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[00:37] SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Canada's podcast, the number one podcast for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs.
[00:44] SPEAKER_03: Hi, this is Angela Barnard, calling from Canada's podcast here with Kyle Campbell.
[00:50] SPEAKER_03: He was a founder of CTO.ai.
[00:52] SPEAKER_03: We just had a fun conversation, not knowing whether we should say,
[00:56] SPEAKER_03: this is for entrepreneurs or for developers.
[00:58] SPEAKER_03: The reality is, Kyle is the quintessential developer entrepreneur.
[01:02] SPEAKER_03: I look forward to talking to you today, Kyle.
[01:05] SPEAKER_03: Tell me a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey.
[01:09] SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me, Angela.
[01:11] SPEAKER_02: I'm excited to be here. Happy and excited to share a little bit about my story.
[01:16] SPEAKER_02: My story goes back to an early age.
[01:20] SPEAKER_02: I started getting involved with computers, self-taught software engineer and entrepreneur.
[01:24] SPEAKER_02: I said, actually, maybe it's practical in some ways, impractical in other ways,
[01:30] SPEAKER_02: path to where I'm at as an entrepreneur and software engineer.
[01:33] SPEAKER_02: Ultimately, the reason I started building software was I wanted to create the ideas that I had in my head.
[01:39] SPEAKER_02: Those ideas started out as any young kid, things like mowing lawns, selling lemonade, even the paper boy.
[01:47] SPEAKER_02: Then I started realizing I could do things on the internet.
[01:50] SPEAKER_02: At that point, I had a band and I wanted to be a rock star.
[01:53] SPEAKER_02: I created a website and I started booking bands and promoting shows in my small town in Nova Scotia.
[01:59] SPEAKER_02: I'd see these bands and I'd bring them in.
[02:01] SPEAKER_02: My journey started really early on.
[02:04] SPEAKER_02: I think at that time, because I grew up in a pretty conservative place in the world,
[02:09] SPEAKER_02: a pretty conservative family, my entrepreneurial ambitions was actually an outlier.
[02:14] SPEAKER_02: I put them aside for a while and I really focused on trying to become a software engineer.
[02:20] SPEAKER_02: I found my way into that as a proper profession around the age of 18 in Toronto.
[02:26] SPEAKER_02: I basically just built a website, showed up at a company's doorstep.
[02:30] SPEAKER_02: It said, hey, look what I built.
[02:31] SPEAKER_02: You should hire me without anything on my resume.
[02:34] SPEAKER_02: I got lucky.
[02:35] SPEAKER_02: I found somebody really understood how well I had taught myself how to build software.
[02:40] SPEAKER_02: I did as much as I could to learn from the people around me.
[02:44] SPEAKER_02: It was really fortunate to experience both software engineering and entrepreneurship for some really great entrepreneurs.
[02:51] SPEAKER_02: People like the Campbell brothers, Colin, Campbell and Brett Campbell, no relation.
[02:56] SPEAKER_02: Although that's my father and brother's name as well.
[02:59] SPEAKER_02: In Toronto, they started two cows, a later hostopia.
[03:03] SPEAKER_02: I experienced what an IPO was there about 22.
[03:05] SPEAKER_02: Later on, places like Blast Radio, where I met some of the most amazing software engineers
[03:09] SPEAKER_02: as well as creative professionals.
[03:11] SPEAKER_02: Actually met my wife there.
[03:13] SPEAKER_02: They went on to be a part of my Wonderman.
[03:15] SPEAKER_02: Then I really got back into the experience when I joined a company in the Bay Area,
[03:21] SPEAKER_02: founded by a man named Chris Newman, who's also on my board of CTO today.
[03:25] SPEAKER_02: Chris founded a company called Data Hero.
[03:27] SPEAKER_02: He offered me the sort of mentorship I was needing to really cultivate that interest.
[03:32] SPEAKER_02: He went on to be very successful with that.
[03:35] SPEAKER_02: I took a different path starting a company called Brexley,
[03:38] SPEAKER_02: which was later acquired by Zill Group.
[03:40] SPEAKER_02: Our past recombina CTO today here, where we're trying to bring accessible developer workflows
[03:46] SPEAKER_02: to everyone via Slack.
[03:49] SPEAKER_02: The idea here is that we're trying to make it so that businesses can really benefit from leveraging the software talent.
[03:56] SPEAKER_02: Creating exponential value proposition within their team by making developer tools really accessible
[04:03] SPEAKER_02: natively inside of Slack.
[04:05] SPEAKER_03: So would your clients be Slack users then?
[04:09] SPEAKER_02: Absolutely. Yeah.
[04:10] SPEAKER_02: So especially in this day and age,
[04:12] SPEAKER_02: Slack is sort of where remote communication collaboration is happening more often than not.
[04:17] SPEAKER_02: I spend more time in Slack than I do in any other program.
[04:21] SPEAKER_02: And it's also one of the first things I look at in the morning to understand what I'm going to do to start my day.
[04:26] SPEAKER_02: This is true for many, many people.
[04:28] SPEAKER_02: And at the same time on the site of software developers,
[04:32] SPEAKER_02: there's never been a time where building software in the cloud has been so complex.
[04:37] SPEAKER_02: I remember when I started building software back in the day, it was quite easy relative to today.
[04:42] SPEAKER_02: And so we came to learn that there's about 300 billion lost in software development productivity every year
[04:47] SPEAKER_02: because the tools that software developers use are so complex.
[04:51] SPEAKER_02: And at the same time, companies are having a hard time hiring enough senior talent that they need to keep up with this complexity.
[04:56] SPEAKER_02: So the reason we brought it to Slack was to really level the playing field and make it so even you Angela could deploy a Kubernetes cluster on top of AWS's EKS in about 15 minutes.
[05:07] SPEAKER_02: Because it's great.
[05:09] SPEAKER_02: Just really makes it easy.
[05:10] SPEAKER_02: I know how to do that.
[05:11] SPEAKER_02: That's right. That's right. That's everybody.
[05:14] SPEAKER_02: Everybody who use Slack really benefits from that that ease of use.
[05:17] SPEAKER_02: And so we're trying to rethink what the software developer experience looks like in this new world of remote communication and collaboration.
[05:24] SPEAKER_03: So I'm going to come back to that because I do want to harvest from you a little bit of flow from everything that you just said.
[05:34] SPEAKER_03: But before I do that, I want to go back to you were in Toronto and then you ended up in Silicon Valley.
[05:40] SPEAKER_02: Yeah. So I started my career in Toronto.
[05:43] SPEAKER_02: I did a small spent event, spent in Banff, Alberta as a as a liftee for half a season.
[05:48] SPEAKER_02: And then I found my way to Toronto. Yeah.
[05:51] SPEAKER_02: I found my ways to Toronto to pursue a career. And at that point, I really realized, well, what do I like to do?
[05:56] SPEAKER_02: I do like computers and I'm good with them. So why don't I pursue that?
[06:00] SPEAKER_02: And that's where I sort of found my career start. I lived in Toronto for about five years working at different companies in the hosting industry, as well as companies are building different products and some agencies.
[06:11] SPEAKER_02: And I eventually moved to Vancouver to work for Black Genius.
[06:15] SPEAKER_02: While it was in Vancouver working for Black Redius, I met my wife. I set down roots.
[06:21] SPEAKER_02: And after I worked at Black Redius, as do they were acquired by Wonderman, that's when I was really interested in working for a Bay Area company.
[06:27] SPEAKER_02: But rather than relocating to the Bay Area, I thought it would be smarter to stay here in Canada.
[06:33] SPEAKER_02: And because I'm in the same time zone here in Vancouver, it was quite easy for me to tell a commute in.
[06:38] SPEAKER_02: You know, I traveled down there from time to time to meet the team members.
[06:41] SPEAKER_02: But mostly I was based here in North Vancouver, okay, from home.
[06:46] SPEAKER_03: Well, that's a great, you were a remote worker before remote worker was even a thing.
[06:51] SPEAKER_02: I've kind of always just worked on the internet is the way that I've thought about it.
[06:55] SPEAKER_03: Exactly. Now, I've had the privilege of a little bit of packing on how CTO started.
[07:02] SPEAKER_03: And you you've raised money in the Bay Area, at least in US, is that right?
[07:07] SPEAKER_02: That's right. So when CTO started, what actually I was trying to do was invest into other startups.
[07:13] SPEAKER_02: And what I kept hearing was, I don't want to take your investment money.
[07:16] SPEAKER_02: What I want to do is hire you as a CTO, help us with our software development team.
[07:21] SPEAKER_02: And that sort of led me to this sort of roundabout conclusion that companies are struggling with making DevOps accessible to their development teams.
[07:29] SPEAKER_02: And so at that time, I kind of put the investment thesis to the side.
[07:33] SPEAKER_02: And I said, okay, what can we do to enable this future that we think can exist?
[07:38] SPEAKER_02: And we started off by providing essentially a managed service based business where we bootstrap the business to go to eight figures and revenue and 60 employees over 18 months.
[07:48] SPEAKER_02: It's so profitably never really took on or spent any investor money.
[07:52] SPEAKER_02: But as I was looking to the future, what I really always intended was to build a software company, a product-led company.
[07:59] SPEAKER_02: And what I was trying to do there was validate a couple of things.
[08:02] SPEAKER_02: First of all, can I as a software engineer learn how to tap into a market and sell?
[08:07] SPEAKER_02: And is this a big enough market? Is the big enough market to justify partnering with venture capital?
[08:13] SPEAKER_02: And then the second thing was I was trying to wait until the market caught up to my ideas because I learned from Rexley that I was ahead of the market.
[08:20] SPEAKER_02: And sometimes takes the market to time to write jobs.
[08:23] SPEAKER_02: So ultimately when I felt like the convergence was there, which was a boat last summer, yes, we did go on a fundraising trip to the Bay Area, about three weeks of being in, you know, back to back meetings, came back to Vancouver.
[08:38] SPEAKER_02: I met Stuart Butterfield on the plane, got back into Vancouver and other, you know, many other investors started flying in.
[08:45] SPEAKER_02: And we ultimately ended up closing with seven and a half million USD from Tiger Global Slack, Yale Town, Panache, who are great investors here in BC, along with John Bixby from Stanley Park Ventures, who's also one of my board members.
[09:00] SPEAKER_02: And yeah, and so that really set us up to really invest into the future of what we think the developer experience is going to look like.
[09:06] SPEAKER_03: And can you describe what that developer experience is going to look like?
[09:10] SPEAKER_02: I can try. I think part of the thing about the future is none of us really know.
[09:14] SPEAKER_03: Of course, you're part of the designing the future.
[09:17] SPEAKER_02: That's right. What I would love to see is I would love to see these complex systems, things like AWS or even Kubernetes, like I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of this really powerful and important technology.
[09:29] SPEAKER_02: I'd like to see it sort of faded to the background. And I'd like to see the average individual be able to find a career in building ideas on the internet.
[09:39] SPEAKER_02: And I think with the rise of things like the bootcamp, what we really need to invest into is a more accessible, transparent, and observable developer experience.
[09:50] SPEAKER_02: Because ultimately what we're trying to do is change the face of DevOps, which is thought of as developer operations.
[09:56] SPEAKER_02: And the founding principles of DevOps are ideology, best practices, and tools.
[10:03] SPEAKER_02: And the way I think about it is you take your ideologies or your ideas, you form best practices, and then you immortalize them in tools.
[10:09] SPEAKER_02: When you do that, you deliver that tool to that developer who comes after you.
[10:13] SPEAKER_02: Now you're creating what we think of as a 10x scenario for software development.
[10:17] SPEAKER_02: That's one person who's enabling five other people to be two times more productive because that person can potentially leverage my experience or last 15.
[10:24] SPEAKER_03: You know what? That's the first time I've heard that 10x, right, which is exponential impact, simplified and so simple.
[10:32] SPEAKER_03: So thank you.
[10:33] SPEAKER_02: Well, there's some things here in software development, often some really sort of negative associations with this idea of the 10x developer perpetuated by HBO sitcoms and VCs who tweet about the 10x developer who's this disgruntled person who sits in a corner and just does 10x more work than everyone else.
[10:51] SPEAKER_02: And typically within software teams, that's not the person you actually want on your team.
[10:56] SPEAKER_02: What you want is the inverse of that somebody who's enabling others and taking their experience using that experience to provide a platform for the success of their team.
[11:07] SPEAKER_02: And that's where I've tried to reclaim that term 10x software engineer and reposition it around what I think is a more productive use of how we think about the future of software development because, you know, what I really want is for my son who's three and a half to get to 18 and be afforded those opportunities that I was to
[11:26] SPEAKER_02: participate in this great thing that we have called software development on the internet.
[11:30] SPEAKER_03: Tell me, can you and you might not be able to share too much here and forgive me if I'm wrong, but can you share some experiences of what you're producing on the other end using software development,
[11:41] SPEAKER_03: Slack and those those are tools.
[11:44] SPEAKER_03: What is what are the end products? What are some of your customers and what experiences are they creating?
[11:48] SPEAKER_02: Absolutely. We're a platformer of framework for those development teams to adopt their own workflows.
[11:55] SPEAKER_02: And so the question is what kind of workflows are they building with our products?
[11:59] SPEAKER_02: We have a large and vibrant community of hundreds of developers who join our free Slack group and an ideate on these things and come with different ideas.
[12:06] SPEAKER_02: We're seeing everything from people building a set of tools to enable their support team to look up errors in production system so that they can more quickly respond to customers.
[12:17] SPEAKER_02: We're seeing developers do things where they're automating what's called the continuous integration, continuous development process.
[12:24] SPEAKER_02: So that's the process of releasing software to servers in the clouds that their customers can see the products.
[12:30] SPEAKER_02: I just did a demo of the other day, which was tailored for data scientists and it showed how you can very easily spin up a powerful data science toolkit on top of Amazon in about five minutes.
[12:44] SPEAKER_02: And so that's where otherwise it would have took you potentially weeks of learning on how on all of these specific technologies.
[12:49] SPEAKER_02: So it's quite custom often and this guy is really the limit and how you can use these tools to develop software within your own team.
[12:58] SPEAKER_02: But the general idea is companies are already doing this, but it's quite expensive for them.
[13:03] SPEAKER_02: There's a high cost of ownership for the tools that you need to implement to enable your software developers.
[13:08] SPEAKER_02: And in a business, you're hiring more software developers and often you're hiring software developers that are earlier in their career because that's where there's more availability in the market.
[13:17] SPEAKER_02: So the question you have to ask yourself is how can you refine the tools that they're using to help them be more successful as if they're successful as an entrepreneur you're going to see more value delivered to your customers.
[13:28] SPEAKER_02: So it's quite unique and there's a lot of different ways that people use it.
[13:31] SPEAKER_02: But it generally is focused on streamlining a developer's ability to connect to many different systems and rationalize some complex process in minutes in a shared environment light slack where everyone on the team can learn.
[13:45] SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's how we accomplish that. And now that knowledge transfer is really organic.
[13:50] SPEAKER_03: And is there any particular sector that naturally gravitates to this?
[13:55] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we think of the sector as sort of software development in general, right? So we have people who are in the financial space who are using it for financial pieces of their workflow.
[14:05] SPEAKER_02: They really like the observability and the audit ability of these workflows that are running in Slack. Then they know exactly how people are interacting with their systems and they have a clear audit trail.
[14:14] SPEAKER_02: So there's other industries that we have, you know, like real estate where people are doing things in real estate that have to do with data processing.
[14:23] SPEAKER_02: You know, there's lots of data processing that happens in real estate. And often if something goes down behind the scenes and you don't know it went down again, you don't have that observability.
[14:31] SPEAKER_02: It can be pretty costly for your team.
[14:33] SPEAKER_02: But in other use case that people have, which is in sort of just the general technology sector is they're automating their incident response.
[14:39] SPEAKER_02: So for example, is that data pipeline goes down and you need to wake somebody up at 2 a.m. How do you run that workflow that raises this to the right people as quickly as possible.
[14:50] SPEAKER_02: But also it gives them the context they need to solve the problem and hopefully go back to sleep quite quickly.
[14:55] SPEAKER_02: So there's a variety of use cases. And you know, we looked to refine these over time. We're definitely aiming for development specific use cases.
[15:04] SPEAKER_02: But we don't want to limit the creativity of our users and our customers.
[15:08] SPEAKER_02: And it's sort of a balancing point here between our community and our open source users who are coming in and they're participating and they're sharing these in a public registry where everyone can benefit from it versus our commercial customers who are looking at this through the lens of their specific business.
[15:24] SPEAKER_03: And let's talk a little bit about that because I know in our in our first sort of conversation, you talked really you have a social purpose here as well as the enterprise side of things.
[15:35] SPEAKER_03: Can you just elaborate on that a little bit.
[15:37] SPEAKER_02: Social purpose remind me which one I've got a few.
[15:40] SPEAKER_03: It was maybe we share all of them, but it was I remember you talking about, you know, having that open source, you know, creative platform for people to be able to create outside of a job or an enterprise and not being part of your social purpose is enabling that to happen.
[15:59] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've learned so much about software development. Obviously, I didn't go to university. I didn't even really complete high school. You know, where else when I have learned how to build complex, you know, high tech software other than both there on the internet through these open source communities where people are willing to share their knowledge and their code so that I could read it, understand it.
[16:20] SPEAKER_02: And then find my own way of creating these sorts of things. So, you know, we've done a couple of things that I think are really important.
[16:27] SPEAKER_02: The first is the Slack community that I mentioned hundreds of developers who are in there sharing ideas talking about what they think the future of DevOps and developer experiences.
[16:36] SPEAKER_02: The other is we created this registry and this registry is where people can publish their ideas. Individuals can come in, they can build a workflow around a specific set of technologies. Maybe it's AWS, maybe it's GitHub.
[16:47] SPEAKER_02: And they can publish that into the registry so that other people can very easily access that but also contribute back to it because we have an integration with GitHub and have published many of these examples with from us and our community.
[17:01] SPEAKER_02: So the source code for those are CLI and what is our SDK or we think of as our software development kits are all open open source means anyone can come and read the source code, understand how it works, learn from it or even contribute to it.
[17:15] SPEAKER_02: And we think that's a really great way to build a business because, you know, we're really building this for our users and our customers and that gives them a direct line to influencing how the product and the platform evolves.
[17:27] SPEAKER_03: And how do people find those Kyle are your registry and your Slack community is it membership based or is it open? How do they find them completely open today?
[17:38] SPEAKER_02: So anyone goes to CTO dot AI, land on our website, you know, there's a link on the website called Community, which just asks you for some basic information. We send you an invite and boom, you're into the Slack channel.
[17:50] SPEAKER_02: So you can communicate and collaborate our whole team hangs out there and it's super fun. We celebrate every person who joins with a lot of high fives and hello.
[17:57] SPEAKER_02: We like to say it's the friendliest DevOps community on the internet. And then if they want to get access to the registry, there's also a registry tab on the website where they can click in, browse the different workflows and each one of the workflows will link out to our GitHub where you can actually see the source code that we've written to demonstrate these different ideas and you can contribute source code back there or change the code if you want to.
[18:23] SPEAKER_02: And then the last thing is to actually get access to the Slack application. We're also in this data where anyone can sign up today and install the Slack application.
[18:31] SPEAKER_02: You need to install our CLI and our software development kit and then you can start building your own workflows and contributing those back so that other people can benefit from the shortcuts that you're offering from your creative.
[18:42] SPEAKER_01: Thanks. This podcast is sponsored by eBay Canada. eBay Canada is powering Canadian small businesses go to eBay dot CA forward slash up and running. Chopen your new global e-commerce business.
[18:56] SPEAKER_03: Something I want to ask you about just changing tax a little bit here. You're your base in Vancouver right now. And do you think there's a competitive advantage or disadvantage of being a cover British Columbia Canadian in the in the software engineering field.
[19:15] SPEAKER_02: I'm in the business of turning my disadvantages into advantages. And so I'd be lying if I didn't recognize that there's certain disadvantages in being a Canada, but I think there's also distinct advantages.
[19:27] SPEAKER_02: I think the disadvantages, well, you're not in Silicon Valley up until recently that matter. Now I'm not so sure it matters at all.
[19:34] SPEAKER_02: But even before when you know the natural perception was you can only build a company in Silicon Valley, you know, I really looked at that is something that I wanted to take a contrarian approach to and potentially disprove. I like a good challenge.
[19:48] SPEAKER_02: So what I looked at was what are the benefits of being in Canada? Well, great lifestyle, you know, decent cost of living. You know, we can be a little bit challenged here on the west coast, but a jet broadly in Canada. There's one of the most amazing cost of living, especially relative to what's available to us.
[20:02] SPEAKER_02: Wonderful social programs. And we have things like the shred grants, you know, scientific research and development grants that come back from the government to help stimulate innovation in our in our economy for small businesses where, you know, many people don't know this, but if you're on the bleeding edge and you're you're doing a research and development and you can meet essentially the five criteria that the government lays out for you, you can actually get up to 60% of your R&D costs returned to you in the form of cash money, which you can reinvest in your business.
[20:31] SPEAKER_02: And when you think about it like that, that's a huge advantage. I don't know anywhere else in the world where you can recycle actual cash money from the government back into growing your business at that kind of leverage. Yeah, most places is just credits against future tax offsets. And that's not really a, you know, a stimulus per se.
[20:51] SPEAKER_02: So I think there's lots of advantages like that. I think there's an advantage up until recently, certainly, there's been an advantage around talent as well. You know, there's a lot of people born and raised here in Canada who are super smart, who are quite ambitious.
[21:05] SPEAKER_02: But, you know, there's not as much of a tech presence here to compete in recent years, that's changed quite a bit. And I think what we've also started to see is, you know, people from other places, even from Silicon Valley, whether they're companies or individuals start to get involved in this.
[21:20] SPEAKER_02: And I think that's a great thing to do is to integrate here for those benefits that I described. So I do think that there's, you know, a narrowing lens on that we need to think a little bit harder about what our advantages are here in Canada. But I see very little reason why personally I wouldn't have a home base here in Canada because I take a two hour flight to, well, not right now, but I've taken two hour flights in the morning to San Francisco and back at six p.m.
[21:45] SPEAKER_02: And it's like I'm, you know, commuting from from Abbots for traffic is bad to Vancouver. So, you know, plus you get a meal on the flight and that doesn't hurt you. It's either right.
[21:56] SPEAKER_03: And you can still buy beer and flights. And you can work with Wi-Fi. It's easier. It's better than it came out on the car. And I know you were going to challenge me a little bit or at least we were going to talk about the challenge of culture of entrepreneurship in Canada.
[22:11] SPEAKER_03: And I think our trigger there was, you know, I had the social social entrepreneurship here versus maybe other nations.
[22:22] SPEAKER_03: And perhaps we're not near as competitive as we should be. What are your thoughts on Canadian entrepreneurial culture?
[22:29] SPEAKER_02: I like to say I'm the most competitive Canadian that you may have ever met. I think my family for having a very competitive spirit, April Fool's days were interesting growing up.
[22:38] SPEAKER_02: I think generally in Canada, one of the challenges that we have to overcome is that, you know, I hear from entrepreneurs all the time, like what do you think about building a company in Vancouver? What do you think about building a company in Canada?
[22:52] SPEAKER_02: And that's the wrong question in my mind. I'm not competing with Canadian entrepreneurs. I'm competing on the internet globally.
[22:59] SPEAKER_02: And, you know, I think if that's your perspective, then you really need to step out of the idea of relative approximation when you think about your ambition.
[23:09] SPEAKER_02: I think there's a lot of really ambitious Canadian entrepreneurs, but I think generally we have a lot of entrepreneurs who are also unaware of what big looks like or what scale looks like.
[23:21] SPEAKER_02: And I think they may look at the world like we're competing locally, but I would encourage people to think about it from the perspective of you're competing on the internet.
[23:29] SPEAKER_02: You know, at the same time, I don't worry about competition competition rarely kills businesses. It's usually bad decision making, mixed up priorities, you know, and potentially, you know, poor financial management that typically will ruin a startup.
[23:44] SPEAKER_02: But I think if you want to go out there and compete for funding, if you want to have that advantage over the companies that are built in the Mecca Silicon Valley where they're an hour away at most 15 minutes at best from San Hill Road where there are literally hundreds of DC offices who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
[24:06] SPEAKER_02: And then you need to be willing to get on a plane, you need to be willing to go and have those conversations with the people who have been more successful with you and you need to use that relative approximation in how you set your sights and set your ambitions because I think one of the things that we we don't have as much here in Canada are those high flying outcomes where everybody has, you know, a friend or a colleague who, you know, had options in some successful outcome.
[24:34] SPEAKER_02: And so as a result, you know, people often in Canada just are it's not that they're not ambitious. It's just that they don't understand how close that opportunity is to them. And when they put themselves in Silicon Valley and they see just the, you know, people talk about the dynamic and the culture of Silicon Valley and we will be talking will pull up our phone and we're thinking, who can I answer you to, you know, what do you need? How can I support you with that?
[25:00] SPEAKER_02: There's a cohesion that starts to foster there where it's kind of like a hockey team to make it in Canadian terms, right?
[25:06] SPEAKER_02: The hockey team is competing with the other team, but also the players on the bench are trying to they all want to score a goal. They all want to come back to the dressing room and have the most points. So, you know, they'll pass the puck, but you know, everybody wants to put the puck in the net.
[25:20] SPEAKER_03: Right. And so one of the things I want to bring that back to you named off, you know, Tiger, Panache, you know, some some big name investors here. So there are private investors, investment firms here in
[25:36] SPEAKER_03: Western Canada that when you said those names in our first call, I'd never heard of them. So that might be one of the limitations, right? Is people don't know how to scale or what, what's out there as far as opportunities to scale.
[25:50] SPEAKER_03: Could you touch on that because you were looking at investing in yourself?
[25:54] SPEAKER_02: Absolutely. I think often what happens in Canada, especially in non major markets, so say markets that aren't, you know, Vancouver, Toronto, and I mean, obviously there's more, but let's just stick with those two.
[26:05] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, especially outside of those market, there's typically what I would think of is, you know, large fish small pond kind of scenario where on average, you're going to have a very small number of people who are willing to allocate their capital in a tech capacity because, you know, there isn't, there isn't, you know, we're not top, you know, very outsized returns are small, right?
[26:28] SPEAKER_02: The way venture capital works at the end of the day is you have, you know, 10 companies that you invest in, one of them makes 100 X in other nine fail, like that's generally how venture capital unit, it's, it's, I would like to say it's kind of the poorest unit economics in tech.
[26:42] SPEAKER_02: I think first things first, you have to understand what those incentives are from a venture capitalist, then you have to understand what the incentives are for an angel investor.
[26:50] SPEAKER_02: Now, the thing in Canada is you're going to have an easier access to angel investors often, but there's often less access to venture capitalists.
[26:59] SPEAKER_02: There are strong venture capitalists in Vancouver, in Calgary, and certainly in Toronto, you know, to name a few gale town here, yale town partners, you know, Eric is great over there who's our partner, panache, Patrick lore, who's been involved in 500 startups and, you know, they've made 150 investments around the world, a lot of them in Canada.
[27:19] SPEAKER_02: And then in Toronto, you know, I really love around 13 and Bruce Cochran are doing a cragg over there.
[27:26] SPEAKER_02: There's just really great investors. Now, if you want to get their attention, if you want to show them that you're going to be that outside's return, then it doesn't make sense to stay in the small pond, jump into the big pond.
[27:39] SPEAKER_02: And so this is what I'm saying is like flying down a San Francisco and spending some time down there, you know, under your normal circumstances, you can create a lot of conversations really quickly.
[27:51] SPEAKER_02: We're not only can you draw in interest from people who have invested into the major tech brands and bring with them that experience, you can leverage that experience, just to understand how big of an opportunity you actually have.
[28:04] SPEAKER_02: And often what that will do is have actually increase your perspective, it'll improve your perspective.
[28:10] SPEAKER_02: And more importantly, it'll test your resolve and your confidence about how well you understand your business.
[28:16] SPEAKER_02: So when you come back to Canada and you're speaking to these investors who maybe haven't had that experience, well, if the equivalent of swinging two backs in the, in the batter's box, you know, you're going to be well versed in what are the questions that they're going to ask.
[28:29] SPEAKER_02: And you're going to understand the differences and in perspectives based on the risk tolerance and the capital deployment strategies.
[28:37] SPEAKER_02: These are business like any other business, you just really have to understand what are their interests and where do they position themselves in the market.
[28:44] SPEAKER_02: And what's been very true about VSC is it isn't evenly distributed from a geographical standpoint.
[28:49] SPEAKER_02: So you have to be willing to get on a plane if you want to be successful in building a, you know, business required, which requires investment from angel investors or even venture capitalist.
[29:01] SPEAKER_02: But, you know, beyond that, and that's just the capital side, which I don't want to pretend like that's the priority really what you're looking to do is finding people who have stronger experience than you do that understand what great looks like.
[29:12] SPEAKER_02: You know, I had the benefit of talking to somebody in San Francisco for an hour named Alex Barrett who, you know, don't quote me on this, but Alex is a partner at Red Point, sold a few businesses, you know, very successful at sales force.
[29:25] SPEAKER_02: I think doing something like, you know, billions of dollars in revenue and how often do I get to talk sit down and, you know, talk with somebody like that and see what they think about the business that I'm trying to create.
[29:36] SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's very few of those opportunities that exist in Canada. So I think you're trying to export that ambition, you're trying to export that experience out of these other markets and still come out as just one of them, right.
[29:47] SPEAKER_02: But you're trying to export that and you're trying to bring it back to Canada. And if you're doing that, then you're taking the global, you know, market and you're saying, look, here's how I localize it and apply it to my advantages here in Canada.
[29:58] SPEAKER_03: What does great look like for you?
[30:01] SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, I think personally great looks like auctionality. My personal values are autonomy, purpose, health and family, because I believe that if I have autonomy to pursue my purposes, you know, and as long as I, and I can be able to stay healthy, I'll be a great husband and a great father.
[30:22] SPEAKER_02: I'm really focused on the autonomy purpose piece and, you know, I'm constantly trying to play those into health and family for the long term. I think really long term.
[30:34] SPEAKER_02: What success looks like to me is building a business that is very meaningful that can help software engineers be really successful in their careers.
[30:43] SPEAKER_02: It has that impact of me giving back to people in the opportunities that were afforded to me, hopefully on a much larger scale.
[30:52] SPEAKER_02: And then potentially just personally turning that into an opportunity where I can focus on the things that matter and make bigger splashes and smaller ponds to come back to that that quote.
[31:03] SPEAKER_02: I think, you know, you have to give yourself a bit of hype in this too. I think if you want to achieve those size outcomes, you really have to sort of have that perspective of world domination.
[31:14] SPEAKER_02: You know, it's all I want to joke, well, what's the goal? The goal is to take over the world, you know, sort of pinky and the brain stuff.
[31:22] SPEAKER_02: But that's part of that. It's just setting your sites really high because if you shoot high, you know, you're going to have some relative success.
[31:30] SPEAKER_02: And as long as you're not worried about failure, then you're good to go. I think you just keep keep at it and stay dedicated and you'll find your path to whatever that looks like.
[31:39] SPEAKER_02: I just think you got to check in on it. And that's why the personal values because I try to check in on those in the same way that I do with with company values because it's not just about, you know, it's not just about money and venture path.
[31:51] SPEAKER_02: But you know, that's good business. They need to make their money back, you know, all the shareholders in this business have expectations.
[31:58] SPEAKER_02: But really, you know, what I personally am dragging for is how do I help as many software developers as possible be successful in their career.
[32:05] SPEAKER_03: So shooting for the 10X concept, right? Helping people get to what great looks like for them individually, they're 10X.
[32:12] SPEAKER_03: I think is the takeaway for me and the gift that you provided for me today and hopefully for everybody else that's listening.
[32:19] SPEAKER_03: But so Kyle, your your enthusiasm is infectious. I am not a software engineer.
[32:25] SPEAKER_03: So I'm not likely to jump on the registry, but I'm looking forward to how do we connect with you post podcast.
[32:33] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, happy to have anyone connect with me. I have a personal domain KC like my initials for Kyle Campbell dot IO for Indian Ocean.
[32:42] SPEAKER_02: You can hop on to that. It's a rather outdated blog of different musings that I've shared.
[32:48] SPEAKER_02: I don't think it's been updated in about four years, but from there, there's jump off points to to my slack to, sorry, not my slack to my Twitter to my LinkedIn.
[32:56] SPEAKER_02: And certainly anyone can go to see today, hop into the community and send me a direct message on on slack.
[33:02] SPEAKER_02: Because like I said, that's one of the primary methods I use to communicate with people that I spend the most time with.
[33:08] SPEAKER_03: Well, I'd like to put a beer in your bonnet that your original idea of investing should potentially be put back on the table at some point and we should connect.
[33:18] SPEAKER_02: Certainly, certainly. I'm always I'm always willing to look at good ideas.
[33:21] SPEAKER_02: And you know, with that regard, I mean, if there are any entrepreneurs out there who are doing things in the realm of software development, that's really the area that I'm the most passionate about.
[33:32] SPEAKER_02: I have a broad macro thesis about what the future software development looks like and you know, I talk to entrepreneurs all the time.
[33:39] SPEAKER_02: And I don't look at that as anything more than me being able to potentially help. And if you know, there's a way that I can invest money, I would always really look at that.
[33:46] SPEAKER_02: But you know, really what I'm trying to do is bring like a minded people together and try to share some of my experience that if you know, let's say if this business doesn't turn out to be the big one, maybe there's well.
[33:58] SPEAKER_02: And that's that's a win all around, right?
[34:01] SPEAKER_03: That's a super enthusiastic. Colin, appreciate your competitive nature. Thanks for joining us in Canada's podcast.
[34:08] SPEAKER_02: All right. Thanks so much for having me.
[34:09] SPEAKER_01: This podcast is sponsored by eBay Canada. eBay Canada is here to help. They've been supporting Canadian small business retailers for 25 years and their up and running program is getting Canadian businesses online today.
[34:23] SPEAKER_01: Visit ebay.ca forward slash up and running. Stay local and sell global with eBay.
