Revenue North

Brett Chang is a co-founder and frontman for ThePeak, Canada's fastest growing daily newsletter covering the top Canadian and global business, finance and tech news in 5 minutes or less. We at Revenue North read it daily because we care about the latest in Canadian tech. Brett is a serial entrepreneur and prior to ThePeak he founded Leaf Forward, Adrenaline Digital and LineSix. Brett also was an early employee at Uber Canada helping drive public policy initiatives to get regulatory approval for the ride-sharing service. 

In this episode, Mark and Brett explore Brett's career path from politics to his first startup venture at LineSix. Brett talks about the value of leaping in to start businesses and how his skillsets transferred across a range of industries. We also dive into the rapid growth of ThePeak and Brett gives a ton of actionable advice on early-stage marketing growth. Brett's insights give a candid overview into the life of entrepreneurship. One of the best podcasts we've done for those looking to get a business off the ground. 

Sebastien Savard is the CEO and Founder of Sourcinc, a Canadian talent sourcing firm. Sourcinc uses innovative approaches in its recruitment and specializes in helping technology companies scale. Sebastien has over 15 years of experience in the recruitment sector and prior to building Sourcinc he worked at 3 other talent agencies, did recruitment for Keurig and Cirque Du Soleil. 

In this episode, Mark and Sebastien talk about how early-stage tech companies should be looking to stand out when attracting top talent. We talk about Sebastien's past as a recruiter for Cirque Du Soleil and how he felt he needed to bring a different approach to traditional recruitment efforts with Sourcinc. Finally, we dig into Sebastien's decision to go out on his own to build a company and his advice to other would-be entrepreneurs who are thinking of doing the same. 

Parag Goswami is the co-Founder and CEO of Clik.ai, a leading AI-powered technology platform for commercial real estate investments that has processed over $12 billion since its inception. Parag has grown the team from 2 to 35 within 2 years. The platform is used by top commercial real estate brokerage and lending institutions. Parag has been an entrepreneur for over 10 years in real estate technology and commercial real estate services. Prior to starting Clik.ai in 2017, he co-founded a 50+ employee KPO focused on real estate and mortgage services.

In this episode, Mark and Parag discuss Parag's journey as a serial entrepreneur with his businesses in India to coming to Canada with the startup visa. We talk about the early founder-led sales Parag was a part of as well as the rapid growth of Clik.ai. Clik.ai has always been a customer-centric business selling into real estate. We talk about how Parag decided to revamp and organize product priorities based on the new realities presented during the pandemic. 

Michael Kravshik is CEO and co-founder of Luminari, a platform dedicated to making CPAs lives easier and their careers progress faster. The Luminari community is over 15,000 CPAs strong, and is most well known for its flagship product LumiQ, a professional education platform highlighting practical skills taught by industry experts (www.lumiqCPD.com). Michael is a CPA himself who ventured from working for a big 4 accounting firm, working in counter-terrorism efforts at a large financial institution to getting into the world of tech startups. 

In this episode, Mark and Michael explore Michael's career path from working as an external auditor, to counter-terrorism to becoming a startup founder.  Mark and Michael talk about career progression and career choice for younger folks and the types of people who tend to excel in startups (we dispel the myth that starting a company is for everyone). We then talk about pivoting and the importance of understanding your target market, especially during COVID times. Michael gets candid with what it's really like to be a startup founder and why it's more of a lifestyle choice than a career choice. 

Dan Debow is VP of Partnerships and Corporate Development at Shopify. Dan is a serial entrepreneur. Dan created Helpful, a startup backed by Bessemer Ventures that was acquired by Shopify in 2019. Previously, Dan was co-founder of Rypple, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2011. Dan is an early investor in over 50 technology companies including North, Layer6, Spell, Wealthsimple, Ritual, GoInstant, SkipTheDishes, Clearbanc, Kindred, Borrowell, and Clio. In 2015 he was recognized as Canada’s “Angel Investor of the Year”. Dan holds a JD/MBA (Gold Medalist) from the University of Toronto, an LLM from Stanford University and a BA (Psych) from Western University.

In this episode, Mark and Dan explore Dan's career in the tech sector from working as an early employee at David Ossip's Workbrain to angel investing to his successful multiple exits to titans like Salesforce and Shopify. Dan and Mark get to talk a lot about what makes a good leader and people operations (Helpful and Rypple were both HRtech companies) and what makes Shopify such an outlier among tech companies. 

It's that time of year again. Mark and Chad talk about planning approaches for startup executive teams going into 2021. A cohesive annual business plan and strategy has never been so important coming out of the curveball that was 2020. 

We talk about some of the critical pillars for success in annual plans from revenue operations to tech tools that can be helpful. We also talk about how to properly change an annual plan which many businesses were forced to do in 2020. 

Matthew Lombardi is Managing Director of OneEleven, the leading Canadian scale-up accelerator, and leads its reboot. Matthew is also the Co-Founder of GroceryHero, a marketplace tech platform that provides a free delivery buddy-matching service to help Canada's front-line medical professionals focus on fighting COVID-19. Matthew is a former management consultant and has spent his career at the intersection of the private and public sector, both in Canada and internationally.

In this episode, Matthew talks about the strategy behind the OneEleven reboot during a global pandemic. We also talk about what growth accelerators have to offer Canadian startups, what work is left to be done to help accelerate our ecosystem, and what physical office space might look like post-COVID.

Dean Hopkins is Executive Vice President and Chief Operations Officer of Oxford Properties. Dean's a member of Oxford’s Executive Committee and is Chair of the Operations Committee. Dean’s background is pure Canadian tech: he founded and led an internet strategy company in Toronto in 1994, was responsible for much of the transformation effort of Thomson Reuters, and, prior to his role at Oxford, was CEO of OneEleven, Canada's largest scale-up innovation hub.

In this episode, Mark and Dean explore Dean's career in the technology sector, enterprise transformation during COVID (why enterprises need tech and how startups can sell to them), the future of real estate in a post-pandemic world, and Dean's thoughts on where the Canadian tech community is headed. 

Bilal Khan embodies the Canadian technology community. He was the founding Chief Executive Officer of OneEleven, one of North America’s largest scale-up innovation hubs, and currently works as Managing Partner and Head of Deloitte Data. He is also the co-founder of MSix Ventures (an early-stage investment fund) and Elevate Tech Fest (one of Canada’s largest tech and innovation conferences).

In this episode, Mark and Bilal explore his career which intertwines with the rapid innovation growth in Canada. We talk about where Canadian tech is headed and the critical items needed for its success.

Mark and Chad talk about tech revenue teams that have been forced to go remote in 2020. Most teams are struggling but there are best practices that are resonating among Canadian startups.

We discuss how sales leaders and AEs can iterate through this time to build better processes and get to success in the most difficult selling environment of all time. Including what technology companies can adopt to give them extra visibility.