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Hubertus Hofkirchner has spent four decades operating at the intersection of trade finance, technology, and monetary theory. He started his career at Citibank International in Vienna, designed a securities system that rolled out across smaller city banks throughout Europe, and later served as Director at Kreditanstalt Investment Bank. As a serial entrepreneur, he built one of the first online brokerages for Central and Eastern Europe, founded what he believes was the first true options exchange (sold to a British bank in 2008), and famously took over Austrian telecom operator Telering as a loss-making vehicle hemorrhaging hundreds of millions per year — turning it around and selling it to T-Mobile for €1.5 billion in 2005. 

This conversation is important because Hubertus isn't just another crypto supporter promising big changes from the sidelines. He's an Austrian-school economist and ex-investment banker who knows the traditional banking system inside out. Now, he's creating open-source tools to bring back something the world quietly lost in 1913—a peer-to-peer credit system that allows global trade to happen without banks acting as gatekeepers. With the Bitcredit Protocol now live, founders and investors should understand what's being built, why it’s happening now, and what it could mean for trade, investing, and the future of money. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. Why the Fiat experiment is failing — How political money since 1971 has produced asset bubbles, currency manipulation, and a $2.5 trillion trade finance gap that's strangling emerging markets. 
2. SWIFT as a geopolitical weapon — The Swiss trading company that got de-banked over legal Cuban sugar trades, and why hundreds of thousands of European businesses have lost banking access. 
3. The lost technology of bills of exchange — How world trade ran smoothly without internet, intermediaries, or persistent trade imbalances on the gold standard pre-1913, and why the UN's 2017 Model Law revived the legal foundation. 
4. What Bitcredit Protocol actually does — How E-cash technology, Bitcoin main chain settlement, and a decentralized mint network ("wildcats" operating in "cowders") combine to create a self-liquidating currency layer on top of Bitcoin. 
5. Four ways capital can be deployed in the new system — From buying bills of exchange and money-market lending to mints, to providing guarantee capital and running a mint yourself. 

Key Insights 

• Banks should never have been allowed to create money. Money creation belongs with the productive sector — companies shipping real goods through supply chains — not with central banks issuing currency against war bonds or commercial banks expanding credit against equities and real estate. Every major monetary distortion of the last century traces back to this single category error. 
• El Salvador's plan to use Bitcoin isn't fully complete. While making Bitcoin legal money helps store its value, it doesn't cover how businesses extend credit. Without a way to measure trade credit in Bitcoin, the country still depends on the politics of the fiat currency that supports its economy. 
• Bitcoin helps keep energy grids stable instead of causing problems. Research shows that countries with active Bitcoin mining can cut energy costs by 20–30 percent because miners turn on and off based on supply. This means there's no need for expensive equipment that only runs during peak times and often sits idle. 

Links 

• Bitcredit Protocol: https://www.bit.cr/ 
• Hubertus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hofkirchner/ 
• Future Ventures on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the Guest 

Hubertus Hofkirchner is the founder of Bitcredit Protocol, a Bitcoin-native trade finance protocol focused on rethinking trust, credit, and global commerce infrastructure. A serial fintech entrepreneur, he is the former CEO of Austrian telecom operator Telering (acquired by T-Mobile for €1.5 billion) and an economist focused on the intersection of monetary systems and trade finance. He leads monthly seminars at the Hayek Institute in Vienna. 

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Dave Hertig has spent his career watching CEOs up close — first as a business journalist who interviewed more than 100 of them for UBS alone, then as the founder of Boom, where he now focuses on CEO performance under pressure. Along the way, he developed a conviction that became the spine of his work: the people the rest of the company looks up to have blind spots like everyone else, but those blind spots carry outsized consequences. Get the CEO right and the whole system compounds. Get it wrong, and no strategy, market, or product can save you. 

This conversation matters because most of what's written about CEO performance is written for the Fortune 500 — the leaders who get six-month onboarding handlers, custom briefing teams, and curated executive networks. The CEOs running companies between 50 and 1,000 staff are running on a fraction of that support, often with no one in the building willing to push back on them honestly. Dave has built a system to fill that gap, and the principles behind it apply whether you're leading 30 people or 3,000. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. The blind spots that quietly shape every CEO's decision — Why "why aren't more people like me?" is the most common — and most dangerous — pattern Hertig sees in founders and hired CEOs alike. 

2. Hire for your weaknesses, not against them — The Steve Jobs / Tim Cook arc as the definitive case study in pairing vision with execution, and why trying to fix a weakness rarely beats hiring around it. 

3. The adversarial gap — Why genuine pushback is the single hardest thing for a CEO to get inside their own company, and what happens to the people who try to give it. 

4. Accountability vs. outcome in the eyes of investors — The distinction between what a founder can control (input), partially control (output), and never guarantee (outcome) — and why integrity and transparency matter more than hitting the number. 

5. The CEO Sparring System — How a boxing-inspired protected room lets CEOs stress-test Board decks, investor pitches, firing decisions, and press interviews before they go live in the real world. 

Three Key Insights 

Judgment is more important in the AI era, not less. AI can help analyze data, compare options, and speed up decisions. It can even imitate emotional understanding. But it can't develop real emotional intelligence, read a room, or replace the human responsibility that leaders have. The polished answers from large language models make a CEO's judgment more challenging — and more valuable — than ever before. 

Authenticity is not the same as showing everything you are. The strongest CEOs Hertig has worked with put on a "uniform" when they walk into the role — measured, deliberate, strategic about what they say — while still ensuring the job genuinely matches their strengths and what gives them energy. That gap is professionalism, not inauthenticity. 

A progressive CEO wants to keep growing — personally and commercially. The CEOs worth working with are still curious, still hungry for pushback, still aware that their business sits inside a larger system. The ones who have hit a personal ceiling and stopped growing are the ones whose companies stop growing too. 

Links 

• Dave Hertig on LinkedIn: https://ch.linkedin.com/in/davehertig 
• Boom — CEO Sparring System: https://boom.ceo/sparring/ 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Dave Hertig 

Dave Hertig is the founder and CEO of Boom, where he focuses on CEO performance under pressure and works with leaders of medium-sized businesses navigating high-stakes moments. He is the creator of the CEO Sparring System, a boxing-inspired format that gives CEOs a protected room to pressure-test their most important pieces of work before deploying them in the real world. Before founding Boom, Dave spent years as a business journalist and content strategist, interviewing hundreds of CEOs across industries — work that gave him the pattern recognition behind his current focus on identity, judgment, and the human side of executive leadership.

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Omar Sahyoun has spent two decades building at the edge of where consumers, technology, and physical commerce meet. He co-founded TeamBuy and DealFind, two of Canada's earliest daily-deal platforms that collectively scaled past 4 million members. He moved into fintech as a senior operator at Ariel and Purpose Financial, helping bring same-day digital lending into the mainstream. Today, as Managing Partner at Brand-FX, he runs three operating companies — Shoply (SMB commerce for retail and hospitality), Wack Jack (a 15-year-old Canadian consumer marketplace), and Go CXM (a CPG platform serving brands like Monster Energy, with one engagement spanning 30,000 sales reps). 

What I like about Omar's perspective is that he refuses to pick a side in the AI debate. He's not predicting that AI agents will eat retail, and he's not romanticizing the corner store either. Roughly 70% of commerce still happens in a physical location with a real person — that's the number he keeps coming back to —, and his bet is on making that experience smarter, not replacing it. Shoply gives a single restaurant or small retailer the same kind of personalization engine that used to require an Amazon-sized budget. Go CXM helps CPG brands finally talk to the customers their retailers have always controlled. If you're building, advising, or investing anywhere in consumer commerce right now, the conversation is worth your time — Omar has strong opinions about where the AI dollars are being wasted. He's earned the right to have them. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. The 70% problem. Most "future of commerce" conversations skip over the fact that roughly 70% of buying still happens in a physical store. Omar's whole thesis starts here. 
2. What Shoply does for a single restaurant or shop. Average order values up 20%. Table turnover up 40-50%. Repeat visits 2-3x. The numbers Omar shared on what happens when a small operator finally gets the kind of personalization Amazon has had for a decade. 
3. Who owns the customer — Why CPG brands are no longer content to let retailers control the customer relationship, and what tools like Go CXM do to close that gap. 
4. Agentic commerce, honestly — Omar's contrarian view that AI agents are already commoditized, and where the real durable advantage actually sits. 
5. The future of retail real estate — How stores evolve into digitized showrooms, what that means for landlords and logistics, and why face-to-face isn't going anywhere. 

Three Key Insights 

• AI agents aren't the moat — data is. Most of the AI conversation focuses on agents and coders, but Omar argues the winners will be data scientists who can take an LLM and tune it to a specific niche. Without clean, capturable, current data, none of it works. 
• Cohort segmentation isn't personalization. What the industry has called personalization for a decade is really just sending similar messages to broad cohorts. Real hyper-personalization means two customers in the same segment receive genuinely different messages — and that capability is only now becoming operational at scale. 
• SMBs adopt tech that disappears. The hardest part of building for small operators isn't the AI — it's the interface. Owners want to press one button and have it done. "Do it for me" beats "do it with me" almost every time. 

Links 

• Brand-FX: https://brand-fx.com/ 
• Omar Sahyoun on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omar-sahyoun/ 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the Guest 

Omar Sahyoun is the Managing Partner at Brand-FX, a family-office-backed group that's building three companies in consumer technology, CPG, and retail. He co-founded TeamBuy and DealFind, helping Canada's first daily-deal marketplaces grow to over 4 million members. Omar also held leadership roles in digital lending at Ariel and Purpose Financial. With a background in accounting and management consulting from McGill, he's lived and built businesses in five countries and is now based in Toronto. 

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Andrew Ackerman has sat in nearly every chair around the startup table. He's a serial entrepreneur, an angel investor, a venture capitalist, an accelerator operator at Dream Adventures and Reach Labs (the venture arm of the National Association of Realtors), an adjunct professor at NYU, and the author of The Entrepreneur's Odyssey — a story-driven guide to building startups in the real world. He's invested in more than 70 companies, most in PropTech and ConTech, and is currently building a holding company that buys construction services businesses and rewires their economics with proprietary AI. 

This conversation matters because Andrew has watched the same mistakes kill startups for two decades, and he can name the exact link in the chain where each one snapped. He's also one of the few investors willing to tell a founder their go-to-market is identical to the eleven other decks on his desk that week — and explain why that's not actually their fault. If you're building a company, raising capital, or investing in either, this episode is a masterclass in how to test your assumptions before they bankrupt you. 

Key Topics Covered 

A startup is a chain — one bad link, and you've got nothing. Andrew explains how investors figure out which link to test first instead of guessing at random. 

What it's like to read 1,000 pitch decks in two months. When a dozen near-identical startups show up, Andrew explains how he picks the team that will eat the rest. 

Construction is less productive than it was 50 years ago. We get into the manufacturing comparison that's been quietly making things worse, and why AI is finally rewriting who captures the value. 

The index card trick that kills bad features before you build them. Andrew walks through the prototyping exercise that costs about three bucks and a stolen bank pen. 

Why did Andrew write a story-driven book instead of another bullet-point business read? Plus, the reason Genesis comes before the Ten Commandments — and why founders should care. 

Three Key Insights 

Founders are always fundraising — the only variable is allocation. Spending ten to twenty percent of your time on relationships when you don't need money is the difference between raising on warm intros and grinding through eighty percent of your week on cold outreach when you do. 

The three dimensions of pain determine whether you have a business. Intensity (hammer-on-thumb versus hangnail), prevalence (does anyone else actually have this problem), and frequency (once a lifetime or once a week) — score high on all three, and you have a venture-scale opportunity. Score on two and you're working harder than you need to. 

A new technology or rule change doesn't give you a unique idea — it gives the same idea to a dozen other founders at the same time. Andrew's seen it happen over and over. The team that wins isn't the one that thought of it first. It's the one with a sharper go-to-market, better people, or the guts to do the opposite of what the other eleven decks on his desk are doing.  

Links 

• Andrew's website: https://www.andrewbackerman.com/ 
• Andrew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewbackerman 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

Guest Bio 

Andrew Ackerman is a serial entrepreneur turned venture investor who has spent two decades advising startups, accelerators, venture studios, and corporate innovation platforms. He has invested in more than 70 startups, previously helped build Dream Adventures and Reach Labs for Second Century Ventures, teaches entrepreneurship at NYU, and writes extensively on venture capital and innovation. His new book, The Entrepreneur's Odyssey, is a story-driven guide to building startups in the real world.

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John Cowan was about to do what he'd done a hundred times before — make the calls, set the meetings, walk a young founder into the venture capital fundraising process. In a split second, he backed out. He couldn't morally send another kid into a system he knew was rigged against him: four cycles of dilution, ratchets, protective provisions, career death. Six or seven months of thinking later, he came back with an essay called The Theory of Venture Reciprocity, a new investment instrument called the SAFER, and a firm — Nextwave Partners — built to do venture differently. 

This conversation is for founders who've ever felt like they were just performing instead of truly pitching when talking to a VC. John explains how the industry has shifted from focusing on funding new ideas to prioritizing the size of the fund, what founder-friendly capital really looks like in real life, and where he's placing his bets for the next ten years. If you're raising money, advising, or managing investments with $3 million to $50 million in revenue, this hour will be one of the most honest and helpful you'll have this week. 

What we covered 

1. The structural collapse of venture capital. Why the 2009 shift to fee-driven economics turned VCs into venture banks — and what that did to founders. 
2. The SAFER instrument. John's alternative to the SAFE — re-centering the founder-investor relationship around revenue instead of equity. 
3. Killing the Unicorn cult. Why power-law thinking went from observation to ideology, and how Nextwave applies long-tail economics to startup investing instead. 
4. The machine economy thesis. Why John believes we're at the start of a long arc of innovation on par with electrification, and where the real money will be made. 
5. Geographic alpha and coalition funds. How distributed talent is reshaping where capital should flow — and the fund structure John thinks replaces the traditional GP model. 

Three insights worth sitting with 

• Revenue is the clearest indicator of early progress. If a customer is willing to pay for your product, that message is stronger than any pitch deck — and it aligns the goals of founders and investors instead of creating a zero-sum battle over ownership. 
• The Titans of rail didn't get rich on rail technology. They got rich on the economies that formed around it — towns, real estate, industry. The same logic applies to the machine economy: own the infrastructure, not just the software. 
• The next generation of transformative companies will not come out of Silicon Valley. Underserved regions — Florida, the Nordics, Latin America — are producing technical talent that the traditional VC hubs are structurally incapable of touching. 

Links and resources 

• Next Wave Partners: https://nextwave.partners/ 
• John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncowan1 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the guest 

John Cowan is the General Partner at Nextwave Partners, a venture studio and investment firm focused on the era of autonomy and the machine economy. He's a 25-year founder, CEO, and strategist who has raised millions in venture capital across his career and become one of the more vocal critics of the traditional VC model. He's the author of Venture Capital 2.0: Building, Financing and Scaling Startups in the Post Power Law Era, with a second book on financing the machine economy due out shortly. 

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Sam Hasty, partner at Active Impact Investments — Canada's top climate tech seed fund — has supported early entrepreneurs in energy, logistics, farming, materials, and resilience over eight years. He started as a Memphis math teacher, helped launch a nonprofit accelerator funded by the Steve Jobs family, and studied rural entrepreneurship in Poland with a Fulbright before his first angel investment. 

This conversation is important because the climate tech scene has shifted in two years — Series B funding declined, and generalist investors' interest waned. However, Sam argues the situation is nuanced. Active Impact recently closed a $110M Fund III, their best, with five founders achieving nine-figure exits. The discussion covers how they evaluate founders, why many climate failures aren't tech-related, and where the next decacorns might emerge. 

These are some highlights of the talk: 

• Sam's path from seventh-grade math to venture capital. How a seventh-grade math classroom in Memphis, a Fulbright year in Poland, and writing angel checks alongside the family offices that backed his nonprofit landed him in a partner seat eight years later. 
• The economics of fund sizing. Why Active Impact thinks $110M is the right number — and why most GPs should be asking themselves whether they want to be greedy with carry or with management fees. 
• The 2x2 matrix every founder gets put through. Intelligence and accountability are weighted equally, and the creative questioning techniques that prevent smart founders from gaming the diligence process. 
• The valley of death and the project finance gap. Why the 2021-2022 cohort of climate founders had the wrong skill set — and what RotaTherm's CEO had that most climate founders don't. 

Three insights worth sitting with: 

1. High-intelligence, low-accountability founders are the most dangerous bet a VC can make. They are the most sophisticated at telling diligence teams what they want to hear, which is why Active Impact relies more on reference calls than on direct conversations with the founder — ten references reveal more than ten meetings with the same person. 
2. The CEO's fluency in non-dilutive capital is now a screening criterion at seed. If the founder cannot speak the language of a debt provider, the company will get crushed on dilution at Series B, and that hurts the seed investor more than almost anything else. 
3. The bottleneck on more climate capital flowing in is not technology or revenue speed — it is exit evidence. Investors need to watch peers make exceptional returns before they reallocate, and Fervo's IPO at roughly $7B is the kind of proof point that unlocks the next wave. 

Links 

• Active Impact Investments: https://www.activeimpactinvestments.com/ 
• Sam Hasty on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/sam-hasty-a7530143 
• Future Ventures: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Sam Hasty 

Sam Hasty is a Partner at Active Impact Investments, Canada's largest climate tech seed fund, where he focuses on infrastructure and carbon solutions innovation. He is a Fulbright Scholar with eight years of venture capital experience and a portfolio spanning energy, logistics, agriculture, advanced materials, and climate resilience. Before venture, he taught seventh-grade math in Memphis and co-founded a nonprofit accelerator backed by major foundations and the Steve Jobs family office. 

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Joyce Shin, founder of The Human Edge and ex-head of design operations at Dropbox, helped scale teams and systems there. Trained in neuroscience and raised across Texas, Ohio, Seoul, and Tokyo, she studied resilience and effectiveness, first after a traumatic brain injury and later professionally in tech. She left Dropbox to ask: in AI everywhere, what makes us human? She created the PEARLS framework—six skills in thinking, creativity, ethics, and leadership—areas AI can't replicate. 

This is her first public sharing of PEARLS. Many see AI as just a tool, not a way to rethink business. For startup founders building better teams, this chapter offers valuable insights. 

What we covered 

1. The PEARLS framework, fully unpacked — Presence, Edge, Authority, Roots, Legacy, and Signal as the six dimensions of human and organizational differentiation in the AI era. 
2. Why leading indicators beat lagging ones — The signals that tell you a team is cognitively decaying before engagement scores and turnover catch up. 
3. What acquisitions actually break inside a scaling company — Lessons from Dropbox on cultural integration, tooling, and the human work most M&A playbooks skip. 
4. The shift from linear careers to horizontal experience — Why disparate cross-functional exposure now beats two-years-and-promote, and what that means for how you design growth paths. 
5. The CEO's job in an AI-native organization — Why senior leaders should stop trying to dictate AI workflows and start building the container their teams operate inside. 

Three insights worth keeping 

• AI commoditizes the average, so the moat moves to what AI can't do. Partnerships, community building, and the communication of vision and story all become more valuable, not less, as automation eats the middle of the skill curve. 
• Resilient organizations are based on their identity, not just their processes. Companies that understand who they are and make steady decisions build trust with customers, employees, and partners—trust that rivals using the same tools can't easily copy. 
• Authenticity outperforms polish. The quirks, imperfections, and real-life mistakes of leadership build more trust than highly produced corporate messaging — and that gap will widen as AI-generated content floods every channel. 

Links 

• The Human Edge: https://humanedge.studio/ 
• Joyce Shin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joyceshin 
• Future Ventures: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Joyce Shin 

Joyce Shin is the founder of The Human Edge, an advisory practice that helps founders, CEOs, and organizations build the capacities AI cannot replicate. Before founding The Human Edge, she was head of design operations at Dropbox, where she scaled teams and systems through IPO growth, acquisitions, and the shift to remote work. She holds a degree in neuroscience and brings a uniquely cross-disciplinary lens to leadership, organizational design, and the future of human work. 

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Shahin Nabavian, a computer scientist turned venture builder, has worked across operations, infrastructure, and transformation for the past decade. His experience includes a London-based financial startup, venture-building at Shell's maritime division, work at The Economist Group, and founding edtech startup Super Savvy Education. Now, he leads Team CMV (CentricMind Ventures), focusing on emerging technologies like infrastructure enabling companies to use LLMs effectively. Their main venture, Go-User, applies this to people services. 

The conversation is important because much of what is called' AI adoption' is actually just deployment without ROI. Shahin has observed companies of all sizes misusing chatbots, wasting tokens, and ending up with chaos. He can also explain why this happens in simple language. If your company earns $ 3m-$50 M and you're exploring AI's ROI, this episode is for you. 

Topics Covered 

• Why company culture beats company size in AI adoption. Why The Economist Group made more progress than expected, and why Shell's scale became a hindrance, not an advantage. 
• The real reason AI ROI is missing. It's not the models. It's not the agents. It's the infrastructure layer beneath them — and most companies haven't built it. 
• Every company needs a brain. What Shahin means by "AI brain," why generic RAG implementations fail, and what a librarian-style routing layer actually looks like in practice. 
• The evolving role of the founder and CEO. What AI takes off the executive plate, what stays uniquely human, and why "purple unicorns" — operators fluent in both business and tech — become the default hire. 
• Why Kodak and Blockbuster aren't technology stories. Shahin's view on Board dynamics, shareholder pressure, and the kind of CEO incumbents actually need to bring in to survive a platform shift. 

Key Insights 

1. The bottleneck isn't intelligence — it's plumbing. The models and tools are well-developed, but most organizations still need a way to understand how their business actually operates. This way, the AI can direct questions to the right source instead of randomly searching through every connected system. 
2. Engineering-led AI initiatives consistently underdeliver. Starting a transformation by focusing on tools instead of clear service goals can cause a lot of manual work, higher costs, and confusion for users. It's better to start by understanding what the business wants to achieve and then plan the system around that. 
3. Transformation is a challenge for the Board before it becomes a tech issue. Most CEOs don’t stumble because the technology is too complex; instead, they often face pressure from shareholders demanding faster results than are realistically achievable. To help overcome these hurdles, companies might consider bringing in a CEO from outside the industry, pairing them with a COO who understands the current business well, and giving them the freedom to learn from mistakes along the way. 

Links 

• Shahin Nabavian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nabavian/ 
• Future Ventures: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 
• Future Ventures Forum: futureventures.ca/community 

About the Guest 

Shahin Nabavian is the Founder of Go-User and a co-founder of Team CMV (CentricMind Ventures), where he builds AI-native systems for fast-growing companies. He holds a PhD in computer science and has spent over a decade building and supporting ventures across financial services, energy, publishing, and education — including work with Shell and The Economist Group. His current focus is on the infrastructure layer that turns organizational data into something AI can actually reason over. 

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Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, the "Food Professor," is the Senior Director of Dalhousie’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab, lead author of Canada's Food Price Report, and a prominent researcher in food supply chain management. He’s the go-to expert for food inflation stories and provides data that guides grocery executives. With 20 years studying Canada's rising food costs, he argues that debates wrongly blame big corporations or stores, overlooking factors like trade barriers, slow regulations, retail crime, and recycling policies that lack proper cost analysis. Sylvain’s data helps differentiate between factors influencing prices and those making headlines, offering valuable insights for food producers, agtech investors, and sector analysts to better interpret news. 

Topics Covered 

1. Grocery theft as a $10 billion problem — The rise of organized retail crime, the urban food deserts it creates, and who ultimately pays. 
2. Why Canadian food companies sell in the US, not Canada — How weeks-versus-months approval timelines are quietly redirecting capital and product south. 
3. Canada's branding problem — "Boston lobster from Canada" and why a country with great products can't seem to build great food brands. 
4. AI in the food system — Where it's already working (precision agriculture, soil science, animal feed), where it's lagging (manufacturing), and where it gets ethically uncomfortable (surveillance pricing for households). 

Key Insights 

• Bad policy is the blind spot nobody can see. Interprovincial trade barriers, industrial carbon pricing, and recycling laws all add real cost to running a food business — but because consumers can't point at them on a shelf, the political will to fix them never materializes. 
• The story of grocers versus consumers overlooks how the real incentives work. When cheaper options like GMO products or newly-made dairy substitutes appear on store shelves, stores with thin profit margins—around 2-3%—don't usually lower prices for shoppers. Instead, they often choose to increase their profit on familiar products. Until labeling requirements and competition rules change, having cheaper ingredients won't necessarily lead to lower grocery prices. 
• Greenfield innovation moves faster than retrofitting. Canada's food manufacturing industry is slow to adopt AI and automation because it's weighed down by old habits and investments in outdated equipment. The best way to move forward is to build new facilities, ideally working with universities, so there's no old baggage holding things back. 

Links 

• 📺 Watch the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vLM1QKjrE40 
• 📊 Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie: https://www.dal.ca/sites/agri-food.html 
• 🎧 The Food Professor Podcast: https://the-food-professor.simplecast.com/ 
• 🔗 Connect with Sylvain on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thefoodprofessor/ 
• 🔗 Connect with Maxim on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassov 

About Dr. Sylvain Charlebois 

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is a professor and Senior Director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, where he leads research on food supply chains, consumer behavior, and food economics. He is the lead author of Canada's Food Price Report, co-host of The Food Professor podcast, and one of the most-cited researchers globally in food supply chain management and traceability. His work bridges academia, industry, and policy — making him a go-to voice on the forces shaping the future of food, grocery, retail, restaurants, and agriculture.

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Tim Fung, Founder and CEO of Airtasker, leads one of the world's top local services marketplaces. Since launching in Sydney in 2012, it’s now a publicly listed company operating across Australia, the UK, and the US, facilitating over a billion dollars in jobs for flexible income. Tim is a prominent voice on the future of work and the gig economy. He experienced what most founders only theorize: raising $1.5M in 2012 when "startup" wasn't common in Sydney, and navigating many trials before success. He took Airtasker public and now, as a CEO, admits the company has fewer employees than four years ago, despite revenue growing five to six times. His insights are very relevant, especially for those building marketplaces, navigating IPOs, or integrating AI into non-software businesses. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. The origin story — How a friend with a truck and an apartment moved in 2012 turned into a marketplace that has now processed over a billion dollars in job opportunities. 
2. Solving the supply side first — Why Tim made the supply experience 10x better than Angie's, Thumbtack, and TaskRabbit, and how that one decision shaped everything that followed. 
3. Trust, payments, and the $20 fee — The escrow innovation that unlocked Series B, plus the small cancellation fee that cut cancellations by around 40%. 
4. Building rails, not blueprints — Why marketplace founders should stop trying to design every use case and start watching what users actually do — including the German bundtlet costume request. 
5. AI as enabler, not replacement — Tim's measured take on AI, the rise of the 10x employee, and why he thinks incentivizing token consumption is doing it backwards. 

Key Insights 

• The product is the network, not the app. A marketplace app with no users on it is genuinely useless. Liquidity comes first. Everything else — features, design, polish — only matters once the network exists. 
• Accountability needs both rewards and punishment. Most platforms only reward good behavior, and that's why they break. Free returns, no-cost cancellations, and frictionless agentic commerce all suffer from the same flaw: when there's no cost to bad behavior, the system fails. Tim's analogy — speed limits without fines change nothing. 
• AI's biggest impact on a non-software business is software velocity. Airtasker doesn't sell software, but it builds a lot of software to run the marketplace. AI has made that build cycle dramatically faster — which matters more than chasing AI features for their own sake. 

Links 

• Airtasker: https://www.airtasker.com/ 
• Tim Fung on LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/timjfung 
• Future Ventures: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Tim Fung 

Tim is the Founder and CEO of Airtasker. He started the company in Sydney in 2012 with his co-founder Jono Lui, after the two of them caught the startup bug while working on the founding team at Amaysim, a mobile SIM card business. The idea came from something pretty ordinary — Tim asked a friend with a truck to help him move apartments, and started wondering why people defaulted to friends and family for that kind of work when there were so many people out there who actually wanted to earn income. 

More than a decade later, Airtasker is publicly listed, operating across Australia, the UK, and the US, and has facilitated over a billion dollars in job opportunities. Tim is one of the more grounded voices on marketplaces, the gig economy, and the future of work — partly because he's been at it long enough to be skeptical of easy answers.