Journey Map

Welcome to Journey Map the audio experience that deconstructs the career paths taken by some of the world's most interesting people. Let's go back to the summer of 2000, the threat of Y2K has subsided and the world is ready to embrace the new millennium. A young economist takes an internship at the Economist of course, he’ll go on to write a dozen articles on business, political and economic topics. Little, does he know (or maybe he does) that fourteen years later he would found the first company in Canada to offer credit scores for free, growing into one of Canada’s largest financial technology companies or ‘fintech’. With more than one million users its won numerous awards including being named one of the top hundred fin-tech companies in the world by KMPG, a company to watch by the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 program, a finalist for international innovator of the year by Lend It and was named a great place to work in 2018. The company is Borrowell, and its Co-Founder and CEO Andrew Graham is sitting across the table from me today. Andrew and his team at Borrowell are helping consumers make great decisions about credit. Earlier in his career Andrew held senior roles in corporate strategy and mergers and acquisitions at companies like President’s Choice Financial, George Weston Ltd and Nortel. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and is a frequent speaker on topics including innovation in fintech. He is the incoming Board Chair of the Canadian Club of Toronto and co-founded the social enterprise Toronto Homecoming.
Check out Borrowell here.
This episode of Journey Map is brought to you by Unbounce.
Unbounce is the number one landing page platform used by more than 15,000 brands to get them more leads, more sales and more customers. Unbounce is a drag and drop builder that lets you create and publish your own landing pages without needing a developer to code them. It’s an easier and faster way to get more conversions from your traffic. Listeners of Journey Map can receive a 14-day free trial and 20% off your first three months of Unbounce. Follow this link to claim your offer.

Welcome to Journey Map the audio experience that deconstructs the career paths taken by some of the world's most interesting people. Okay picture this, you graduate from the University of Waterloo with a degree in system design engineering, you cut your teeth for 10 years at BlackBerry and rise into its VP of Global Alliances and Developer Relations. This is during the mid 2000’s as the company is booming and then... its not. Next thing you know you do a career pivot and windup as the Chief Marketing Officer for a mobile security startup for a few years, but then that pivot becomes a full 180 flip and the next thing you know you’re the VP of Marketing at Vidyard. Vidyard’s helping businesses transform through the use of online video. You are Tyler Lessard. Tyler’s a marketing, product and business development executive with a passion for customer centric, problem solving, creative storytelling and data driven marketing. He’s got over fifteen years of experience in B to B marketing, sales enablement, content marketing, brand and video. This guy does it all. 

This episode of Journey Map is brought to you by Unbounce.
Unbounce is the number one landing page platform used by more than 15,000 brands to get them more leads, more sales and more customers. Unbounce is a drag and drop builder that lets you create and publish your own landing pages without needing a developer to code them. It’s an easier and faster way to get more conversions from your traffic. Listeners of Journey Map can receive a 14-day free trial and 20% off your first three months of Unbounce. Follow this link to claim your offer.

Welcome to Journey Map the audio experience that deconstructs the career paths taken by some of the world's most interesting people.To say that our guest today has been a force in reimagining the way the world buys things is a bit of an understatement, but she has some pretty humble beginnings. In 2001 she enrolled in a creative design course developing a range of hands on computing and multimedia skills in areas like web design, animation, graphic design, sound and video editing, and digital marketing. Remember this is 2001 the ‘Flash Era’, from there she would go on to obtain a degree in multimedia technology and an MBA in ecommerce. Since then she has advanced her career at a pretty steady pace moving from UX Analyst to Lead User Research Experiencer, and Interaction Designer / Usability Specialist. Then in 2013 she would introduce the concepts of user experience research and the practices that go along with it into her new employers company. Six years later she is still there and those efforts have helped build products that are used by more than one million companies around the world that collectively contributed over $183 billion dollars in global economic activity last year.

The company of course is Shopify and its VP of User Experience and General Manager of its Core Product Lynsey Thornton is sitting across the table from me today. Originally from Ireland and currently based in Vancouver, Lynsey has spent the last six years leading both a team and a discipline and helps hundreds of ‘Shopifiers’ be successful in their roles as product designers, UX developers, researchers, and content strategists. With this background in design, project management, and business she focuses on building UX teams and practices in high growth tech companies and has been doing so for quite a while. Her true loves are ethnographic research and developing women in tech today.

This episode of Journey Map is brought to you by Unbounce.
Unbounce is the number one landing page platform used by more than 15,000 brands to get them more leads, more sales and more customers. Unbounce is a drag and drop builder that lets you create and publish your own landing pages without needing a developer to code them. It’s an easier and faster way to get more conversions from your traffic. Listeners of Journey Map can receive a 14-day free trial and 20% off your first three months of Unbounce. Follow this link to claim your offer.

Welcome to Journey Map, the audio experience that deconstructs the career paths taken by some of the world’s most interesting people. Do you own your own business or work with someone who does? If so, chances are you have used the product founded by our guest today. So imagine this, you’re sitting in your parents basement managing a fledgling design agency. You have a few staff to manage, sales leads to chase, meetings with your lawyer…oh, and doing work for your clients of course. One day, as you’re frantically trying to keep all of these balls in the air, you accidentally save over an old invoice! You know there can be a better way to manage this aspect of your business, and others are also likely to have this problem, so you set out on a mission to make running a small business easy, fast, and secure so that you can spend less time on accounting and more time doing the work you love.  Fast forward 16 years and you have built the world’s #1 cloud accounting software designed exclusively for service-based small business owners and independent professionals. You’re Mike McDerment, the co-founder and CEO of Freshbooks who just happens to be sitting across the table from me today. 

Mike has led Freshbooks to become ranked in the top 10 small medium employers in Canada. As of 2017, FreshBooks had secured a total of $75Million in venture capital funding over two rounds. In 2019, the company announced it had secured an additional strategic investment from JPMorgan Chase & Co. 

This episode of Journey Map is brought to you by Unbounce.
Unbounce is the number one landing page platform used by more than 15,000 brands to get them more leads, more sales and more customers. Unbounce is a drag and drop builder that lets you create and publish your own landing pages without needing a developer to code them. It’s an easier and faster way to get more conversions from your traffic. Listeners of Journey Map can receive a 14-day free trial and 20% off your first three months of Unbounce. Follow this link to claim your offer.