Techstars Toronto 2020 Demo Day

welcome to techstars toronto 2020 demo day my name is sunil sharma i am the managing director of techstars toronto techstars is the global platform for investment and innovation at techstars we have run more than 200 accelerator programs worldwide we have more than 5 000 founders in our private network we have a total portfolio value of 25 billion dollars and we are ranked as the number one investor in the world on crunch base by investor volume now you may have taken notice this is a virtual demo day we are not in person at the cbc broadcasting center you are not in an auditorium filled with investors waiting to book meetings with some or all of these companies so as to become partners in their journey beyond tech stars but because of well life you are looking at your computer screens or your mobile phones from your spot which may be anywhere in canada or across the world this i must say is a bit poetic because these ten companies are also from across canada and the world you may be physically closer to them than we are if you happen to live near lagos nigeria or krakow poland or istanbul turkey or vancouver british columbia or wawa ontario look it up of course toronto is still in its moment we have plenty of home-grown startups to show you as well they are founded by canadian-born and immigrant entrepreneurs by men and by women by serial founders and first-time entrepreneurs toronto is attracting record numbers of people from across the world and even from nearby countries our city is booming and tech jobs continue to be created our beloved raptors continue to win and defend as world champions we are following good common sense by listening to our health officials and leaders as we keep the covet 19 numbers within reason as we wait for innovation to save the world and innovation will save the world that is what we are most excited about here today as we introduce you to 10 incredible presenters who will each take a few minutes to share with you their vision of a better world tech stars toronto is a city program which we will deliver today in collaboration with real ventures one of canada's leading early stage investment funds now as a city program we are able to select companies from any industry vertical and from any geographical location as such you will soon be taken around the world to see disruptive innovation at its best to get the companies to this point we had a lot of help we called out to our community of mentors who did not ask for anything from us in return other than the opportunity to listen and to help mentors are the fuel that techstars puts into companies to accelerate their growth and to raise their trajectories that is a critical part of what an accelerator is mentorship combined with networks and capital we have incredible global partners at techstars that help our nearly 50 accelerators across the world these are not just logos they are powerful organizations that are purpose built to help startups grow and we're lucky to have them as they engage with our companies provide their software and tools host seminars and talks and connect our companies to their global networks well before i get too carried away i want to make sure that i recognize our small but powerful team here in toronto in this era with large innovation budgets and programming i'm incredibly pleased to recognize our two talented and upwardly climbing associates stephania and judy judy is already off to do her mba at columbia in new york city and stefania will be making her next announcement very soon now techstars toronto would not work without our exceptional program director and my colleague from day one tarek hadid tariq is a force of nature and anyone who knows him will immediately agree so tariq and i are the day-to-day people year round at techstars toronto we are eager to meet you to spend time with you and we look forward to your application or referrals to others to help us get positioned for techstars toronto 2021 and now please meet our founders hi my name is homai i am the co-founder and cto of archboard studio my co-founder and i started a company in turkey in which we sold thousands of design assets to over 200 000 designers from all around the world including corporations like microsoft sony playstation and squarespace to name a few amassing over one million dollars in revenue in just three years we talked to our top customers and realized something was missing content was separated from the tool designers could not collaborate with each other and their clients and existing tools were hard to learn and expensive and so artboard studio was born amid the decade of design artwork studio is an online graphic design and animation platform for digital branding and content creation it's a collaborative environment bundled with thousands of useful mock-ups assets and templates it helps designers save time and money by managing their workflow faster and more effectively in a market mainly dominated by adobe companies like canva and figma emerged and soon became giants by liberating design and collaboration for all enticing their users to leave expensive and complex adobe products for a better less expensive and easier to use browser-based software we aim to disrupt the same markets for digital branding today we have more than 30 000 monthly active users ranging from freelance designers to smbs and enterprises such as fiverr.com and png who have collectively created more than 700 000 projects on artboard studio here's how it works artwork is fast a project that normally takes one hour to finish in other apps can be done in less than five minutes in our app it is flexible everything can be easily customized and animated artboard has a massive built-in library of assets helping designers only focus on creativity rather than hunting for assets on the internet you can collaborate with other designers and your clients in real time asset management is a breeze in artboard you store once and reuse across multiple projects artboard is more capable yet easier to use compared to existing apps on the market it has the proficiency of photoshop and the ease of use of canva making it the one-stop design platform for digital branding and content creation everything can be animated in artboard allowing designers to create eye-catching videos and animations we are just getting started so far our growth has been totally organic in fact we launched three times on product hunt and every time we became the number one product of the day at the week and we were trending several times on tick tock too we are a software as a service with an affordable plan for all designers we charge our users fifteen 15 per user per month design software industry in the us alone is 13.4 billion dollars while the global market size of graphic design industry is a whopping 44.8 billion dollars we have over 1500 paying customers generating more than 20 000 in mrr and growing 12 month over month we are a team of six creative people we love design and we cherish its value my co-founder mujay is a fine arts graduate with more than 16 years of experience in design i was a designer for over seven years before falling in love with computer programming together we've already built one successful business and now we are taking it to the next level we are also planning on hiring a growth manager to help us grow even faster majority of our customers are in north america so we have decided to grow our business closer to our users in fact hardwood studio is now a canadian company our journey started in istanbul turkey and we shall soon continue it in toronto canada a true bastion of thriving global startups are you interested in taking part in the future of digital branding let's talk thank you 80 of the brain's development happens in the first three years of life and yet for most parents they struggle to understand if their baby is progressing at the right pace hi i'm miriam co-founder and ceo of babyli at babali we're changing the way parents track a child's development starting with speech and language millennials make up 80 percent of first-time parents every year and they're far more data-driven in their parenting than any other generation this has led to the creation of a 60 billion dollar parenting economy in u.s and china alone they use smart baby monitors and wearables to track their child's sleep heart rate even diaper change but when it comes to their baby's brain development they're stuck with paper checklists that haven't changed since the 1960s this leaves them feeling scared and confused about how their baby is developing relative to its peers and in many cases results in early red flags being overlooked and undiagnosed i experienced this firsthand when my son was 11 months old i noticed he was not meeting his verbal milestones like saying mama after being told to wait and see by my doctor and feeling helpless for nearly a year i pushed to get the coaching and the support needed to help him talk and communicate his basic needs this is the story of millions of parents who either feel their concerns are not taken seriously by their primary physician or end up in the long wait list to get services we are going to change that at babali we're using the baby's voice as a proxy for brain development and give parents actionable data to promote their child's positive growth here's how we do it through an ai enabled mobile app parents can upload a video of their child and get an instant analysis of their language skills using machine learning we analyze a child's utterance and compare it with known benchmarks we then provide parents with personalized recommendations that will help them promote communication literacy and social skills all activities are written by experts and have proven to improve communication outcomes through parent training for the parents that want more babali connects them to a pool of coaches who can support them with video consultation and weekly programs we have partnered with pediatricians and coaches from over seven states in north america and growing now you might be asking how is this going to work with different languages and dialects here is a fun fact all babies go through the exact same stages and patterns of language development regardless of their mother tongue this means rai scales across languages much faster than a language-based voice technology our business model is a hybrid of monthly subscription fee and in-app purchases for coaching programs where parents can get a personalized curriculum and continuous support for their child this can all be done without a need for a doctor's referral and in the near future we believe the real opportunity is in licensing babyliss ai through integration with hardware devices such as baby monitors smart speakers and cameras speech and language pathology alone is a four billion dollar industry we have partnered with pediatric clinics child care centers and social media influencers to get baby in the hands of millennial parents and help them accelerate their child's development since launching our beta version over 85 percent of parents reported they've seen improvements in their child's language and social skills people like cj who was worried about her daughter's speech and felt at ease after she tested her voice using baboli or adam who found a new way to support his son's development through baboli's custom recommendations babali is developed by a strong team of technology and product executives my co-founder carla is a former amazon alexa engineer who spent her entire career on voice technology as a machine learning scientist shane is a roboticist with deep experience in application of ai in healthcare and i spent a decade in product development helping companies such as samsung develop their next generation wearables and nasa to create better communication tools between their engineers it's time to change how we track a child's development and babyli is on a mission to become parent source of truth for the right information at the right time if you want to join our journey of parent empowerment please reach out as i would like to hear from you thank you hi my name is suavek potash i am the founder and ceo of car scanner what does car scanner do i'll give you five guesses well you've most probably guessed it yes it's gone scars let me explain you why this is important for years car sales people have gotten a bad rap they're often described as pushy and even untruthful which puts many car buyers on a defensive from the very beginning the online used car marketplaces are booming right now due to the pandemic this online shift is here to stay in the online world trust and transparency are essential as we make big car purchases online there are about six million cars being auctioned annually in the u.s alone this means six million cars being manually graded against the standard by car dealers who already have a bad reputation this manual grading is prone to human error that leads to over 1 billion dollars loss in undetected damages every single year in the us let me rephrase that it is 2020 we have self-driving cars hydrogen cars we have cars in space yet we still have thousands of car sales people walking around the cars every day taking pictures of card images and noting them on a piece of paper this is ridiculous that's why at car scanner we're revolutionizing a 100 billion dollar industry with precise standardized and machine learning enabled robotized car documentation system we provide our customers with embeddable player that are put on their websites so that their customers can see a comprehensive 360 degree overview of cars exterior and interior virtual tour as well let me show you how car scanner works an autonomous robot moves automatically around the car in just two minutes and creates high quality body documentation at the same time the interior scanning module creates a virtual interior as well with this technology we increase the online conversion rate for our customers with great looking car documentation and we lower their operational costs by robotizing car documentation our competitors are huge bulky legacy drive for light tunnels which use over 20 cameras take up to 1 000 square feet to set up and cost 100 000 plus unlike our competitors care scanner provides affordable and easy to use robot that's deployed with activation fee that covers our production costs and then we charge per every vehicle being scanned during that two-year contract duration as a company we're scanning 1300 cars a month we've generated 300 000 us dollars in revenue in the last 12 months we have poc with porsche and we have other car manufacturers and car auctioning companies in our pipeline as well car scanner is a canadian company where tech is being built by extraordinary team of software electrical and mechanical engineers located in poland we treat this as our unfair advantage low burn rate while having outstanding quality to price ratio in every single dollar spent on research and development in fact poland has third best software engineers in the world according to business insider for example macik our cto has over 10 years of experience as a full stack developer and cto isabel our ceo is ex-proctor and gamble and abb engineer i am the ceo a mechatronic engineer with background in cameras we are a team of 12 people and 10 of us are engineers if you want to learn more about car scanner or you want to be a part of our journey please reach out to me thank you so much hi i'm joe the ceo and co-founder of fable the home decor brand that makes it easy to upgrade your space designed in vancouver crafted in portugal like most millennials i purchased my first set of homework at ikea it was easy the experience was simple those swedish meatballs fantastic but what they don't do is sell products that i could be proud of or would last long term however for the price point you know it made sense at the time now i'm a bit older i had just bought my first place and i wanted something high quality that i could show off to my friends and you know post on instagram so i turned to the classic stores pottery barn west elm creighton barrel and do you know what i found it's neither easy nor enjoyable most products in these stores are dated overpriced and i couldn't relate to their brand i left these stores feeling frustrated and overwhelmed and what we found in our research is i wasn't alone 75 percent of millennials feel this way when trying to upgrade their home we've also found that 72 percent want to spend their money on brands that they can relate to brands that are value driven and inspirational like majuri for jewelry a way for travel brook linen for the bedroom the traditional home decor stores haven't adjusted for millennials and in fact we now make up 61 percent of the 232 billion dollar market fable is now the brand millennials turn to to upgrade their home we launched fable in late 2019 with our first product category dinnerware and in just 48 hours we had completely sold out now still in our first year we're at a 2.5 million dollar run rate growing at 15 percent month over month with a 45 contribution margin all done with a 22 customer acquisition cost and we're profitable on first sale with a seven to one ltv to cac the home decor market is clamoring for more fabled products with over 1500 orders fulfilled we've only ever had 13 returns here's how we do it first our products are aligned with millennials needs products that are artisan crafted and excessively priced because we design every product to match this takes any challenge out of curating a beautiful space fable looks like it's something out of a magazine and in just four clicks you can create the perfect table setting second our brand is value driven over 2020 we've built a community and audience who values and relates to how we operate we partner with artisans who think about the world in the same way we do sustainability ethical craftsmanship transparency are at the forefront of every decision we make third we make the purchasing experience easy and enjoyable leveraging the best technology and our team's exp expertise in user experience the customer journey at fable feels personalized and simple and i'm excited to share starting today through the use of virtual reality you can see fable products on your table before you purchase them taking any guesswork out of how fable fits into your home built by a team of startup veterans we've been a part of scaling startups building customer success teams and held senior leadership positions our team members also have experience from well-known startups and direct to consumer brands like airbnb brook linen and everlane we've also welcomed two of the largest direct-to-consumer founders as fable advisors the co-founder of majuri a leading jewelry brand and the co-founder of retruvi an essential oils and wellness company as we gaze into 2020 and 2021 we expect people to continue to dine at home more than ever we plan to continue to expand our products across more areas of the table and home soon to be a part of every great dinner party family picnic and wine night at fable we're on a relentless pursuit to make outfitting your entire home easy and enjoyable if you would like to change home decor retail with us i'd love to connect thank you hi i'm gujod the founder and ceo of genie health did you know that 60 of calories in the american diet come from highly processed food the foods they are eating are high in calories and low in micronutrients which leaves 90 percent of them deficient in one or more nutrients that's why americans spend a whopping 48 billion dollar a year on supplements and sales have skyrocketed from kovid 19. with over 000 different products on the market most people are completely clueless about what supplements they need to take and when to take them genie health is disrupting the wellness industry with personalized products and data driven insights that help us live healthier lives and we are starting with the revolutionary smart multivitamin that's as unique as you are we do this by aggregating and tracking individual health data i'm talking about your dna your lifestyle what you eat your health goals to create a vitamin that's made just for you it's so smart that if you had an identical twin you would both have a unique formulation how cool is that and this is the perfect timing for genie health quantified self-movement has exploded millions are taking health into their own hands they are getting dna tests they are doing their own blood work and are using variable health trackers like the apple watch with this surgeon data how can jenny use this data well let me show you how it works meet sandy she always feels tired and bloated she has been using the genie health app for a few weeks to track her diet her sleep and understand her genetic health risks and even track her poop yes we have a poop tracker in the app jenny shows her that loose bowels may be a sign of inflammation from lack of sleep stress and not enough exercise and that's impacting her gut health and making her feel tired and bloated we make a fully customized dose for her multi-vitamin subscription and match her with the best probiotic supplements the more data that sandy tracks with the genie app the more personalized her vitamins become and the more user data that genie gathers the better our algorithms become our unique approach is working and we are growing fast we have over 62 000 people on our platform and 30 000 have already connected their dna data our vitamin sales are growing 30 percent month over month with an 83 resubscription rate our average order is 65 per month for subscription our market opportunity is huge there are 50 million people in our target market who have already done a dna test and they spend 672 dollars on vitamins every year that's a 10 billion dollar in immediate market potential there is no other health and product platform that knows how their customers eat move and sleep as we do this approach has gained the attention of drug to consumer health brands who want to deliver personalized health transformations to their customers i'm happy to announce our new partnership with one of the best canadian probiotics brands genuine health we track their customers gut health and send them personalized multivitamins this partnership is just the beginning we can provide huge value to these brands allowing us to acquire customers at scale my team is passionate and experienced and we all have a deeply personal reason for being on this mission my friend taran died of cancer at 28. inspired by grief i started researching ways to help people live healthier and longer lives that led me to start genie health our medical expert dr sarah seidelman is an internal medicine doctor with a phd in nutrition and genetics and a professor at columbia university miguel has been an early tech member of two toronto successful startups and wreath has built a unicorn in india and is now leading our business and operations if you want to help us create a happier healthier data-driven world book a call with me i am gurjot and i want you to join us on our mission thank you very much hi everyone i'm anya the ceo of lively a platform designed to create a better working world for freelancers ten years ago my co-founder adam and i successfully built then exited canada's first advertising agency exclusively using freelance talent working with this group we recognize that freelancing can be so rewarding but it can also suck and there are real challenges impacting their livelihood and today i want you to meet eric eric is a freelance designer along with 26 million other professional freelancers in north america eric is forced to choose between the dental work he needs and the vacation he wants he chooses whether to spend his time chasing payments or doing work things get real when eric needs a sick day does he recover from illness or financial uncertainty can you imagine having to make these kinds of choices while being employed these problems run so deep and the segment is so large that even slow moving entities like our government are being forced to adapt policies and social supports available to these individuals freelancers like eric don't have benefits they don't have paid leave and don't know when the next check will arrive despite the fact that the freelance economy will account for more than half the workforce in six years there are major lags in technology and solutions available to actually solve these challenges as a full-time freelancer eric earns 60 000. he would part with up to three percent of that just to collect payments online he would spend weeks searching and qualifying for a health and dental plan and pay up to five times what a group policy would cost this is why lively exists today we literally put money back into the pockets of freelancers we save them time and effort in managing payments and getting benefits so they can focus on doing what they love these are the things that matter lively helps freelancers access free benefits and pay days off by embedding costs into their invoices that are processed through our platform we give eric and his clients easy and intuitive tools to request and transfer payments for the first time ever eric will proactively include coverage for his benefits paid leave and payment processing within his hourly rate this simple action creates a world where these forced choices don't exist and together with manulife canada's largest and longest-standing insurance provider a leader in international financial services we are thrilled to introduce the first of its kind lively exclusive group benefits product for independent workers eric's lively fund grows with each transaction and sick days become a thing we track his payments and incentivize his clients so his cash flow is more predictable for eric we are an advocate and our connection to him and his livelihood is what will earn us reputation and revenue we do this through a monthly membership subscription a percentage of each transaction and as we continue to build and scale strategic partnerships we'll open additional revenue streams this grows with each member and this market opportunity is huge compounded by the surging unemployment and business restructuring required from covid19 we are on the brink of another mass explosion of freelance professional freelancers today represent 450 billion in transactional volume and are the fourth largest producer of gdp our business is built around the transactions between freelancers and their clients we capitalize on the value we create for eric and the freelance community our powerhouse team of successful entrepreneurs and past freelancers are experts at engaging consumers and have robust partnership and paid plans in place to drive a rapid growth for lively adam and i share a deep understanding of this market a passion for change and have the drive to make great things happen with a proven track record and having grown our former business thirteen hundred percent over eight years to be listed as canada's 54th fastest growing company we are ready to do this again we've been here before we're comfortable with introducing a new way to work and above all eric's success is our success we are creating a better working world for freelancers thank you hi my name is jeremy bell and i am the founder and ceo of mayday mayday is a platform that helps busy people make better use of time it's a calendar that cares about you helping you sustainably increase your productivity while reducing the potential for burnout now i know firsthand what it feels like to burn out after successfully exiting my first startup the idea for mayday was born while working at facebook where i helped create the portal and portal tv products and during that time my entire team and i burned out this happened because we were in meetings all day every day which meant that we had to do our work after work it was completely unsustainable and there's a good chance you've experienced this yourself as well because 77 of all busy professionals are overworked and overstressed the majority are not making enough time for health and fitness half do not get enough sleep why because our calendars look like this the calendars that we use today are all fundamentally the same they are passive ledgers that are easily overloaded and in the modern workplace they act more like a sponge that absorbs the things that other people want you to spend time on and this has only gotten worse since the covet outbreak as we adapt to new ways of working we must also rethink the ways that we manage our time we need new tools that consider our overall well-being so we can sustainably achieve our long-term goals we call this empathetic productivity and mayday was created to solve this for instance in may day you don't schedule meetings you make time for things with calendar shield mayday keeps an eye on how many meetings you have during the week if a particular day starts to fill with too many it automatically blocks the remaining time before you can get overloaded of course everyone's job is different so if you're a manager you can adjust for more meetings but if you're a maker like a software developer you can adjust for more focus time routines are like smart recurring events if you want to make time for things like monthly one-on-ones with your team sales calls or even date night with your spouse mayday make sure there's always space in your schedule even when your calendar starts to fill up by aggregating the data in your existing personal and work calendars mayday develops an understanding of the actual demands on your time and what's important to you as an individual the entire mayday team is passionate about solving this problem brian my co-founder and our cto also worked with me on the portal products and previously he spent more than 12 years in the gaming industry our ceo was the associate director at the creative destruction lab there he worked with hundreds of tech startups but he chose to join mayday after we graduated from it in may our lead engineer has shipped over 20 ios apps and our lead designer was previously at ecobee collectively we have been trusted to design and build products for some of the top companies in the world and every one of us has burnt out at least once in our career 95 of busy professionals rely on a digital calendar every day while the global productivity software market is projected to be 96 billion by 2025. the opportunity to reimagine the calendar is massive for a small monthly fee mayday gives you a way to take back control of your schedule establishing a greater work-life balance in making time for what matters most to you and if you're a leader with inside of an organization maybe will soon offer ways for you to support your entire team to get mayday into the hands of people who feel burnt out the most we are partnering with leading executive coaches and hr professionals and because of how media interfaces with your existing calendar there is also an organic virality built right into the product mayday is currently available as a closed beta but even in these early stages our initial experiments are showing promising signs that mayday can effectively help combat burnout for example one of our early users said calendar shield would have been a lifesaver a few years ago when i was at shopify i can imagine many of my old co-workers loving this today and calendars are just the start as we look to the future mayday will also utilize health data such as sleep patterns exercise and heart rate variability so it can account for the physical effects of poor productivity habits and predict burnout before it becomes serious our mission is to fundamentally improve the sustainability of the workforce and we want to work with people like you to help make it a reality if you're up for this challenge let me know and i look forward to speaking with you soon thanks in 2018 global catastrophic events such as flood and fire have resulted aggregate losses of 25 to 30 billion dollars for commercial property insurance companies and this number is growing exponentially each year to support these losses commercial insurance carriers employ thousands of highly paid risk engineers to review and analyze commercial buildings for potential risks to estimate the risk for a single insurance account a team of engineers will have to spend over 400 hours reviewing thousands of pages of property documents before they can confidently determine the insurance premium to charge as a result the commercial property insurance industry is facing enormous problems with data overload we produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day in fact ninety percent of the world's data has been generated in just the past two years alone and this is not slowing down new technologies such as iot and on-person wearables are allowing us to collect real-time data faster than ever yet the manual and error-prone and repetitive process performed by risk engineers to synthesize risk summary reports has not changed in decades hi my name is jack and i am a co-founder and the ceo of orbiseed orbisi has built an ai power platform that supercharges commercial property risk assessment by enabling engineers to efficiently summarize their building data at lighting speed and with pinpoint accuracy within three years the implementation overseas ai can reduce at risk engineering empowerment cost by up to 90 percent which is equivalent to 21.6 million dollars in savings for the insurance carrier each year here is how it works the web c platform securely retrieves property inspection files directly from the content management systems that insurance companies use then our patent-pending machine learning process will identify key information from these documents that are important for risk assessment finally our ai synthesized a fully customizable risk summary report by combining information from multiple sources into a single concise executive summary so what makes overseas unique from other solutions on the market our process complements the insurance company's existing workflow and act as a supercharger this allows us to provide the extra set of eyes for their risk assessment giving the engineers the confidence they need in their decision making orbc also has a pricing model that's tailored to the needs of the insurance companies by charging a monthly fee that scales with usage this gives consistency that fit well in an annual budgeting process for insurance companies while leaving plenty room for growth and seasonal fluctuations we target commercial product insurance companies through direct sales and the risk engineering companies that service system we have spoken to over a hundred professionals in this vertical and all of them have expressed interest in supercharging their risk assessment team using our technology we're already working on two pay pilots making over four hundred thousand dollars in recurring revenue and there are six more in discussions as of today was extracted over 183 thousand data points with recent week on week growth of nine percent in the past 12 weeks what makes us the proudest of our strong and diverse team i am a third generation engineer and a multi-time founder with previous startup experiences in virtual ready and computer vision ching chung is our cto and the software genius and is a nationally acclaimed program winning at various programming competitions jim orbc's president and cmo comes from a corporate executive background and have built a 200 million dollar business throughout his career and many of our 14-member team have experiences working at other technology startups before joining the orbisi family orbicy is transforming how insurance companies assess property risk and supercharging with cutting edge ai technology we invite everyone who is interested in this mission to reach out to us orbisi property risk analysis supercharged we have all seen the sampling cards at costco where people line up to try a new snack or young students in front of a scotia bank arena handing out free products after live events you may think these are fruitless marketing activities but these efforts have been proved to be very effective in fact fifty percent of people that sample a product will actually buy the product and recommend it to four other people this makes product sampling the main sales driver for consumer packaged goods companies in beauty alone samples are the third largest driver of product purchases hi my name is milad zabih i'm the ceo and co-founder of pkh and we're changing how brands can give a taste of their products to consumers last year alone consumer packaged goods companies spend close to 70 billion dollars on product sampling yet this powerful sales channel has not been disrupted by technology or data for years brands have struggled with product sampling efforts unable to target the right audience track sales or leverage data good or bad as a consequence of this pandemic the traditional sampling channels are gone nobody will feel safe to try in-store samples anytime soon and with the exploding demand from direct consumer brands on e-commerce platforms such as shopify wanting to get in front of customers this becomes an even bigger opportunity pkh is here to reinvent product sampling by making it data driven and accessible to all brands consumers sign up on pkjab to discover new products and share their opinion and voice with brands we make this fun and easy by designing highly contextual surveys that users can respond to in a few seconds through these rapid surveys users are rewarded with pkh coins which they can exchange for free personalized offers with these collected user responses we build a comprehensive user profile that brands can leverage to create hyper targeted campaigns using over 200 consumer attributes such as age income diet lifestyle hair and skin type and many more this is the first time brand managers can target beyond demographics in their sampling campaigns tracking has always been the missing piecing sampling so we fixed it with peakage brands can track consumers and measure their sales conversion or social media engagement the pickage analytics engine will turn consumer data coming from different sources into actionable insights enabling brands to know their user base optimize their marketing message and improve their product or services since our launch in may of this year we've seen tremendous growth in our user base and today we have organically reached 10 000 users we recently started our sales engine and have since signed five brands in canada and europe with an additional 200 high quality leads in the pipeline we're also in discussion with two enterprises to run pilots we charge brands a fixed monthly subscription fee for access to data and analytics plus one dollar per reach to consumers to address the shipping cost challenge faced by small directed consumer brands when running sampling campaigns we have partnered with retailers and shipping aggregators to piggyback off of their current distribution by inserting a sample in each box they are delivering as a result we reduce sampling shipping costs by 80 through our partners in canada alone we built a huge distribution capacity of 500 000 items per month while there are few other companies in this field pkg is uniquely positioned to be a leader in the product sampling space for three reasons we built a two-way instant communication with the user through our mobile app we have trusted firsthand data coming from the users themselves for hyper targeting and retargeting and we are the only platform measuring the roi of sampling campaigns we're also going to scale our sales by leveraging our shopify plugin shipping partners inbound marketing strategy and our user base by partnership with high traffic e-retailers and media platforms this is only made possible by our amazing team at pkg my co-founder cena and i have previously built two startups onboarded more than 20 million users and grew them into multi-million dollar businesses our team has tackled big problem in tech data and design in some of the largest tech enterprises in the world we have deep experience in business and technology so we know what it takes to be successful what it takes to scale and how to build deep data driven tech pkg is bringing data to the forefront of digital product sampling join us in helping brands to replicate the retail experience for consumers at home thank you over 650 billion dollars were sent into and within africa last year alone and 15 of that was processed with cryptocurrency that's 97.5 billion now imagine there was an alternative infrastructure that would process all of these volumes powered by cryptocurrency with instant settlement and for only a fraction of what it costs today my name is buchi and i am the ceo aquidax we make it simple and secure for businesses and individuals in africa to buy and sell cryptocurrency using their local currency since we launched in 2018 we've seen over 120 000 people and businesses trust and use products for their cryptocurrency transactions and this has led to us processing millions of dollars in transactions and we've been growing at 30 percent month over month it's been very interesting for us to see the type of stock people are doing with cryptocurrency vr platform from hedging against local currency devaluation to parents paying their kids tuition in canada to businesses sending and receiving payments for goods and services let me walk you through the quidditch experience first simply go to quiddax.com create a free account verify your identity and once that's approved you're now able to buy and sell instantly we've been able to differentiate ourselves via our unique banking payments and regulate relationships and now be to improve our regulatory integrity i'm excited to announce you today that we're now a canadian headquarter company and we've obtained the money service business license from fintra canada what this means is that we'll now be able to connect the north american and african corridor in a way that has never been done before this corridor was responsible for over 30 billion dollars in transactions last year we make money by charging an average transaction fee of 0.5 and where cash flow positive we started out to build a simple exchange but we quickly realized that the financial problems in africa need for there to be an alternative infrastructure for payment settlement and we built with that to be that infrastructure that's why i'm so glad to announce you today that this infrastructure is now live and we've onboarded over 200 merchants on the api including some banks this would mean that transactions that took up to three days to settle before can now settle instantly and instead of costing between six to nine percent it will not cost under one percent our journey has been very exciting and i'm glad that we have some of the best and brightest home for the ride with us our cto uzo has over 10 years experience leading technical teams morris our cio has over 80 years experience architecting fintech solutions and he has one exit under his belt i have over a decade experience in the finance industry and building businesses and together we need an amazing and inspiring team of 22 talented people now let's take a step back to think about the power of what we're building the future of finance in africa has to be built on tomorrow's technology join us as we bring the power of the blockchain to those who need it the most thank you that was incredible wasn't it i am blown away by the caliber of these companies by the quality of those pitches and by the tenacity of these founders let's recap what we just heard we saw a company that is booking millions of dollars in transaction volume already per month and is experiencing tremendous growth serving global financial markets we heard from a company that already has tens of thousands of monthly active users in what could be the hottest space in tech collaborative design a company that is providing new robotic and scanning technologies to ride the wave of online car marketplaces and auction houses a company that is disrupting the pen and paper way that insurance companies conduct their risk assessment of buildings for their multi-million dollar insurance policies a company that is finally providing a way to give health benefits to freelance workers to keep them and us safe a company that is defining new consumer categories for millennials to shop online for beautiful things that they need in their homes and condos a company that is digitizing and bringing data science to the age-old world and multi-billion dollar industry of product sampling a company that is introducing sanity back into our lives by bringing innovation to the one tool we use every day which needs it more than anything else our calendars a company that is analyzing the universality of baby talk in the home by using ai in a way that will help parents detect speech and language difficulties before they become impactful and finally we witnessed innovation already being delivered to tens of thousands of subscribers as they disrupt the massive global industry of vitamins and nutritional supplements by actually using our own personalized health data so those were the pitches but we're not quite finished we want more we're now going to go and turn to some quick panel talks which will include each of our presenting founders who will answer a few pressing questions and also give you a chance to get to know them just a little bit better we want you to meet them and they want to meet you and as you may have heard we have a very special guest with us today lance armstrong he needs no introduction or context lance will be joining us shortly in conversation with lionel connicker and our very own janet bannister so now let me turn it back over to tarek who will start the first panel with the founders of both mayday and genie health well thank you sunil and welcome to all of you joining us from home whether you're in canada or around the world i'm excited to kick off with both jeremy bell and gurjot the ceos and co-founders of mayday and genie so guys we're talking and the companies that you're building are in this space of well-being burnout and just kind of taking care of ourselves really for the most part so looking at the last decade technological advances have really increased productivity and created a lot of efficiencies at work yet we continue we continue to see burnout on the rise so what do you think are some of the contributing factors to this increased stress and burnout at work and in the personal life and maybe jeremy will start with you sure so i mean i think there's this trend's been has been going on for quite a while um i think one of the bigger kind of issues is that it's been increasingly easy for your co-workers to see your schedule see your calendar and schedule things into your day and it's been a bit of a compounding problem where like as you get busier and you need to find time to work with your co-workers it becomes increasingly difficult to find time and therefore you just kind of keep jamming it into your your co-workers day and it kind of snowballs from there becomes very difficult to actually like get ahead of it i think that's probably one of the main contributing factors that that challenge of i'm in meetings all day but then i also have to get stuff done and and not they're not being enough time during the day to actually get it done yeah and graduate what's your take on kind of this shift that we've been seeing i think we have slowly moved into this 24x7 culture where it's always on so you have your devices on yourself they are like a double edged swords and they can track your sleep at the same time you're just looking at them all like during the night you're not falling asleep because you're looking at your phone i think productivity is like there's so much emphasis on productivity and like an individual's you know the emotional well-being you are tying it to your like performance at work and i think that's sort of in a way if you take evolutionary standpoint we are still adjusting to it like we haven't adjusted to it and the the fight or flight mechanism then because of that like we are always in there like fight or flight state and it's like we are stressed out because of that that's causing a lot of burnout yeah and i think you know at genie health you know you're working in this personalized healthcare space so zooming in on that how do you see um burnout and these stresses that we're seeing you know daily now affecting our own you know personal well-being and physical health and how do you see personalized health playing a role in how we can continue to boost our immune systems and really kind of live a healthier lifestyle from the inside out yeah i think the the way we work at the company and the viewpoint we have is is your unique individuality everybody responds to the stress very differently though we are living in the same like sort of environment so there's a very interesting gene that we uh have in our analysis we call it's comp c-o-m-t gene so it's called warrior gene as well so some people you know if you see this stress is like this like rough sea that you have hit by this like waves then some some people are like okay they were like okay i'm gonna write this way they have like the positive attitude which is like related to the compto gene uh variation like some people take stress really well they like it's good for them but many people they cannot they like they get crushed by these waves so it is like it's it's very very important to know the individual differences so based on that you can easily see right okay i have low tolerance to these stressors so when you are put under these emotional stressors uh it's it's gonna be difficult for you so you're gonna be like proactive in your approach so in that we suggest people to do more meditation to those people have more positive visualization be more optimistic right to the other people that they do like thrive a little bit on stress but still they have they have the danger of that they don't do much unless they're put under stress so like you will not like work unless there's deadline you know tomorrow so i think it's very very important and during these core times and most of people are stressed even if you are working out earlier you cannot work out you are stressed because of that uh i think there's some some general things that you have to take care of your vitamin b iron radiola right that's but how much you need is like based on your individuality i think couple of other things that movement is so important so people like your stress level is impacting your gut health like this your brain body uh thing so i think three common things we tell people personalize your diet like how much percentage of each vitamin or nutrient you need every day second is your movement like we just look at your movement from your apple health or your google feed and just you know nudge you to move third thing is mostly how you cope with stress like have meditation and more social in your approach and how important is the relationship between dna individuality and some of the personalized health products that are offered through genie oh it is super important like because if you see the way we have been living right so uh it's like what what actually inspired me to to start this thing is like uh my friend died of cancer at 28 and i got obsessed with this idea you know how can we know more about ourselves we didn't know about what was going on inside and then it came across the work of dr roger j williams so in 1956 he gave this concept of biochemical individuality so like we all are different like we have like a different finger prints similar we have about biochemically we are very different so we took idea from there and it was like 60 years we are still not doing it so and dna plays like a huge role as a as i told you about the compt gene so but it's like easy way to understand there is no personalization without the dna and also you cannot have the 100 personalization just based on the dna so you have to start with the dna then you have to see somebody's like current health situation and then you see how they live on day-to-day basis so i think dna is super important to start with and there are huge variations that you can find great and you know jeremy building on that you know this is how health has evolved how has technology evolved to help us combat burnout you know we're spending a lot more time at home especially now with covet you know if people have kids they're homeschooling you've got your companies you're running others that have you know multiple other things that are on the go all the time how has technology and how does mayday enable these people to really find the optimal work-life balance and avoid burnout and some of these kind of long-term effects that would happen because of it so i would say ironically a lot of the technology is not helping it's it's actually the opposite um what what we see is a lot of the tools that we use today are increasingly set up to make it easier for other people to take time it's very distracting as well so you've got products that are constantly notifying you throughout the day it becomes very very difficult to maintain focus and maintain an understanding of what it is you're trying to achieve because the technologies are all trying to reach out and grab you they're trying to hold you for as long as they can and they don't really want you to leave so when it looks when you look at the the tools that we use i actually think there's there's a need for more products that understand who you are and what you're trying to achieve products i understand you know much like your dna like we're all very individual in terms of our personality um and i don't think any or very few of the products we use really understand who we are what we what we're trying to do um so in terms of may day like we we really created a product to go out and understand the individual understand and acknowledge that we're all very different the demands on our time are very different um if you happen to be a parent and you've got kids at home especially now uh given the outbreak your work-life balance is very different than someone who might be just at home solo kind of working on their own um and so the tools we have don't really understand that they don't understand how i'm feeling or what i should be focusing on and that's really why we you know we set out to kind of create something that that could help you make better use of your time unlike some of the other products that exist yeah so if you had to kind of give people one or two pieces of advice to determine and figure out how to manage and how to figure out a better work-life balance what would be one or two things that you would give people tuning in today yeah so i think there's there's a couple i'd say the first is you need to think of time as like a budget and you need to be very aware of of you know you misspending it one of the great kind of things that people say about when you save money is pay yourself first you should think of time in a very similar way put things on your calendar that are for you and respect that time so when you block it out you keep it there uh don't give it away to somebody else the second would really be acknowledging that that time is limited it's precious and you you need to say no sometimes you need to you need to acknowledge that you can't be in multiple places at once you can't do multiple things at the same time you sometimes need a break you sometimes need to take a step back so understanding what is of importance and what is not and having the the confidence to say you know what i'm not going to do this right now and then at the end of the day really kind of disconnect and and try to to do not less but really focus on the quality it's more about quant quality over quantity and i would say a combination of all those things would go a long way to helping most people nice well jeremy thank you very much for being a part of this discussion in this conversation and thank you for all of you that are joining us at home and now over to sunil for an exciting panel with our international companies and for any of you that are looking to learn more about these two great companies or any of the other eight companies make sure you check out demoday.techstars.com and now over to eusenil it's been an incredibly long journey to get us here and unfortunately we're still not here so this pandemic has taken us by surprise and unfortunately there is still a ways to go but the most important thing for us all is to remain safe and to keep others safe we know that covet 19 shows no respect for national borders so i wanted to start off by asking each of you to give us some sentiments on how the virus is being contained in your respective countries countries of turkey nigeria and poland let's start with you human yes uh as far as i know uh turkish government has been able to contain this situation very well the healthcare system here uh is very well uh they are producing and even exporting ventilators to the rest of the world and businesses have started opening up uh starting from two months ago and we pretty much feel relatively safe here that's good to hear um buchi what is the situation in lagos and uh even across nigeria i'll say nigeria we've been quite lucky right um i would say relatively speaking we've not had too many cases so right now we're at about 53 000 um but only 53 000 there have been 39 000 recoveries right so um right now there's just a curfew in in force so you have to be home by 10 p.m but besides that the places of worship are opening up restaurants are opening no bar so you know i think it's just the clubs left right but then um everyone is still trying to like do their own part and then be responsible just stay in those as much as you can or businesses and places so things are easy things that isn't out here okay thank you uh buchi and uh suawek finally to you uh in poland uh your city of krakow or in warsaw or just anywhere in the country or even eastern europe how has the virus be been progressing as of late yeah sure so actually we had like quite a good situation i would say from may to like july and then in july i would say the wedding season started off and we reopened i think a bit too early and right now we have like still like incline literally a few days ago we had a record of number of cases in a day that was like almost 900 today we had like 550 so it's definitely like increasing right now more and more and yeah for example my city of krakow right now is that close from actually getting uh red listed as a like orange warning zone that's one thing and then the second thing is that actually like my district of the country has like biggest number of cases right now and i would say we're definitely heading right now for the second wave unfortunately well our uh our hopes are that we all stay safe and we have to get through this i want to ask a question first to human so human you are an iranian national living in istanbul turkey and along with your co-founder mujahid you had big plans to move to the united states to continue building our cord studio into a world-dominating design sas company one country's national politics we find can have severe impacts on entrepreneurs a world away and i think that's what happened in your case and what eventually led to something that i'm calling your pivot to canada so please do tell us a little more about how your path was mitigated from going directly to the u.s and end up coming here to canada with us well since most of our customers are in north america it only made sense for us to bring artboard studio to north america and grow it over there and to be honest this was not our first attempt to migrate to north america we tried several times but unfortunately every time uh we hit closed doors just because of my nationality and because of this political situation between iran's government and the us government it's practically almost impossible for an iranian national to be able to obtain a visa and travel to the us so every time that i tried it failed uh just as we were planning to give up on doing this we decided to give it one more shot with techstars boulder we applied for that and we got accepted to the program but again the same thing happened i applied for a visa and it took them several months to even respond to give me an interview for my visa so uh the managing director of techstars boulder decided to give our position to another startup and on the final call which was kind of like uh the goodbye call they ask if there is anything uh they can do for us and we just said there is another program in toronto and could you introduce us to the people in toronto and we were actually shooting for the 2021 program but after the first introduction to you sunil uh we got into the toronto program and we couldn't be happier about that i just want to be able to do my job because i love my job and i'm good at it and i believe i can do a lot better over there we're excited to have you we can't wait for you to finally get here uh a question for you now not everybody fully understands and appreciates the world of cryptocurrency and digital financial assets many argue that we have reasonably well functioning and stable banking systems in place and thus there's no real need for digital currencies to transact with or simply to hold but i think that's a very westernized point of view and when you apply the lens of say africa with 1.3 billion people an incredibly young population all of whom have mobile phones and are using their devices to transact i think it's fair to say that the argument is entirely different and so now given that you two are awaiting your arrival here in canada and we have a headquarters of quiddax here in canada i wanted to ask you what are you doing to position yourself as an international financial company an international banking company to leverage both the market in africa and here in north america yes you know i'll see you all right when you you you mentioned that it's very worst nice view right if you've ever been at the end of a situation where because of a payment your family can't eat right or your business can't thrive because you're unable to receive payment you would realize that cryptocurrencies in africa is not just a nice to have assets it's not just an asset you can use to replace gold right but it's a transactional tool that people used to survive on every day right that's why we're making it our mission to make it very easy for people in africa to buy and sell cryptocurrency using their local currency right and then beyond that we've realized that africa needs a new infrastructure for finance right for these businesses over 120 million businesses that are struggling with payment settlements for them to be able to thrive in the new economy they need a new way to accept payments they need a new way to move payments into one within africa right so positioning as a canadian headquarters company what we're doing what we're making our mission is to make that connection right moving value into africa moving value within africa as seamless as sending a text message and that's what we've been working on and it's it's such an exciting thing to to be working on it is exciting uh suave now you live in a country that is an engineering and a software development powerhouse i'm speaking about poland and that's the case even if most people in the western part of the world don't realize it what are you going to be able to do to leverage the engineering and the technical capacity that you have and will continue to grow across poland with your pending arrival in canada and your headquartering of the company car scanner here in north america yeah sure so actually we're trying to get the best of twirls and what i mean by that is to actually uh have the best possible quality to price ratio in every dollar spending r d and this will be achieved both with r d grants coming from our government and from the european union as well as actually the fact that we have like very low costs of running the business in poland and we actually want to invent and produce in poland then ship it to canadian company and then from toronto actually uh scaling our business with north american business developers marketers and sales reps as well as you know cfos cso and so on and so on so that way actually we can use our uh engineering expertise and at the same time get the best of you know the capitalist world in north america where you guys know how to sell innovation how to approach customers and so on and so on that's like our approach and we're right now figuring out how to do it in a legal way concerning you know transfer pricing withholding tax and all those things that are there but actually a very good thing is that canadian government signed uh actually some kind of agreement with european union meaning that we can actually transfer some of our products and everything without the taxes which is like super cool without the duties and everything this like helps us a lot exciting okay listen i want to close it there uh it's been incredible getting to know you all over the past many months uh this wasn't the plan to have a distance-based tech stars but we are expecting you here soon and we can't wait for you to arrive so until then uh please keep safe and we'll be together soon thank you hi everyone i'm anya the ceo and co-founder of lively and i'm miriam the co-founder and ceo of baboli we're here to talk about kind of what drove us to start our businesses and there are so many similarities that i saw between our companies from day one which was the fact that we were mission driven and we wanted to make an impact why don't you start telling us about what problem you saw in day one with lively and your journey so far sure sure i think uh one it goes back quite a while so it was uh it all started about 10 years ago when my co-founder adam roach and i we we started working together and we created this advertising agency the first of its kind here in canada to really focus on utilizing and celebrating uh freelance talent this uh for so long it was a dirty little secret where freelancers were in the background and they were never really celebrated for all that they do all the expertise that they bring to businesses and over the course of the last 10 years that whole perception has changed and business survival is so reliant on freelance talent particularly now in the world today so one of the things that we recognized in working with this group was was just these extreme challenges that they were faced with all these things that are just not found in the traditional world of employment and this ranged from funding and accessing group health and dental benefits as well as paid days off it's not a thing if you're on your own off time is off time not to mention the whole idea of being treated like a line of credit by these companies you know it was like all of a sudden freelancers were credit cards and it was it was an awful thing so we we really felt like we couldn't do too much outside of our world in communications and we wanted to tackle this problem in a meaningful way and start moving the needle for this community that was just massively exploding right and that's where lively was really born from it was was that feeling of working along freelance alongside freelancers but also being an entrepreneur you know what it's like facing the world alone and getting these things established it's really really hard so we're here to create a better working world for freelancers and and that was really where that that need and that drive for lively first began and i love the bably story so so please please share with us yeah i guess very different space but it was driven by a pain that i experienced myself about two years ago i was doing something very different and i realized that my son who was then two years old wasn't meeting his developmental milestones um it wasn't really something that i realized overnight it was probably 12 months leading up to that realization that he wasn't saying for instance mama or dada when he was around a year old and then you know after months and months of having to fight with my pediatrician googling trying to you know find answers from facebook groups with other moms and learning from their experiences i finally you know went back to my doctor and i said nothing is happening like some we've got to do something about this and at that point she referred us to a program where they train parents to essentially coach their children and and play with them in a specific way it took us about a year to get that service and not only it was terrible it was just inhumane i mean when i think about and you know meanwhile we were fortunate enough to be able to pay for private therapy on the side but through that experience i came to you know hundreds of thousands of stories of other parents who end up either falling through the cracks of the health care because their concern wasn't taken seriously day one or um we refer to one of you know the government backed programs but had to wait for 12 to 18 months while their child is having tantrums every day head banging and they feel helpless so that was the moment for me that i and i think i would love to get to that point with lively as well but to me there was a day where i was looking at my phone and again googling things and i thought gosh like i had my phone with me the entire time we have a smart speaker at home which is listening to our conversations 24 7. um yeah absolutely but at the same time like none of these devices were able to tell me you know that there is a red flag while we have this whole body of literature in the early development space where we know children go through the different stages so um long story short it the personal pain point started kind of ignited as spark and led me to figure out a way to help other parents not have to go through that journey or through that pain and find other resources i'm curious what was like was there a moment or was there a person out of all the freelancers that you guys came across to at lively that was that moment i think i think it was built up over time you know when we first got into the space working working with the top talent in toronto you know it was eye-opening that these people were so in demand and so required that they weren't treated as well as someone would treat an employee particularly in the world of payments and celebration of their talents and all of those kinds of great things and and i think that it kind of mounted as we worked with this group and and it came to a point where we we implemented all of these policies procedures and and methods to make this the case for our business and and we weren't able to influence outside of our own walls and there's nothing worse than having to look someone in the face and they're saying oh my gosh i i can't i can't take this job because i i have to like work on on this one continually and i'm waiting for that payment and i'm struggling with this god forbid someone have to go to the dentist and that's an awful thing to face on a daily basis and this is when this this big moment happened for us and and even with our own lives you know i think there's a desperate need for flexibility these days there's a desperate need for really qualified productive talented people pilvit has just changed everything and we're in a very unique and and transformative time for how business is done in a working capacity but also the relationships that exist and we we're really focused on solving very human challenges and i love that about babli as well you know there's businesses that have impact that move that needle and i think it's so important now that that we focus on the human side of that and that's that's where business needs to go today and having a conscience of what's happening on the independent level but as an organization and together as an economy so you know i know that parenting amidst kovid must be an interesting time for you as well and i'd love to hear about your thoughts yeah i couldn't agree more you know parents are spending countless hours with their baby and i think you know startup journey is always long and notorious but being able to especially these days and these months during covet being able to hear the stories of parents being able to move the needle for their child um and you know working seeing the improvements that the child has made in front of their eyes has been very rewarding so yeah i think i can't you know agree more that we need to build a more human future and especially now it's more and more relevant yeah absolutely so thanks uh thanks miriam you know i think there's been a great wonderful relationship established here at tech stars between our companies and all the best and back to you sunil well thank you very much anya and miriam that was an incredible conversation and as a parent i too am uh thinking uh a lot especially right now with back to school just on the uh on the horizon and you know how we're all gonna handle that safely for our families and for society at large i want to turn to joe parento joe it's fantastic to have you here fable what i love about fable is it's a direct to consumer brand we don't always see direct direct-to-consumer brands kind of take off in canada here we have one it's a it's a fantastic company in the making and really it just started at the late part of 2019 and already you've shown incredible traction what's the underlying reason why you think you've been off to such a strong start yeah i think it's a combination of a few components obviously like you said we did launch we just launched in november and we kind of we started picking things up in may when things started to really ramp up and i think that the the pandemic has definitely played an effect in it um really early on when the pandemic hit there was a lot of conversation around what should you do with your business i don't mean you had even spoken about this and i had actually talked to one of the founders of article another direct consumer brand out of vancouver and he had expressed to me that to actually step on the gas he had an insight that a lot of brands were pulling away they were slowing down they were kind of going into shelter mode and preparing for this storm but with the brands that are home based like dinnerware it's actually a great time to just like actually step on the gas turn on more channels and really start to market yourself even more and in more ways so that's exactly what we did yeah i mean when you think about it as pandemic businesses that are kind of benefiting from the boom i can think of you know lumber for backyard deck construction sweatpants and maybe anything for the home like curated artisanal dinnerware uh yours comes from halfway across the world from portugal and i know there's a story for why that is and there's also some benefits coming from having these portuguese artisans create your line of of tableware and dinnerware can you tell us about that for sure yeah when we started fable we were looking all over the world to create the best dinner where we possibly could um we searched all over asia and in lots of places in europe especially and it turns out that the portuguese have a deep history in ceramic creation and i flew over there i remember july last year flying over there visiting everyone and the experience there the hospitality was just it was it was amazing it was just remember getting headache espresso cups and getting to just enjoy a conversation with everyone and i think it was at that point we knew that they were going to be great partners and people we wanted to continue to work with and as it continues as it turned out as we started exploring even from a business venture that canada and portugal both actually have a duty-free trade which actually is a huge benefit to us right now and something we very fortunate to have you know another thing that struck me uh when i first met you and it was uh you know over over the internet even even pre we were practicing for kovit because we were we were talking from bank you were in vancouver i was here in toronto we got to know each other a little bit one thing that struck me immediately was your own background so there's three co-founders uh you and max and tina and both you and max worked at a very well-known successful tech stars company uh from you know from previous accelerator days and in fact tina's husband was a co-founder of that very company i'm talking about bench did that give you some i guess did that prove to be a bit of an advantage in terms of your understanding of like what to expect with an accelerator program i would say so yeah you know when we start i started a bench the a month before max had actually and we were some of the earlier on employees and i remember talking to jordan and ian and how fondly they thought of the techstars program they went to techstars new york quite a few years ago now and it was something that became a goal of ours was to attend tech stars and be a part of this program and i think that they gave us a really good understanding of what to expect throughout the program and as we began applying for the program i remember talking to ian at a dinner party with jordan about actually like what the program was like for him um and then also their friend tim he had attended the program down in seattle as well so it was an interesting conversation where a lot of people were talking about the program what they were able to take from it and i felt uh very much more equipped with what to expect and what the three months would be like yeah and another thing that i've been quite impressed by is uh how much geographic coverage you have already within the company uh so as i mentioned we met when you were in vancouver all tina max and yourself were all living in vancouver now tina lives here in toronto with her husband you are talking about moving to lisbon for a little while at least to be closer to your supply and really understand the product and what can come from it and you have a team in the u.s as well so this is a lot of growth again for a company that just got off the ground in late 2019. yeah for us we knew that the direct-to-consumer space here in canada is new and it's like almost at its infancy for a lot of a lot of brands and it was important to us that we'd be able to attract and retain the best talent in the world and with our suppliers already being in portugal and us exploring suppliers across all of europe um we thought that there's no reason that we needed to be in one central location so max and his fiancee wanted to stay in vancouver tina and jordan wanted to move to toronto and myself like you said portugal so i came here to toronto and we'll be headed off to portugal hopefully here in the next month or so we also do have a team member in montreal our creative director and we have our head of products actually based out of new york not bad at all for a guy whose roots i think are from regina and you really started to capture not only the entire country of canada but now the world i'll just close off by saying i'm incredibly excited to watch the next chapter of growth in in fable and i think with the brands that we've seen take flight and short order companies like away and casper and warby parker missouri and others i mean there's no reason to believe that you will not be the category leader in the dinnerware and home homeware space and i'm really excited to watch you take off thanks i appreciate that's new well thank you very much joe incredibly excited by fable i'm going to now turn it back to my partner in crime tariq hadidin who is going to take us into the next session here at demo day in this panel i am joined by two founders who are redefining the industries in which they operate milad the co-founder and ceo of pikage and jack the co-founder and ceo of orbiseed so guys since we are talking about disrupting traditional industries maybe we'll start by looking five to ten years ahead how do you see disruption affecting your industries and what will the future look like and maybe jack will start with you absolutely thank you derek so in the next 5-10 years we'll see a huge change in the commercial property industry which is the industry we're disrupting and this is fundamentally what really made orbc start with we'll see two major trends the first trend is that 25 all the risk engineers serving the commercial property industry will be retiring soon so there will be shift in management into the younger generations this will also seeing a shift in how people are will be focusing on commercial private insurance assessment so we'll see more data-driven decision-making we'll see more clarity and transparency in how insurance premiums are calculated and third of all we'll see more strict guidelines on what good insurance means secondly we'll see a change from supply side demand to demand side for the insurance industry there will be more insurance buildings to asking for insurance than there will be insurance carriers what this means is they'll meet more strict guidelines and property owners now will have to follow a more strict guidelines or they may face a more expensive insurance premium or no carrier willing to ensure their buildings at all at betting on those we are seeing going to see a more data-driven approach to commercial property insurance very similar to what car insurance and auto insurance has been going through in the next five to 10 years excellent so lots to look forward to and milad what about the product sampling space how do you see the future of that industry being redefined by technology right i think while most of the brands will take the direct to consumer approach and uh e-commercials will replace the brick and mortar retailers consumers will still look to try and experience products before buying them consumers still wants to see how does that energy bar taste or how does that make up look on their skin so for a lot of like you know cpg verticals like you know food and beverages or cosmetics in beauty uh sentiment plays and influences actually consumer decisions greatly this is a great opportunity to build a long lasting relationship with consumers at home and consumers will continue to ask for trying products at home so i think the retail experience will eventually evolve to consumers home and experiential marketing will become more data driven targeted and personalized i also think that the search for products will replace by mix of highly recommend product recommendation highly personalized product recommendations and product testing at all so kind of digging digging a bit deeper into that you know many people say that industry disruption really starts with unhappy customers so how has this concept of customer experience and user experience informed what you're doing at peakage and how do you see that as an advantage to what you're building i think yeah you're right a lot of people think that disruption starts with technology but disruption actually starts with unhappy customers customers are the ones behind decisions to adopt or reject new technologies or new products disruptive startups uh j they enter market not just by stealing customers from incumbents but but by identifying the customer needs that are not satisfied and trying to create a fulfilling experience for customers for example in product sampling a space uh brands have struggled for years to run their product sampling initiatives dual product sampling is a powerful marketing tool uh but it was never efficient or targeted uh and the incumbent services were mostly catered towards enterprises leaving a lot of me tier businesses behind so when we try to address those shortcomings by adding data to product sampling and making product sampling targeted and data driven and accessible actually to every brand and we got a lot of like you know interest in huge reactions from the customers disruption is a customer driven phenomenon and i believe that uh behind every disruption is a unhappy customers that a new technology or newer startup is addressing those changes many of the fast-growing startups they don't necessarily have access to a more or to more or better innovative technology but what they do have is the ability to deliver and execute faster what exactly the consumer or customer wants excellent and now so jack back to orbiseed you know um traditional industries are really adopting more and more technology so how do you see the future and the relationship between the people doing the work and the technology that's enabling to do the work evolving that's a great question tarek we created technology as a tool to make our work more efficient and for us to be more productive however the tool is useless without the person that's using it so what we'll see is that instead of changing in how what people are doing we'll see a changing how they're doing the work so what this means is that we created computers to handle more file management we created a spreadsheet to handle the manual and repetitive calculations and now the ai thinking way a lot that a simple mental decision making that's currently done by junior workers in the future we'll be seeing more process the people with the experience still remain the same they'll be needed more than ever to leave this technology change however the new generation that's coming into this workspace will be have to change the way they work in order to fit into a technology adoption they can no longer follow the steps their parents or grandparents instead must focus on one the four main air four key areas that's technology expertise customer and user experience creative problem solving or solution architecture and then finally pro focus on process management and change management great well milad jack thank you so much for joining us with this panel and for everyone at home thank you for joining us as well make sure to check demoday.techstars.com to hear more about these two great companies and the other eight great founders that we have and now back to you senile thank you tarek it was very important to us for you to get a chance to meet our founders in conversation with each other we are so happy that we were able to do that now i'd like to turn things over to janet bannister from real ventures janet an accomplished athlete in her own right is going to host a panel chat featuring the partners of next ventures including lionel connector a fellow canadian and the one and only lance armstrong thank you so much um it is great to be here today i'm here with lionel and lance armstrong from next ventures as many of you know lance armstrong is a globally known cyclist was at one point one of the most recognized athletes of the world in the world and lionel is an accomplished multi-sport athlete as well as having a very uh storied background in leading financial services firms lance and nano together founded next ventures which invests in early-stage technology companies that are dedicated to improving people's health and wellness so today they're here with me to talk about their firm and what they've learned working together and how they're leveraging their past past stories their past backgrounds to do what they're doing today so we'd love to kick it off with you lance lance tell us about your journey into venture capital and how you have leveraged background your skills into what you're doing now well thanks first of all thanks for having us um you know my background in health and wellness really goes back 30 plus years it was at one point or for many of those years it was a job uh but it hasn't been a job for better part of a decade um but it's still a space that uh you know i'm super passionate about i think that and and i don't think i know the data shows that uh more and more people around the world care about this space uh the birth of of our fund and and our religious lionel's relationship including melanie strong was really born out of creating content and building back this massive audience and um and then as a byproduct of that just seeing a lot of really interesting deal flow in this space so stuff that was authentic to this and and unique to health and wellness and so you know that's when lc and i just got together and thought you know a lot of this is interesting feels like you know for as we like to call it feels like the beginnings of a flywheel and uh let's look you know let's go build a fun build a team raise a fund and uh invest in the best opportunities and what how have you what do you view as lance you've brought to the table in terms of your you know as i said you both have all three of you have very varied backgrounds and would love to hear from you in terms of you know your career in um in professional athletics and how you you know the sort of the lessons that you learned to doing that and how you're applying those today yeah i mean i think on a broader scale we view ourselves as a as a three-legged stool um i bring my experience in the sports and health and wellness world um i bring the expertise and the experience in the content world and also as i said earlier just a deep passion uh lionel obviously spent his his entire career in financial services so when it comes to evaluating businesses deal terms valuations all of these things that um you know obviously i i didn't spend any time doing that as a professional cyclist and then melanie strong who who's really we like to refer to her as our ninja she's her expertise and experience uh in branding marketing messaging is is kind of unparalleled she was at nike for 20 years and ran brands built brands revived brands so we feel like that you know again that three-legged stool is a nice uh nice compliment to each other well i know tell us a little bit about from your perspective how you got into how you met lance and how it came to be that you two along with melanie started next ventures uh sure um so i met lance about 20 years ago i got involved with with his foundation originally went back when it was the lance armstrong foundation um before livestrong and uh i had had a young partner of mine um ultimately passed away from cancer and and uh some went down and and raised a bunch of money um for for both the uh laf and then also for for princess margaret hospital in toronto and and that's when i met lance um initially through uh canadian pro cyclist steve bauer who's a friend of mine and and who had raced with with lance on uh on the motorola team and uh and so then um from there just kind of crisscrossed with him um through pro cycling and then and then ultimately um i i had founded a uh an investment bank in canada uh that i sold to thomas weissel partners and and tom had owned the team that lance rode for and so lance was a logical person to call and ask uh for uh advice on on dealing with tom and and i got got some good advice uh from him and uh and and so we just have kind of crisscrossed for for a long a long time um over over the years so tell tell me um uh lance you know you talk about how you lionel mel all have very different skill sets and diversity is something that we talk a lot about um in terms of whether it be at the board room whether it be a founding team whether it be a management team we would love to hear from you how you leverage the diverse backgrounds of all three of you and how you make that work well because i think if you've got a group of diverse people it can either be terrific or it can be really bad if uh if there's not that mutual trust and mutual respect for each other's point of view and would love to understand from you you know what you've learned along the way in terms of working on such a diverse team well to start i mean fortunately for us it's it's not been really bad it's been really good so that's that's been across our fingers that continues um you know it's worth noting that um you know we're living at a time the last six months of all of our lives is is is it's been a total game changer for all of us in terms of interacting with each other taking meetings reviewing deals this is you know nobody ever could have predicted this um i guess the silver lining was this is how we were working pre-covet uh lionel in the bay area myself in austin and mel in portland um we were used to that and and it you know it it is as unfortunate as as the pandemic has been it hasn't been an adjustment for us it's just been uh status quo um in terms of interacting with with either potential lps or existing portfolio companies i think we're all very mindful and respectful of each other's strengths and weaknesses none of us pretend to be somebody that we're not none of us you know as we say get out of our lane and i you know lionel defers to me on things i defer to him he'll defer to mel it's it's it's you know there's never been a conflict there on on on or any territorial conflict on uh on those lanes that's good we also you know when when lance and i started it we knew we had we needed to have a third person that that really understood branding and marketing um because because that was you know not not one of either of our strengths and you know the fact of the types of companies that we were going to be investing in not all directly consumer facing but but all you know very important um around around brand positioning in the marketplace you know whether whether it's a consumer product or or even if it's a if it's a b2b platform in in the telemedicine space like one of our companies said emd and and so we set about trying to find the best person we could possibly find for that role we're incredibly fortunate to uh to come across mal um we weren't specifically looking for for a woman as our third partner um but i can tell you both you know from my my standpoint not words in lance's mouth that mel has brought a completely different perspective to how he and i generally look at things and and um and i i think it makes us a way better team because of it and um you know as lance says we all kind of overlap we all have a huge passion for this space um but but we all um we all respect each other enormously and and uh and and allow each of us to to excel at what we do do well so it's worked out it's worked out really well it sounds like i'm fine with the best teams that i've seen they have common vision common passion and they have distinct skill sets and they're tied together with their mutual trust and respect yeah no i i would say that that's that's incredibly important and and and something that you know covid has caused us to work harder at it um you know be being in three different areas um geographically and and all really important areas to to the space that we're investing in um you know one of the one of the questions that potential lps have asked us a lot is you know how does that work and and and uh how have you been able to make it work and and you know before covid we would get together for at least a week a month whether it was in in austin or or aspen or the bay area um you know when covet hit we we haven't actually gotten together um since since covet hit we're getting together in aspen um in a couple weeks time for a week and we're we're going to resume our our uh our monthly practice of doing that um but but largely driven by mel she she's really um you know forced us to to take time to just be partners and and and share what's going on um you know in in our personal lives and and um and be supportive of each other and and and i think you know largely you know driven by by her lead we we've worked harder at it than we probably otherwise would and and uh so i think you know i said it earlier today in another meeting that we're on that we i think we've come out of this period of time much stronger than we otherwise would have which has been kind of interesting because you wouldn't necessarily expect that yeah thanks thanks so much for sharing uh just sticking on the subject of sort of your team and composition of next ventures um i noticed that you have about 13 very accomplished people on your advisory board and interested in how that works again for a lot of both venture capital funds or startups they are looking at having advisory boards and would be interested in your thoughts in terms of how you selected members to be on your advisory board how that works with such a large group of people yeah it's not it it's actually not on a relative basis it's not a large group of people and and it's one of the things that when we first put the fund together we decided we wanted to have an advisory board i was coming from a private equity firm that had 30 advisors and um and my experience there was was that nobody in the partnership really reached out to and used the advisory board so they ended up being um you know kind of faces and faces on a website in a bio um and and and and so we were we were concerned about that um and so we decided to go with it with a what we think was a smaller group um but you know lance may maybe talk about just you know how we arrived at some of the folks and and uh and and the why behind you know why we chose each of them yeah i won't bore you with all 13 but just on a generally speaking when we think of health and wellness we then also think about performance um obviously uh you know and we speak to this a lot but the you know if you have a marathon of 40 000 people the winner cares about performance the person who got last place also cares about performance and all the 40 000 people in between care about it so then we uh took it a step further um and in our minds collectively our opinion was that the true tip of the spear is the military the special forces that is where true human performance and optimization starts um they see technology way before we do whether that's a lens of fabric a food a soul anything um so then you know to us you start with the special forces which we have represented on the advisory board and then you just trickle it back down into the high performance athlete to the general population we wanted it obviously to be a diverse board with with um you know male and female but also people from all walks of life and so um you know several very successful entrepreneurs on there that have built really big businesses uh sold them off and they're now doing it again but just people that we can pull into this process or insert into the process in the in the port codes as they need help right and so it could be a robin thurston that started map my fitness and sold that to under armour for 200 million bucks and was in their cto for five years it could be charlie denson who was at nike for 30 years co-president for 10. um it's just a you know we've got a deep deep bench there but you know just to say it again i mean it really does start at what we view as the tip of the spear hey lance building on your um how you just described i loved how you described that in terms of hey everybody in the marathon cares about their performance and so you know tell us how does that lead into your investment thesis and what you're looking for to in terms of companies that you're investing in with next building on that concept about you know human performance and people caring about sort of getting the best out of them themselves well i'll make it real simple um since we're we're in the venture capital business and in our job and responsibility and and fiduciary responsibility is to return capital to our lps um if and then i think this is safe to say if we saw an idea that was absolutely amazing a complete game changer but only the winner would benefit from that that is not an opportunity or a deal that we would pursue we have to have things and lionel speaks to this a lot and maybe better than me if this doesn't um trickle down to the everyday person to the general population you know as people who are stewards of other people's capital and expect a return on their money you know we have to you know we have to you know our opportunities have to be selling into the body of forty thousand again using the marathon as an example i mean if forty thousand people start there's only fifty that think they're going to win that is a very small market that we would be out of business before the word go and so uh it really has to transcend and and be available and relative to the to the general population yeah i like to say we we look at everything through the lens of the high performance athlete and then we step back and we ask ourselves how does this translate to the general population and if it doesn't no matter how cool it might be um we'll buy it for ourselves and use it and and uh but but we won't invest in it and and we've been we've been very disciplined about that the other thing that i would say is that is that you know lance's lance is so um focused on on performance and and how things work he's he's a he's a you know closeted scientist kind of a guy and and uh and and so you know everything that we actually try an amazing number of things and and you know one of our one of our very first things that we do as part of our due diligence process which is a little ass backwards but but it's how we do it it works really well is we say you know we we don't we don't want to meet you we don't want to see your deck send us a product send us the service let us try it and and then we go if we ourselves would use it we then dive dive in and start doing our due diligence and that's that's worked really really well for us it's been amazing to me the number of you know we've had since since we started the fund we've had over 800 opportunities that we've looked at that have come in through our deal funnel all different ways and um and our standard our standard response is send us a product it's amazing to me how how many companies don't bother sending you the product like they just self-select out it's it's really and they don't have the product ready or they just they don't have it ready or they don't you know that it's not you know it's not what they it's not it's in beta form or whatever it is like you know it it's but it's it's amazing how how much self-selection there ends up being interesting now you talked about um hey you know what you'll only invest in those in those products where you see hey it's going to go beyond that 50 percent you know the top 50 people elite and into the masses you know how do you assess that because and that's a challenge for a lot of early stage companies or early stage investors is okay is this product going to sort of cross the chasm and go from a few select you know very small target to much broader and i'd love to hear how you think about that well we're we already start to have uh uh insight on that because you know based on you know our thesis you know we're not investing in whiteboard ideas or just uh even great ideas you know we invest in companies that are in the marketplace that are that are real businesses led by real teams that have traction and have some sort of uh some sort of vision for uh for the next what call it two to four years and so uh i mean i think it's safe to say uh all that we've made nine investments thus far the ones we have i mean they will all transcend past that filter that lion will lay out speaking of which would love to hear about one or two or three of your companies that you're particularly excited about i'll go first and talk about aura um so we were early investors in aura ring and i'll just try to hold it up here so aura ring is it's actually a lot of folks are aware of this brand we were fortunate to to get into their a round and then participate in the b round it's the best sleep tracking device uh commercially available it's a remarkable piece of technology it's not without competitors um their competitors are slightly different in that they're primarily wrist based so whether that's the the apple watch the fitbit the whoop auras made the bet on the finger and so we you know bet alongside them um it it it's interesting because it came on the market as a sleep tracking device the reality is it actually tests hundreds of data points throughout the day and the night whether it be obviously sleep so it's all sleep cycles movement heart rate heart rate variability respiratory rate and body temps the body temp i say last because it's really for them it's also been a blessing uh based on because of covet and obviously what happens to your body temp whenever you're going to get sick but especially if you're getting coveted they just did this fell literally fell on their laps they were seeing loyal users uh they were closely monitoring their body temp and realizing watching it go up and up and up and then boom all of a sudden being diagnosed with covid it was just a byproduct of making a really badass piece of equipment after that you know then they formed the partnership with the nba who's now presumed to play every player coach staff member has the ring so they're closely monitoring all of these people for their core temp throughout the day just to give you some of the numbers in this company in 2019 projected to do 25 million in sales they did 34. um looks like they're going to do they're going to push 100 million in sales this year in 2020 so it's a you know for us it's been a great a great investment and also um you know they really i hate to say it but i hate to say it for a lot of people but they've they've actually benefited during these crazy times i think the the one i would uh pick is uh one of our most recent investments um a company called kinetics which is out of calgary um founded by uh an amazing woman named um brianne everett um who who i met two years ago through one of our advisory board members mike smith out in calgary and uh and at that time brienne had started a company called orpix which had developed an insole sensor specifically targeted to the diabetic market and to help diabetics who often have a very poor feeling in their feet and get sores and sepsis which leads to amputation and or significant balance pro problems and she had not on purpose but you know someone inadvertently uh created a foot sensor system that that was leaps and bounds ahead of every other foot sensor on the market um and so two years ago we we talked to her about you know maybe taking it and applying it to sports and if she wanted to create a subsidiary company of orpix directed exclusively um at the sports market that that would be something that we were we would be interested in and and uh and so she started working on that we ended up investing um into kinetics um in uh in the spring couple months ago um she's she's doing amazing with this company um her whole idea is to essentially not become an insole company but to become a uh um an oem provider of the circuit board that goes inside the insole and so she's partnered with the likes of nike and adidas and and super feed and shows wellness and uh we're really really excited uh about that and and uh one of the interesting things that that um they seem to have been able to solve the solve the problem on is is measuring power in uh in in running um which you know revolutionized cycling when when power came into cycling um caution lines probably 20 years ago now um or yeah i'm going to say 20 years ago time flies don't don't don't say that again anyway anyway so so that that's what we're that's what we're really excited about and and as a canadian i'm i you know i i love the fact that we've invested in in in a couple of canadian companies and in this one in particular that's terrific that's terrific um just one fun final uh question for each of you um a line no what is one of the biggest lessons that you've learned in terms of as you've built a venture capital firm i well firstly i'll say a couple of things one uh kind of like many of the entrepreneurs that we meet that start companies if they knew how hard it was going to be they would never have done it um and and so i think you know when we when lance called me with with this crazy idea you know two two years ago and we decided to you know kind of go off on on this path to do this i i really had no idea how hard it was going to be to raise the money and as a first-time fund and and without you know a team having worked together in a track record and all that stuff and and uh you know and i'm enormously proud of what we've achieved so far and and the companies that we've invested in particularly um so so that was one thing that i that i was surprised by um i think the thing the biggest thing i've learned as a venture capitalist and having come from you know early in my career large public companies and then kind of move down and down and down you know into into private equity for a decade um there's a big difference as a private equity investor where you control the company and and how you influence um the the management team to to do what you want them to do to venture investing where you're you know typically investing in our case you know late seed series a we're normally around 10 of the of the cap structure and and while we often have a board seat and and have certainly board observer rights to try and and guide and influence um the the the ceo and his or her team and and try and and help them and and do it in a positive you know kind of cheerleader mentor way um has been a very interesting transition for me particularly and and something that uh um that i you know that i i need to get better at and and hopefully we'll get better at as time goes on um but that that's the um you know most most founders are very strong-willed people and and have very clear ideas about what they want to do and how they want to do it and and and so to try and try and be supportive and and suggest things and but not necessarily expect that they're going to do them that's that's been the biggest thing i think i've learned so far yeah well i know it's always it's an ongoing uh art to uh it's it's both a privilege and an art and a challenge to get to work with entrepreneurs every day yeah that's true lance you've now worked with with a lot of entrepreneurs at uh companies in your portfolio what is uh one piece of advice that you would give in general to founders early stage founders based on what you have seen in your experience in working with many successful founders oh god let me just say if i would have gotten the previous question and answered it lionel stole every bit of my answer it was you know ray and this applies to us as we raise the fund it applies to uh young companies as they uh try to raise funds to to launch it's just always harder than you'd ever thought i mean he and i you know could probably answer this question in unison i mean we thought it would be easy uh it's been a complete root canal daily root canal um but hey we're getting there and i think for a first time fun we're we're ahead of schedule um and then you know also to not to i'll get to your question in a sec but you know hit lionel's point of people i think when we first started you know in my head at least early days it really started with product then it went to brand and then it went to people um i was actually at a ypo speech here in in aspen probably a year ago and a very successful venture guy named brad huff came and spoke and he's with the foundry group in boulder but so their filters go just like this so here i am thinking product brand people they have four filters at the foundry it goes like this the people the people the people the idea so uh with that i mean i think for any entrepreneur i mean it because when when you're building a team then you're hiring people and then you're managing them and you're managing your time and we in lino can back me up here but we see it all the time with founders that want to be involved in every little thing if you are building a team and hiring the best people to do certain things let them do those things right be the founder be the visionary be whatever you are set out to do and be but if you're not the marketing guy if you're not the sales guy if you're not the let if and you think you're hiring the best people let them do that and then they obviously can report to you and but don't get bogged down we see so many people that just they're involved in everything i don't know how these people sleep honestly i mean they need like 48 hours in a day and um to me it's it's maybe it's just a it's early days mistakes for them but the quicker they can hire the best people and delegate and trust them way better that's great great advice lana lance thank you so much really enjoyed our conversation today and appreciate you coming on and sharing your experiences well that was just amazing thank you janet for such an interesting conversation i for one can't wait to introduce genie health to lance and lionel as i think it represents exceptional canadian innovation and such a nice fit for their backgrounds and as you said lance it's all about people people people and idea they have that and that's a wrap techstars toronto 2020 virtual or otherwise it was an incredible performance and the founders adapted and in fact surpassed all expectations please connect with us by email or linkedin or twitter even by phone and soon in person stay healthy and stay safe and we will be together again soon you

Channel: Techstars

Views: 9,071

Rating: 4.9771428 out of 5

Keywords: Toronto, startups, canada, techstars, demo day

Id: w5eMFUUD3pE

Length: 129min 34sec (7774 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020