or something like that.Edward: Okay, let's play another what if. Now you're at McKinsey. You don't have that lunch, and you don't find out about Rob Charron and the opportunity, and you don't go to McKinsey. What happens instead? What does your career path look like for that alternate Jason?Jason: We can play it out a few years. That could be fun. I do think I would go to law school. I do think I would start a job at a law firm. I do think that I would practice law, try to become a partner. I think that's the game that people try to play. I think that's a six- or eight-year game, which is kind of fun. Probably sometime along the way I become disillusioned with the art or the practice of law, and maybe I would feel the fallacy of sunk costs so strongly that I would leave private practice, just go in-house at a company, and keep practicing law in-house. I think it'd be sad. I think lawyers are sad.Edward: Do you think you end up being the in-house counsel for Wealthsimple?Jason: Certainly not, and the reason I say that is because the fiduciary responsibility of being the in-house counsel of a disruptive finance company is not something I want to take on, and I can't imagine that my career path would have led me to be intimately familiar with the capital market legislation in Canada. I don't think I could find that interesting. Even though we've played this what-if game where I've gone against my natural curiosity, I do think that would kick in at some point along this career path and prevent me from doing something like that.Edward: You come out of McKinsey and instead of going directly to business school, you work for the Vancouver Olympics. How many McKinsey people were you working with there?Jason: It was none when I started, but one of the cool things about working for an organizing committee (the Olympics) is that I think I joined as employee number 900 and something. By the peak of the games, I think there were 70,000 employees, contractors, and volunteers working for the games. So you need to scale up quite quickly. I think all that happens in the span of six or nine months. I had the opportunity to hire some great people to join my team, but on the other hand, it's not a professionally-managed business, for example, like the one that we joined later afterwards and A Place for Mom.Edward: What did you learn when you're at the Olympics that you wouldn't have learned if you'd done a more traditional post-McKinsey role?Jason: It's a good question because I think this goes back to part of the career arc here, which is after McKinsey, there is also a defined path that lots of people do that I also avoided at the time. It was very fashionable to go and spend a year or two at a private equity firm or a hedge fund before going to business school and coming back to the firm. For me, that also didn't sound interesting and I wanted to try something different. One of the things that I thought I had been missing from my McKinsey experience, even though I had managed teams of clients, is that I hadn't had a direct management role at McKinsey. As an analyst, I was doing tons of maybe big data insights, creating lots of decks, and trying to come up with strategic recommendations, but I hadn't really managed the team. I thought it would be cool to add that weapon to the repertoire and manage a big team. I think at the peak I was managing a hundred paid staff and volunteers to run the operations at the Games. That was the path that I took. I also thought it would be cool to be part of the Olympics. I mean, the Olympics don't come to your home country all the time. The timing had worked out and I thought it'd be really interesting to take a peek inside of that organization.Edward: Now, post-McKinsey, I hired you to come to A Place for Mom. This was the job you had before your CMO role. Why did you come work for me and what else could you have done instead?Jason: Actually, in between there. I did do my MBA in INSEAD, so that opens up a lot of job opportunities. There's a huge on-campus recruiting push. There are all sorts of post-MBA opportunities that open themselves up to you. But I think there was a transformation that I had there where before I had been guided by what I thought was cool.I thought clothing was cool. I thought that doing the small program was cool and interesting. I thought doing the Olympics was cool. I thought seeing the world with McKinsey would be cool. There was a bit of a transformation I underwent during my MBA, which was seeing a lot of other ambitious people that also thought some of those same things were cool.One of the defining factors for me of something being cool was that not a lot of people want it. It made me reflect a little bit more on what I wanted to do next and the reflection led me to this new insight, which is awesome people are cool. Instead of chasing industry, instead of chasing a brand, instead of chasing experience, how can I chase great people that I could work with who would care about me, who would invest in me, who would believe in me to take on more responsibility and grow? I made a list of people who had worked with before who I thought fit the bill and I guess you were just the first person to pick up when I called you. You told me there was a great opportunity and I think I said yes before I even asked who it was, or where it was, or what we were going to do. I just was excited about the opportunity to work with someone awesome.Edward: A lot of your career looks like jumping from success to success and sometimes fairly randomly where opportunities kind of happen and you jump at them. What were the biggest failure points in your career? Where did things not go as expected?Jason: It's not always up into the right in the sense that if you wanted to use a traditional measure like salary. I certainly made much more at McKinsey than I made at the Olympics. That was a major step backwards, for example.Edward: I wouldn't call it a failure, though. Where did the failures happen? Where did things happen that at the time at least you did not expect and did not want?Jason: The human mind is probably really good at erasing a lot of those things to be consistent with your story. But there's no doubt that at each one of those points, there are things that you want specifically, like local maxima that you're optimizing for, that you don't get.You can imagine at a firm like McKinsey, there are lots of different projects to work on. I'm certain there are projects that I wanted that I didn't get, and even worse, projects that I had that I hated, and ones where I wasn't working with great people or didn't feel like I was, and it was a slog every day to learn, to try to be productive, to try to even just be happy. It's the same also at the organizing committee for the Olympics. This was sometimes tedious and not exciting work. I can remember a time where I tried to make it better. I tried to apply some of the insights I had from McKinsey to some of the processes at the Olympics. After spending weeks building this macro model in Excel to help all of the volunteers get their preferred time spots on a 24 hour calendar for 77 days, I was told that I couldn't use it. I was like, what? All that time and effort that I put into what I thought, improving the process, making it more efficient, making it more effective was sort of all wasted.I had maybe some dreams or delusions of grandeur of this product that I built, sort of being rolled out across the entire organization and maybe it would be like a legacy of the organizing committee to be passed on to the next organizing committee, the next one, and there it ended with me using it by myself.Edward: When you left Wealthsimple, you did not move on to a new marketing role. What was your plan for what to do next and where did you end up at?Jason: It's similar to the transformation that I had at business school, which was driven by a lot of reflection and seeing sort of people around me be successful in their own career paths. I think I got the chance to do that a lot again at Wealthsimple, which is to think about the people that inspired me, the people that I looked up to, see their career paths and where they were going, and see which parts of those I wanted to take for myself and which ones I wanted to leave behind. I certainly saw lots of people continue on the marketing path, chase another CMO role or level up to a bigger brand with more spending, maybe one with more followers on Instagram, or maybe one that gets treated better by Google or Facebook because of their annual ad budget. That wasn't an interesting challenge for me. The people that I looked up to, they had taken marketing skills and they had created something entirely new. I think I got pulled into more of an entrepreneurship track and thinking, how can I take some of the skills that I have and apply it to something new and different, together with the people that I want to be building with.Edward: What's next for you?Jason: We are starting all over again. If you think about my career progression, I started at a really big firm, then I went to a smaller organization. I went to an even tinier organization, then I went to a 10-person startup. I think I finally—like Benjamin Button—gotten back down to being born and starting with just myself.What's next for me is building a software business in a sustainable way that's going to help really change the way that people meet each other, that people learn together, and that people grow as one and I'm really excited about it.Edward: That's great. Well, thank you, sir. We'll continue this conversation in part two, digging into Jason's experience at Wealthsimple. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com