The Operator Behind Wealthsimple's Growth: Brand Bets, Blitz Hiring, and 125 Billion in AUA

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Welcome to Between Two Burnettes, a show dedicated to highlighting Canadian voices. Together, we're sharing authentic conversations with the people shaping the future of Canada. We hope you enjoy the show. Today we have with us Paul Tashima, Chief Commercial and Chief Marketing Officer at Wealthsimple. We are so excited because I feel like you've played a pivotal role across brand, marketing, operations, sales. So we are excited to get a little glimpse into your brain. Paul, are you ready for a conversation between two brunettes?
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I'm so ready. Thank you for having me. Before we get into Wealthsimple and everything that you've done in the past, what, five or six years that you've been there now, want to go a little bit back in time. So in 2020, you sold your company, Nudge. Take us back to that time. What led you to want to join Mike's leadership team? Because in an article we read that there was maybe a little bit of hesitation at first. Yeah.
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Yeah, so I just sold my company. I think it closed like two weeks before COVID hit, which was crazy. And it wasn't a great exit. We had to basically shut down the company and sell the technology, but enough time that we could let people find new jobs and do it in the right way, which was really good. And Mike, who I'd known for several years before because he was in a founder's club I was with, asked me to look at an opportunity while simple. And I actually said, you know, it's B2C because I was a B2B startup person. Yeah.
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it's financial services and I know nothing about financial services. I'm probably the wrong person for your role. That's what I said to him. But Mike's really smart and just a really sharp guy. And by the way, I've always wanted to work for Mike. He said, you know, take your time. You just sold your business. Why don't you meet a couple people? And so I met, you know, the co-founder, Brett Honeycutt. I met at the time the chief operating officer, Robin Ross. And I was like, wow, these are really smart people. And I thought, you know, maybe now's a good time to try and learn
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It's interesting that you say that on you feeling like you didn't have the experience being an industry because with a lot of the other founders that we've talked about, they've been very intentional about not hiring people that come from the industries, especially the ones that are very slow moving. And they want to innovate in because they want people who bring in new ideas and bring in innovation from other areas. And it sounds like Mike probably had that point of view and bringing you on as well.
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I think so. Yeah. I think he both wanted a different point of view. He knew I had more of that gritty startup approach to things, more growth sales oriented. And he obviously I'd had one success before. So it's seen that I'd known how to get take something further along the journey. So I think that combination of things helped. It's interesting you don't nudge is not a success story to you, even though you guys did manage to sell the company.
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It was like I saw an article where it was framed as a failure and I was like, interesting. You were also pretty vocal about it. I don't know. Yeah, it wasn't a success story. We didn't return that much money to the investors. Was it success in terms of learning a lot? Yeah. We learned a massive a lot. And I also learned never to run a startup into the brick wall and go like bankrupt. You like properly wind it up. Yeah. But if it wasn't for that ending, I never would have joined Well Simple. So it's kind of hard to. It's bitter. Yeah. It's serendipitous in a way. Absolutely. Absolutely.
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You joined WellSimple 2020, is that correct? Yeah, November 2020. And you guys would have been around somewhere between $5 to $10 billion in assets and somewhere between $500K and a million clients. Today, you guys passed $125 billion, I think, in assets and $3.5 to $4 million clients, which is crazy. 70% year-over-year growth. Yeah.
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One, what's it like being at a company that's growing so fast and especially with all of the evolutions that you had in the roles that you've taken so far? First off, when I joined WellSimple, I did not know that was what was going to happen. So it was already a pretty big company relative to other startups and doing quite well. But we had a couple of interesting events happen, one being the meme stock event.
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with GME and all the trading that went on in early 2021. And then two, I would say that Mike and leadership team really want to take advantage of the moment and lean in with growth. And so that's where we really started to focus on like, what do we need to do to build an amazing growth engine by focusing on our customers? Being part of this journey, the thing that's I'm a little more used to that maybe other executives aren't who haven't done the startup journey is this, you're always uncomfortable. Like,
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You never feel comfortable. Even today, I don't feel comfortable. Even today, I'm like, okay, so we're going to have an amazing first half of this year. What are we going to do for the second half of the year? Yeah. And so it's always that kind of uneasiness feeling that kind of drives you to kind of look for more opportunities or new ways to do things that I think helps. Yeah.
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It's so crazy because on paper, Wealthsimple has made it as a company, but you guys don't act like it at all, which is so, it's so hard to maintain that. It's actually a pretty impressive thing. Like you move with so much urgency. There's so much, there's a product velocity, but it feels like there is momentum in every function of the business. From the outside, I'm like, feels pretty rare. Like you don't see a lot of Canadian companies operating that way. I think you're right that I find it rare as well, especially at this size. And I think that
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It's something that we want to really try and hold on to, primarily because we think innovation drives value for customers. And if we can do that, everything else works out.
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You've evolved through a couple of different roles as you've been at Wealthsimple. When you first joined back in 2020, you were chief customer experience officer. And really, the focus there was on scaling customer support at the time, client support at the time. How did you balance growing a team at that speed and also ensuring that the quality remained there? Oh, there was no balance.
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So when I joined, Mike originally wanted me to join for both CX support, but also to start thinking about sales, human-led sales. Okay. And even then we had a small sales team. So that was always like advisor type? Advisor sales. And then eventually we got into business development sales. Okay. But when I joined was when that big crazy stock trend hit. So we hit our year-end customer number in 30 days in January.
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And so we had to hire as fast as we could. So we adopted the LinkedIn blitzscaling model, which was every single person on the team does 30 minute one call close interviews. That's what you were doing.
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One call, close interviews. Okay. Like you make a decision in 30 minutes whether you're going to hire someone. Oh, whoa. How were you preparing the talent team? It was for a period of time. Like we had to. I've never heard of that in my life. So like how many customer support reps or people did you have at that time versus like the end of that year? So when I joined, we had 70 total people in the team of which maybe 40 were in support. Okay. 40. 40.
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And when January happened, we had to hire 20 every two weeks. Every two weeks? And so we ended up closer to 200 by the end of March. Wow. Yeah. Something like that. That's crazy. But it was important because customers were joining really fast. They needed help and support. And we wanted to make sure we had people who could pick up the phone, answer the emails. Yeah. And so, yeah, it was a pretty aggressive growth curve. But today, obviously, that's not the same. It's not the same story today. But back then, that's how aggressive we had to be.
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And so if there was no balance, how did you just manage for the days where things went wrong or things were messy or things were breaking? You know, there's this book called Made the Stick, and it's about storytelling and why certain stories stick in certain stones.
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And they have this concept called the bright spots. And so one of the things that happens in a startup land is that when things go wrong or things are going crazy, you only focus on all the bad stuff that's going on. And what they teach you is to actually not do that.
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That try and focus on something that's working well and ignore the bad things to some extent and focus on that. Like ignore as in like don't address? Yeah. Just let the fire is fire. So during this time of like... It's the fire burn. Yeah, absolutely. Don't ignore it like completely, but just know that you should make a decision of what you want to focus on. Yeah. And during this time...
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You know, we were taking many days to get back to customers who had problems and all these things. And I remember at one point they were asking me to say, should we stop signing on new customers? Like, are you so underwater that you need to stop? And I, it's just beyond me. I couldn't let that happen. I was like, I'm never going to stop that. And so we did this analysis. And what we realized is that of all the new customers who joined us, only 7% ever called in for help.
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So if we shut it down, 93% who wanted to participate and did it in a seamless way self-service would be stopped of that opportunity. So we focused on that bright spot and kept going. And that's why we went into this hiring. We're just going to hire as fast as we can, catch up and make it work. Now, are a lot of those processes automated or do you still have a big? Oh, it's very, it's very, very different now. You can even compare. We can handle massive scale and spikes. It's not even close to the same. That was a much different time.
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And you mentioned that when Mike brought you on in this role, you guys were already starting to build out the sales team as well. So when you moved into the role officially as chief commercial officer a couple years later, had you already been scaling and building out all these different sales teams? And that was more of just like an official recognition, but the org was already getting developed from the start? Yes. Yeah. It had been since...
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Right when we started, we had salespeople when I joined in 2020. They were in the advisor group. And then we added on what I call a full stack business development team. So these are people who would call non-advised clients. So clients who don't want to work with an advisor. And the thing about what I believe in sales is that, you know, especially in this world, is money is pretty personal. Like it's very personal. And most people in Canada especially, they're going to move large sums of money to you for investing. They want to talk to someone. Yeah.
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And so we tested the theory out in late 2023 and then realized that this could really work paired with a really strong growth marketing engine. And then we started to really accelerate that in 2024. And I think the major insight was this gentleman named Simon, who's my chief growth officer today.
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He said, you know, rather than spend millions and millions of dollars with Facebook and Google, why don't we just pay our customers directly? Like referral, you're saying. And so we came up with this idea of providing incentives. But not even just like you're talking about the like buying someone a home. They have like a monthly millionaire program. Yeah, we just ran a match program where if you moved your RRSP over, it would give you a 3% match on it over the next five years. So it's like.
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Yeah. Covering the trans payback on it. That's right. Yeah. And so we spend more money directly in our customers' pockets than we do in advertisers. And so that was a big unlock for us. I'm curious to know, kind of like macro big picture, I remember WellSimple when it first started. It was actually my first case study in business school back in 2015. Yeah. And back then, the competitive advantage, lower fees, stronger UX, and
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brand. Do you think that's still what, like, how would you describe what the competitive advantage is today, almost 12 years later?
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I would say that there's very similar. I think the experience you get absolutely is a big advantage for us. And when I talk to customers, they often talk about how they feel when they use WellSimple as much as the actual features, which I think is important. And then the investment in brand early on, I think, is what really allowed us to build trust with Canadians over long periods of time, something that most fintechs in Canada have not done. At all. And it's hard to make that decision because it's expensive. It's counterintuitive. It's counterintuitive.
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But one of the co-founders, Rudy Adler, really spearheaded that. And I've tried to carry it through after taking over as marketing officer. And we have an amazing in-house creative team that really supports that. It's actually not well known. A lot of people ask me, like, what agency do you work with as you're in-house? And we don't have one. We do it all in-house. That's amazing. It's also, it's so cool, too, because I feel like the brand's been good since the beginning and has only gotten better and evolved more and more.
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because you guys were investing so much in brand early on too the cac was actually bananas and no traditional venture investor would have actually underwritten the strategy to invest in brand the way that you did obviously it's paying dividends to this day but like really hard for another startup to replicate that even i'm thinking about us too like we have shied away from making too big of a brand investment because it's just like
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Is the cack there? Is the payback there? All of the questions. But you guys early on were like, we're doing this. It's important. And like in hindsight, amazing, amazing decision. And I think particularly with the sector within and the fact that the way Canadians feel about financial services. You needed to. Yeah, we needed to build trust over time. Well, it's like shocking for me now, like even when we've spoken to some of our friends who...
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are in that like 25 to 35 age range. And they're like, I don't trust the incumbent banks. I don't know. I'm just nervous to like take my money out of RBC or TD. And like, I think that that's less common in a younger demographic, but it's still very much...
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the culture in Canada just because we've had such few very large banks that have been extremely safe and conservative for so long. Like, it's like so embedded in our society. Yeah. But it needs change. I'm not saying it doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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Yeah. You guys have proven the banks no longer have a monopoly on trust. Certainly in some segments of the market, we're making a good headway for sure. Yeah. But what's the relationship like with the banks now? Obviously, you were mentioning OffAir. They're both competitors, but you also need to partner with them. Has their attitude towards you guys changed?
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I mean, I think the banks are a great part of the Canadian fabric of financial services. Like, they're not going anywhere. If anything, like, what we hope is there's just continued innovation in financial services because customers are asking for it. Yeah. And so we'd love to see that continue to happen. But we do partner with banks on different things. When it comes to the customer that you're focusing on. So I just looked online at Wealthsimple's mission, which is to bring smarter financial services to everybody, regardless of age or net worth.
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When I looked, so I looked up website visitors for Wealthsimple and it skewed 60, 40 men to women. And the most common age group was 25, like this 25 to 34. I'm curious, like with the focus of your product suite now, which is very much focused on...
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options, getting into predictive markets, crypto. Are you still long term trying to build for everyone? Or is there like a natural progression where you do focus on a subset? Well, I think I think we want to earn the entire financial relationship of our clients. So I think that we are.
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going broader on many fronts. And the focus on some of the newer products is really this idea of providing access. So if you think of the traditional financial services industry, a lot of the wealth building tools are kept away from the general population of retail investors.
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And so, you know, maybe we started, for example, with like crypto, but we chose to become the first regulated crypto and safe place to do crypto. And we work really tightly with regulators on making sure we're adopting the right rules and processes to support that. Similarly, we launched alternatives for retail investors. Yeah. And you may have seen the news that the Interior Teachers Pension Fund made over $10 million on their investment in SpaceX. Yeah.
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And so this idea of like, well, why can't we provide, like one of our roles is to provide this access to new financial products and then work within regulation and put the right guidelines in place so that Canadians can do it in a way that's responsible. So that's the same approach we're taking for prediction markets. Okay, yeah. So it's more around just broadly accessibility to these different types of assets to then be able to give it to everyone. Yeah, accessibility and education. And what we've found with clients is that
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The average Canadian investor is actually pretty educated and smart. And if you give them the tools and you give them the content and education, they may make some mistakes, but they certainly will learn from them. Yeah. And they tend to do the right thing, do the right thing. Is there any like focus as a subset of...
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younger people who are either currently or we expect in the future to have a higher net worth and think more around like how can you help create like exit strategy planning when they sell their companies or like estate planning and try to capture more of that market that you said is like this very kind of niche no one talks about area.
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I mean, we focus on what we call as a modern investor. So this is someone who has more than 50,000 investable assets, although you can get onto our platform with any number of assets. Our fastest growing segment actually is people who have more than a million dollars in net worth, which was surprising to us over the last two years. That's changed pretty significantly from like a decade ago, like who the client base was back then.
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No, it has changed. And as a result, we've had to build other types of products, services to support them, like advisory, because a lot of them do want to work with an advisor, for example. But we still want people who are just starting their investing career at 2022 to have a way to do it with a very low barrier to entry. They can just start opening an account digitally, put in $20 a week or whatever they want to do, and still do it in a low fee manner. Yeah. Have you talked to any of them about why they chose to switch to Wealthsimple?
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It's a great question because I was just thinking about this. I was – so we had a dinner. So we do in real life events. We had this big Well Simple Presents event in Calgary, and we're doing more and more in real life stuff. And we had a dinner not that long ago where I asked to bring some of our higher net worth clients to dinner.
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To learn from them, talk to them. And so we did it at – we actually did it at Prime Seafood Palace. Amazing. Oh, amazing. And I remember I asked them this question. Yeah. Why? Why? Why us? Yeah. And I thought I was going to hear, oh, you guys have a great match program or, you know, I love the low fees. And actually what they said was not that. They said –
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I kind of felt you were trying to teach me something, and I've never felt that before from my financial partner. I would not have expected that as the reason. That was very strange. Through product and product design or like the newsletter? Everything that we were doing made them feel like there was something they were going to learn that was going to be interesting or different or they were going to be, you know, something that they would be exposed to that would be new. That actually really solidified my thought that we don't need a separate brand to move upmarket. Yeah. Like we don't have to have a...
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you know, a different wealth simple to service the high net worth if we get there. Which is great because I think we want to try and have a brand that's consistent and the same feel for all Canadians who try and use us.
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When we spoke to Stephen, your previous co-founder, he did. Yeah. Is it Steve or Stephen? It's Stephen. Stephen. We were joined at the hip for 20 years. So, yeah. Yeah. We said, what's Paul like? And I think the first thing that he said is you are customer obsessed and you will do anything to make the customer happy. What does that look like at four million Canadians? And if there is like people listening to this that are joining their first startup or in a head of CX role, strategy ops, how do you live it day to day and how do you inspire it in organizations?
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I think the first thing is just you talk to customers. I know everyone's going to say that. One of the things I will say, though, that I try and do when I talk to customers is I try and the one question I do ask is like, what was unexpected in your experience with us? And usually the best thing to figure out is the gap between their expectations and what you delivered, whether it's up or down. So obviously, if it's down, then that's like not great. But if it's up, it's usually an opportunity you can go much bigger on.
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checking account and it has no FX. So if you go to like, you know, Europe and you're using it, there's no FX additional exchange on it. And we didn't think that was going to be the big thing on the prepaid card. This was several years back.
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But some customers started talking about it a lot. They had no idea. This was so important. And so we started to really lean into this idea of FX, and then we did it on our credit card. And so those type of differential expectations are really interesting to learn in customer conversations. So that's one is just talk to customers a lot. And then the second I would say is that if you can't always talk to customers, talk to the people who are talking to customers. So meet directly with your support organization or meet directly with your sales organization.
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It's like way better to do that than to do surveys or research studies that kind of proxy what customers are trying to do. Were there certain customer segments that were harder than you expected to get on the platform? I mean, still to this day, I'd say someone who wants to go to a branch to do their transactions. That's a hard segment for us to do that. It's crazy that those people exist. They should watch the video. I go to the bank. I won't say the name, but I go to the bank and I feel like I'm going back to the 80s when I'm standing in the bank branch. It even looks dated.
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Yeah. Yeah. They're so dated. They're really dated. But but I think there is something to having the comfort of like being able to go somewhere. Really? About your money. I'm not and I'm not saying we're gonna build a branch, but I'm saying there's something that we are we will look into as an opportunity of like having a physical presence. I think that's something that is important. You look into it, but maybe different ways other than a branch. It's gonna be beautiful.
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It's not going to look. Well, hopefully it's beautiful. Hopefully it's functional. Hopefully it matters. It makes difference. It won't be the same thing that's there today. But I think the idea of like having something where someone can go and engage us physically in real life is important. Today we do that through events and other things, but maybe there's something more permanent we should explore.
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I was reading, it was a quote from, I think, Simon, your head of growth. Yes. He was like, the secret from going from 10 billion to 100 billion wasn't acquiring millions of new customers. It was convincing existing clients who had a thousand in the app to transfer their $100,000 from the bank. Can you just unpack how that strategy comes to life? I don't, I don't. I think it's probably much more of like a whole series of tactics that eventually look like a strategy when you look at it from behind the scenes. And I think that it starts off with this idea of like.
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Low barrier to entry, low fees. Let people try things really easily. The second is build an experience that really over time engages you and then really try and stick to some of our key principles around transparency, keeping things simple, like, and then giving access to things, like not holding things back. And so-
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By doing that over time, people will start to realize, wait a second, I'm going to move a little more money, a little more of this, open a TFSA, maybe I'll move my RRSP. Oh, what, you have banking? I should try it out. I can open a checking account digitally and not have any minimums, right? And so all those things kind of help. And really, that's like one way we get customers. And then the other way is that something crazy goes on at the current institution I'm with. Like they lose $50,000 of their dollars and they're kind of like, I'm fed up and I move everything all at once. And so those are the two ways people usually find us.
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And you incentivize them really well now to do that. That's right. Yeah. How do you guys think about growth today? Obviously, product expansion is one way. How else do you guys think about growing? First off, I will say this. We have an extremely strong relationship with our finance department. They're one of our most strategic partners in the business because in marketing, we have the most discretionary budget to spend. And so you could spend it on so many things. Like we could go try and name a stadium if we wanted, but like.
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So you want to try and build some science around what we're doing. So in working with that, we tend to think about what are things we know that we can do that work. So, for example, we run these incentive campaigns and we know they work and we know they linearly scale with spending money to do X, Y and Z. And we know that customers love them. So we can run that playbook at different times. We always try and then do some things that are nonlinear campaigns.
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non-scalable or like unsure. We don't know what's going to happen. And, you know, we just launched a contest where you can win a million dollars a month if you have a checking account with us. And so we don't know what's going to happen with that one. And, you know, we put constraints around how we think about it.
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But so far, it's doing really well and really encouraging people to save. That's the idea. It's like the more you save, the better chance you have to win these rewards. And so, yeah, we always try and do a little of both things that we know and then save some room for some experimentation.
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And would you know in that example, so like a million, 12 million a year, would you know what that would have gotten you if you had put that money on ads in terms of like you guys ran the analysis to be like. If we spent that on other things that we've done before, we would know what that would produce. And why I love this other campaign is that
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We really want Canadians to save more. Like that's like a big thing. It's like so mission oriented. Yeah. Like the ways you grow your wealth are you get promoted. We can't help you with that today. Maybe someday we can. Two, you save more. Like you spend less, save more. And three, you just stay invested in the market. Right. You stay invested. And so as much as we can help with those last two things is really important for us. What's been your most successful campaign since you've been at Wealthsimple?
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It depends how you judge it. If you were to say in terms of growth, it was the last one we just did, which we called an unreal deal. It was – we gave away the home in Vancouver. And we gave this very large match for your RRSP, up to 3% if you stayed there for five years. So that was very successful. But I would say, like, some of the campaigns that I've really, really loved are our Well Simple Presents, where we go and talk about our product showcase. And so we did our first one last year, and we had no idea –
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because it's a very B2B play to go and do a product event. Right. Was that the, like, the stage presentation? Yes, where we get on stage presentation. Yeah. So we did one last year called The End of Banking, and we thought, who knows if this will happen, but we're going to do it live, and we're going to do it, like,
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It's a classic B2B, you know, Salesforce Dreamforce play, right? Yeah. And we had 110,000 people sign up to watch it. And so this last one we did had over 330,000 people sign up to watch it. And we just had no idea that people would want to listen and hear about a checking account. Yeah. And so that's been probably one of my favorite. And for something like that or a commercial where it's a little bit harder to measure the ROI, like how does your team approach that measurement? I think...
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So they do do, like, don't get me wrong, and the woman who runs his name is Dasha, she's amazing. They put in all the metrics and instrumentation to look at incremental change in account openings, client satisfaction, all this stuff. But the part of it is just we know when we do it. Like, you know when you're there. It's worthwhile. It's like intuition and feeling. And you asked this thing about urgency. So one of the things I think is hard to manufacture is what I call an immovable date. Yeah.
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An immovable O. It's very hard to do in most businesses. Usually most dates can move. Even if a CEO commands it, usually it can still move ultimately. Mm-hmm.
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When you announce to all your customers you are launching something on a date. You have to show up. We can relate to that as a podcast where there's an expectation that episodes go live. That's right. So the whole product and R&D organization gets in line and starts getting ready for it. The marketing organization does. The CX organization. The operations. Everyone in the company builds to this moment.
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And then everyone experiences all their hard work and it's an incredible internal value for us. So we would do it even if the external metrics are bad, but the internal values like through the roof. Yeah, it's special. I also, I happen to read the comments on the, because the YouTube link is still up. It is insane. You guys have so many loyalist customers. Everyone's like, it's the best company in the world. It's the best financial institution Candace ever going to have. I've been a client for 11 years. Like it's actually, it's pretty powerful. I can't, like, I can't imagine the feeling in the room because the comment section alone, I was like, wow.
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Yeah, the clients are amazing. Like I, you know, part of why I like to talk to customers is just I get so inspired to talk to them because they so much, they believe so much in what we're doing and like you don't want to let them down. So it's like, how do we keep doing better things? Like.
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In that presentation, and I might like mess up the slogan, but you guys revealed this more is more wealth simple takes over your life. I don't know if it's a campaign or the new messaging, but it was a pivot from what it was before. I think it was get rich slow. Is that intentional? It was definitely intentional to upgrade our brand a little in this last change.
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And I think that because we're evolving, you know, I think there's a couple of things. We have way more products than ever before. Like we don't just have, you know, the investing in the portfolios that grow slowly. And so I think the idea is just expand until when we have more that you can do. Mm-hmm.
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I think the second is this idea that I still believe that keeping things simple is like our craft. Like it's hard to do simple really well. So we want to obviously say that we have more things, but we want to stick to the fact that we're going to make it as simple as we can for you. And so the combination of those two things are where we're working on with our brand.
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Between like your different channels, like you have the retail and then you have the commercial side on the retirement plans. How interconnected are those teams and kind of the movement of customers who maybe came in through the group retirement and then they start banking with you and investing with you beyond that? I mean, they all do work together. I mean, it's the same customer. And it's one of the benefits of having both the retail and the group retirement business
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Some people who come in through the group side would never have known who we are on the retail side. Yeah. And then when they come in and they move their workplace savings over, and even if they leave the job, they say, well, you know what, I'll just transition to a retail account. Why wouldn't I? Why would I move off platform? And it's not really well known in the group industry, especially in Canada, if you have a GRSP, that you can actually move it.
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Right. And so there's like. Yeah, I moved my lira that was with whatever whoever we were with at KPMG to Well Simple. Well, thank you for that. And that's not very many people know you can do that. And so it's this idea of like getting people in the door and getting them access is what we try. I was paying horrible fees and now I'm not. So thank you.
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Yes, yes.
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And I think it's interesting because one of the things that we're also trying to do is provide more what we call tax alpha to customers. Okay. Tax alpha is like when you get tax advantage during the year in decisions and what you're doing.
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So that you can get tax back or tax benefits. Something, again, that the wealthy really take advantage of. Like even like borrowing against your RSSP and then. Yeah. Borrowing early at a good rate so that, you know, if you can handle the risk or consolidating your loans and then like using some of that borrowing rate to actually, you can actually deduct the interest on that. So there's lots of little things we want to try and do better on the tax side over time. Over time. Yeah.
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Any recommendations for how to think about setting up a growth and marketing function? And especially now with AI and all the new tools and apps out there, just any advice for maybe newer companies or newer entrepreneurs starting?
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I mean, I would say, first off, you get a person who's like a growth hacker who can do multiple things and is good with tech. Absolutely. That's super, super important. And then I still believe in like some of the more traditional foundational things like figure out who your audience is, what's the value proposition, what pain are you solving? And then I would just start trying things right away. That's the thing that's the most important. The cycle time to try things is going to be the most important.
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critical factor in starting any growth cycle. And just learning. Learning, data, what's working, what's not, double down on what's working, and just keep going from there. And even with the advent of AI, I think that what you're going to see is that, and we're already seeing it, is that customers still sort of understand like what's good or not. They have taste. And so you still need someone to be that tastemaker, understand what is interesting and it works. Yeah.
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Yeah. Right. I love that you just said the word tastemaker. I just listened to a podcast with, I'm going to forget his name. Who's the founder, the designer of the iPhone? Tony. Johnny Ive. No, it wasn't Johnny. It was someone else. It was a co-designer. I think his name was Tony. But he, the entire podcast was about being a tastemaker and the fact that it's so easy early on in an organization. But then over time, you have like committees and bureaucracy and like you just lose taste in product or in marketing or in all these other functions.
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And he talked the entire, it was an hour on how hard it is to maintain taste. It is. It is. And sometimes, and this is something I've realized in working with our creative team is that sometimes you just need to let them do stuff that isn't on the plan. Yeah. Because, so we had this, we just finished our second Well Simple Presents. So everyone had been working flat out in the Jays Run the World Series. Mm-hmm.
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And one of our creative leads was like, we should do something with the Jays in the World Series. This is like rare. Yeah. It wasn't on the roadmap. No, not only that. It's always the last minute ideas. People were flying home from this thing and really tired and literally started with the lines like,
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We should start 1993 and do a line about the stock market and say good things take time. And so that was Thursday. By Sunday, we had a finished commercial. Wow. That's crazy. That we put the media and it did incredibly round. I think it did over 55 million impressions. We got it on Facebook.
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55 million. Wow. We got it on Sportsnet. More than the population of Canada. Yeah. And such a simple idea. So low effort. It was. Oh, it was high effort. It was just a good idea. Simple idea. Yeah. Who do you look to outside of Canada for inspiration? And are there any things that you're like really keen to bring here?
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I think we look to lots of companies outside. Some of the work, especially in financial services, being done by NewBank or Revolut are incredible. And Revolut especially has done a great job breaking into new regions really, really well. And that's been very interesting. NewBank has this incredible ability to acquire new customers. I think their CAC is like $5. Wow. How? How can't he just... Well, it's ones they have to do with products that are very accessible in early stage, no matter what you're,
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wealth is, but they also have a maniacal focus on MPS. I think their MPS is like 94 or something, 93. And so they just realized if we can make our products incredibly promotable, they're going to get people like Wildfire to spread them. And so I think we try and take different things from different companies.
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players in the space that are doing great things and at the same time be a little worried because like eventually they're going to want to come to Canada yeah yeah no I was going to ask a question on you saying that one of the things was how well that they revolute gets into new regions for wealth simple you guys were in different regions and then you went back to just focusing on Canada I think around the time that you joined but is there like based on your comment is there an idea of potentially going back and expanding again
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I mean, I think we're always considering how do we keep growing. Canada is, this is something that not a lot of people know, it's the third largest financial services market in the world. Really? I think I actually did know that. Yeah, it is U.S., China, then Canada. Yeah. So you can build a hundred, multi-hundred billion dollar business in Canada alone. And so today we're focused on Canada, but that doesn't mean that at some point we may not decide to go somewhere else. But I think we have a lot of work to do here still. So that's where we're focused.
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And you guys are, are you dipping your toes into business now? We are. Okay. Yeah. We're super happy to hear that. Yeah. Well, we, except we're with Ben right now. Yeah. But I'm just curious, how bullish are you guys on? Because obviously like a revolute has just kind of taken it all. But how bullish are you guys on business? And how deep are you? I mean, I think that, I mean, there's 1.1 million small businesses in Canada. It's like a huge market opportunity. And when I talk to these entrepreneurs, I would say that some of them feel they're like, it's actually a harder, they have like,
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more challenges than the retail customers like totally that's right and like way higher threat like yeah yeah and it's it's more like discombobulated they're using like 15 different platforms to achieve the same thing especially in today's day and age where everything is so global like even for us like we work from people we work with people all over the world and we're paying people all over the world and we're like this baby little company and it adds so much complexity to things yeah
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I think that we are very, very excited about our business offerings. And we think that it's going to be a real opportunity to add lots of value to people who are trying to start new companies, be entrepreneurial, and not worry about the money part of it as much. How have you guys maintained such a high quality bar on product? Because you are a product-led organization, right? That's how you characterize it. Absolutely. And obviously in startup world, it's like,
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do one thing and do it well. Like that's the gospel recommendation that you hear, but you guys have so many offerings and you're like pushing so much more out. How one, like how is the organization organized to support this? And then how is the quality maintained?
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First off, our co-founder and chief product officer, Brett Honeycutt, is this amazing leader. And he's brought an amazing leadership team. And they really focus a lot on a set of product principles that they want to adhere to, like fast and frictionless. They want to make sure that it's a delightful experience. They want it to be low cost.
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high value. And they really, there's a process, a lot of like, get something, start something really. And they take that sort of startup mentality of like, get that MVP early, get customers using it very early. Like Brett, I hear many times in meetings saying like, wait a second, what we need to do is do this much and then get it in the hand of a customer. Even though we're a very large business, like there's not,
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This idea that we need to build this massive product first and hold it back and have this big reveal. He would rather get it in the hands of customers first and then learn really quickly. So I think that's why we've been able to innovate really fast is to keep that agile approach. Is there a product or product feature that you can speak to that maybe at the beginning you thought was a really good idea and then going through this realized it was a bust and didn't go through? Let me think of that.
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Hmm. You're like, no, we're just like. No, no, no. I'm just trying to think about like what that would be. I mean, there's certainly features that we've done that have not been as well adopted. Or ones that maybe even just never saw the light of day because. I mean, we used to have a product that was for advisors to use, like not for clients. And I think we learned early on that was challenging because, you know, advisors have clients. We were pretty big in the market.
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clients look at so maybe I should try just using you directly and it was causing this like real channel conflict and I think that was hard for us because we don't know how to dial things back like so we're not going to figure out how to not market yeah and so that was a problem I remember and we wanted to the back that's called well simple for advisors and we ended up shelving that about the second year I was there okay
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How much internal debate, like when you guys launch things like cash tags or options, predictions obviously coming, how much internal debate is there around these products? Is there, is everyone like on board with every launch and every feature and?
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I don't think everyone's on board with every launch, every feature. I think as an executive team, we get aligned and, you know, we tend to debate and like commit really well. I mean, we do take a pseudo Amazon memo style approach. I love debate and commit or disagree and commit. Yeah. It's hard to do, to be honest. So hard. It's very hard to do. And so we've started to do, so we have a three hour, two to three hour management meeting every week. And, um.
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We then do also periodic offsites and like the offsites are for the times we really want to go long and not be forced by timeline on something. And but I would say that the management meetings weekly are very productive in terms of the fact that we do talk about decisions we need to make. And then we make a decision. We typically try and get it to an action versus just like continuing to talk about something.
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And so back to this idea, do we have debates about launching a certain new product, like predictions? Yes. But when we get back to like, why are we doing this? Focus on that. We tend to get aligned. And then we hold hands and make sure that if things go wrong, we all kind of figure it out together. Yeah, there's no pointing fingers at the end of it all. Yeah, I mean, there's maybe some fingers pointing, but like, I think at the end of the day, it's like...
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if we can get aligned on the principles of why we're doing it, I think it usually works out. Yeah. And you mentioned the prediction markets. I'm curious, like why now? Why did Wealthsimple choose to launch it early 2026? Well, because we, we feel it's like a trend in financial products that's taking off. And we want to, again, bring those innovative products to Canada, like no one else is doing it. And we want to do it in a regular way. In a safe, conservative way. In a regular way. So, um,
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Yeah, we believe like first to market's important and then being able to shape how it works for Canadians is important. I was honestly like surprised that it was coming in a good way. And I'm like, yeah, things usually take longer for us to get in Canada. And it was nice to see. But I know there was also like a lot of pushback and people maybe not understanding the differences of.
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how you guys are approaching it versus if you were just like directly trading on CalShe. So like for the people who think that this is a bad idea, what would your explanation be? Maybe not a bad idea, maybe like a deviation from original like ethos of the company. Yeah, I think I think the the ethos of the company for me has always been about providing access to financial products and new products in a way that's.
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you know, simple, understandable, also in a way that we can manage the responsible aspects that are important for Canadians. And so, like, choosing to be regulated is first. The second is that, you know, for this particular product, the way predictions work, it's a futures contract. So the idea is that you can, with another person or party on the platform, make a decision on a contract with no middle person, no book.
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Not like sports betting where there's a book or a house that decides the odds. And based on the supply and demand of that contract, you can place your opinion on something. Say it's like, what's the weather going to be in 45 days in Toronto? Yeah.
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And then based on that, you can take one side, a yes or no, and the outcome of that pays out whoever made the right decision on the contract. Yeah. And so right now we have predictions in weather, economics and financial. Not sports. No. Or politics. Or politics. Not crypto. Not politics. Or any of like these other just like random things that really get into gambling. Yeah. Yeah. We also have to. Yeah.
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Yeah, and we've also made a decision to not do contracts, even in those sectors that have anything that could result in, for example, a disaster or something that would be an extremely negative event. So we've been really cautious about what contracts we put on the platform. I think another important call out, too, is just on, like we were talking about this off the air before, but the 30-day contract piece, because a lot of the manipulation risk for this, like in California,
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in the platforms in the States comes from these like one, two, three day trades that they can make. And so I think there's a lot less risk for that. And that's right. We only we only put on contracts that have to be settled in more than 30 days. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
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Is the, because obviously while Simple's now all consolidated in one app, is Predictions going to be its own separate app or within the... Today it's its own separate app. I'm not saying that... Is that a regulatory? No, that's our decision to do it that way. And it doesn't mean that we'll always have it that way, but we thought it was the best to launch it separately, allow people to try it in a way that was really easy. At the same time, we wanted to keep it separate from our main investing app today, but it may change in the future.
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Yeah. We also have to remember, like, you guys have done so much to have human level design. Like, I was having this comp with my friends, like, this isn't Robin Hood at the end of the day that has, like, gamified every element. And it's so aggressive. And it's like, you get, like, confetti all over your screen. It's aggressive push notifications. Like, you guys have such a human element to how you approach these things. So.
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We try. It's a balance. It's a balance. We try. Sometimes we probably. Gamification is critical. Like you got like the we talked the wealth ranks. Yeah. That we kind of love. I think it's a great idea. Like when Germana and I were talking about this, I was saying like we are like inherently competitive as people. I would much rather someone be getting peer pressured to invest so that they can show a higher wealth rank, which helps them in the long run, than posting a story at a restaurant where they spent $200 that they didn't have.
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Right. Like one helps you, one hurts you. And like, I don't know. And I think it's a good push. Wealth Rank did get some dialogue. And I think the thing that we debated and committed on was the idea that one of the things we want to try and do is normalize some of the subjects that Canadians don't like to talk about. Like if you go to the U.S., it's much more free when people talk about how much they make or whatever. And so it's like we should normalize some of these discussions so people actually...
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We'll ask questions or like be curious. Yeah, I agree. I feel like as females, even less. Like men don't talk about wealth. My head went right there. As women, it's like down here. Yeah. Like if people are, because like if you aren't saving any money as like a 25-year-old and all of a sudden you're at dinner with your friends and they're talking about the fact that they're putting away money.
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20%, maybe they're like Anton and they're putting away 70% of their... Or maybe they'll just say like, hey, how did you do that? Yeah. Or what would... I don't even know where to start. What do you invest in? And like, just those conversations help. And that's what we heard when we talked to customers, that even people who were negative on it, when we asked them, well, did you have any conversations around it? They said, oh, actually, we did. We actually did. We actually did. It served its purpose. Yeah, we actually did. So did we. So it served its purpose. Yeah. Awesome.
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I, because we were talking a little bit about like just company building and team building earlier, I'm curious to know at this stage, as a member of the leadership team, how do priorities get set at the company and how does accountability get maintained, metrics, all the things? It's a really interesting thing because I would just say there's like this clean fame framework would be kind of wrong, but I would say it starts with...
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setting, understanding what's like a core thing we want to accomplish in the year. So, for example, we have this theme this year called Win the Future. And like, you know, what does that mean? What does that mean to the company? What are the key KPIs around it?
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And Mike actually is really clear on like what he wants us to do. He thinks that so customers vote by moving their money to us. That's when they decide that we're value. And so we call that flows or net deposits. And he thinks that's the most important thing is like earning trust so that customers move their money and they keep it here. And so this key metric then gets set for the company and everything flows from that. And that metric has there's a Mike version of the metric.
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And then there's another version of the metric that's still aggressive, but like we see a path to it. And we then set the rest of the KPIs and key initiatives off that. Off net deposits. Well, net deposits start setting it under this idea of win the future. But win the future has like these other initiatives under it that then line up to those KPIs.
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And so we may have like seven or eight what I call like tier one initiatives that we want to or programs that we want to do. And those get assigned DRIs. And then we have a process not always structured to report on them throughout the year, throughout the quarter. And how is accountability maintained? Is it like one person per metric or is there like multiple owners to a metric? As much as possible, we try and have single threaded owners. That means one person owns not maybe per metric, but one person owns a key initiative of which they're measured on something.
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Um, and then as much as possible, we want that person to be able to make decisions. And this is probably the hardest part decisions and take action without a lot of overhead on what they want to do. And especially in very cross-functional things, it can be hard. So hard. Yeah. Yeah. And so without doing full reorgs, every time you have a new set of initiatives, it's like, that's probably something that we, we need to work on. And, you know, we used to do these things called growth pods where we would try, like when we started these incentive programs, um, yeah, um, yeah, um, yeah, um, yeah, um,
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we created a growth pod. So it was this autonomous little unit with like some engineers, data people, marketers, a salesperson. I said, go figure out how to make that thing work. Like a cross-functional pod. Cross-functional pod, yeah. And even at the time, I think they were meeting together in person all the time to do it. And that worked out really well, but you can't always do that in every initiative. So, yeah. Did you find from that that there were any like wins that came from just better integration and connection across the teams? Yeah.
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It always is that way, I think. I think always tighter loops in person, things can get solved really quickly. Absolutely. And we're big on principles, not process at Wilson Post. So like, what are the principles of like how we want to approach something versus what's the process to get there? And so- Can you give me an example of principles? You said one earlier, but- Yeah. I mean, on the marketing side, I think like, for example, we always try and like, whatever we're trying to do on the marketing side, it's about like leading with customer value first. Yeah.
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If we're going to do something and be aggressive on it, ultimately, is it still better for the customer or not?
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that can guide our decision. And I know that sounds a little trite, but we really try and do that. Because if we, like even when we launched this millionaire piece today, some people were like, is it, oh, is this going to seem like a lottery? Like that would be bad for us on our brand, right? We wouldn't want to do that. But then what we said is that, but ultimately we want people to save. Like the way they get. You're not spending the way you would for lottery tickets. Well, they're saving to get the entry. So like, so that principle kind of held true and we carried through with that initiative because of it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
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What is the most unique thing about how you guys operate at Wealthsimple? I'd say it's two things. It is one of our values is naive ambition. And Mike especially is good at setting goals or targets that when you hear them, you're like, that's just that's crazy. That's not going to happen. But he has this kind of determination and he's this incredible leader, humble leader that you're like, I'll just give it a shot. Like, let's give it a shot. So that is actually probably the thing I would say I was the most...
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surprised and learned about the most since my journey with WellSimple is like set crazy targets. You never know what's going to happen. Makes you think differently. And so that's been a really strong push for us. Yeah. It also sounds like there's also a culture of comfort and failing then too if you're going to have such ambitious targets.
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Yeah, I think there – I mean, everything – every company works on trying to make that better. I would say, like, I'm not a big, like, fail person. Winner one. I'm more, like, learn fast. Yeah, evolve it. Yeah, I don't over-celebrate. But you don't want people to be scared of taking, you know, big swings. Like, it's okay to fail and take a swing and miss it as long as you're learning something. Yeah. If you take, like, three big swings and don't learn anything, then that's a problem. Yeah, you have a pattern. Yeah, you need to kind of, like –
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figure out where you're trying to take those swings and then like, what do you want to learn out of it? Steve also said that you are exceptional at building teams. If you agree with that sentiment, he mentioned that a lot of people that worked for you, reported into you at other organizations have gone on to have incredible careers, CMO, I don't know, CCO. I'm curious to know just what your approach is to like maintaining this high performance and also just building people, building teams.
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I think that some of the things are going to be things you've heard before, like servant leadership, like you're there really to serve your. OK, no, I actually don't know what the word is. Oh, OK. Servant leadership is this idea. Well, I think I've heard of it, but I'm like. Servant leadership is this idea that like my job as a leader is to make you successful. And so like whatever you're working on is the most important thing. Whatever problems you have is the most important thing. And so I've often said to younger leaders like who are complaining about.
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things that happen at work. And I was like, you know, 40% of your job of a leader is kind of whatever's happening that you just got to deal with. And so just make the time for it.
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I think so there's a bit of just put in the work and it actually helps. I think the second is that one thing I've liked to do is provide more real actionable feedback to my team. I'll give you an example. Someone will say there's a phrase often like you got to level up the team. You've probably heard that before in startup world. Like everyone's got to level up or level up. Like what does it actually mean? Like no one knows what that means. And so I would say to a team, you know the questions that you call.
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come and ask me in our 101 at our level.
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I need you to figure out how to get your team to ask you those questions. And they'll say, but if they're going to ask me those questions, they would have to know this. They'd have to have this understanding that I have. Like, yeah, that's right. You'd have to transfer everything you know to them. So then they would be worrying about things that you're worrying about with me. And that's like an example of like where I try and take something that's, you know, I guess something that's like kind of told off and like level up idea and make it so someone can actually do something with it. Mm-hmm.
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Yeah. That's good advice. It's hard. One of the hardest parts I find is just like leading, creating high performing teams and maintaining it. Yeah. I think it's just a lot of work. I think it's just you have to put in the time and then you have to make them your priority when they have challenges. Yeah. And then the other thing I just say is like, I'm a,
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And I've loved this at WellSimple. And one reason I joined was because of this philosophy. It's like I'm not a big delegate or like don't pay attention. Like stay at your level of the business. Don't go too deep. I'm a big, if you want my help, I'm going to go deep with you into your part of the business. And I will, I want to learn everything. I don't want you to have to write a giant doc for me. Like I'll figure it out. But if I'm going to help you really, I have to be really. You have to understand what's going on. Yeah.
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Yeah, we had someone else. And that's where AI actually helps a lot right now. It's like you don't have to host 50 meetings to get caught up on something. Yeah. How do you guys use it in the organization? Is it like every function, every level? I assume you've clawed on every computer. You know, we went out to meet with a bunch of companies in the Valley as an executive team to see, like, what's the actual state of going on? And we were pretty impressed that we're pretty advanced compared to what we thought we were. What does pretty advanced look like? Well, I mean, we use AI for a lot of our coding, a lot, a lot.
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Um, today I'd say we, in our marketing commercial, almost every function use it to some level for improvement of productivity. Even my chief creative director will do prototypes with, uh, like runway or AI before very quickly get it into the hands of like the rest of the team. So they can understand what he's thinking about.
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I use it for a lot of information flow in Slack. Like we build this, I have this process where I can understand like what people are working on without having to bother everybody. And then I can ask questions. Like I can say, how far down the org has this idea gotten today? Oh, that's really cool. I haven't seen that use case. Because like often in large orgs, one of the problems is that people start working on things that aren't the top priority. All the time. And you're not clear. Yeah. And it's not because they're doing the wrong thing. It's just this is what they thought this was or that was. Sure.
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And so just finding a way to know where I should support or what blockers are in is really helpful. Yeah. I'm loving it for just deep data analysis. Like we have, it's probably the same with you guys, but we have all of our data on Snowflake. That's our system, our data lake. And now the AI connects directly into that. And every question that you could have, it runs so much analysis for you.
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It gives you such clear recommendations. Not that it all makes sense, but it's like the speed at which I can get like an idea or hypothesis through to numbers through to I have a point of view is faster than it's ever been.
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I think that's one of the big things you ever gets to figure out is like, how do you get that information layer consistent across all the things you need? Like from meeting recordings to data to understanding goals and key KPIs you're measuring. Yeah. I think the problem is, is that especially in our world as a financial service organization is that we still want to be very careful about PII and information about our customers. Yeah. Fair. Yeah. Yeah. But definitely.
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Yeah, I think a lot of companies are investing in AI, but they're not investing in like what's needed underneath as much, which is like, do you have quality data? Do you have the SOPs? Because like that, like the quality of what's coming out of any AI that you're adopting is going to be based on that, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I agree. I'm just curious to know, at this stage of the business, is there anything that keeps you up still?
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I'm sure the answer is yes. But what keeps you up? I mean, I think the main thing that keeps me up, and this is definitely the startup person to me, is just that, like, you know, we need to continue to serve more customers and grow. We have a long way to go. I know you said we're $125 billion in assets. I mean, I think the smallest bank is $900 billion. Yeah.
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Like Smalls Canadian. Smalls Canadian bank is like $900 billion. So we would have to grow six or seven times just to catch them. And so I think that's the thing that keeps me up at night. And, you know, it's always harder to grow faster than you just grew. You know, the last record you just, quarter you just had, it's always hard to find the next record. And so I think that's hard. And then a second is that, you know, as you get bigger, it all comes about like getting the right talent and keeping them. And I think that's harder and harder as you get bigger.
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Especially now that like I find we find especially that with the advent of all these AI companies and the hyper growth they're going through there's a lot of attractive opportunities out there for some of the really really strong talent and it's kind of borderless so I think that's really hard for us. So what have been some of your strategies to retain yeah retain and also compete like in the attraction game.
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Well, so we spend a lot of time as an executive team also on just our talent strategy. For example, we run these events called North Star. So we kind of like borrow on like the Canadiana DNA and we go down to like San Francisco and say, if you're an expat, we're having a happy hour for all expat Canadians.
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and literally within 24 hours, they show, everyone who's Canadian wants to show up and we have like ketchup chips and stuff and like all that stuff. I love that. And then we talk to them and we say, you know, we say, you know, if you ever want to work for Simple and stay in San Francisco or come back, we would support you. And so we'll do things like that and I've been to like three of these events and they're amazing and what's more amazing to me is like,
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How many Canadians are working in senior levels in incredible companies and just, you know, but maybe want to stay and work remotely or maybe they want to come back based on decision. And so just doing things like that. Those are good strategies. I like you're bringing the Canadians back. Yeah. Yeah. We need to. We need to. We love to. Yeah. I'm curious to learn a little bit more about you. Where did the entrepreneurial bug come?
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come from? So my dad, as a partner, is an architecture firm. So I think he always had a business. We used to go play in his place, his office. I remember. In Toronto. In Toronto, yeah. It was called Morium and Tashima. They did like the reference library. They did the science center. Oh, wow. That's so cool. Yeah. They did a bunch of places. And internationally, they did a bunch of places as well. So they're one of the more successful firms. And so I think I always had this feeling of like owning and running your business piece. Yeah.
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But for me, it was really just an opportunistic thing where I was doing my master's at UBC and I was an engineer and I was about to take a job with the engineering firm that sponsored my thesis. My mom just told me to come home and she's never told me. She would never, if you met my mom, she would never say, come home, Paul. Just never would express that type of emotion. I was like, that's very strange.
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And so I came home and I just happened to fall into this opportunity to build a business. So it was a little bit fortuitous. And then a bit of my dad. What business was that? Elequois. That was the first one. And coming from an engineering background, you were a mechanical engineer, right? I was in engineering physics in my undergrad, which was the hardest thing I've ever had to do and not be good at. And it's not a typical training of someone who ends up being in a marketing commercial role.
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Would you say that you do take more of that like systems approach to how you approach growth and how you approach brand and creative? I do. I do take more of a I think the engineering trait that helps me the most is probably just this idea like everything can be solvable eventually. Like you can figure it out. My dad, though, was very creative and I was going to be an art like I wanted to be an architect. OK. Do you have the design capabilities? Yeah. I like design and I really loved it and I loved art. Yeah.
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I think he kind of made it sound like it was very hard to be an architect. And so I ended up not choosing that direction. But I think that creativity was there. And then in my first role at Eloqua, we work with global marketing leaders. That was the software. It was basically marketing automation. So we work with leaders at, sure, B2B companies, but also B2C companies like Activision or Wells Fargo or Morgan Stanley. So we spent a lot of time working with global marketers, both on the revenue growth side, but also on the creative side. Okay.
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At both Eloqua, is that how you pronounce it? And Nudge, what would you say, what do you remember about those experiences that like shaped who you are as a leader the most? I think the first thing is, is that the best part about any of those journeys are the people you get to work with, the customers you get to meet. So that's, so even by, even though Nudge was like, in my books, a failure, it was still a great experience ultimately.
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I think the second is that there's a lot of luck involved. Like even if you work really hard, there's always a bit of luck. And so you can never take things for granted. And just like making sure you stick around long enough for that luck to happen is important. So just keep going. Yeah. Giving yourself opportunities to find the luck. That's right. That's right. And then keep doing things. Shots on goal. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
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Obviously, I know your heart is Wealthsimple right now, but like way down the line, would you ever see yourself going back into entrepreneurship? No. No. This is it. This is the last one for me. This is the last one. I'll take as long as I can go, but this is the last one. Yeah. I'd love to like maybe at some point help other. Yeah. I've done some advising. I've been on some boards before, but like, yeah, mentorship. But yeah, I'm in this one. You're going to take it to the moon. Yeah. As far as we can go. What does Wealthsimple look like in like 10 or 20 years now?
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I think ultimately, if you think about where things are going, is that we have to get much better at human behavior to make a real change because. Like psychology, yeah.
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Well, just like how people like think about money, react, do things because saving for your retirement is a vitamin for sure. It's not a painkiller. It's not Advil. People don't want to do it and they don't want to change their lifestyle. And so when you have a vitamin, you have to get really good understanding like what turns the vitamin into a fake pain or what turns a vitamin to something that people want to take.
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Yeah. You know, wealth ranks a great example where it's more FOMO that's driving that interest versus actually I want to be better with my money. It's like, no, I want to know how much you're worth compared to me. And so that's going to drive my behavior. And so.
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I think there's an element of us becoming much better at the human behavior element of money. And so that'll allow us to do things that let people actually save more, get wealthy faster, and like, you know, achieve their goals. And I think the other part, which is a little more obvious, is just that there's going to be way more engagement of intelligence within the entire experience. Like just, we talk about like the CFO in your pocket for your personal life. Yeah. Like, why can't we...
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identify things that you don't know where you could save more, spend less, make more money and make it just easy. Like strategies. Yeah. Everything. Do you guys equally prioritize approaches to going deeper with your existing clients as much as you do acquire, like finding ways to acquire new and obviously.
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I think historically we've focused much more on like people who are already on our platform. How do we get you to consolidate more and do more with us? I think we're now at the point where to continue to grow at the pace we want to. We need to get new customers. And so that's why you're seeing things like more commercials, more things that are brand oriented starting to come out. And I think we'll continue to do that. Is there an IPO in the future?
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I mean, at some point in time, I'm sure we will IPO. Right now, my only investment in Wealthsimple is through PowerCorp. Oh, there you go. That's like the way to do it. I'm like, they're invested, so I'm, as an extension, invested. It's really clear to us that Canadians, you know, the bulk of Canadians, it would really increase the trust level if we were a public company. So at some point, I think it's important. What do you think has to happen in Canada for us to see more builders, more innovators, more entrepreneurs?
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Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things. So when I started the first company, and this is a perspective I have, is like there was one venture firm in Canada called Jefferson Partners. There was like one or two angels. And SaaS meant you had servers in your office and you literally were running just a rack in your office. And so it was very, very different. And I would say that when I think about it,
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I think we have capital here. I think we have lots of talent. And I'm sure there are things that could be better about all those things and people will talk about it. I think you want more founders, successful founders to stay and build their second or third company. Yeah. And I think the reason is that when you're on your second company, you've gone through some hard challenges and you know how to kind of keep going. The second is that financially you're way more able to go the distance. That's scarcity. Yeah. Ideal or tolerant. Right? And you know how to attract other talent, other capital. It's much easier to go.
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And so that second and third time you can go even bigger. And the other thing is like something I would call like tech density. Like, you know, when you're in the Valley and I used to go to the Valley every other week for almost like 10 years, things happen just by bumping into someone on the street or at Starbucks or whatever. And until you get that tech density, it's hard to have those happenstance things happen.
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occur. Like I went down to New York for an event with FirstMark and just to actually get back into the ecosystem a little, you know, it's the U.S. and we sell we were only in Canada. Yeah. Just because like I kind of feel I'm missing doing that. I'm not part of this ecosystem as much and having those conversations that, you know, where things can happen that I was like, well, that was really fortuitous that I met that person. So I think that tech density piece of like keeping really strong focuses in different areas of the country, I think would be important.
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I think that's such good advice. Do you think that, because obviously there are some, like the ex-Shopify employees and there's probably some others, like, I'm like, have they started their companies yet? Because you always wait for people that are like exiting a company to then like pick up and start. I'm like, have they? Or like the ex, I don't know, maybe I just don't see the density yet, but it doesn't feel like that has like happened or materialized. I think I, I, I.
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You know, I definitely see some people who've done multiple startups. I think you're right. It's not at the same pace. Well, I work for, like, my two founders are exceptional. They sold Chef's Plate, and now they started this company. And then they breed other entrepreneurs, right? Oh, 100%. Because you learn so much more from a tenured founder than you do, like, a first-time. We notice differences. Like, we can spot a difference between a first-time founder and a second and third. 100%. Yeah, and I think you're right on that. And I think that maybe part of what...
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this platform can do is expose more scenarios where that's happening and like bring more awareness to it. Okay. Awesome. Rapid fire. Let's do it. What is your biggest productivity hack? I think it's, it's two things. It's, it's running. Okay. Like marathon? No, no, no. Just a half an hour to 40 minutes. Just to clear your head. Yeah. For mental, not mainly mental, less physical. Outdoors.
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both. I'm actually probably more indoors than outdoors. I used to be more outdoors than indoors. It's hard on the ankles. Well, it's hard in the winter here. Yeah. I don't understand why people run, but I'm. It's a mental, for sure it's mental. So that would be one. And the second is I do this thing, um,
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at the beginning of the week and the night before the, it's like a version of golf swing thoughts. It's like envision your week, like what's hard, what's going to be easy, what's going to be fun. And then make sure for the hard parts, you're ready mentally for when they're going to happen or like what you need to prepare for. And then I do it for the next day. And that actually helps me also for the leadership piece. Like if I have a one-on-one, I don't show up with like nothing to talk about. Like I don't show up like almost like pretending like I didn't even know that one-on-one was happening. At least I try to do that. Maybe my team would call me out on that a little bit like.
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No, fired. But like, it's like, I know I've been thinking about your business or there's some things I want to talk about. Yeah. And so this idea of like being prepared. So that's swing thoughts for your week. Yeah. I like that. I haven't heard that before. Okay. What's the best piece of advice you've ever gotten?
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I think the best piece of advice that I've ever gotten is from a gentleman by the name of Alec Kristic. He used to be the head of Rogers at Home before. This is, again, before most people's time who would know this. It's the internet division at Rogers before it became Rogers. And he told me a lot of people say put your customer first. You should put your people first because if you put your people first, they take care of your customers. And I think that's well known now. But I think at the time it was really stuck with me.
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especially in a, like a people business. Like we're in, I'm in veterinary care. So it's like your veterinarians and your nurses are at the front line. I feel like probably in a product role organization too, but especially, yeah, that's the number one thing that we actually, it's number one metric is employee job. I'm like a BSC too, right? Like I think that matters more. Yeah. And I like them when if you're just like exclusively. Yeah. We actually track employee job love as like a quarterly metric. Yeah, no, that's great. And I'll give you one more, which, um,
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is probably, I wouldn't say it's controversial, but maybe it's like less romanticized, is that I think Drew Houston, who is the CEO and founder of Dropbox, said a lot of people don't realize, but like building a startup is...
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Not these like magic moments that happen that like everyone romanticizes. It's actually like if you ever had a dog, you take him to a park and you throw a ball. I have a dog. Yeah. And you throw a ball at the park and they'll go and get that ball and they'll just do it forever. Like they'll never stop. That's what it's like to build a startup. It's a good analogy. Just going and getting the ball every day. Every day. The same thing. And then one day something different happens, but like you just keep going and getting it. Yeah. I like that.
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If you had to choose between optimize for customer acquisition or unit economics, which would it be? We kind of think about those as, like, we always want to optimize for customers, but, like, we care about the unit economics of how we do it. So then we don't spend our money foolishly. But we would tend to be more on, like, let's try something that's going to really attract attention than get the perfect economics. What is the product you are most proud of shipping?
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The most recent product is not going to be a sexy product. It's something called portfolio line of credit. I love this, though. The reason is that most people don't take any leverage. They don't like taking leverage. And it's fair. Some people shouldn't take leverage, just so we're clear. But leverage is a huge wealth building tool for the wealthy. And the wealthy know it. The wealthy know it. It's the people that aren't wealthy that don't. Yeah. And so this idea that you could take a credit card debt or you could take your line of credit at a bank and instead of,
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paying whatever 7 or 8 percent pay 4 percent yeah is like just automatic extra money for you yeah and so i don't want to sound like a commercial but like i love the idea of making it more it's going very well and just making it easy and transparent and like people can do it and it's not something scary i was shocked like when i was on the app and i saw that it was just automatic approvals for i think it's a third of your yeah portfolio so yeah okay um what would
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I think I would tell my younger self to stop being, it's not like workaholic is the wrong word. I think like I, through my first two startups, I didn't learn how to be present. I think I've learned how to be present. So whatever the opposite of that is.
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So learning how to be present was what I've only learned to do here. Like in life, in the corporate environment, in the work environment, and everything. But in my first two startups, I didn't learn how to do that. And, you know, there's an interesting, so I was part of this founders group, which actually Mike was part of. And one of the exercises you do is you rank like your personal life, your family life, and your work life. And then you could describe like, so you give it a number and then you describe things that are happening that are positive and negative.
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And the first thing it tells you, if you're a founder or executive, is that in your personal life, you talk about family. In your family life, you talk about family and work. And then you're working like, so there's no personal. Yeah. And so, like, after that, I actually decided I was going to do something for myself personally. I used to play tennis competitively. So I actually started to get back in tennis and I sort of played club tennis.
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It's crazy that if you think of you can go like so many years in your adult life and not actually having anything that's just for you. Especially in adult life. Yeah, in adult life. You can just like be consumed with so many other things. So, yeah, that would be it. Okay. And then final question. What is, I'm going to put my cue cards down, but what is one thing you would tell your future self would tell you to do more of today beyond being present?
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I would say two things. On the work side, I would say I appreciate what's going on right now in technology. It's insane. And I think there's both this disbelief it's happening, but also concern, but also maybe it's overhyped. But there's very few times you have these kind of shifts. And so I just really appreciate it. And as an engineer, I should spend more time really understanding it and getting excited by it. And I tend to be...
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I'm always a bit of a cynicist on anything. The second would be like, and I know this is going to sound cliche, but like I have two kids, so I have an 18 year old and a 15 year old. And like, it is the biggest cliche that time goes by so fast. So I would just tell people,
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me to be more forceful with them to spend time with me oh that's really cute because i i let them off the hook all the time yeah my wife doesn't but i do oh well thank you so much for your time today we really appreciate it it's great thanks for listening to this week's episode of between two brunettes
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