Join in for a conversation with Justin Jackson , Co-Founder of Transistor.fm . It’s a podcast hosting service and full disclosure, Accounted For is hosted on Transistor. I learned about the company and Justin because Basecamp’s podcast is hosted on Transistor and I further learned how Justin bootstrapped Transistor 2 years ago to a company that generated monthly recurring revenue exceeding $50,000. Justin didn’t start out in tech or podcasts but working for a not-for-profit for the first 7 years...
May 06, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 83
Join in for a conversation with Matt Cohen , Founder & Managing Partner of Ripple Ventures . Ripple Ventures is a Toronto-based early-stage venture fund that works alongside startups through the good and the bad every day. Fitting with their motto of “Operators First” per Matt’s background as an operator turned investor. Though before Matt became an operator, his career started in finance as an equity trader for RBC, completing tours on Wall Street and Bay Street. While working in capital ma...
Apr 22, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 82
Join in for a conversation with Terrance Kwok , Product Manager at HyperComply . Terrance was one of the pivotal folks who recruited me to KPMG to start my accounting career. It’s been a while since then and today we go through Terrance’s journey from leaving accounting just before getting the Chartered Accountant designation to join a young Vidyard, before it became the 150+ tech company it is now, in an entry role in sales. We explore how he pivoted from sales to product management, working re...
Apr 08, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 81
Join in for a conversation is another anonymous podcast with a return guest from episode 29 where we turnover the rock of working in a hedge fund in Canada. This was a top 10 downloaded episode in 2019 so what better way then to bring on my guest back during a time of market turmoil to see how it’s been like being an investor at a fund. Turns out, my guest already has an anonymous profile in the finance Twitter community as Moatsixcap . We chat about what it’s like being a fund manager during a ...
Mar 25, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 80
Join in for a conversation with Josh Broun, Co-owner of Impact Kitchen . Impact Kitchen is a wellness company with 4 restaurants in Toronto. I’ve been a fan of Impact Kitchen since it’s first location at King East and I’ve been a patron here at least once a week for the last few years. It’s one of my staple places for legit healthy meals. My go-to is the paleo waffle though. A comfort food. So it was a real treat to speak with Josh, the man who helped create a place where I could get awesome cof...
Mar 11, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 79
Join in for a conversation with Elvis Wong, Founder and Managing Director of Innovate Financial Health (IFH). IFH is a not for profit accelerator based in Toronto that works with start-ups addressing the problem of financial health for financially vulnerable Canadians. Having developed a passion for social impact since high school, Elvis leveraged his experience as a management consultant to join the MaRS Studio Y Fellowship program to find ways of using technology to create social impact. What ...
Mar 04, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 78
Join in for a conversation with Miguel Fernando , the Founder of Moment Financial . Miguel navigated a career starting in international finance to building products in FinTech companies to becoming a full-time bootstrapped entrepreneur. Miguel started his career in finance as an economic researcher at RBC and moved over to international wealth management with a focus on Central and Latin America. He made the pivot to work in a product role and become a product manager after realizing he enjoyed ...
Feb 27, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 77
Join in for a conversation with a return guest, Marc Champagne . Marc is the Co-Founder of Kyo and Host of Behind The Human Podcast . In episode 46 we talked about Marc’s journey of building Kyo after a career in pharmaceuticals. In today’s episode, we talk through the developments since the year. The process and reason behind shutting down Kyo, the digital journaling app that had 86 million impressions and a community of 200,000 users. We talk about the difference between app rankings and user ...
Feb 20, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 76
Join in for a conversation with Alex Norman, Co-Founder of TechToronto, Head of Canada for AngelList and Partner of N49P Ventures. Through his various ventures and roles, Alex is an investor and tech entrepreneur who is building the Canadian tech ecosystem. TechToronto is on a mission to develop the technology and innovation economy in Canada through its wide-reaching events. AngelList is the startup investing platform that manages $1.8Bn and N49P is a VC fund for early-stage companies in Canada...
Feb 12, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 75
Join in for a conversation with Ben Yoskovitz, CPO and Founding Partner of Highline Beta. Highline Beta is a venture capital and startup co-creation company based in Toronto. In our interview, we pan through Ben’s 20 year career as an entrepreneur, angel investor and startup executive. After graduating with a psychology degree, Ben started by building a web service business then a product based business and one of Canada’s earliest accelerators (where one of its companies was acquired by Airbnb)...
Feb 05, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 74
Join in for a conversation with Daniel Francavilla, Founder and Creative Director of Now Creative Group. Now Creative Group is a creative agency based in Toronto the builds brands and tells stories through impactful design, digital, marketing and media. In our chat, we go through Daniel’s journey from a freelance graphic designer in high school to starting his own agency after graduating from OCAD. We talk about Access, his first entrepreneurial project he started in high school and is in its 13...
Jan 29, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 73
Join in for a conversation with Jaxson Khan. Jaxson is the CEO of Khan & Associates, a consulting firm that focuses on AI and FinTech. As a result, he also is a co-host of an AI podcast called Ask-AI. I reached out to Jaxson after learning he had left his role as the Head of Marketing at Nudge.ai, a startup in Toronto, to live remotely in Columbia where he was getting paid to write in-depth articles for companies. Needless to say I wasn’t disappointed when we met to have the interview as I l...
Jan 22, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 72
Join in for a conversation with Karm Sumal, CEO and Co-Founder of Daily Hive. Daily Hive is a national news media company that started out in Vancouver as Vancity Buzz and now has offices in Calgary, Montreal and Toronto. As a site that started in 2008 amid a competitive industry with many regional and national giants it garners as much as 17M page views a month. Not too shabby for supporting a country of 30M. Karm did not dream of owning a digital media company. Born to immigrants in the East s...
Jan 15, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 71
Join in for a conversation with Jim Elli. Jim is a powerlifting coach and marketing manager of Reactive Training Systems (RTS). RTS is an online coaching company that leverages its founder, Mike Tucherer’s method of auto-regulated strength training and they’ve trained multiple world champion powerlifters. After reading Mike’s work and following some of their world-level powerlifters, I signed up to work with for the last 2 years as I rehabbed back from my knee surgery. Today conversation isn’t a...
Jan 08, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 70
A blast from the past to start the new year. Join in for a conversation with Stephen Shedletzky, Head of Brand Experience and Igniter at Simon Sinek. If that name is familiar with you it may be because you may have watched Simon Sinek's famous TedTalk or read his first book "Start with Why". Stephen joined Simon Sinek's company, called after his own name, as the 4th employee 7.5 years ago. Stephen's journey to help people feel more fulfilled and engaged by the work they do started when on his fi...
Jan 02, 2020•1 hr 2 min
A blast from the past with a replay of the most popular episode of the quarter. Join in for a conversation with Nadeem Nathoo, Co-Founder and Executive Director at TKS (The Knowledge Society). The Knowledge Society is an education company that works with 13-17 year-olds to mine human potential to make unicorn people. From cold-emailing his way into an internship with, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunnus' Grameen Bank at 19, to being part of the first cohort of the Next 36, travelling throu...
Dec 26, 2019•1 hr 18 min
Join in for a conversation with Alex Castellani, Co-owner of Boxcar Social and veteran coffee professional. Boxcar Social is a cafe and bar with 4 locations in Toronto and 1 in Halifax and one of my go to places for some light acidic coffee. Alex got degrees in business and philosophy but instead of embarking on the path of an academic, he would make coffee his career through some fateful encounters from living in Vancouver to taking a break from school. We talk about his journey of building and...
Dec 18, 2019•1 hr 49 min•Ep. 69
Join in for my second anonymous conversation with the accountant turned UX designer from episode 60. Thanks to you my listeners writing in: we answer questions on whether having a bootcamp credential adds any value if your portfolio is already good, difference between college programs vs. Bootcamps vs. doing it by yourself, skills to prioritize to set yourself apart, why there are more senior design positions vs. junior ones, whether the guest would do the bootcamp again and learnings to make th...
Dec 12, 2019•55 min•Ep. 68
Join in for a conversation with Hans Arijanto, Product Engineer at Angelist. We have a dual segment episode today. The first half talks about Hans’ career from working in startups in Toronto to Silicon Valley to Jakarta and back to Toronto. We dive into the various transition points in his career, why he left Facebook for a startup, how he ended up working for the Tokopedia, Amazon of Southeast Asia, and owns a board games cafe. Then, we go into a second part that is a new concept I’m trying out...
Dec 05, 2019•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 67
Join in for an AMA episode on Podcasting. From the numerous chats I’ve had related to my podcasting experience, I decided to answer the most commonly asked questions in a full episode. Here are the questions I cover: How much does the equipment cost? How did I find the equipment and what to use? How do you host and what analytics do you do? What software/tools do you use? What marketing do you do for the podcast? Why did you start the podcast? What’s kept you going for the last year? How do you ...
Nov 27, 2019•54 min•Ep. 66
Join in for a conversation with Shawn Huang, Founder and CEO of 36paths, a career accelerator based in Toronto. Shawn immigrated to Canada as an international student from a city 2 hours outside of Shanghai China. Despite having a family tree filled with academics in all subjects of science, Shawn decided to study business to chase an internal entrepreneurial fire that had him sell soda cans as a kid and drop ship shoes as a kid. After building a career in finance as an investment banker and pro...
Nov 20, 2019•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 65
Join in for a conversation with Carolyn Plater, a psychotherapist and mental health clinician who is the Co-founder of Hoame (North America's largest meditation studio) and Ease (Corporate Wellness Consulting Company). Before starting Hoame and East 2 years ago, Carolyn spent 10+ years in the mental health space as a therapist, clinician and crisis worker who worked with various mental health patients in schools, foster homes, and hospitals. Though her mother's nursing career had influenced her ...
Nov 13, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 64
Today is a little different. A semi-anonymous podcast. I say semi because the guest wanted to keep his identity open in case people had follow-up questions for him. My guest today is Vince and we explore his journey from the world of Big 4 audit to transitioning to be a software developer by going through a bootcamp. In our conversation we go through his process of making the jump, why he decided to do a bootcamp, the assumption vs. reality of bootcamps, the surprises in the transition and what ...
Nov 07, 2019•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 63
Today is another anonymous podcast. We go deep into the life of an experienced back-end software engineer. The interview gets quite technical as I have my guest go deep into explaining what software engineers do so that a non-engineer like me can understand. We also talk about how the guest hires and interviews engineers, the industry, and how my guest has managed to create a situation of remote working with 4 hour work weeks (quite literally at times). Got questions? Ask away for an AMA episode...
Oct 30, 2019•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 62
Join in for a conversation with George Khalife, Head of Marketing & Business Development at owl.co, Host of Let's Grab a Coffee podcast and Co-founder of BookBack app. Having grown up in the middle east from Lebanon to Bahrain, the merchant blood and a passion for building relationships was rooted in his upbringing. Seeing the world through his father's career in finance brought him to be a finance major in university and start the student investment club at University of Ottawa. However, in...
Oct 23, 2019•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 61
Today is another anonymous podcast. In this episode, I dig into my guest's journey of leaving the world of accounting and tax to Product UX/UI Design at a Startup. For those unfamiliar with product design, I would recommend listening to episode 20 with Jason Li who now runs a product design agency called TomYum. In this conversation, we talk about my guest's experience leaving the coveted professional service world with a manager's title, the decision making process behind it and what it was lik...
Oct 16, 2019•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 60
Another blast from the past. Join in for a conversation with Tom Lowden, the Labs Manager of WeWork Toronto. Prior to WeWork, Tom build out a skill set in fundraising for the public sector after having explored a number of different opportunities. After that experience he was the inaugural, I daresay the 'founding' team, of Toronto's Creative Destruction Lab incubator and he went on to become an investor and operator with Boat Rocker Ventures where he brought to life the Dineen coffee shops. Tom...
Oct 09, 2019•1 hr 11 min
Join in for a conversation with Ian Weng, an operations and logistics manager and Vancouver market lead for UberEats. Ian and I met at the University of Waterloo and we both started our career in Audit at KPMG. Since then Ian has taken a unique journey through infrastructure investing, a food startup and then to his current role at UberEats where he has noted that Uber's unique business model makes the role very different from his counterparts in other big tech firms like Google or Facebook. Got...
Oct 02, 2019•58 min
Join in for a conversation with Shubha Dasgupta, President, and CEO at Capital Lending Centre (CLC). CLC is a brokerage house for mortgage brokers in Canada that grew from just 6 in 2017 to 160+ in 2019 and is one of the fastest-growing mortgage brokers in the country. Shubha and his partner, Kendall, started CLC to be a new kind of mortgage brokerage house, one they wish they had when they started. Shubha's been in the mortgage industry for more than 10 years and before this part of his career,...
Sep 25, 2019•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 59
Join in for a conversation with Graeme Moffat, Chief Scientist and VP of Regulatory Affairs at Interaxon. Interaxon is a neurotech company based out of Toronto. They are the creators of the Muse headband where it uses technology and neuroscience to help you meditate effectively, one of the world-leading companies making this happen. Graham earned his PhD in neuroscience at Universite Aix-Marseille in France but he had his sights set on joining the private sector during his early neuroscience edu...
Sep 18, 2019•56 min•Ep. 58
