The StartWell Podcast

Most adult rec leagues run on the same model: charge as little as possible, pay as little as possible, and hope the gym is unlocked. Connor Renton looked at that model and decided the cheapness was the problem.

Renton, 29, is the founder and CEO of Brodie, the Toronto-born adult basketball league now running across 20-plus markets in Canada and the U.S. It started in 2019. He'd just graduated, signed up for a local league, and ended up in a church gym at 11:30 at night with a smelly pinny and a scorekeeper eating a burrito. He wanted to feel like a pro. He felt, in his words, like a bum.

The first season was a side project that lost money. There were eight teams, and half of them were his friends playing for free. Then COVID shut it down eight weeks in, one week before the finals. What came next is the part most founder stories skip. He started a pandemic side business selling touchless door tools and landed a national Loblaws order. Then he doubled down on inventory right before demand disappeared, which left 10,000 boxes in his parents' Oakville garage. Somewhere in the pile was a single box of Brodie jerseys.

Then a gym owner in Burlington called. Brodie went from eight teams to 40.

The growth is impressive: The Globe and Mail just ranked Brodie 21st on its 2026 Top Growing Companies list. But the more interesting part is the thesis. Renton priced backwards from the experience he wanted to deliver: a concierge at the door, photographers and videographers every night, live-streamed games, AI-cut highlights, and an app that tracks your stats like a video game. That takes people, and Brodie pays them. He says the company employs more than 500 part-time operators, all paid well above minimum wage.

The media isn't a perk. It's how Brodie grows. The company has never run paid ads. Players post their photos, friends ask what it is, and they sign up. One player met his wife after putting his Brodie photos on his Hinge profile.

Renton is also unusually honest about restraint. He admits Brodie expanded into New York and Calgary too early. After raising venture capital, he slowed growth down on purpose and told his investors he wouldn't promise to double every year. He'd rather be Phil Knight than build something to flip.

Then there's the line that sounds absurd until you think about it: he believes Brodie will be bigger than the NBA by revenue. You don't have to believe him. But the NBA has a few hundred roster spots, and everyone else who loves the game has spent years in the stands.

Matt Espinoza sold his first software company the same week he graduated university — then did it again, faster. Now, at 23, he runs Clover Labs (AI), a Toronto startup that grew to 65 employees in a year by building AI "growth agents" that mass-produce content, run outbound, and manage ad spend for other companies.

In this episode of the StartWell Podcast, Matt breaks down the mechanics most growth operators won't say out loud on camera: how "volume negates luck," why the same clip re-edited and reposted 100 times isn't spam, how account networks get "warmed up" to avoid algorithmic penalties, and why he thinks most Canadian founders chronically under-shoot their growth targets compared to their US counterparts.

If you run a B2B or SaaS company and think content marketing doesn't apply to you, this is the episode that will change your mind — or at least make you uncomfortable enough to try.

Stan has helped over 100,000 creators and entrepreneurs earn more than $600M online — and takes $0 in commission on any of it. Vitalii Dodonov, co-founder and CTO of Stan, explains why the team made that call on purpose, and what it's built on top of it since.

Vitalii traces his path from arriving in Grand Prairie, Alberta not speaking English, to self-teaching his way into a software career at eBay, to co-founding Stan with John Hu after a chance customer introduction. We get into why Stan walked away from transaction fees, how founder-led content became their only real marketing channel, and the "Hacker House" method Stan uses to build entire products from zero in 14 days — including the honeymoon-prep trip to London that became the origin story for Stanley, Stan's AI content partner, which negotiates its own price with every user.

Shopify's VP & Head of Engineering Farhan Thawar joins StartWell to unpack Sidekick, why Shopify builds its own tools instead of buying them, and how a 7,000-person hackathon and 1,000 annual interns keep the culture moving.

Venn co-founder Saud Aziz on building Canada's business banking alternative — from a cold email to employee #5, Revolut's Canadian expansion, and raising a $21.5M Series A from a team of 10.

Affirm CRO Wayne Pommen on building and selling PayBright, why credit cards are broken, and what Canada's fintech scene needs to grow up.

Former Anduril executive Eliot Pence left Washington DC to build the defense company Canada never had. Here's why he came back — and what's at stake.

Som Seif has spent two decades disrupting Canadian financial services — first with Claymore, one of Canada's earliest ETF companies, then as co-founder of Wealthsimple, and now as CEO of Purpose Unlimited, a platform spanning asset management, wealth management, SMB lending, and retirement solutions. In this conversation on the StartWell Podcast, he gets candid about the mindset holding Canadians back, what's broken in how we build wealth, and why he's more energized right now than at any point in his career.

Steven Wang, Rhodes Scholar, Harvard-trained lawyer, and CEO of Venture for Canada, joins Qasim Virjee at StartWell to talk about what it really takes to future-proof the next generation of Canadian workers, why the country has an experience gap (not a talent gap), and why buying a small business might be one of the most underrated entrepreneurial moves of our time.

Canada has no shortage of talent - but according to AJ Tibando, we have a mindset problem.

As CEO of Shift Canada, AJ is leading a national effort to reshape how young people think about risk, failure, and entrepreneurship. Starting with students as early as grade five, Shift’s programs challenge one of the most deeply ingrained barriers in Canadian culture: the fear of getting it wrong.

In this conversation, AJ breaks down why traditional education systems often unintentionally discourage experimentation. When students are rewarded for being right instead of trying, they learn to avoid risk altogether. That mindset doesn’t just stay in the classroom - it follows them into careers, limiting innovation at a national level.

Shift Canada is tackling this head-on by normalizing failure as part of the learning process. By creating “permission structures” where students can try, fail, and try again without judgment, they unlock creativity, confidence, and real problem-solving ability.

But this isn’t just about education - it’s about economic competitiveness. AJ connects the dots between cultural attitudes toward risk and Canada’s ability to produce founders, builders, and bold thinkers.

This episode is a sharp reminder that innovation doesn’t start in boardrooms - it starts much earlier. And if Canada wants to compete globally, it needs to rethink how it prepares the next generation.