Lunch Academy Podcast - Ep 11

Welcome everybody. This is episode 011 of Launch Academy with myself as the host, Sam. I work at Launch Academy and of course the star of the show, Sade.

Hi everyone.

We're here and we finally have our guests. We say finally because we actually tried to do this last week. CEO and founder of Ray Wally, co founder, apologies of Launch Academy and I guess Launch Academy, Ray Walia, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I wouldn't say I'm a co founder of Lunch Academy. That was definitely your idea.

I get all the IP right.

I just said, okay, go for it. Just to watch you.

So I'm failing. And then Sam is my assistant. That's how it works.

Production assistant and of course conducting the dials, we have producer lady Claire. As always, she's super shy and never wants to be mic'd up, but here we are. This is, this is a big day for us, but maybe not for. For you guys.

Viewers.

It feels like the day after the apocalypse.

It wasn't that bad.

I felt that bad. I don't know what it was this year, but maybe it was my ankle.

No, it was great this year.

This is your first time doing it energy wise. The, the event was great. I'm not, I'm not denying that, but I just meant energy wise. It felt very tough on me. I think it's just hitting that 30 mark. So I don't know how you're doing it at your peak age of 18. But for those that are listening, we just held our annual Traction conference. So what is Traction?

So Traction essentially is a conference to help entrepreneurs, founders, marketers understand the ins and outs of how to acquire customers, how to retain customers, and more importantly, how to monetize your customers. And so what we did, this was our fifth Traction conference. And so this all started with myself and Lloyd Lobo from both AI. We were having drinks and talking and bemoaning about the lack of experience and insight in Vancouver. Entrepreneurs understanding how to properly build their businesses and how to scale and grow their businesses and more importantly, how they don't do things the way that things are done in Silicon Valley. We started going back and forth, well, how do you get more Canadians to go and experience Silicon Valley and learn from Silicon Valley companies? It's just not impossible. And so we thought, hey, what if we can bring Silicon Valley to Vancouver and help disseminate this information and this knowledge? And so Traction was born. It was a conference designed to bring Silicon Valley to Vancouver and bring cool, amazing speakers. We had a unicorn threshold, so we had to be worth A billion dollars or more to be on our stage and come and talk about how you've scaled and grown your business and more importantly how you gain traction. And it was all designed to be rapid fire 1520 minute talks that are practical content information that you can take right back to your company the very next day and start to apply and try to get yourself to that billion dollars task.

I heard a lot of really good feedback about the rapid fire kind of. Yeah. Because I mean I've never experienced a conference like that before.

Yeah.

And at first when I saw the schedule and I saw that it was going to be 20 minutes or max 30 minutes, I think some people was 30 minutes.

It's 15 to 30 minutes. 30 minutes is usually a panel or a pod.

People are like incredible leaders. How can you get up on stage for 20 minutes? Like go. I feel like they could speak for hours. Right. But then I actually talked to a few people and they said that that was the best part of it because they didn't feel drained at the end and they felt like they got the most important points.

Well, the other thing that a lot of people don't know. So my launchcomy is a non profit. So Traction is a fundraiser for Launch county as a nonprofit. And as a nonprofit and Lloyd and myself being two cheap brown guys, we don't pay our speakers to come and talk. Like they fly in on their own dime. They spend their own money on the hotel rooms and they take time away from their business all to just come up on stage for 15 minutes. Attraction.

Yeah, that says a lot.

And these guys are girls are running billion dollar businesses. And yeah, just there's a lot of the nature and quality of the people, but also the concept and the mindset around that subject matter. Traction is the lifeblood of every business, every successful business. You cannot have a successful business unless you've got customers coming in through the door and more importantly, people paying you for your product and services. And so the other thing is again, that format over the last five years, we have a very specific reputation now of fomo. Nobody wants to leave their seats because they're afraid of missing that next talk. And there's very little networking that happens in the hallways, in the lobby area while the conference is actually going on. It all happens during the breaks, but more importantly in the cool, kick ass parties that we run in the evenings before and after the conference.

That was also something that was impressive to me. So like I was impressive.

Like you had really low expectations of the people you worked with.

Traction. And I'M running around dealing with a million things, and I, in my mind, have only the expectations of all the conferences I've been to in the past, where a lot of the times people end up networking during different speakers that they don't really care for. And this is the first time in my entire life that I was walking around. I'm like, everyone's in there the whole time. Every speaker is getting a full crowd, which I think is.

I think my favorite part is every once in a while, me being on the outside of the conference room is that every once in a while, you're gonna see one guy, one gal just sprint out of the conference room, go speeline for the bathroom, and then they gotta go back in. And just every. Every so often, you'd think, like, oh, something bad's happening. Like, there's a fire or something. This is why there's a person running. It's like, no, they're just. Or they do a double take.

Right.

Cause they don't know which direction the bathroom is.

Yeah.

And then they do this thing, and then they do a shift, and then they run from the bathroom, and then they back.

It's like me at the movie theater.

It's exactly like that.

Right.

But. But, like, I want to dive a little bit deeper. Like, what do you think the motivation is for some of some of the speakers that are, you know, flying down here, spending some time with. With our community and our crowd here.

So I'll give you a history of. Of the first traction. So Lloyd and. And myself came up with the idea and drinks.

That's important.

Drinks. Yeah.

Yes.

Best decisions are made over drinks. Lloyd said, okay, let's reach out and see what happens. See what type of response you get from people and see if they're interested in talking. And again, we set the bar high. Okay. Billion dollar evaluation or more. And I think it reached up to, like, maybe 35 people. And we're sitting here thinking, okay, maybe five, maybe 10 will respond, and we can kind of work with that and see where we go. All 35 responded. All 35 said, yes. And these were top names. The Linda from Linda.com, we had Mark Organ. We had Josh from Twilio, and these are major companies. And we're sitting there looking at you like, oh, what do we do now? All 35 said, yeah. And when we dug into. Turned out, like, why did they say yes? It's like, first of all, subject matter, what's really, really key to all their businesses. They truly, truly believe traction is the most Important thing that they've needed focus on. And this was 2015 and Silicon Valley. So Traction was a very, very hot topic and everybody really wanted to wrap their heads around it and drive that home to their teams. But the other two factors was the peer group. And so when you're in San Francisco, you're inundated with all these different events and activities. You got to run your own businesses. And so these entrepreneurs, these leaders will only get like maybe 5 minutes, 10 minutes of cross pollination time with their peers. Sometimes they'll go for drinks or whatnot, but it happens very rarely for them to be able to get out of San Francisco close enough that it's only a two hour flight and they can fly back the next day if they need, or the same day if they need to, next day, no problem. But also be able to get out of Silicon Valley, be around their peers, have some networking time, connecting time with their peers that are like minded and trying to wrap their heads around how to scale and grow their business, how to get traction was very important to them. And the third factor was especially in 2015, a lot of the bigger companies out there were getting wind of other tech companies coming and setting up shops in Vancouver and getting their development teams set up here. And so a lot of them were coming up saying, okay, hey summertime, I can go to Vancouver for a couple days, I can connect with all my fellow peers outside the valley so we can have a little more downtime. Not a lot of pressure, not a lot of other people were asking us for our time and I can check out what's going on in Vancouver. Why is Zillow acquiring a company out here? Why is Zenefit setting up an office out here? And that all started happening around that time and Traction was a catalyst to that. You look at it today, fast forward, a lot of these larger corporations are coming up here because they're scouting, they're looking for opportunities, looking for acquisitions, looking for dev teams to acquihire, they're looking for companies to set up. Ventbrite just yesterday announced that they acquired.

Pika Tick Shout out to Jay.

Congratulations.

Two touch points there. Pik A Tick was a company incubated here right at Launch Academy in 2014 and 2015. And Eventbrite was one of the speakers at our conference in actually the one that we did in San Francisco in 2015. So tie ins. There you go.

Yeah, that's really awesome.

Not to say that launch can be anything to do with the introduction between them. That's just an aside like hey, Everything's like a six degree separation, Kevin Bacon thing, right? Yeah. There's. There's a game for you guys for one of your future six degrees of separation. Six degrees of shot A. How much, how far does Shot A need to go to learn something about somebody cool?

But like, you know, one of the things I think you mentioned, and I'm going to come back to this drinks thing in a second, but I think a lot of things had to kind of line up together. The timing had to be right. Random question, just out of the blue, do you think Traction Conference would be what it is if it was 2008 or 2010?

No. No, I don't think it would be. It is a magic mix of different opportunities. Launch Cameo is getting its brand and reputation up. Those a lack of knowledge and experience around that specific subject matter. A lot of people come back to us say, oh, well, well, what's the difference between Traction and BC Tech? Back then it was Grow Conference. What's the difference between Traction and Grow Conference? It's like they're, they're not the same thing. Grow Conference, BC Tech Summit, they're showcase events of the industry. And it's an opportunity to cross pollinate between verticals, Health tech and clean tech and ILC and IoT AI. Whereas traction is a very specific subject matter. How do you get customers, how do you retain them and how do you monetize them? And I personally think there's no comparison to other conferences because we're not trying to compete. We're really there just to help these entrepreneurs accelerate and grow. I think the other factor is also Launch Academy is a nonprofit, so we're not an entertainment company. We're not an events based business. So our primary objective is not to bring in as many dollars through the door. Our primary objective is to bring as many resources and opportunities to the companies attending to scale and grow their business. So other people that are doing conferences and events don't see it through the same lens as we do. And so, yeah, to your question, would it have been the same thing at a different time? No, because both Lloyd and I would have been in different mindsets. The environment around us would have been in different mindsets.

But speaking, speaking of where you come from. So one of the things I wanted to make sure when we first meet Ray Guest on the show is that we're not just gonna sit here and be good employees and things like that. And I think part of it.

Who said you ever were good employees?

That hurts.

Yeah, you are. When you actually listen to my Slack.

Messages, but I actually haven't looked at any messages.

I think one of the mysteries of Launch Academy and one of the mysteries of yourself is like your entire background of all these different things that have occurred. Occurred that makes us where we are today. And not to say that where we are right now is the destination or the end point or pinnacle or anything. I think we're still kind of riding this journey along with all your different projects. But, but like, for example, like, who are you really? Like, were you even born here?

First of all, let's go far.

Let's go way far back, right? Like, because I think, oh, my shirt is totally shrunk.

Don't say like that. That's hilarious.

Shouldn't have had that extra burger.

I had too much good food yesterday. But yeah, like we're. And it all ties in together because, okay, you know, behind the curtain, I do know a little bit about race story. And it does tie together because part of running a good conference. Yes, part of it is understanding good content, but also being able to put on a good show. And I think, you know what, I'm attesting to this. But like, but like, yeah, were you actually born here? Like, where did the skill sets come from? What was your family business doing? Like, why didn't you continue doing that? That kind of stuff? Write us down, that journey.

Yeah. So I guess before I do that, just a little side. I said this on stage yesterday and it's just a funny anecdote that came out during the conference we had. I won't say who it was, but very prominent tech leader come up to us and say, hey, this is amazing conference. Who's the event company that you guys use to put this on? And that person said that to myself and Lloyd. Lloyd and I are standing next to each other. Look at each other. Like, are you serious yet? Two cheap brown guys here. You think we use an events company? It's like we do it ourselves. You get a bunch of volunteers, you get a bunch of slave employees, give them a mandate and go execute minion movement. And so that's just a funny aside thing. No, we don't use an events company. We do it ourselves. The other funny thing though, I guess it's not funny. It's just reality is we are a non profit and this is a team of six people and we accomplished a conference that's recognized by Forbes and Inc. As one of the top 10 marketing conferences in North America with just four people or three people most of the year. Myself, Lloyd and Alana last year Anu and Alex and a handful of people in the previous years. Whereas other events companies have 10, 15 people running a conference all year round. But you go back to Launch Academy is not just traction. We put on our launch pad, we do our landing pad programs. We are elite programs. We've got other stuff that's happening, events that are happening on a regular basis all year round. And then on top of that, Lloyd runs Boast and he's building his company, and I'm doing Victory Square or Sports Technology Group or any of the other 200 other things I'm doing at any given time. And so it's a big testament to the team that's around it. Like on the day of, everybody rolls up their sleeves. Sam was there at six in the morning. Sade was there keeping everybody happy and smiling, even though everybody's grumpy being up there, inflating flu, inflating balloons.

You guys enjoyed those helium balloons. That was all me. So you're welcome.

Give us a light for the balloons.

And producer Claire making sure that the missing balloon gets put back in place. There's a lot of inside jokes here, but seriously, yes, it was definitely a team effort, but I want to recognize that we accomplished so much with such a small team. It's really impressive. But to go back to your point, it is a lot of experience. Yes. I was born here, Born and raised in Vancouver. Very proud to be a Vancouverite. My family immigrated here. My father came in. This is a long story. I'm gonna try to keep it really short. He came in the 60s. Real true entrepreneur story. $7 in his pocket. Well, he came with more. He went around the US Just trying to scope out what's out there. He had a PhD in chemistry and he wanted to look for jobs and opportunities and came to the US Went around, went to Toronto and then last stop was Vancouver. On his way back home to go back to my mom and then kind of give him a lay of land and make a decision where they want to go. He came to Vancouver and literally only had seven bucks back left in his pocket. And he had a friend that owned a grocery store, and he kind of crashed it in the back of the grocery store while he was here. And he just fell in love with the city. He's like, this is where I want to spend the rest of my life. This is where I want to raise my family. And he didn't leave. And so he worked. He got his work visa and he worked at the grocery store, slept at the back of the grocery store. In the evenings. And he got. Then started driving a taxi. And so he was working the grocery store. Working taxi. And then he also moved off from the grocery store, started working at a steel mill. So his PhD degree in chemistry was worthless because it was from India. It had no weight here since the 60s, mind you. Right. And then my father also, as this is going on, made enough money, brought my mom here and started to raise a family. Had first challenged my older brother. But also also along this time, my father had connections to the Bollywood industry in India. And what he did is he worked with his connections to bring a top star at that time, his name was Koshore Kumar. Very, very reputable singer.

I totally know who that is.

Yeah, well, if you're a Bollywood historian and fan, that's not gonna happen. Not gonna happen. But it's. Yeah, he's like one of the most famous singers in Bollywood history. So my father brought him over and essentially my father was one of the pioneers in the concert businesses, especially from a Bollywood perspective. And that then led to concerts every year and my father became the international producer, bringing in a group of a tour to go around the world. And these are Bollywood concerts. So if anybody knows about Bollywood. Bollywood is the Indian version of Hollywood. Bombay being the bee.

Bollywood and Hollywood, but even more extra.

Yeah. So the extra is almost every single movie is a musical. And so in the movie there are dancing and singing and acts. And it's usually guy finds girl, girl gets kidnapped. Guy learns how to fight, goes and gets kid girl back, guy, girl get married and it's all song and dance. Amazing. That's like every single movie's that way.

But for most like cultural kind of movies nowadays.

Yeah, right.

Like we look into like Asian dramas and stuff like that. It's the same line.

Yeah, Scripts work. I got tons of stories around this stuff. Like my father bought.

We're going to do an entertainment episode.

My father brought a bunch of fast forwarding here, but I'll go back. So. Yeah, so what he ended up doing was putting together these concert tours which was really movie stars, not singers that were the, the main act coming in and doing on stage, live performance, recreating the dancing scenes and the theatrical scenes from those movies. And you had the actual singers that sank those songs off stage singing. So the actors are on stage lip syncing and doing theatrical experiences and stuff. So it's like it's out. So it's like seeing Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom recreating the scene from Pirates of the Caribbean while they're singing. It was a musical while they're singing, but they're not actually singing, but they're recreating the scene on stage. So it's a theatrical experience. And there's elaborate costumes, set changes and whatnot. And what a lot of people don't know is that when you go to any major concert today you're seeing like go to Britney Spears, she's changing outfits like 20 times. You're going, you're seeing the huge set displays that never happened before. It was really singer, artist comes up with a guitar or a mic and they're just rocking away and drinking beers and whatever on stage. And that's the show. All this theatric that came through, in my opinion, I think it actually had a lot to do with what we were doing. So my father was a pioneer in this stuff because nobody else was doing this. And we did shows all over the us all over the uk. And I remember one year it was kind of a big deal. I was like maybe seven or eight. Madonna came to the concert in la. I think Jan Jackson came to one as well. Then the next year you see Madonna's got this big elaborate stage. Janet Jackson's doing multiple set changes, costume changes. So no way to tell if this is accurate, but I think a lot of the stuff that we were doing in these concert tours had a major influence in what you see in concerts today. And so my father ran these conference concerts around the world. And as my brother and I grew up, we ended up being the ones running the conference concerts in Vancouver while my father managed the international tours. And so I'm like a 14 year old kid running around selling. Here's a funny story. My father like running Bollywood concert is very different than North American concerts because you have to tell sell tickets in the community. And so you. We'd sell tickets at through Ticketmaster. We get the tickets, we take them to grocery stores or video stores in the Indian community and they'd be on display and for sale in the stores and it's all cash. And so my father wouldn't have to go to the stores, drop tickets off, pick up all the cash from what was sold and take it home and then go deposit the bank and run it that way. But my father would always take me along with them and then he'd always have me carrying the briefcase. There's times where I was like a 9, 10, maybe 12 year old kid. This is conscious every couple years where I'm walking around with like 3, $400,000 in a briefcase. And my father's Just walking along in front of me, I'm walking behind them and people are oblivious. And as I got older, I like Ted, you do realize, like, you're trusting me with all this money. It's like, look, people know I'm the promoter. If I'm walking around the briefcase, they're going to know that there's probably something of value in there and they're going to try to rob me. They look at you holding the briefcase, they're going to think, oh, it's just a bunch of papers. Why would he let his son hold three $400,000 in briefcase?

That's amazing.

And so, yeah, I was, I got a lot of lessons in entrepreneurship from my father at a very early age because I just grew up around it and saw the hustle. Like we were putting up movie posters or concert posters and doors and windows in the middle of the night and hustling just to get a few handfuls of sales.

And do you think there's a specific skill set that your father had or that, you know, you're seeing entrepreneurship today?

Yeah. No, it's the, the drive and motivation of an entrepreneur. You got to just hustle. You got to do what you got to do. It's our mandate. This is why, like, get shit done isn't just a thing that we put on our T shirts and on our posters. It's the true epitome of what an entrepreneur needs to do at an early stage. You just have to get shit done. You got to roll up your sleeves and make things happen because nobody else is going to do it for you. And that's what my father was, was doing. Like he had this PhD degree in chemistry, but he, there's nothing he could do. And so like my father was also doing construction, so driving a taxi. He worked at a steel mill and then got injured at the steel mill. And I forgot why the reason was, but they wouldn't hire him back and he couldn't work in the steel mill again. And then he bought a piece of land and he started building houses. And my summer, my, my summers as a kid was either I'm walking around construction sites, working on a construction site, stepping on two by fours with nails on them and getting nails on my feet, or running around backstage at a Bollywood concert. And so growing up, I was just always around different business activities that my father was doing. And then we also ended up buying a, a partner with my uncle to do a store fixture business. So we ended up having one of the more predominant store fixture businesses in the lower Mainland store fixtures being. If you ever go to a store to buy clothing, the shelves, the boards, the glass displays, everything that you see products being featured in, we made those and we supplied those.

So somehow all of this still motivated you to like be your own entrepreneur after. Because I know that when you experience all these things, you also see how hard it is and the stress level and the hustle.

I'm good. You did that.

Yeah. Like my family, my family. People look at me as, oh, you were born rich. Like, no, my father came with seven bucks. My father hustled his way up, made a lot of money. And then in the 80s, like we owned a lot of. We own real estate, we're building houses. But people are old enough. Remember that there was this massive real estate correction and everything crashed. The market crashed, basically bankrupted my family. And we had to start all over again. And then same thing happened in the 90s, started building its way up. We were doing a concert and a lot of money invested in this concert and the biggest stars. Her husband committed suicide. And this was on the plane leaving India and we had to cancel the entire tour. And that's a. Even though there's insurance and whatnot, it was a huge financial hit to our family. We're back to being broke again.

Yeah.

And roller coaster. And had to hustle our way back up again. So, yeah, just again, get you done. Like nobody else is going to do it for you. Like when you have those type of ups and downs, you enjoy the ups, but realize that there's going to be a down again. I can't remember what the question was, but.

Like, I mean, going from that, because I think even if you decided you're going to be an entrepreneur, there's a couple routes you could go. You could continue working at a construction company, run that. You could have started a show production company. I mean, you have these experiences. It's your comfort zone. It's what you know. How do you transition and why did you transition to something relatively obscure at the time, like from your perspective anyway, which is tech.

Again, this is a very long story, but I'll rewind a bit. So I was never going to be an entrepreneur. When I was in high school, my goal was to be a neuros. Neuroscientist or neurosurgeon. I was fascinated with the brain. I wanted to become a neurosurgeon. I was in honors math, honors science. Long story short, I skipped a lot, partied a lot, still got good grades. But being the smart ass that I was, I Started doing the calculations of if I really wanted to be a top world neurosurgeon. How many years of schooling did he need? And it was like another 10 years after high school.

That was a mistake. You did the calculation.

Yeah. And I was like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, screw that, I'm not gonna do that. And then in grade 10, or yeah, grade 10, I took entrepreneurship and I started liking it. In grade 11, took more business classes. In grade 12, I was one of three students that was selected to run the school store. And so I was basically managing the school store and went to bcit, took small business, the entrepreneurship course. But I kind of decided like, hey, like, I don't really want to run my own business. I got a job offer from HSBC in the marketing department. I was kind of set to take that, that offer. And my dad said, hey, this is a great offer. You should give some serious thought. But one thing I want to make sure you understand is that when you're working for somebody else, you are helping them execute on their vision and their dream. Whether it's a big corporation or not, you're helping somebody else achieve their dreams. Now, that might line up with your dreams and what you want as objectives, but make sure you're clear about that. Whereas you can work for yourself and be the control of your own destiny. It's never a straight line to success. It's always ups and downs. But at least you're focusing on your dreams and making your dreams happen. And that stuck with me. And I was like, okay, yeah, you're right, I'll do entrepreneurship. And that's when I end up looking at trying to buy a franchise and going down the whole Dairy Queen run, working in restaurants. But the tech thing came from. So I owned the Dairy Queen franchise in Richmond, British Columbia. And most of my business came from the other businesses around us. Being a faster franchise and a Dairy Queen, the biggest profit margin items for us were our cakes. But also because we're close to all these offices, big, large, bulk orders for food for lunchtime and dinner time after work. So again, I was going through the process. I come to the realization that the only way to make money in franchise system is to have multiple franchises. And so ended up building another dairy cream franchise from the ground up in downtown Vancouver. Reason for downtown Vancouver is because again, I did the math. There was so much revenue coming in from the other businesses from my one in Richmond. If I put myself downtown, guess what? I'm surrounded by nothing but businesses. I'm gonna kill it. I'm gonna do amazingly well. The realization that my one enrichment had a drive through, everybody had cars, it was very accessible. But the ones downtown, well, these are all people in walking distance. And I can't expect everybody to walk to the restaurant. But if I can sell one ice cream cake to each office tower every single day in downtown Vancouver, because there's got to be at least one person having a birthday or one person leaving or having anniversary in each office tower in downtown, I'm going to do okay. Now how do I make that happen? And so came up with this idea. It's like, okay, if I have a website, this is 2002. It was very, very early geocities. Yeah. So if I, if, if I had the ability to let people order an ice cream cake online, give me all the instructions online and have it come to the store and I can get a courier to pick it up and take it to their office, solves a problem. And one of my friends, he was building BlackBerry apps at the time, so he was a developer. And I said, hey, do you mind helping me do this? He said, sure, I'll do it if you let me use your store for an experiment. I'm like, yeah, sure, no problem. So what we ended up doing was creating this online website. People were able to place their orders. And the way it was jury rigged was they place their order. It comes in as an email, but at the same time it comes in as a fax to the store. And so printed out, the staff got it. There was instructions on there when they needed it. Staff calls a courier, courier comes and pick up the cake 30 minutes, or picks up the cake and has to deliver it within 30 minutes because it's ice cream, it's going to melt. And so we basically were doing what Uber Eats Fedora does today. Back in 2002, I was doing on demand delivery and ordering Zappy. Yeah, exactly. And so it's all jury rigged to, to work off a fax machine. And it worked. And Dairy Queen took notice and they tried to shut me down saying, oh, yeah, you can't do it like that. I'm like, why? I've got no restrictions on jurisdiction. Somebody wants to order a cake and I get a courier to pick it up. And now you look at 2018, they've got their own dqcakes.com which is like I had Richmond DQ and Cambie DQ as or Demon dq as my URLs. So I think I definitely pissed off a bunch of people because I was Smarter than them and taking their marketing jobs from them. But the funny thing though is so my friend that wanted to use my store as an experiment, exchange what he did, he ended up rigging the entire store with the bluetooth nodes again. 2002, this is way before iPhone. There was BlackBerry, Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Ericsson. And what we started doing was he was pushing coupons to people's cell phones in the store while they're in line to get products. And it was all done through the Bluetooth hotspot so there's no data charges. Again, people are old enough will realize that back then if you wanted to put like download a picture onto your phone because of the data charges from Telus, Rogers and Bell, a simple small three megabyte phone picture.

Three megabyte wish.

Yeah, well, whatever.

Like couple kilobytes.

Yeah. And so that would cost. Oh, sorry, no megabytes is a different story. The couple kilobits, that would cost at least like 15 bucks edge. Yeah. And but because you're using Bluetooth, there was no charge because it's all interconnected. And so when he showed me what he was doing and I saw it in action, it just blew my mind. I'm like, wow, I can actually influence the people in line to buy something before they actually get to the front of the register. Meaning that I can probably speed up the customer flow tenfold at least and start to direct them and pivot them towards specific products that I want to move off my shelves because I might be overstocked on chocolate syrup and I need to get more peanut buster parfaits out of the, out of the door. Actually, that would have been hot fudge. I gotta correct myself there. No, I know my DQ.

Really falling off the track.

And so it just blew my mind. And then long story short, there is that we ended up creating a new startup. 2002, we joined the New Ventures VC. Back then it was called a Telus New Ventures VC startup or a competition and essentially got laughed off stage. People told us nobody wants pictures and images on their phones. Text is like probably the most they'll do, but it's all about voice. And we're like dumbfounded because we modeled this all after NT docomo out of Japan and stuff that we saw happening by text message marketing in Germany and stuff. And so we're like, no, no, you.

Could write when you can talk.

Yeah. And so we kept, kept at it. And Fast forward to 2007. We had progressed enough that we were actually pushing movie trailers, game trailers and music videos to People's cell phones using Bluetooth. And so again, three megabit videos, a music video would have cost probably 30 to $40 in data charges. And we were able to save that because it was Bluetooth. So it was zero dollars. And so we have this deal, we worked with Sony Music, worked out with Sony Music and HMV where we were going to equip HMV with all these hotspots and we could actually control what type of content you receive based on the aisle that you're in. So if you're in the movie aisle Looking at DVDs, you could actually watch the movie trailer before you buy the DVD on your cell phone. Again, there's no iPhones, no touchscreen. This is often Nokia off of blackberries and stuff. There's all these technical challenges of pairing with the phone and getting all sorted out. But we'd solve all that. It was all you just walk up to a poster, touch your, tap your phone and it automatically pairs. And then if you're in the music aisle, just watch a music video before you buy the cd. If you're the game aisle, you watch the game trailer before you buy by the game.

Successfully created spam pretty much.

No, it wasn't spam. You, you had choice, you had to download it. It wasn't automatically sent to you. You had, you could actually see the list of stuff and download it and watch it. And so I sold my restaurants to focus on tech. I done the restaurants for 10 years. I was kind of at the end of my desire and motivation to stay in the restaurant business and tech was just blowing my mind and I wanted to pursue tech. So 2008, sold my restaurants, focused on that. 2008, another big correction and crash happened that everybody who's in tech probably knows about. And that company went bye bye. First one to move was HMV and said, sorry, there's no way we're spending any dollars on something. Shout out to hmv, anything like this. Oh yeah, they kind of went away as well. And then Sony said, look, we're happy to keep giving you content, but you got to find your own distribution channel. And ended up shutting that startup down. So. And put a lot of money into that stuff. But startup life, things failed and I ended up taking sabbatical, went around the world, went to Mobile World Congress I think you're very familiar with. At the same time, iPhone came out that year and I bought an iPhone and ended up building apps for iPhones. First one was a Magic 8 Ball app. So I obviously with the gyroscope you shake the phone and they'll tell you. You ask it a question and be like, the answer is likely or you're shit out of luck. I had some bunch of funny little phrases to it.

You had a developer though, right?

So I designed it, like on paper and I mocked it up and then I sent it to a development team out of India. But I was actually trying to teach myself how to code. So I was actually debugging a bunch of their code for them that same year.

This is the first year I dabbled in anything tech because I had got my hands on an iPhone and I spent like months trying to figure out how to unlock it. Once I figured how to unlock it, other people wanted me to unlock it for them. So I was sitting on my little, little PowerBook. There wasn't even a MacBook. It's called PowerBook. Typing in this code that I don't understand in terminal because you knew it.

Actually it would do something. Do this isn't this. It's going to do this.

I don't understand the logic behind it, but if I press this button here, you can use your phone on Rogers or Bell or whatever from. Instead of AT and T. So that's. That's my first tech entrepreneurship.

And you were that. That go to Asian guy that everybody has like. Oh, yeah, this guy. Lock unlock my phone. Yeah. It cost you 200 bucks though.

Yeah.

Right.

And I remember like, you probably made it.

You probably made a killing too.

I. I was sitting up at sfu.

At SFU too.

Yeah.

There you go.

But that's secret.

Going around campus. Yes. The Asian guy in the cubicle next to the window by the biology books.

I was sweating buckets.

Bring cash.

But anyway, back to your side young entrepreneurs.

The hustle. Hustle has got to always be there.

A funny story about young entrepreneurs. My first, My brother first went away to university. We were doing high school together in Victoria. And then he went away and we were two years apart. He went to college, Concordia. And so that was the first time we were sort of like apart for a long period of time. And I remember calling him, being like, how's university? Like, he had been there for like three weeks. And he was like, amazing. I found a side hustle. And I was like, what?

No.

What are you. Are you selling drugs?

Like, no.

He was like, no. I found a guy who can replicate textbooks, like print them and make them into like the binded like paper. And he's like, so I'm printing textbooks and selling them for half price because Texas and you're missing, like, $400 a book sometimes. And I'm like, stop. No, no more.

Your.

Your entrepreneurial side is not good.

We're gonna just.

Yeah, there's definitely some gray areas when it comes to entrepreneurship as you learn and figure things out.

And I feel like every team has this kind of story. I don't want to talk about Alex's story anymore. But let's. Let's. We've been digressing for, like, a half hour.

Shout out to Jordan. But you're one ounce of entrepreneur.

Like, your entrepreneurial dreams are crushed by Sade. It's like, no, you are not doing that.

Maybe he keeps watching this podcast to learn a thing. But, like, let's move on because we've been digressing for half an hour. Like, how do we get to launch Academy? Like, how did it get started? And we've heard Alex's side of the story of how he joined as a member, but what about you? And I know this story has to do with drinks also.

Why? So, again, these are all long stories, but because I never do anything the easy way, and it always takes a lot of persuading for me to actually commit to doing stuff. But what had happened was. So again, 2008, crashed and took a sabbatical, went around the world, started playing around these iPhone apps, created an iPhone app called I Wardrobe. So anybody that out there that watched the movie Clueless, remember Shira's Closet? And so again, from the gesture motion technology on the iPhone, what we did was we created a way for women or men to take pictures of all their clothes in the closet and have it categorized as, you have hats at the top accessories, and you got your shirts, you got your bottoms, and you got your shoes, and you can swipe left and right on different items to mix and match outfits. Built the app called I wardrobe. It got 10,000 downloads within the first month. I got featured in some fashion magazines. And I was like, hey, this is an actual opportunity here. And this is. Again, this was 2009, I believe. Actually, no, that was in 2010, 2009, when all the games that I started making came out. And then I realized, okay, well, there's some real potential here. And I ended up converting it into a Facebook app because I thought, okay, if I can tie into products that are available for sale online e commerce sites, I can get affiliate income. I can start monetizing this. And what happened there was it became like a little drop pad where you can drag and drop your clothes and mix and match, but because it's Facebook. You actually go into your friend's closet and go borrow one of your friends shoes and see how that looks like with your outfit. And then you'd have the stream of stuff that's available available for sale online. You take the picture of the item online and see, okay, well if I buy this skirt, how many different outfits can I make with makeup? Make with it with the stuff that already had my closet. And that's how been monetized. And as I started going through that process build this whole new startup and new team started form around it and Fast Forward started focusing back on the mobile experience and taking pictures of stuff while you're in store and populating to your closet and whatnot. In 2011 team was starting to come together and I wanted to get out of my basement and work in the community again and get connected. There's a place called Boot Up Garage. Boot Up Labs was the first accelerator in Vancouver started by Boris Wirtz and Leonard Brody and Jason Bailey from ESA Games for Rewards. All very accomplished entrepreneurs had their big exits and angel investors. Boris works today as probably one of the top VCs in Canada and partner with Andreessen Horowitz, a mentor of mine, somebody I really look up to. And he was part of this group and I'm like, okay, why would I not want to be there? And Boot Up Garage was the non profit arm of it where they were just creating a community space because they had excess space. Boot Up Garage, Open Up Labs. For the whatever reason the model didn't work out and there was some issues and that ended up shutting down. It was just the garage and the garage ended up shutting down. And three months. So from January to March I was in the garage and then it shut down and go back to. I worked out of my basement and my other friends that were there kind of all went to coffee shops or other places. Fast forward to September. I got accepted into Wavefront. Rest in peace. And team was excited saying, oh, we got into accelerator. This is gonna be awesome and amazing. And Again, this is 2011. Things were very different back then and we were basing everything off of what we read about accelerators in Silicon Valley and whatnot. As we got in there, went into Wavefront and it was cubicles and it was very corporate. It was very bland and not the vibrant experience that we were expecting. Very quiet. This is where I met Sam for the first time. He was the only cool person there Vivian that we could never showed up. And yeah, he showed up there once every couple weeks and at least I had a nice view. I had a nice cubicle by the window, some cool guys working behind me. But everyone was like in closed door offices. It was never really communal and whatnot. And so December rolls around, 2011, and Jesse Hesip, who's part of the garage, sent out an email to everybody that was in the garage Google Group. And the email said, hey, I'm sick and tired of working out coffee shops. Anybody want to help me get the garage off the ground? Again, I'm sitting in a cubicle, like, yeah, I want to help. And then Roger Patterson, who's another member of the garage, was sitting at another co working space thing. Yeah, this is definitely not the same vibe that we had at the garage. I want to help. And nobody else replied. So the three of us went to Steamworks in Gastown, Vancouver, and we're having beers and saying, okay, how do we want to go about this? What do we want to do? It's okay, well, let's practice what we preach. We're all about lean methodology. Let's take a, let's have a beer meetup and see what the community thinks. And if anybody's willing to put a deposit down on desk. Rizwan from NRC irap, he, he knows all three of us from the community as an IRA rep, came, was walking by at Steamworks and he's like, hey, what are you guys doing? This doesn't look cool. Three separate entrepreneurs. You could scheme me on something. Really? Oh, we're thinking about getting the garage off the ground. Off the ground. It's like, oh, hey, I'd love to help like, you guys get off the ground. We'll give you some, some money and support that. And we're like, oh, sweet. Okay, we, if we can make this happen, we can actually get some government money and see where we can take this. Now mind you, all three of us are still building our own businesses and this was just like a side gig, side hustle, just to get ourselves an environment where we're able to connect with each other and motivate each other and tap into each other's networks and whatnot. And so we had this beer meetup at a bar called kaylee's and about 40, 50 people showed up. And just like any other startup, meetup was beers, networking, and talk about hustle and whatnot. Jesse, Roger and I got up on stage and said, hey, thanks for coming out. We wanted to see what the interest is in the community of seeing a space like this put together again. And then who'd Be willing to support it and want a space in there. So 30, 40 hands in the air. Okay, well, who's willing to put $100 deposit down today on a desk? There's still about 20 hands in there. We're like, hey, that's not bad, that's 2000 bucks, let's go for it. And we never actually collected the cash. We just made people give us their verbal commitments that they do it, always take the cash. And so then we started looking for space and seeing, okay, let's see what we can do. We're smart guys, we can make this happen. And at the same time, Mike Edwards, who was part of the Google group, but he wasn't there to build a startup. He was there because he exited his company and was trying to get back in the community and learn about the ecosystem so that he can become an angel investor, start making investments. He had come on board. He was also one of the founders of Grow Labs. Grow Lab was the reincarnation of Boot Up Labs. So same group of founders came together, the team set it up in a different way and created grow Labs. And GrowLab was in existence for a year prior to that. And we're fast forward now. So this is about February 2012. Mike emails us and says, hey, I've got the space for GrowLab. It's empty for the next three months. What do you guys think about just using this space as the new garage and see if, if you get it off the ground? And we're like, how much is it going to cost us? Like, nothing, nothing. I can give it here free. It's already sitting empty. We're like, okay, yeah, we're not going to say no to that free space. Sweet. And there's about 12 deaths there. So this is the whole story of 1212, 1212. So we started in 2012 with just 12 deaths. We filled them up in two weeks, took that money to Ikea, went to Ikea. So we charged 200 bucks a day. We had 2400 bucks. We went to IKEA, bought 12 more deaths, filled out that space with 30 some odd companies, and then fast forward 12 months later, we had over 12,000 square feet filled here in the new home of launch company, both startups. Does that answer your question? There's a lot more to it in between.

This is a major history lesson for I think a lot of you guys who are listening to us watching this. Maybe you've done two, three startups, something like that. Maybe you've just come to Vancouver and stuff. Like there's a Lot of history in here. And the only reason I let him ramble is because he's my boss. But no, really, I think it's important that Vancouver has its own heritage. Not all of it is about Ray. In fact, most of it, Ray was just kind of lingering around. But there is a history of tech that I think people aren't recognizing here. When we get up on stage at Attraction Conference, something that always kind of is in the back of my mind is where we started from. Not necessarily you or me or anybody else, but Vancouver tech itself. Right. Like six years ago, would we get the CTO of Reddit hanging out with us? It'd be probably be at Steamworks.

Right.

Just knowing where you're coming from, not necessarily is all about being historical, but I think it makes you appreciate what we have now and what we're building towards the future. Just that much more.

And a great time to talk about it because, I mean, we.

Exactly.

We're now six years old and there's waves of change and we're going through one right now with Academy six. We can chat a bit about it.

Yeah.

And this is the internal joke, like, it's launched by 6Launch Academy 6.0. It's because Alex and I, from day one, have kind of been reinventing what Launch Academy is every single month. And so Alex has, like, redrawn the logo like seven different times. And the internal joke between him and myself is always like, all right, which version are we on today? It's 2.0. That's 3.0, 4.0. And the model and the business has changed over time for multiple reasons. One is the ecosystem around us changed and we need to adapt and address things accordingly. But the team has changed. The team has evolved. And again, when it was just myself and Alex, there's only so much two people can do. And then once Sam came on board, okay, we feel a lot more stable. We can actually offer more structured programming. And then now that where the team is today, with the Shade helping me with ops and really leading the community, and Alana taking the reins on all events and marketing, and then Kelsey coming in to do business development, we're able to do so much more and really change the type of the business that we can bring to the market. So what do you hope?

And I get asked this question a lot, so probably easier to just have it recorded. What do you hope Launch Academy and its legacy will be like? What's the point of all this? Because we said from day one, because you, Roger, Jesse, all of you guys Alex as well, all of you guys are working on your own businesses. And the story that I've always told is, you know, you guys are going to become successful with your businesses. So Launch Academy was always a side of the desk thing. That's why we set it as a non profit. But what, what do you hope, like, you know, years from now, what do you, what do you think that legacy of Launch Academy, not necessarily yourself, should be?

There's a bunch of jokes I can crack right now, but to take the serious route route, really, Launch gaming. We set it up as a nonprofit for multiple reasons. One was to try to get access to government funding. Unfortunately, that never quite materialized the way that we hoped it would. Knock on wood, that it changes soon. But the other reason was like, we wanted people to understand that we're not here to con you out of your basement to give up equity to us. We're a nonprofit, we're not taking equity. What you really want you to do is get out of your damn basement and start talking, connecting with other entrepreneurs. Because the only way you're going to really prove yourself and get your company to the next stage is get out there and talk about your startup and start getting shit done. And so Launch Company was always designed to be that nucleus of that opportunity for people to connect with each other, to break out of their bubbles, break out of their shells, cross collaborate, cross pollinate ideas. And it then grew into the nucleus for the community. As investors, both Mike and I knew that whenever you walk into any other ecosystem, there's always some sort of entity that you can go to that can get you instantly connected to the community. Whether it's events happening there on a regular basis, whether it's connecting you to influencers, advisors, mentors, you go to any market, there's something like that. But there's never anything like that in Vancouver. And so we built out Launch Academy to be that space. So moving forward, we really want to see Launch Academy to be that nucleus for the community to be able to help entrepreneurs. And now, more importantly being that the launchpad for Canadian entrepreneurs, but also that landing pad for international entrepreneurs that want to move their company and business here. And so it seems like a bit of chaos on the outside, but there's always a rhyme or reason why we're doing things here and why we're structuring things. It's just we're thinking two or three steps ahead of where we want the ecosystem to be. And so another long story I'm going to try to make short is, is I Strongly feel that there's huge opportunities and potential for Vancouver. But we're up, we're going to come up to a few difficult years here where you've got a lot of companies starting to make headway and a lot of opportunities starting to pop around. But talent is short supply. And you've got big organizations and that are coming into town like Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Salesforce, Sony and whatnot that are hiring up talent, sucking up talent. All good reasons, all good things. I think it's awesome that's happening. It's going to force some zombie companies to shut down. Zombie companies being companies that are struggling along that shouldn't be moving forward. They should kill themselves and shut down and release the talent, Release the talent so they can go do other things or free that entrepreneur up and so let that entrepreneur either go back to the workforce or try something new. But it's gonna also suck talent out of companies that are doing really well and make it harder for them to hire other people. But the flip side of that, it's gonna suck in people from other provinces, it's going to suck in people from other countries. And so it'll naturally start to build up the talent base, but more importantly, it will naturally start to build up the income levels. Because as much as everybody says Vancouver is so expensive and whatnot, relatively speaking, to look at any other major city in the world, you are on par with costs of living in other places. The challenge you have is that the medium income here is too low. You can't sustain yourselves in that type of environment with such a low income. And so when you have people like Microsoft and Amazon increasing the salaries and forcing the startups and other growth stage companies in the space to start leveling up their offerings of how much they're willing to pay people, you're naturally going to bring that income level up. It's not happening as fast as everybody wants it to, but you can't have this rapid growth because that's just going to disrupt the entire market. But that being said, companies of the same potential and nature that are now struggling to meet those salary demands, that same type of company in Austin or in San Francisco or New York would have raised capital from VCs with that in mind. Like, hey, okay, it's going to cost me $120,000 for an engineer, whereas the company in Vancouver said, okay, it's going to cost me $80,000 for an engineer, so I only need to raise 2 million as opposed to 3 to 4 million. Whereas. Exactly. Whereas the other companies in these Other markets would have raised 4 million because that's the cost of them to execute against that plan. And investors have no problem putting that money in as long as you justify why you're doing it. And so the, the Canadian companies in Vancouver are going to start to raise more money because they need to, and the Visas will be fine with that because they need to pay higher salaries to get the talent that they want. So naturally going to see the income level start to go up. But that being said, the next two years you're going to have less and less startups. You're going to have more startup with potential struggling a little bit more. And this is a worldwide problem. It's not just Vancouver, but what's going to happen two years after that is. I don't know about you, but I don't really know many people that want to work at Microsoft, Amazon, Slack or Facebook for 10, 15 years. They want to work there for two, three years. And this is the norm in Silicon Valley. They'll turn over and they'll work for other startups and start to level themselves up, finally get to a position where they get some equity and whatnot. But in order to do that, you have to have a very solid, strong startup ecosystem that can support that. And so if you're an engineer that comes out of Romania and you are working at Amazon on a global skills entry and you're getting your visa and you now you've got Perma Resi and you're playing foosball with somebody else or playing darts or whatever and throwing ideas back and forth and you spark a new idea, you're gonna germinate that idea and start playing with it. But once that idea actually has legs and you're gonna go build a startup, you're gonna quit your job at Amazon, go build a startup. If that support system, that ecosystem, such as Launch Company, does not exist three, four years from now, those people are not going to stay in Vancouver, they're going to go to Seattle, they're going to go to Portland, they're going to go to wherever that market that gives them the resources to be able to execute on that idea and vision is. And so that's why it's important for environments like Launch Academy to stick around and be supported. Even during these times where everybody's trying to focus on these growth stage companies, help them get to the next level. If you're not focusing on the foundation that's underneath and let it crumble, the future is not going to be bright.

We need to be ready for that next wave of entrepreneurs.

And it's a patience game, right? Like it is very much like, very token by now, like entrepreneurship itself, the ecosystem down to the company is very much a marathon. Yeah, I think it was Bradfield who said like a startup community takes 20 years to culminate. So you know, when you started, I don't know if you realize you're signing on for at least 20 years.

Oh yeah, you're right. Well, I have to put explicit on this podcast, I'm handing it over to Alex. So Alex, as I, as I dwindle away and die in the next five years, Alex inherits this and he's going to take over. And then it goes to Sam and maybe, maybe Sade. One day if you prove yourself, you actually listen to or read your Slack messages, you might be able to get in that queue. But one thing I wanted to say though, and that's one of the reasons why launch County 6.0 is what it is because we recognize that there's this challenge of companies in Vancouver are going to struggle, but there's a lot of talent that wants to break North America and there's no better place in Vancouver. But we're targeting companies that already have product market fit, they already have revenues, they are already prepared to be paying those type of salaries because they're looking at relocating to either to SF or to Paris or to London or to Germany or Berlin, wherever. And so they're properly funded to support the set of salaries. So when they come here, their, their cap table or, sorry, their budgets already allocate for salaries of that nature. And so it's not as a significant hit to them. There's a lot more more to this. And, and I know there's arguments on both sides, but for us, that's our thesis that if we can bring in strong, successful companies into North America or into Vancouver to access the North American market, not only are you going to stem that tide of, well, you've got this talent being sucked out by Amazon and what happens to our community? Well, we're injecting new talent, new startups, new opportunities. But as you get into two, three, four years from now, guess what? Those companies are now germinating other people that want to get out and start their thing and it really starts to build a healthy ecosystem.

It's kombucha.

Yeah, exactly. You're fermenting. We're fermenting entrepreneurs.

That's a new one. Startup ecosystem.

Launch Academy 7.0 kombucha condition. And it's funny, we say this because, and I didn't plan this out, but it's just the way things have happened. One of the companies that we brought in, literally right now as we speak, are conducting interviews in the room right behind us. And that's why I'm keeping the volume low, because they're creating Canadian jobs and this is happening as we speak.

That blew us away. Like a lot of other startup visa programs that are working with entrepreneurs, a lot of them are early stage entrepreneurs are just trying to get their ideas together and they're getting funded and, and they're moving to the next steps. Whereas we're working with companies that are more than likely already have product market fit and they're as, they're coming into Canada, as soon as they land here, they're hiring right away. They're like, Bloombase just came back or came three days ago from Hong Kong and they sponsored Traction. They were at the event, they're networking and making business deals and diving right in. So it's not like, okay, we still got to validate our idea. It's like, boom, we know what we need to do, we know we're executing. Let's start ramping up our talent and our team and become part of the community and make this our own.

It takes away that acclimation period for them coming to a place like Launch Academy, where it's like, okay, you're here, here's the deal. This is how we're going to support you. Instead of figuring it all out on your own, coming to a new place.

And that's where I think for us, having the launch pad for Canadian companies, early stage entrepreneurs like helping them understand how to find product market fit, validate your idea, get customer validation, go through the cycles, understand where to network, what type of research.