This Colombian Founder Left His Dream $200,000 Silicon Valley Job & Moved to Canada [Startup Visa]

So good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. My name is Sam. I'm the VP of Programs here at Launch Academy, joined by my good buddy David. Welcome.

Thank you very much, Sam.

All right, so we're going to learn about your story today.

Let's go. Let's do it.

All right, so we're in studio. It's like we're still getting some tweaks out, so apologies if anything happens, but just some quick housekeeping here. As we're talking, we're sharing Daveed's stories. You guys might have questions for me for Daveed, for whatever. We do have a Q and A, so feel free to use that. And then my team will kind of tag me and we'll try and answer some questions during, but we'll also have time after the whole session to answer your questions. So hopefully if you guys have questions, everybody can get their questions answered.

Sounds good.

All right. All right, so for those that are just rolling in now, want to encourage everybody, this is, this is a two way street, two way or three way conversation between me, you and you guys listening on air. First question we have for you is where are you from? Where are you dialing in from? We will try and make the story more relevant for you guys, but today we're gonna talk specifically about your journey of how you ended up sitting here beside me to just kind of get things started. For those of you that are not familiar with Launch, I'll tell a little bit about what we do and what we've been doing and how long we've been doing it for. And so we are one of Canada's western or one of the Canada's leading hubs in technology in Western Canada. We've been around since 2012, so little story time. This was our logo when we started. I'd like to think that we've modified it a little bit for the better. We started in 2012 and the story goes, 1212, 1212. We initially had 12 members and we went out and got those members desks and we actually made them build the desks as well. And yeah, within 12 months we actually filled out our initial space and we moved to a 12,000 square foot space in Vancouver. Our goal and our mission is really to elevate the ecosystem here in Vancouver, specifically in regards to tech startups. And we've been doing that for the last decade as a nonprofit entity. And so for how all of our services, all of our programs, all of our resources work, generally speaking, there will be some sort of program or administrative fee that helps pay. Obviously for our space, these mics pays for staff, and then we're able to support the community here and the startups here with as many resources as we possibly can. But I don't want it to all be all about us. Want to roll over to you like Daveed, what were you doing in 2012?

In 2012? I was in school. I was in school.

What kind of school?

Just high school in Colombia.

All right. I found this great photo.

Well, that's, that's young David, way older now. So, yeah, I mean I was in school. I was probably in 10th grade. I was mainly coding apps in the Reese's. Like I knew I was going to get into tech.

Right.

So that's where Stories started.

When did you actually like publish your first app? I guess it would be App Store, right?

Yeah. Well, the first apps, I never got to publish them because they were, to be honest, not good. But the first one, it might have been 2013. Okay, 2013. So 2012, I was starting to learn how to develop apps.

Okay.

That's what I was doing.

Did they teach that in school? What, they teach that in grade school or at all?

No, no, no. I think in school it was more about how to use computers in general. Yeah, I was, I went out of my way, out of the way and started learning it on my own.

Okay.

That's how it all started.

And this was in. Where, where in club was this?

Where'd you go? Bogota.

Let's go Bogota. So if you're from Bogota and you're listening to this, shout out to you guys. Awesome. So, so yeah, like you, you, you launched your first app in 2013, but you were still in grade school. So that's pretty cool.

Exactly. Yeah. That's awesome.

That's awesome. So going back to, going back to us. So we, like I said, we started working with startups in 2012, over from 2012 and on next jump I'm going to make is to 2017, which is a significant milestone for a reason that I'll explain in just a second. We did quite a few things actually. We incubated. I think it was something like 300 different companies, over a thousand different projects. Lots of people went through our doors, joined our education programs, joined our in house incubation program. We did a whole bunch of things. Those companies raised a whole bunch of money as well. If you go take a look back, you can see some of our metrics way back in 2015. 2016. In 2015 we also launched our traction conference. So by 2017 we had already done two to three of these. It became known as North America's leading growth conference. We would fly in the best growth hackers in the world, give them a platform to talk for. I think it was 20, 25 minutes and the room's packed. And so people started flying in and noticing us really around 2016, 2017, partly due to the conference, partly due to our growing brand here in Vancouver. At the same time, we started doing trade missions. So this is a picture of me, kind of. I was in Brazil talking about the opportunities to do business in Canada. And we also had an opportunity to bring Brazilian startups over to Canada where we worked with them for, I think it was two plus months, couple of goals. I think some companies were looking to relocate to Canada, some companies were looking to expand their operations, maybe they wanted to hire someone in Canada, and some were just looking for partnerships. Right? And so that was a really valuable experience and ultimately one of the deciding factors and why we decided to participate in the immigration program alongside of course, the government and participate in the startup visa program, which we officially joined in 2017. And we started working with companies and we've built a program called Maple, specifically working with companies like Daveed to help relocate and expand their businesses to Canada. I want to jump back to you real quick and just talk about what you were doing in 2017.

2017.

This is a memory lane. He has no script.

So, yeah, no script. So I have to remember all by heart. So 2017, I was in university. I was studying computer inside computer science, software engineering. But I think 2017, the interesting part about 2017 is that I started being kind of like an entrepreneur. I was building two companies when I was in university. I was building this great app called Vista that helps blind people all around the world. So I kickstart that up during 2017. And then I also had a software development agency. I was creating apps for other people. It was not like a big deal back then, but this is around the time when everything started for me as an entrepreneur.

So let me ask you this. We obviously work with a lot of founders here. What was kind of your motivation to like, hey, I actually want to build something and be responsible for having users, having customers in some cases. What was that like? You were just starting college, right? So what made you want to do that?

Oh, well, that's. That's a great question. I think I've always tried to have a positive impact in the world. And unless you build something big, I think the mark you. You leave, you know, will be as big as your impact is. So that's when you need to start about, hey, maybe I can't do this alone. Maybe I need a place and a time to do this. So that's when I realized it was not just another random project. Right. It was not another cool app that I just developed. Had to kind of, like, build a business out of it.

Yeah.

And also, if you want to make something cool like Vista, it needs to be sustainable. It needs to be something that people can rely on, and it can grow, and it can just become something bigger than itself.

Yeah.

So I guess that's what drove me into actually creating a company and thinking about expanding and going to other places.

And was that kind of like, you built it and they came. Like, a lot of startup stories go, like, you just put it on the App Store and people showed up. Or did you have thought process behind how you're gonna get the word out for people to use it? Because as I understand, Vista is nonprofit, if I'm not mistaken.

Correct. We get no profit from that.

Yeah. So how did you actually get people to notice the app specifically? I guess your users were blind users. Right. Like, they're not gonna see. No pun intended. See the app alone. Right. So how did you get the word out and actually get people to use it?

Well, for me, it was an interesting experience because, a. I'm not a marketeer. I was not good at it, and just regular marketing wouldn't work because, as you said, blind people will not visualize advertisement the way, for example, you would. So what I did was I knew it was a good story to tell, and I knew I want to reach people. So what I did is I started to talk to different newspapers and different magazines and news outlets, and they were interested in the story, and I had to learn how to, like, pitch me my idea to the world. Go. Go and sell this new idea to. To the media.

To the media. So you went kind of traditional PR.

For lack of traditional pr? Yeah.

Newspapers, tv. And this was mostly Colombia.

Correct. Mostly Colombia. We ended up having media all around the world. But at the beginning, yes, it was just knocking doors and, hey, there's. This is my story. This is my product. I want to share it with you. Are you interested? And that's how we got.

And then was it your. Your kind of, you know, pseudo fame with Vista that kind of led you to have actual business that would pay the bills through the agency or how did those two tie into each other?

So I've always, like. People always ask me, like, if you were to charge even just $1 of Vista, you would have X amount of money. The way I see it is. I'm sorry, by developing Vista, I was able to put myself in a different table, is the way I like to see it. If you start to hang around with smarter people, maybe more influential people, that ultimately benefits your other businesses. So my idea was, okay, I'm gonna offer this for free because I believe in it, I want to have positive impact. But even though I was not expecting it, I knew it was going to bring new opportunities, it was going to connect me to new people. And I was just hoping everything would just puzzle together somehow.

Yeah. And you were like, I mean, you were one person, you were still going to school, you probably did some agency projects, you still had an app with users that you were funding. So like, you were pretty busy, Right? I want to draw my attention back to this slide. I want to explain what's happening in this photo here.

Oof. Great memories. So Apple, the company, they have a. They have enough marketing people know who Apple are. So they have these worldwide developer conference in which I would say they bring the best iOS engineers in the world to the conference. And they have a scholarship program. So you would. You had to develop apps and send it to them so that you could apply to be to win that scholarship. So this is, this picture is really important because I. My wife helped me create that app. She took the pictures for it. I created this app that showed how diverse we are as humans and it had really good, cool tech. Apple loved it and I won the scholarship. I was amongst the few, if not the only Colombian that was that won the scholarship that year. So all expenses paid by Apple, I went one week, went to the conference to California. To California, yes. They took me. That's a really, really important kind of like, piece of the story because I really loved California. It was my dream. And they took me to California, all expenses paid. I met incredible people. But not just that this changed my life because from that point on, I got a lot of PR attention. A lot of different people around the world knew who I was and knew that what I was building made sense, including companies like Facebook and just, you.

Know, and that's important, right? Because as. As we get in, we talk a little bit about your dream, right? Like one of your dreams you talked about, you know, when you started building apps, you wanted to make change, you wanted to create change. But I mean, you're still young, you were a teenager. One of your other goals, as we were talking offline, was like this idea of being in, you know, what you thought back then was the best country in the world.

Yeah. So, I mean, California is well known to be kind of like the Mecca for technology. Like, people know Silicon Valleys, you know, a place to be. So for me, as a. As a software engineer was like, I gotta get there somehow. You know, that's the place that I should be. That's the place my companies should be. That's what I thought at the moment. So I was trying to find different ways to land there, which is what people do, you know, trying to come to Canada, trying to go to the US we always try to find the best path for us to get from point A to point B. For me, you know, I guess we're going to talk about that afterwards, but for me, it was about bringing these WWDC scholarship and May and Vista and maybe my software development experience at my other company. And I, like, compress that into something I could use as a key to enter California at the moment. I mean, I even had the flag hand painted on my bedroom wall.

Okay, so it wasn't this photo. I just took that from Matt.

Yeah, that's a random photo, but I did have the California flag hand painted by my wife on my then girlfriend. Then girlfriend. She was my girlfriend back then.

Yeah. Okay. But eventually, like you, you were kind of the poster boy in that sense because your dream succeeded. Right? Like, you, you landed at a company in California.

Mm, correct. Correct. After. After I went to wwdc, I got an interview in New York. I got to talk about Vista. And then even though I applied, like, three years back to multiple internships in big companies like Facebook, of course, they never replied back, but this time they wrote me. They were like, hey, we've seen your work. We want you to come to work with us at Instagram. And I was like, okay, this is. This is a great opportunity to. To go there with a work permit. Yeah, Right. So I just rolled the dice and I. And I said yes, and I became an iOS engineer for the Instagram. Instagram iOS platform, which it was.

It was Facebook by then.

It was Facebook. Yeah, yeah, Facebook as a company.

And then so what? Like, let's. Let's talk tactical for a second. What was the visa you were on?

It was an H1B.

Okay, what does that mean for.

Well, H1B. Visa is your work permit, like the regular work permit that the US has. But to get it, you need to be sponsored by a company. You need to go through a lottery. You need to wait. I waited, like, one year to get it, and after that, you know, you have to be very skilled or educated in order to immigrate with that program. And just that's, that's like the general idea of an H1B.

So I'll kind of just summarize it right? From my understanding of what you just said was like, you had to be skilled, you had to get noticed, and on top of that, you had to be lucky. Right. Because there was a literal lottery.

There was a literal.

So you literally won the lottery.

I literally won the lottery.

Okay. Okay. So, so then you, you dropped into Instagram or Facebook.

Mm.

What was the whole experience like? Right, like your dreams coming true. You got. You got the beach every day or whatever. I guess it wasn't. It was NorCal, right?

Yeah.

But still, it was just your dream coming true.

So, I mean, of course it was amazing. Like, I guess the most kind of, like, beautiful part of it, the one that I liked the most was I just met a ton of smart people. It was like a life changing experience. Of course, you know, working for a big tech company kind of like changes your resume, you know, night to day. But, you know, also it was. I think I. I thought it was going to be better. You know, I thought it was going to be even more awesome. The country by itself was good. Silicon Valley was probably not what I expected, but it was, it was a nice place to be. But generally just. I learned a lot because I knew software engineering. But then when you work at these companies, you learn how to build for billions. Every single decision you make from the copy you use as a text in an app has so many implications. So I learned about creating apps that are massive. And I guess that prepared me to have my own app with a lot of users.

But to be kind of clear, like, at this time, you couldn't really build too much on it because you were that.

Correct.

H1B.

Correct. So part of the H1B is they don't want you to be working on anything else other than the company that sponsors you. Gotcha. You can't get money from hobbies or any other stuff you might want to do. You can't build your own company. You can't work for other companies. It's super restrictive.

So you can't sell T shirts on the weekend or.

No, I mean, there's like a. I don't know the number, but it's. If you make more like 500 bucks per month, it becomes a business.

Right?

So it's. Yeah, you sell 10 T shirts and you can't. You can't do It. No more.

Okay, and what did that mean for your agency, for Vista?

That, that what that meant was I had to put things on hold.

Okay.

Everything was frozen or updates were not coming out. You know, I was, I was, I had to leave this live and I was expecting I would be able to go back to that as soon as I got like something like a green card or some other form of immigration paper that would allow me to work on them, but it was not easy and that was not the case. And I guess that's when everything started to. Felt to feel a little bit more rocky. I felt like I wanted to do what I really love to do.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, I like, I like Facebook and Apple as companies that I might use, but I just don't share their vision if I have to build their product. Product forever. Right. I'm the type of person that wants to build his own thing and work with a team that I feel close to and we all have a mission to build something cool. Yeah. Maybe not. Not. Not Instagram.

Yeah. Okay. So, so eventually you kind of got, I don't want to say tired. I want to put words in your mouth, but you decided to move on from Instagram. But. But you gave it a shot with another company that we're all very familiar with. And kind of the reason we're here today. Right. Is you end up joining the Google team or YouTube specifically.

Right? Yeah. So I joined. I was going to leave Facebook and I wasn't going to start working on my things. But then Google approached me with the opportunity of, hey, we've seen what you've been doing at Facebook, Instagram, why don't you come and work with us? And I guess at that time I thought like, if I'm really not going to work again for a big tech company, might as well learn and check the other big company out there, which is Google. Might as well be like, okay, I've been through both and just know that it was not the company, was not Facebook. That made me feel maybe not like Field and maybe like dreams accomplished.

Yeah.

So I wanted to just give it one more try and be like, okay, I'll put my projects in on hold one more time and I'll try it out at Google. And you know, money aside, I just wanted to see, okay, this is what people, all software engineers talk about.

Yeah.

Working at Google, it's awesome. Personal, not my experience, but, you know, that's all long story.

Right. So you kind of give it another shot. It still, I guess, wasn't satisfying you to Some degree. And that forced you to look at kind of your original dream of like, you know, you've been planning for years, you look at the mural on your wall, all that kind of stuff. And I might add the fact like your partner at this time was not living in California with you.

Right?

Like you guys were separate. So what kind of pushed you to actually. And the reason, obviously we're having this conversation and the title of the webinar today is like, what kind of push it to look as Canada as a destination. Because I think behind the scenes we were talking Canada was not, not. It was not on the list of things that you wanted to do.

Yeah, well, what, what happened there was, I guess one of the most important things was immigration. Immigration in the US I would dare to say it sucks. It's not good. I mean, there's opportunities out there for different types of people. I'm sorry, but I wanted to be with my partner. I wanted to bring my family, I wanted to bring my brother, my mom, my dad. And what Google lawyers said was, yeah, it's easy for us. We'll get you a green card. It will take X amount of years. We're gonna wait until you're a citizen. That takes X amount of years. And then we can start the process to apply for your families, kind of like pr, so citizens green cards. And that's going to take X amount of years. So we were looking at decade, more or less. And I was like, dude, that's insane. You know, I wouldn't want to be in Silicon Valley if it means I have to be by myself, if it means I have to surrender on so many things. And you know, bear in mind that I think the idea of Silicon Valley is roman romanticized because it's not like you meet tech people to every Starbucks. That's just not the truth. You meet people because you sign up for events, for meetings, for XYZ. And you can do that even without paying, paying $3,400,000 to live in Silicon Valley. So a, it was not, it was not powerful enough. It was not beautiful enough to, for me to make that decision of, yeah, you know what? I'm gonna wait 10 years by myself.

And you were already on like year two or three.

I was in almost. Yeah, three years in. Yeah, three years in. So it was like a 13 year wait. It didn't make sense. And then, you know, to your question about why Canada? So I started Googling. Of course I wanted to stay in the North American market because I mean, for the viewers out there, North America for us was a really like most of our users were here in, we're here in North America, are here in North America and you know, it's the place to be for us as a business. I didn't want to leave so I started googling like, hey, what's, what's a way for me to stay here at that time, the US without having to work for these big tech company. What's, what's other immigration options I have.

Yeah.

And they were not that good.

Yeah.

So Google and I stumbled upon this Canadian immigration website.

Yeah.

And it had a beautiful title. It said startup visa Program. And I felt like that was me. Like I'm a startup, I want to immigrate, I need a visa, I need a visa, I need to do my things. And that's when these beautiful piece of immigration came up and I started just, you know, before we, we dive in, into this, that's when I started to research into Canada as a country. For many people out there, it's like, oh, it's just snow. Oh, it's not like the U.S. oh, there is no like real benefits compared to the US but once I actually kind of like investigate about the country was it offered everything that the US had, you know, even the same fast food restaurants, it had the same highways, it had the same products. I love, it has Best Buy. I love Best Buy.

Best Buy in Chipotle.

And there is no Best Buy in Chipotle. There's not like snow all year round depending on where you move. I went for Vancouver, which is a two hour airplane to Silicon Valley more or less. So I could still go to my meetings. I can. And it was just a nice place, nice weather. So I was like, okay, let's research this startup Visa.

Yeah. And this is a screenshot for those that are looking at our slides that our team actually made. Just comparing the startup. These are program itself versus I think what's most comparable in the US and stuff that you were, you were telling me beforehand like you looked at this. The initial investment required was a large sum of money. We're looking at $250,000. And I think you, you zoomed in on the last one. Here is the no clear path to green card or citizenship. Right. Like you were talking about 13 years versus, you know, when you're talking about permanent residency to start a visa, you're looking at 16 to 20 months and then within five years you can get citizenship.

Correct.

Right. And that to, to you that was a big deal.

Yeah. I mean for me it meant I Can't move. I can move to that country, and I can bring my family with me. And I. I think it's not here, but when you. When you go with the startup visa, there's something called. Whenever you have a work permit, there's some permanent residency. You. There's something called a super visa that lets you bring grandpa, grandma, mom, and dad almost immediately. So, like, processing times is just like a visitor's visa.

Yeah.

So what that meant was I can move to this country and I can actually make it home, because home for me is a place where you can bring your family whenever you want. That's home for me. And I mean, looking at the numbers, when I was doing my research, there was another investors program in the US and you were looking at half a million dollars for cities like Detroit. Detroit. Or like $1 million for cities in California or New York area or something like that. So, I mean, as an entrepreneur, many entrepreneurs out there know that you can't just burn half a million dollars just because of immigration.

I don't think there's too many people out there that. That can just pick up and do that.

Yeah. There. It's just. There's no way. There's no way I could have done that. And also, if there's no clear path, it's like, you're not. You're buying nothing. You're just giving the US Your money. Yeah. So it felt. It felt nonsense. Whereas the Canadian startup visa program felt like it had way more benefits.

And one of the things that we had talked about earlier was like, you know, obviously we're fast forwarding a little bit, but when you came here, you could immediately come with your partner, correct? Yeah, immediately. So that was a huge part. Just to dive really quickly and sidetrack your story a little bit, because I know people are gonna ask questions about Startup Visa. Just a couple of quick guidelines, and I'm not gonna read through everything, but I wanted to make sure that you guys have the slides on here. A big part of how the Startup Visa program works is there's two components. There's a work permit component, which you're currently on. And then, of course, the end goal of the startup Visa program is the PR that you receive within 60 minutes. Which we're still waiting for.

Correct. Right.

But to do that, one of the big things is you require a letter of support from what they call a designated organization. There's three types of organizations that can write those letters of support. That's all gonna be on the government website, and I think on our Website, we have the link directly that gives you that whole list. So not just us, obviously we're one of them. But with venture funds that do support, they need to invest 200,000 into your company. Angel investors, if they're on that list, they need to invest $70,000. And if it's an incubator accelerator, the participant needs to be an active participant in that incubator's program.

Correct. Which is the route I, which is.

The route you ultimately took. Speaking of the requirements for it. Obviously it's meant and it's targeted to people who have startups, AKA technology companies. Let's just kind of overall kind of wrap it that. But immigration wise, each of the co founders and you can have up to 5 must pass that IELTS English exam. Right. Level 5 in either English or French. I know there's French speaking people out there as well as you need to meet their requirements for personal funds, that's about $32,000 for a couple. And then of course all the regular immigration requirements like criminal record checks, health checks, fraud history, things like that. From the company perspective, and this is the last one I'll kind of talk about in terms of the requirements for Startup Visa is the company must be owned by the founders that are applying. Each of them must own a minimum stake of 10%. Together that group needs to own over 50%. And of course the company needs to demonstrate that the Canadian company owns the IP or somehow direct control over it. In your case, the company that you, you applied with Domova, which is surprising. We're half an hour in, we're only talking about the MOVA now. You, you own that completely?

Yes, I own the mova.

So, so that, that, that, that kind of was like checkbox, checkbox, checkbox for you. Right. And then you kind of found us, right? How did you find us?

Well, the government website for the startup Visa program has a list of what we were talking just about, just, just, just now about designated organizations. Right. And you can see who's an investor, who's an incubator, who's a whatever. So what I did is I filtered out by what for me made the most sense. I want to build products that help people. So I know investors are somewhat, somewhat resilient.

Investors like helping people too, but they prefer making money.

Making money? Yeah, it's a business, it's, it's purely business for them most of the time. Whereas if I went with the incubator route and I participated in a program, I could keep control of my company and I could still apply for the startup Visa. So I filter out incubators and then I found about Launch because A, they were amongst the few incubators in the Vancouver area, which has nice weather and it's close to the Pacific coast, which is what I wanted. And B, coming from Vista and from not making profit from my users, it made a lot of sense that Launch was. I think they're the only ones, the only nonprofits that kind of like met my criteria. So, you know, the program looked cool. Everything looked cool. So as soon as I saw Vancouver nonprofit, no percentage, they wouldn't take equity of my company, it check, check, check. Then I went to their website and I started watching Samson's videos explaining what is and what not is the startup Visa program. What's Maple, which is a program, the program I eventually joined, which is, you know, kind of like the. The incubator program that taught me how to be a Canadian business and how to thrive here, which I think it would be better if you talk about it yours.

Well, I'll mention a little bit. Right. But the impetus for us, I think, for starting Maple was very similar to our overall mission of Launch, which was we really wanted to see the ecosystem specifically in Vancouver. But over time, as I kind of told the story, our reach became first cross national and then global. And then we started working with different companies in different countries. But we wanted to raise the level of entrepreneurship and technology that was being created out of here. And Maple was a very kind of obvious decision because while we were doing a lot of education programs, we also knew that for us to become a global hub, we needed other perspectives. And Maple allowed companies that wanted to enter North America, but we also wanted them to bring their international experience. Whatever country you happen to be from Colombia, we have companies from 39 different countries that are kind of going through this program. And that to me was very interesting because all of a sudden, everybody in the room just gained 38 other countries experience.

Correct?

Right. And so with Maple, of course we wanted to help founders like yourselves and help them expand their business and whatnot. But we wanted to be like, okay, we want to move you here and we want you guys to build global businesses. Right. And the only way to do that is you, as founders will have learned, is the networking effect. Right. Like it's a matter of who you know and what doors you can get in. Right. Like you talked earlier, you know, you getting into WWDC really opened your doors to get into those big tech companies. Right. It's very similar when you're trying to approach Global business. Right. If you don't have an in into X country, it becomes difficult. So we didn't want to just be an in to Canada. We wanted, you know, U2P the launch pad, for lack of a better term, into wherever you want to build. And so really that's the design of how our Maple program works. Of course, like we have specific requirements for our program as well. One is we generally work with companies that are already, their product is already in market. So it's not too many pre revenue companies. In your case Damovo already had thousands of users using their app, paying your services, things like that. You do have to be financially stable and we're going to talk a little bit about cost more at the end. But generally speaking that means either A, you have revenues or B, you've raised funds to kind of tie you over. Because like the spoiler alert is it's not this entire venture, with or without us, is not cheap. Yeah, exactly right. It's going to have costs related to it. Of course for us, we want people that are focused on expanding their existing business into North America, but like I said, really with a global minded mindset, of course they have to participate in our entire program. And then we do have a program feed throughout the course of the program that rounds off at about $40,000 Canadian generally. The timeline, again I'm not going to break down these details because they're all on our website. The general milestones are within about three to six months. You're getting your company incorporated in Canada and this is done virtually with us with our programming. You're also getting a letter of support. You're applying for your work permit and by seven to nine months you're usually applying for your pr and you're on your way here regardless because you're allowed to come here with your work permit. But everything immigration wise should be settled by the time that you're landing here and working out of our offices and we continue to work with the companies like yourselves. You're currently in phase five of the program, well beyond when all your immigration stuff has been filed. And you're waiting because we know as we're gonna talk about in just a sec, there's further support needed for your business, but kind of going back to your case. So you started going through our program, when was that? Like 2020.

2020.

Yeah, 2020. Those listening, anybody know anything else happened in 2020? Of course, like we ran headfirst into a pandemic. Right. And so I know when we first started talking with you we're like, great, you're in the States. You should be able to get a work permit fairly quickly. Super quick, super quickly. That didn't exactly happen. Right?

Yeah, I know.

So like walk us through like what 2020 and 2021 looked like for you.

Yeah, well, for me, a was stressful. It was not a.

It's not a pleasant time.

Yeah, it was not a pleasant time. But for me, even, even during COVID it was. It was not like a long time, but for me it was. I started the program with Launch Academy. I guess what I really liked was that phase one was Launch Academy kind of like giving these webinars and this content that gave me the opportunity to make my decision of whether or not I wanted to be in Canada. If my company made sense in Canada, which is, I mean, big shout out to, you know, for breaking up the whole Maple program in different phases. Because it. As an entrepreneur, it was helpful for me to know what I was kind of like going into every time. But yeah, 2020 for me was just phase one of the Maple program. I started kind of like learning about having a business in Canada. And by, by phase two, I applied for my work permit from the U.S. the wait time should have been like three weeks, two weeks. But because of the pandemic, we had to wait like one year, one year and a half, which was insane. So I had to keep working at, you know, what I was doing, full time job. I had to just find a way to grow my company without being able to work on it. So it was just like a weird experience in which I just wanted to leave. So what I ended up doing was I went back to Colombia, I left the US and then back in Colombia I could start building my company. So during the different phases of the Maple program, I was creating my bank accounts here in Canada, I was incorporating my business. I was. The Launch Academy has a really, really good network of immigration lawyers, corporate lawyers, even people working like at banking. So I was able to do everything remotely. Building a business was not that difficult even during these times. And I just started working on my app. I started working on Pineapple, which we haven't talked about it, so I'm just going to plug it here. Pineapple is an app that lets you build your own apps without having to code. So no coding experience required. Kind of like Squarespace or Wix, just to create mobile apps. It's available on the iOS App Store and now we're launching on web for our web platform. So you will be able to access it everywhere. So that was 2020, 2021 for me. Just immigration stuff and all of that.

And just quickly, on Pineapple, one of the special things about your, your no code app is that you don't see their data. It's secure for them.

Correct. So with, I mean, I worked at Facebook and Google, so I know how important data is, but that's exactly what I want. Why I wanted to build something that was my own. Me and my team, you know, big shout out to Daniel and Mashu. We've been working on trying to build an app that is 100% respectful of the user's privacy whilst still having growth and providing you with the best features we can. So, yeah, we track nothing, we know nothing, and even if we know something, it's disclosed by the user, so no tracking. And we really trust about humanity behind tech.

Yeah, that's super fair. So Pineapple Build will give you that plug. I saw somebody put it in the chat as well. Thank you to those guys. Just quickly, I know somebody's asking specifically a question about Maple and Launch. What are the first two phases of the five phase Maple process? So you can see on the chart I have, the first phase is really focused on bringing you information from different lawyers, from different business perspectives, how to handle your global accounting, how to incorporate your business as a Canadian business in alignment with startup visa program or whatever immigration path you choose. And then phase two is all about roadmapping and building out your plan.

Right?

In Daveed's case, he built a plan, then he built a second plan. I think we were joking. He built like six plans. We were on like plan G or something because, because of COVID because of setbacks and different things like that. And so we, our team works with each company, each, each person's design is a little bit different. And that's why you see on this timeline, there's, there's variations, right? They're not set months because some companies are really busy and they need this whole six months to complete this process. Other companies really put this as a priority because maybe they're being roadblocked, being in whatever country they're in, they want to prioritize this, they finish it in three months. And so that's why, like, with the design of the program, we want to fluctuate and we want to work for those in case scenarios, right? Like what we always, and as founders ourselves, like, what we always deal with is you want to hope for the best and you prepare for the worst, right? And in this case, like, we've definitely seen a lot of worst case scenarios, primarily due to Covid, but I'm happy to kind of say, like, most of our companies have landed on their feet. Working together. Right. Is not anything that anybody on our team did specifically. Um, but. But we are very hands on with our companies.

Yeah. And, you know, looking at this chart, there's something that I want to talk about. You know, let's make it fun. Let's make it sound fun. What you're looking at is in four months, you could be applying for your work permit, which in, under normal circumstances, should take no more than three weeks. Again, we don't know how processing times are at the moment in each country, but what you're looking is at a six month time.