Canada

“So in Canada, we were the first. No one had done it before in Canada. In other countries, especially in the US it had been you know, other companies did offer free score or had started doing that a few years before but it had never come to Canada. And so we we…”

“Canada doesn't have a very big mid market, but the United States does. And I, you know, and I think that's one thing that, that, that does create some inefficiency in Canadian founders is in their home market. There's not a great mid market.”

“In fact, in Canada, if you wanted to open up an investment account at that time, there were rules that said that you needed to meet a financial advisor in person for an in-person suitability assessment for that person to actually build a portfolio on your beha…”

“In the US? Because the industry is so big. You have these infrastructure players like apex clearing that if you want to start a stock trading business, you just like ask them for their APIs and you plug in. It is super simple. In Canada, none of that existed.”

“Just actually last week, you announced what I think is Canada's largest seed round. We can even call that a forty million dollar round for your new startup passage.”

“First night, we put the software up someone paid 500 dollars to get the admission package to come to Canada for whether it's for Canada or for an English language test, for English language program, sorry.”

“You're the CEO of Applyboard, which is, you know, now worth four billion dollars, making it one of the biggest unicorns in Canada.”

“Wealthsimple is a super popular finance app in Canada worth over five billion dollars. They have like 10% of Canadians have this app.”

“I do give founders now advice if they can launch the US right away, just do it. Because I look back and, ah, there is nothing, you know, Canada, US, like there, we learned there wasn't a big difference in the market.”

“Everything was better. Like consumers were more engaged. It was cheaper to acquire. They were, you know, more retentive on the product. Like everything was just better.”

“Yeah, we're in we're in 24 cities right now. 23 of them are in Canada, and we just launched our first national market. We got a couple thousand drivers, and so drivers are growing.”

“Our mission is to build great Canadian companies. So we identify concepts that have product market fit in other parts of the world. And then we systematically figure out if there's a market here in Canada and then launch a Canadian variant, localized version o…”

“Like one of the things about having a company in Canada, you can run a lot, if your revenues in US dollars and your expenses are posted in Canadian, you can, you know, kind of be that cockroach that's hard to kill.”

“You can go through all of Apple's various, you know, beta schemes, or you just launch Canada only, and no one's going to take notice of it anyway unless you tell them. So we have this great beta testable country here.”

“And if we do that, we can save Canadian taxpayer by .15% of GDP while being extremely humanitarian. And we solve our nursing issues. We solve our trades issues. We bring people to like a degrees that Canadians don't want to do, do it or, and the people who hav…”

“To give you a sense, like .5% of population of Canada, we brought to Canada. Not population of immigrants, population of Canada. Like all the students that we brought are producing more than .6% GDP of this country.”

“Canada is not big enough to build a big business in a lot of industries and sectors, in my opinion. Like, you need to go to America.”

“Our cost to build was three, three and a half million dollars per megawatt, and in Canada at the time, we were seeing our competitors build it, like, ten million dollars per megawatt in Canada. In the U.S., they were more competitive. They're more like, you kn…”

“And if I look at financial services, I mean, it's the biggest industry in Canada. It's seven percent of GDP. It's, which is actually twice the size of our OECD peers as a percentage of revenue per GDP.”

“It felt like the sand in the gears of the economy was the fact that we've have a financial system that has prioritized, even celebrated Stability to the point of killing innovation.”

“So we looked at it and we're like, well, credit is the one that you need to be in market for the longest to understand, to get data, to build a stack. And it's also the number one product used by the mass affluent and middle-class credit cards are very, very p…”

“I think we're just a big believer in secondary markets. You know, like we believe that there's a huge amount of pent up demand for Services that you can get in these tier one markets, like London, England. And so I think that the idea of launching Canada and f…”

“Right now Canadians are paying over double for the same products and services that you can get in other countries.”

“Once they started focusing on Canada, they would go and offer restaurants to have what we were doing for 25% commission. They would just do for free.”

“Back home in Canada, there really wasn't a service that could do this. Certainly not a nationwide one. And there was kind of like all these mom and pop little delivery companies. It might be five or six in every single different city, but the websites were kin…”

“It's clearly like the future has already arrived in other countries. You just need to go and look, you just go to Latin America with new bank, you go to, and like, there's a ton of other great ones in Latin America. You look in Europe, it's happening. So to me…”

“In Canada, there's massive white space where there's no retail brand for used cars in this country.”