He sold SkipTheDishes for $200M—then grew Neo Financial to a $1B valuation. | Jeff Adamson, Co-Founder of NeoFinancial & SkipTheDishes

Jeff Adamson co-founded SkipTheDishes, scaled it to 80% market share, and sold it for $200M—all before Uber Eats and DoorDash even got serious about Canada. He started with zero tech experience, got doors slammed in his face by restaurant owners, and had to personally place orders just to keep early partners engaged. Then, when Uber Eats launched in Toronto, backed by billions in funding, he thought it was over.

Instead, Skip became Canada’s dominant food delivery platform and got acquired for $200M.

Then Jeff did something even crazier—he decided to take on the banks.

With Neo Financial, he’s tackling Canada’s most entrenched industry, building a modern, full-stack digital bank from scratch. He's raised $100s of millions at a $1B valuation.

Why you should listen:

• How bootstrapped SkipTheDishes took on $10B UberEats 
• How to build a three-sided marketplace.
• Why building trust with customers is key to long-term success.
• Why beginnings are always messy and more about grit than perfection.
• Why Jeff didn't stop after exiting for $200M.

Keywords
SkiptheDishes, Neo Financial, entrepreneurship, delivery service, startup journey, market competition, founding team, restaurant industry, business growth, feedback loop, three-sided marketplace, startup journey, Canadian startups, entrepreneurship, financial services, exit strategy, partnerships, growth strategies, advice for founders

Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:00) Gotta Have Thick Skin
(00:03:54) Skip's Origin Story
(00:07:18) Competing with Uber
(00:16:09) The First Few Restaurants
(00:22:45) Initial Demand
(00:26:28) Three-Sided Marketplace
(00:38:38) The Original Mission
(00:52:10) The First Year at Neo
(00:58:40) Product Market Fit
(00:59:55) A Piece of Advice

Chapters

• 2:00 Gotta Have Thick Skin
• 3:54 Skip's Origin Story
• 7:18 Competing with Uber
• 16:09 The First Few Restaurants
• 22:45 Initial Demand
• 26:28 Three-Sided Marketplace
• 38:38 The Original Mission
• 52:10 The First Year at Neo
• 58:40 Product Market Fit
• 59:55 A Piece of Advice

Transcript

Jeff Adamson (00:00:00):

None of us were really afraid of getting told to screw off. We went out and we got a lot of feedback really, really quick about what people cared about. People will expect there to be this moment where you really feel like you made it. We honestly never felt like that. Yeah, I think of course you look at what's being done, you try to learn from what works and what doesn't work, but at the same time you're like, what's going to be different? What's the nuance? What're the things that you have to unlearn or throw away based on what other people are doing? FinTech is actually more of an art or science of integration and orchestration across other people's technology than it is a real science and art of building your own tech. 

Previous Guests (00:37)

That's product market fit, product market fit, product market fit. I call that the product market fit question, product market fit, product market fit, product market fit, product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:48)

Do you think the product Market Fit show has product market fit? If you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone, you have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you.

Well, Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff Adamson (00:01:03):

Hey, great to be here, Pablo. Thanks for having me, man.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:05):

Well, I'm really excited. I mean, you created- I'll share a little story actually just to start, and I've shared this before, but I don't think I've told you. So you guys started Skip the Dishes, which is let's say the UberEats of Canada, right? And when you started in 2012, my co-founder and I were exploring things to build, and one of the ideas we had separately was this idea of a delivery system for restaurants we had come back from Argentina, Buenos Aires. Everything was able to be delivered. Nothing was ,here. So obviously quickly we learned about Skip. We went out and we were like, let's test it out, right? Validation, lead, startup, whatever. We're like, let's just test it out. So we went out. Actually, Lee went out. 10 different restaurants knocked on some doors and tried to pitch this, and he came back and he's like, dude, half of them shut the door in my face. Two of them told me I was an idiot. One of them said, maybe. We're not doing this, man, you guys, it clearly worked out. We got the wrong message. But anyways, thought I'd start things off with that story.

Jeff Adamson (00:02:00):

Yeah, you know what, you gotta have pretty thick skin. I think to work in the restaurant industry regardless of where you're working, whether that's front of house, back of house, selling into restaurants, building tech for restaurants, it's such an operationally challenging business to be in. And I think you probably heard this before as well, Pablo, but a lot of that ability to go from zero to one is that naivete that you have. You just don't know how hard it's going to be. And I think we were fortunate that growing up in Saskatchewan, a lot of the founding team at Skip was a lot of ex-athletes, aspiring athletes, perhaps weekend warriors. So they were used to a lot of maybe the pain, and they're used to failure, but they're also used to getting back up again and not really letting that prevent them from moving on.

(00:02:50):

And I think that really helped. But I mean, man, the number of times I got doors closed on me, restaurants, I mean, it's such a passionate business though. The restaurants are just grinding so hard to make ends meet, and everyone kind of thinks like, Hey, if you own a business, you're probably doing pretty well. And there's so many restaurants, so people think restaurants are millionaires, but at the end of the day, most of them are barely paying themselves. So I can understand why they are kind of frustrated when someone's trying to sell them something and they're just like, man, I'm trying to make payroll.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:27):

Exactly.

Jeff Adamson (00:03:28):

So kudos to you for trying though, man.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:30):

They don't have time for that 20-year-old with startup ideas trying to get something going. It’s just not top priority for them. So walk me through that. I mean, how does Skip the dishes get, because I call it the Uber eat of Canada, which is kind of unfair. I think you were before that. What's the origin story there? Who has the idea for Skip and how do you guys get that off the ground?

Jeff Adamson (00:03:53):

Yeah, so we knew one another, the founding team. We knew each other from university. We all went to the University of Saskatchewan, and we were, for the most part, university athletes, Chris and Josh Simair, were on the track and field team. The older brother Dan was a volleyball player on the Husky volleyball team. Andrew Chau is actually the odd man out, although he's- I call him an intramural league basketball player, and he's actually pretty good, but we all knew each other from university. And it was actually Josh, he was working in London at RBC capital markets. And I think that the way that Josh works, he's always absorbing what's going on around him. And one of the things, if you work in capital markets, these people are extremely efficient, driven, working a ton, working on really, really big opportunities. And I think what he saw was that a lot of people were using a lot of time saving services, and that could be on demand, dog walking, on demand, dry cleaning, it could be getting car services everywhere. They're just literally setting up their lives so that everything is focused on work. And Josh was like, well, hey, what are the other things that people are doing? Cooking takes up a lot of time in someone's day, plus getting groceries. So a lot of these bankers were actually just ordering food delivery constantly. And London is such a big city, London, England, that there's so many restaurants that offer delivery, but back home in Canada, there really wasn't a service that could do this. Certainly not a nationwide one. And there was all these mom-and-pop little delivery companies. It might be five or six in every single different city, but the websites were like, there's no online ordering. It was like a PDF that you would click, and then you'd have to call the delivery service and then they would call the restaurants. So it was just a very fragmented, not very much tech being used.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:50):

I remember you could order more alcohol by delivery than food in high school, at least in Ottawa, in my city

Jeff Adamson (00:05:57):

Yeah, probably getting it crossed over the border from Quebec probably, right?

Pablo Srugo (00:05:59):

Yeah, that's right. That's right. 

Jeff Adamson (00:06:01):

So yeah, we kind of looked at it and we were like, listen, there's not a lot of tech being used. It's a country where it's cold most of the year, and so people don't want to go outside. We figured that the market would be big. And we were like, we don't know anything about tech, we don't know anything about restaurants, but we figured we can learn this stuff. And that was the opportunity that we saw. And it's funny, Pablo, you say about UberEats offence taken that we're being compared to being the Uber eats of food delivery, but UberEats first market was Toronto, and I remember when they launched Toronto, we hadn't even raised a dollar a VC money at that time and just thinking we're completely screwed.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:36):

What year was this?

Jeff Adamson (00:06:37):

I think it was 2014 perhaps when UberEats launched, and they're again- global launch market is Toronto.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:45):

Oh my God.

Jeff Adamson (00:06:46):

And you got, it's almost like the Eye of Sauron I dunno if there's any Lord of the Rings listeners out there, but all of a sudden it was shining on us and I'm thinking they've raised 10 billion, they're the most popular startup in the world and they're launching in our home market. So it definitely got real at that point.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:05):

Well, it's existential because you also would think at the end of the day they have infinite capital and they're known for subsidising like crazy, so they'll just give it all away. And then what's left for us? we actually have to make money. If you haven't in your bootstrap.

Jeff Adamson (00:07:18):

I will say one thing about Uber though, and that is that they were a great competitor. They didn't turn the market upside down as much as DoorDash did. Actually. I found that DoorDash, again, also a great company, great competitor, but I felt like I had a deeper respect for the Uber and UberEats team. And the reason I say that is they didn't drop the bottom out on the market. They didn't go around just offering everything for free to everyone and then just kind of burning all their VC money on just food delivery. They actually had pretty responsible economics they were creating- again, it depends on who you are, but I felt like they were fairly fair deals with the restaurants. They had food delivery fees that were sustainable. Doordash was a little bit different. Once they started focusing on Canada, they would go and offer restaurants to have, what we were doing for 25% commission, they would just do for free. That really kind of devalues what you're offering now, someone's doing it for zero. So they kind of dropped the bottom mode on the market and it was tough to adapt to. But Uber was a really, really great competitor and one that I really enjoyed. They made us better.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:22):

And so going back to the beginning, so there were four co-founders, five cofounders?

Jeff Adamson (00:08:25):

There were five, there was three brothers, Josh, Chris and Dan, and then Andrew Chau and myself.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:30):

And first of all, why structure it that way? How did that happen? I mean the normal thing is two or three maybe the siblings just keep to themselves, don't even bring you guys in. How did that kind of play out? And also it seems like you guys actually maintained five. Normally if you start with five, you end up with two or three and a bunch of issues in between.

Jeff Adamson (00:08:46):

Yeah, it's funny because a founding team, there's so many things that need to go to keep a founding team together and so many things will go wrong. That is the one thing for certain. So I think having three brothers I think would've been an interesting dynamic if it was only three the whole time. Because then it's brothers. I mean, I don't know if you have a brother Pablo, 

Pablo Srugo (9:06) 

I do

Jeff Adamson (9:07)

You know how to gauge all these nerves, you know what I mean? And so I think that having someone who's not a family member is also helpful because, and this is something I kind of believe in when it comes to doing business is: you never want to have to make a choice between your close friends, your family and the business. And I think that me not being a member of their family was a lot easier for me to say what needs to be said and to say the thing if you know what I mean. So I think that helped. It certainly wasn't easy because you've got more voices in the room, but I think we all knew what our swim lane was for the most part. And even though we're intensely competitive, there wasn't too much of an ego between us. I would never be getting into product and saying, you guys don't know what you're doing. This is how you should be doing it. And for the most part, when it came to building up the supply side of the marketplace, that was kind of the area that most people felt like I was able to own. And if I needed support, I was glad to take it from the other people on the team.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:07):

And so what is kind of the first move? Josh has this idea to bring the sort of delivery systems that you have in big cities like London to Canada? Where do you guys start?

Jeff Adamson (00:10:16):

Yeah, what they did was they, and Josh was definitely the first one who took the leap here. He left an extremely well paying job in London, came back to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, got his brother Chris, who was working at Cameco, which is a uranium mining company. They coded the first version of the website. But even before that, some of the wireframes actually, we went out and we had an iPad, and this is actually right when the iPad came out. So people were just stoked to see an iPad. And we actually just had a wireframe of the website. It wasn't even a functional website, it was just taking out a sketch and showing them and saying, Hey, this is what your menu would look like on SkiptheDishes. They would want to hold the iPad because it was a cool thing at the time. And then they would go to tap on one of the buttons that didn't work and accidentally swipe over to the next photo of Josh and his dog or something.

(00:11:05):

So obviously we had to work on the pitch a little bit, but I think the lesson there, Pablo, is really about not investing a ton before we actually got out and started getting feedback from people. And I think that because none of us were really afraid of getting told to screw off, we went out and got a lot of feedback really, really quick about what people cared about specifically on the restaurant side, about: how can we actually acquire and build out a lot of the supply. I think that supply really is what drives demand. You could have an amazing app, but if you don't have any great restaurants on it, no one's going to want to use it. So we cut it from the very beginning, believed that supply was going to drive demand, and then got that feedback from restaurant owners before we really built a massive product.

(00:11:50):

And this is all done with Chris working. He would be in the bathroom stall at work, coding the website, and then he'd go to a meeting and I would be setting up tablets at restaurants and calling him to help me troubleshoot with them. And again, he moonlighted for a little bit and then kind of finally quit his job. And that way we had Josh, Chris and I all working on it full-time about probably about six months in, maybe a year in is when all three of us and then Andrew joined about a year in, and then Dan Simair was actually the last founder to join, and he was probably about two years in because he was actually helping fund the business a little bit. He was actually the one that was making money at the time.

Pablo Srugo (00:12:31):

Was there any logic to launching in Saskatoon or it's just that's where you guys were, so that's where you guys launched?

Jeff Adamson (00:12:36):

I think we're just a big believer in secondary markets. We believe that there's a huge amount of pent up demand for services that you can get in these tier one markets like London, England. And so I think that the idea of launching Canada and focusing on tier two cities first appealed to us because people were like, we built a product that was better than what you'd use in downtown London. And you're getting that in Saskatoon, you're getting that in Calgary, you're getting then Yorkton, Saskatchewan, Winnipeg, and then eventually Calgary, Alberta, and then Edmonton and the outskirts kind of focused on the outskirts of the major centres like Vancouver and Toronto and then went outwards in. And so I think that was kind one part of the strategy is that they're underserved, but there was a huge amount of demand. And the other part of it was obviously in the beginning you're leaning on your network in a really, really big way. So that means that you can't pay someone Google or meta salaries out of the gate. So where else are you going to find people that you can pay to code a website or programme menus with Lucky Lager, if we were doing this in Toronto, people are going to be saying, well, that's going to be 180 grand and a hundred thousand shares, which we didn't have at the time.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:55):

And were you looking at GrubHub or Postmates or any of these other players, or were you just building from first principles?

Jeff Adamson (00:14:02):

Yeah, I think of course you look at what's being done, you try to learn from what works, what doesn't work, but at the same time you're like, what's going to be different? What's the nuance? What's the things that you have to unlearn or throw away based on what other people are doing? There's a lot of trial and error. There's a lot of just going out and building a sketch, getting it out, getting feedback.

Pablo Srugo (00:14:23):

What was some of that? You mentioned the feedback. What do you remember from back those early days that those early restaurateurs were telling you, especially things that were kind of insightful?

Jeff Adamson (00:14:33):

So for example, here's a pretty easy one, but we would get a lot of- maybe I'll start on the restaurant side. So on the restaurant side, a lot of restaurants would say-, and this is actually an example of half listening, but also half, not necessarily doing what you're told, but kind of looking at what people do. So a lot of restaurants would say, Hey, I want to be able to print the order out. And we were like, okay. So then we build the ability for them to print the orders and the other thing, but then we realised though, is that paper is analog, it's fixed, but the process of preparing food needs to be dynamic because depending on how backed up that kitchen might be, and depending on where that courier picking up that food is, those are going to change. So if you print something that says, Hey, the courier is going to be here at 12 o'clock, but then what happens if the kitchen gets backed up and now the order's not going to be ready for 12:30?

(00:15:29):

Now that courier is sitting there for 30 minutes. So we actually had to say, Hey, we're going to enable you guys to build a print, but what we're going to do is actually very quickly move people over to a tablet so that they can see the real time that they should have the order ready and also communicate with the courier if the order gets pushed. That was an example of just something that we saw in operations, something that we heard from the restaurants. It was also going to what we're asked to be doing, but then also saying, we need to quickly get out of this phase because it's going to cause issues for customers, for couriers and restaurants, even though it's what they're asking us to do.

Pablo Srugo (00:16:09):

How many restaurants did you kind of sign up? and maybe just walk me through that whole process of getting those first few restaurants again, back to my story of getting the door shut in my face. I assume you experienced something similar, but what was that? How many restaurants did you try to get to sign up before you even launched and what was that pitch like and the reception of that pitch?

Jeff Adamson (00:16:29):

Yeah, the pitch obviously was really bad in the beginning. We crashed and burned a lot. We had these scripts, pages and pages and pages of scripts to use. And then what we realised is that- and I love restaurant owners so much. They're extremely candid with their feedback. They're not politically correct, they're just going to tell you exactly. And so you can just get so much raw feedback. And one of the observations I had was they wanted to work with people who they knew really cared. They wanted to work with people who they really believed were going to work hard to help their business. So I think that when you're operating off of a script, what we found was that you really didn't come across as being authentic. And I think restaurant owners have a very good inauthentic detector.

Pablo Srugo (00:17:20):

That's the euphemism. Yeah. Yeah.<laughs>

Jeff Adamson (00:17:23):

So they would be like, okay, you're just another sales guy coming in here, get the F out of here. But as soon as you start focusing on the basic principles of what they really care about and then you build a bit of a narrative around those principles, you can communicate it in a lot more authentic way. And because we were doing the selling, it wasn't like I had gone out and hired a sales team I was doing selling to the restaurants, and so they knew it was a business owner to a business owner, and the model that we had created was one where we were not going to get paid unless we actually sent them a lot of business. On top of that, I think one of the number one problems that a lot of businesses have is that they need more sales. And that was the one thing that we were providing.

(00:18:11):

So you could come in and you could talk about online ordering, you could talk about delivery. Those things - though kind of work, but where we saw a really strong product market fit on the restaurant side is when we just started selling more orders. That's all we were doing. And they were like, well, how do you do it? And how does it work? Don't worry about any of that. You get to cook food and we're going to send you orders. And they're like, well, how is the courier going to-? it's like, listen, you're already doing takeout today. This is exactly the same. It is just doing more takeout. So we just simplified everything. And that really, really helped.

Pablo Srugo (00:18:45):

I mean that makes sense. That's the core thing. If I were to think about it from a restaurant perspective, just sell more things, why wouldn't you want to sell more things? I'll take a cut of that and then we can kind of move on. So I mean, it makes sense that that's what worked. Let's talk a bit about that launch. So you're going out, you're getting restaurants on board. Do you guys have a set idea of, okay, we need to get 20 restaurants or we need to get these specific restaurants on before we launch? How did you think about, because then once you get demand on, then you have that marketplace dynamic you have to worry about.

Jeff Adamson (00:19:19):

Yeah, at the time, we didn't know a ton about marketplace. There's so much literature out there now about marketplaces and network effects, and it is mostly instinct. In the beginning, Pueblo, it was mostly like, okay, we think that people like great restaurants, we think that if we get more great restaurants, that's going to create more demand. Our conversion's going to be higher on the consumer side. So it just came down to, well, how do we figure out which restaurants are really good while there's already review sites that do that? So you build a very basic algorithm that curates and basically highlights to us and our partnerships team, which are the top restaurants in any one neighbourhood. And then you kind of figure, well, there's the law of diminishing returns. I think pretty sure that's a law.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:05):

Yes, yes, I can confirm. I studied econ, I know that. <laughs>

Jeff Adamson (00:20:10):

So you're like, okay, well a certain point, adding more restaurants isn't really going to be, is not going to add more value or a diminishing amount of value. So it really comes down to then figuring out how many restaurants do you think you need in every single different geo in all the different cities that you operate? How many restaurants do you need to launch a city? How many do you need to sustain a city? How many do you need to do to drive order volume up? A lot of trial and error, but I think it's just really closely observing how things are going and being really close to the business, kind of like we picked it up as we went.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:43):

And for that first city, do you remember more or less how many restaurants you had at launch?

Jeff Adamson (00:20:48):

Saskatoon? Oh my goodness, 

Pablo Srugo (20:51) 

we're going way back. 

Jeff Adamson (20:53) 30? maybe 30 restaurants.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:55):

Tell me about the demand side. So you have these 30 restaurants that are already to go, you have, I assume, tablets inside those restaurants?

Jeff Adamson (00:21:02):

No, no. We actually only had a web UI, so it was basically just a website and the restaurants would have to use it if they had a computer in the back. We didn't launch tablets until a year, maybe two years in.

Pablo Srugo (00:21:17):

So not only did they have to be okay with trying out this new thing, they also needed to check their computer, whatever X minutes to see the order.

Jeff Adamson (00:21:26):

But here's the thing, and again, there's a lot to convince the restaurants of, but again, it's like we're bringing business. That's the number one thing you need as an owner and you've got capacity for it. And so if they can handle more orders and we have more orders, then it's like, sure, you might have to walk to the back and start up your computer, I dunno if anyone's been in restaurant offices, but every restaurant usually has a back office where the owner has all their stuff and there's usually a computer from the 1980s there.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:00):

Yes.

Jeff Adamson (00:22:00):

So the lights would dim when they would turn it on kind of thing. But again, they're very motivated to get more business. And I think that when you look at the economics of a restaurant, when you look at the fixed costs, the variable costs, the margin on getting incremental business is very, very high because you're already paying the staff and their overhead. So it's a wonderful business model for those that really get it. And that was one of the important things that we did is we didn't want to onboard any restaurants that we didn't feel really got it. Because if they're like, well, listen, you're taking 25% commission. I'm losing money on every order. We know eventually they're going to churn. So we actually wouldn't even let those restaurants join until we were confident that they understood that there was  healthy margin on every order.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:45):

How do you get demand initially? What is your go to market to get people in Saskatoon to find out about SkipTheDishes and start ordering?

Jeff Adamson (00:22:55):

It was like friends and family. Of course you're talking to friends and family. Facebook was fairly popular at that time. So we would just basically do these really corny memes on Facebook, basically just try to get anything that would draw attention to what we were doing,

Pablo Srugo (00:23:13):

All bootstrap? all with no funding at that point?

Jeff Adamson (00:23:16):

Yeah, very, very basic. Or it'd be organic. And also you could get better organic reach through Facebook back then nowadays you're getting nothing. So we could create really funny posts, and again, we tried to really bring our entire community in on doing it. So I think a lot of their early success of Skip was a lot of friends and family just really supporting us and pushing us and getting the word out there. I mean, we didn't raise any VC capital until probably two and a half years in, so we didn't have any money to really put into Facebook marketing. It was a very, very small amount.

Pablo Srugo (00:23:50):

How quickly did things kind of grow?

Jeff Adamson (00:23:53):

Yeah, and I mean in the beginning you're growing off a very small number, but the crazy thing about Skip is that when you actually look over the course of the business, we grew on average over 20% month on month

Pablo Srugo (00:24:05):

Wow.

Jeff Adamson (24:06)

For seven years. So it was pretty crazy. And obviously you're going to have stronger months, weaker months. The hard part was actually growing when you have things out of your control working against you. So weather is- it's very dependent on weather. So what would happen is in late April may order volume would just tank. So growing 20% in a month where no one's ordering food, it means that you literally have to work 10 times harder to get order volume in that month. And versus maybe December you could chill out and you're going to get 20% growth. So to consistently grow meant a lot of people working really, really hard and looking for every way that we could continue to keep up with demand.

Pablo Srugo (00:24:56):

But do you have a sense, just thinking back to those early days, like 2012, 2013 or so, was it kind of this, you launch it and then it just kind of takes off or you launch it and it's kind of eh for a while it's your mom, it's your brother, and you're like, tweeted two orders today. You know what I mean?,

Jeff Adamson (00:25:14):

Well It was actually even us placing orders with the restaurants because if a restaurant didn't get an order, they would forget that they ever signed up. So sometimes we would just place the orders Pablo, but it was not a viral thing. And also it can't be because if all of a sudden you get a ton of orders, it's going to overwhelm the delivery network. You're not going to have enough couriers. So you're constantly needing to keep supply and demand perfectly balanced. And anytime they got off, it was so painful because if you have not enough demand, too many couriers, all the couriers will quit. And then you had to go out and rehire onboard more couriers. And then if you have too much demand, not enough couriers, couriers are pretty happy. They're making lots of money, but the customers are furious because their orders aren't arriving and the restaurants get upset and they'll quit. So we had a great logistics guy and he was kind of this guy that was always with his hands on the dials of supply and demand, and it's just like you're always failing, but he had a high enough pain threshold that he could handle it.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:27):

Well, it's a three-sided marketplace. These delivery marketplaces have been taken for granted today. So at scale, they kind of work everywhere, but there's so many different pieces, especially, and again, when you're at scale and you have crazy amounts of data and crazy amounts of resources, not saying it's easy, but it's certainly way easier when you're kind of in that fake it till you make it zero to one mode. It's chaos.

Jeff Adamson (00:26:48):

Yeah, no, it always looks easy from the outside. I find myself, I actually met with Apoorva Mehta from Instacart, and I felt like a three-sided marketplace was really difficult, and everyone kind of feels like their business is the hardest business. And then you meet another founder and you learn about their business model and then you're like, okay, I'll just hold your beer. Instacart, I think is a five-sided marketplace because they have CPG advertisers, they have the shopper. It seemed very, very painful. He's actually running five companies right now. I dunno if you knew that.

Pablo Srugo (00:27:21):

No, I didn't. That's wild. That's wild. And I guess let's talk about that real quick. The couriers early on, were they always, you just paid them by delivery? How did you get those first couriers or did you partner with some other delivery services that already existed?

Jeff Adamson (00:27:36):

Yeah, we did a bunch of different things. We did delivery ourselves, obviously, just to understand it. Very beginning it was delivery just done by the restaurants. We just send the order and the fulfilment would happen by the restaurant. But very quickly we realised that the number of restaurants that offered delivery wasn't super high and also the best restaurants. So in terms of quality of supply, they didn't offer delivery. So we had to find a way to offer it for them. And really just owning the end-to-end experience was super important because if you rely on someone else to deliver the food, we had a lot of complaints about people who were like, Hey, my order didn't arrive or missing things or Why is it taking so long? There's no transparency on where the order is at in the delivery process. And actually it was funny because when Chris, our CTO and co-founder at the time. He was actually on his honeymoon and pretty much when he got back we were like, Hey, we're actually going to do the deliveries ourselves now, but we're not the technical ones. We're not the technical founders. So he was like, that's going to make the business a hundred times more complex. It amped up the pain to about 11, but it also ended up being one of the most valuable things because it just totally allowed us to add so much more supply. And now it was for the first time ever, you can get Earl’s delivered or five guys delivered. Exactly.

Pablo Srugo (00:29:01):

Because before that, what it was either pickup or delivery only if the restaurant offers it

Jeff Adamson (00:29:06):

And delivery at the time only was like, okay, pizza or Chinese food, that's what you were limited to.

Pablo Srugo (00:29:10):

Exactly. Pizza and Chinese, that's it. A hundred percent

Jeff Adamson (00:29:12):

Sounds like you've gone deep on this you really thought about this business.

Pablo Srugo (00:29:16):

I'm really worried because listen, you've been listening for what, 10, 20, 30 minutes now. Clearly you like it and the thing is the next episode is way better and you're going to miss it. You're going to miss it because you're not following the show. So take your phone out and hit that follow button.

I did, but it's because you mentioned Josh was out in London.  Like I said, I'm from Buenos Aires. When you go to my grandma's house, she has magnets. This is old school, but magnets of probably 50 different restaurants including McDonald's by the way. You know what I mean? So I was like, and then you travel back here and it was pizza and Chinese. So I remember thinking about it and the scale economics of having your own delivery system, but it's all cool in your head. You got to actually go out and do it for the part that matters.

Jeff Adamson (00:30:01):

Absolutely. Yeah.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:01):

I Take no credit. I take no credit for that. That happens. That starts taking off. When did you kind of feel for Skip, okay, this is actually working. This is well beyond just like, yo, it's kind of happening. There's some orders here. There, you're doing deliveries, you're ordering food, your friends are doing it, and it's just taking off and getting a life of its own.

Jeff Adamson (00:30:20):

It's kind of disappointing. Maybe people will expect there to be this moment where you really feel like you made it and honestly never felt like that. We never ever felt like, oh man, we're a household name. And there is one story though. I remember when  Dan Simair, the older brother of Chris and Josh, was kind of joining us full time and he was taking a taxi cab to the office for the first time. And we've been working on this for quite a while, and Dan comes in and he's like, do you want to hear something really cool? And he's like, the taxi driver asked me what I do for a living. And he said, oh, I work at Skip the dishes. And the driver thought that he was a delivery driver for Skip the Dishes and thought that that was cool.

(00:31:12):

Pablo Srugo (31:13)

No way.

Jeff Adamson (31:13)

 And then it was like the taxi driver had heard of Skip and he thought that Dan was a driver and that was a good job. And I was like, wow, okay. Maybe some people do think that what we're doing is pretty cool, but you never had this feeling like, oh man, we've really made it. Literally even up to the point of my last day in June of 2019, it was like I still didn't feel like the job was done, didn't really feel like we had arrived or anything. And I think it's mostly because of the attitude that we have is that: it never gets easier. You just go faster. And we never really took our foot off the gas, I guess.

Pablo Srugo (00:31:49):

And remind me. You guys exited and you did it for over a hundred million to Takeaway, when did that transaction happen?

Jeff Adamson (00:31:54):

It was to Just Eat, actually. So it was 110 million in 2016 and then another 90 million over the course of the next couple years on earnouts. 

Pablo Srugo (00:32:05):

And it was to just eat, which then got absorbed by Takeaway, is that right? That's the story, right?

Jeff Adamson (00:32:09):

Yeah, it was kind of crazy. We went through six CEOs of Just Eat in two years after we were there, and so it was just a revolving door and then Just Eat ended up merging with Takeaway, a Dutch company, and then they ended up buying GrubHub. And by that point we had already started on Neil.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:28):

What was the feeling of completing that? at 2012 to 2016? It's not a lot of time, four or five years, and without having raised a lot of venture capital to sell for a hundred, then became 200 with the earnings after it's a serious exit. What did that feel like for you and the team, especially since it was five of you ride or die together for that many years?

Jeff Adamson (00:32:55):

Well, it wasn't just five. I mean, we'd had a great core founding team as well of people who had been with us through the thick and thin. It wasn't like this big popping champagne moment

Pablo Srugo (33:06)

Really? 

Jeff Adamson (33:06) 

Yeah, because the goal was never really to build a company so that we can get rich or sell it or anything like that. The goal was to put the prairies on the map. That's what we wanted to do. We wanted to build a company that we could be proud of, that we would be proud for our friends to come work at so that people could look back and say, Hey, this was really special. It didn't really achieve any of that for us. It was kind of like more of a symptom of what's the end game here? And I think that if looking back and being a bit more mature and understanding of what our potential was, I think we could have held onto it and actually done pretty well with it. But we were 28 or 29, and

Pablo Srugo (00:33:54):

No one's going to blame you for taking that exit, especially in the dynamics of what you mentioned with Uber coming, DoorDash, all these sorts of things. I mean, you got to take all that into consideration. I would assume that was part of the thinking.

Jeff Adamson (00:34:03):

Yeah, yeah. Part of that is too is also like, I mean we had 80% of market share back then a food delivery in Canada, so we were doing really, really well. But you're kind of like, no, there's no way we can beat these other companies. They're just so well funded. They've got Sequoia and they've got Benchmark and Greylock and they probably all the who's who are invested in them and we're like maxing our credit cards.

Pablo Srugo (00:34:30):

You’re here from Saskatchewa. <laughs>

Jeff Adamson (00:34:34):

But I think that's part of the thing that we need to fix in Canada though, I think, is that we need to start actually believing that just because we didn't go to Harvard, just because we didn't get backed by the tier one VC doesn't mean that we can't win. Doesn't mean that we can't build world-class businesses. It doesn't mean we can't compete with the best and take some heads. I think we can and we need to start acting a little bit more like we can.

Pablo Srugo (00:34:59):

It happens more often than you think. I had the founder of a company called Flo Health on the podcast. This company, it's a period tracker, believe it or not, it fights for top one, two, or three position in the health and fitness category globally and does $200 million in revenue, billion dollar valuation. And the founder is this 40, 50-year-old man from Belarus.

Jeff Adamson (00:35:21):

Oh no way!

Pablo Srugo (00:35:22):

Imagine this. I'm starting Flo Health, it's the early 2010s. You've got two options. You can invest in us like me, this guy from Belarus, whatever, or you can invest in a company called The Glow, which already raised $30 million from A16, and the founder is Max Levchin from PayPal. What would you do? I'm like, alright, you already know ,y answer. And he's like, fast forward to today, we're a hundred times bigger than them. We're a hundred times bigger than them. So I'm not going to go and say none of that matters. Obviously resources and these things play a role, but it's not as nearly as determined. I think as people might think from the outset, you can never win against a better funded competitor. You can never win against somebody who's backed by A16 or Sequoia. It's just not true. And there's just so many other factors.

Jeff Adamson (00:36:11):

Oh, I mean, yeah, look at Shopify. I mean Shopify is the prime example of a company that just keeps going from win to win to win.

(00:36:19):

And they're showing us the way. And I mean that's why I'm so proud that they're headquartered in Canada, that they're passionate about Canada, that they're passionate about driving this country forward. I think too many founders I think, and I think there's a lot of things that cause it, but it's the media environment, it's the brain drain to the south. I think a lot of founders will look at Canada and say, man, why bother? I'm swimming upstream here. And so I hope one of the things that changes in the near future is to create an environment where we encourage people to pursue their dreams. And that dream may be by building a billion dollar business that creates an enormous amount of value for Canadians. I think that's a great dream to have and I think we should encourage people to go out and do that rather than saying, that sounds really greedy of you, we don't need more billionaires in this country. I think we should focus on the value that we're creating. We should focus on encouraging people to headquarter those businesses here. There’s an example right on our doorstep of how it's happened, and I mean Shopify just beat earnings by 30%, 30% of a company that size.

Pablo Srugo (00:37:32):

I mean they're- for a bit, they were the number one biggest company. Forget tec. Just company in Canada, but they basically fight RBC and maybe some other company for number one position. This is a company that didn't exist 20 years ago. So just think about the value, the shareholder value, the number of employment, the amount of employment they create, and then the number of millionaires, forget billionaires, but millionaires they create because of the early shareholders and what that does to the economy anyways. You don't have to sell me on the values of venture capital startups or capitalism, but I think you know what, and it's actually a good segue because you having sold Skip and then work through it after the exit and all that stuff, you could easily have said, okay, cool, I'm done here. I made a bunch of money, I'm going to go into real estate and just whatever. But you decided to go for round two and in an even bigger way with Neo. Maybe before we jump into Neo, what's the thinking? What drives you to start another one and another one? And another one that’s a neobank, it's kind of big or bust definition, I don't think you can have a small neobank.

Jeff Adamson (00:38:38):

Yeah, I think it kind of just goes back to that original mission of building a company that we can be proud of, a generational business that is going to add a lot of value to Canadians. And if I look at financial services, I mean it's the biggest industry in Canada. It's 7% of GDP, which is actually twice the size of our OECD peers as a percentage of revenue per GDP. It's incredibly concentrated and it really affects everybody. Food delivery was like if you're fortunate enough to be able to afford food delivery, it's great, but financial services is a utility. And it felt like the sand in the gears of the economy was the fact that we have a financial system that has prioritised, even celebrated stability to the point of killing innovation. And if I kind of fast forward it again was like, well, what is Canada going to be a hundred years from now if we don't start to prioritise modernising our financial system?

Jeff Adamson (00:39:54):

And I never like waiting on government to do anything and waiting for the government to say, Hey, we need to do something about this. You just never know when that's going to happen. And so I felt like we needed to, this is kind of an overarching theme, is to really be a participant in this modernization as opposed to an observer. And I felt like this was going to happen regardless of whether I participate or not. Maybe someone else would come and do it from outside of Canada, but I don't know at what point, how long is it going to take, how long are we going to delay that from happening? And I wanted that value creation to occur in a place that I care about and that's Western Canada. Now. We now fast forward today we have offices in Toronto across Canada, but the kind of genesis of it is here in Calgary and Calgary is traditionally kind of an oil and gas town, and I thought it could really have a major impact if we could create a business that was focused more on value creation as opposed to value extraction.

Pablo Srugo (00:40:54):

So you have the Canadian kind of set up, macro setup there. What about what's happening in the US and the neobank world, Chime, whatever, was that kind of like, oh, that's a model there, I'm going to bring it here. Or did that kind of come after as you start to explore the space and you see what's happening south of the border?

Jeff Adamson (00:41:10):

Well, part of the genesis of Neo was really seeing, we were expanding Skip into Western Europe and we saw the Monzos of the world and Revolut that were starting up and you kind of use them and you're like, wow, these are user-friendly banking apps. I've never used one of those before. And I actually went back home and I thought maybe I just had an outdated version of my banking app. So I

(00:41:35):

Went to go open up an account and I was told I had to go into the branch. And so I drive across town, go into the branch, and again, this is 2019, go into the branch. I'm told I have to book an appointment. So I booked an appointment. The soonest appointment was the following week and then I came back in and they said, well, you need more than just your id. You need to bring a power bill in. And so this went on for weeks until I finally opened up an account and the website crashed. I couldn't log in. And then I was like, okay, I'm done. Closed my account. So I go to close my account. And they say, you have to come in and talk to a branch manager to close your account. I'm not going to name the bank, but the closest branch was hundreds of kilometres away.

Pablo Srugo (00:42:19):

Oh my God,

Jeff Adamson (00:42:20):

I think it was over a thousand actually, because they're primarily an Eastern Canadian institution. So I just was like, it's clearly the future has already arrived in other countries. You just need to go and look. You just go to Latin America with Nubank, you go to, and there's a ton of other great ones in Latin America. You look in Europe, it's happening. So to me it wasn't like I didn't need to create the future. I could see it just a matter of, okay, how do we actually bring this to life in Canada?

Pablo Srugo (00:42:48):

And it was you and Andrew this time that decided to partner for Neo?

Jeff Adamson (00:42:51):

And Chris Simair 

Pablo Srugo (00:42:53):

and Chris, okay.

Jeff Adamson (00:42:53):

Yeah. And they had both left Skip, I was the last guy there. And this idea, I mean again, you're like 30 something years old and you're like the thought of not really having a purpose or a passion and being that young and just kind of having some success and having an exit, but then to not have a purpose to me was kind of an empty life. And so this seemed like something that was important and something that I also believed I wanted to change. So I joined Chris and Andrew as the early founding team. And then to my surprise, a lot of people also felt like this was a problem we're solving too. So a lot of folks from Skip, we had another founder join us, James Noss from BCG. Super lucky to have a really, really, really strong founding team, again outside of the founders.

Pablo Srugo (00:43:46):

And what was the initial kind of product or maybe less product like the initial value props, when you think about the average consumer and the challenges they have with banks, what were some of the first few things you really wanted to kind of address with Neo?

Jeff Adamson (00:43:59):

Yeah, it's a good question, Pablo. So there's so many different ways to start in banking, and there's also a lot of blueprints in terms of how other people have done it. If you look at Europe, there's really little interchange. So credit cards aren't really that popular relative to debit or prepaid. And then you look at the US where a lot of the challengers have been pushed down market into near-prime. So for us, we were looking at Canada, we don't have as big of a near-prime market, and we felt like the LTV of more middle class, mass affluent customers was going to be a big market, lots of problems to solve. So we looked at it and we're like, well, credit is the one that you need to be in the market for the longest to understand to get data, to build a stack.

(00:44:48):

And it's also the number one product used by the mass affluent in the middle class. Credit cards are very, very popular in Canada, but we felt like all the value propositions were relatively different versions of the same thing. It was like 1 point, 2 points, 3 points for cash back. That was about it. So we thought we could take a page out of our skip playbook and build another marketplace, build personalised rewards and deliver vastly higher cash back by building out this marketplace of retailers. And so today we've got about 13,000-14,000 retailers that use neo. They give customers cash back for the loyalty that those customers show to them this way. For example, just on the average Canadian middle class Canadian, they can earn over a thousand dollars back in their pockets on their grocery spend alone with Neo up to seven to 7% cash back on just groceries.

(00:45:45):

I think it's six on gas. Plus you can get like 20% back at restaurants. So an order of magnitude higher, stronger value prop that's personalised to their spend and it drives sales to the retailer as well. And then very quickly we went and said, well, this customer also wants bank accounts. And also having a credit card in a bank account with the same provider makes it a lot easier and smoother and seamless. So we started adding products and today. We actually offer everything from credit cards, prepaids, investments, and we're also a mortgage lender as well.

Pablo Srugo (00:46:15):

And walk me through the economics then, and especially early on, you go to the first few retailers, maybe tell me about that. What are some of the first few retailers you go to and what's the story to them? How is this going to drive loyalty to them and why would they do it with you and not name whoever else they could in theory do something like this?

Jeff Adamson (00:46:34):

Well, I think it goes back to the same thing at Skip. People want to work with people who really care about their business. And when you're genuine about helping them solve problems that they have, the idea doesn't actually matter as much as they're just like, Hey, we believe that you're going to add value to our business. The idea for us was just really driving more sales to them. Again, it was the same idea that we had at Skip is like, Hey, we think we can drive sales to your company. Here's how we do it. And a wonderful thing for retailers is that it was free. They didn't need to pay us anything this time. So they actually provide cash back. We don't take any commissions. A hundred percent of the cash back that they give to the customer goes to the customer and the retailer in exchange gets higher sales, then we can show, because there's so much data in financial services, we can show how much of return that they're getting on that spend. And it's vastly better performance and higher return than what they would get from any social platform.

Pablo Srugo (00:47:30):

And what's the difference between partnering with Neo as a provider of this and partnering with some other bank, whatever Costco has a MasterCard issued by, I think it's Scotiabank or whatever, you know what I mean? And a lot of retailers have different MasterCard or Visa cards and they partner with some issuing bank, and then they do that. What's the different take here?

Jeff Adamson (00:47:49):

It's the personalization engine. So I think you're referring more to co-branded credit cards. And this is more around a platform that can actually acquire net new customers. So Neo will acquire new customers for those retailers. That's a win for the retailer. And we then give those customers cash back in exchange for them making these first time purchases, at the retailer. And then there's ongoing benefits to both as well. So they'll get continually rewarded and they don't need to have a co-branded credit card. They could just literally participate for free as a merchant on that platform.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:26):

And so you're almost acting like in those early days, you're a new acquisition channel for, I don't know, what were some of your early retailer partners?

Jeff Adamson (00:48:35):

So Earl's was a partner at Skip. They were one of the first merchants to join. And in fact, I mean I just love that Earl's family. They were just like Jeff. And again, I know that not everyone can replicate this, but just because we had done right by them at Skip, they basically said, Jeff, whatever you're doing, we're on board. Just tell us what it is. And again, I think that just goes to show you that, and a lot of people have short-term thinking when it comes to relationships, but I know that, and a lot of founders will need to get the wins just to survive. But at the same time, if you think in terms of 10 year horizons or 20 year horizons, these are people who you want to work with for life. And I was really, really grateful. Well, first of all, working with them at Skip and then because they believed that we had a good relationship that they were on board with the next thing. And of course they weren't needing to take a huge risk or anything like that. So Earls came on board. Ironically, DoorDash was an early partner as well.

(00:49:38):

And then very quickly we just went locally. So we had tons of local restaurants, cafes, Phil and Sebastian here in Calgary is a famous kind of coffee chain. They came on board and then we just started building up a network kind of neighbourhood by neighbourhood across Canada.

Pablo Srugo (00:49:50):

And so take me through a simple example just for my simple brain, like take DoorDash for example, or Earl’s doesn't matter, but DoorDash would say, Hey, if you use Neo Financianal credit card for DoorDash, you get 5% cash back. And you would take that messaging and use it to acquire Neo Financianal customers and get them to kind of transact on DoorDash. Is that kind of the initial?

Jeff Adamson (00:50:09):

Yeah, in part. So the network effect is really the more merchants that we get to provide cash back to customers, that creates more value for the customers, then the customer only gets rewarded when they spend that then drives that creates more data, which we can then use and actually help provide insights that help the retailers understand their business a lot better. Because for example, no retailer really understands much at all about their customers because how could they, all of the data is trapped within the Big five banks, but then the more spend then brings more retailers to the platform because they want to get access to more customers. And then more retailers bring more customers, more spend more retailers. That's the flywheel.

Pablo Srugo (00:50:58):

And is there any worry from them that they're like cannibalising their direct? like, Hey, well this customer might've already bought, but they would've used some other card and I want to have to give 'em cash back. Is that a pushback at all?

Jeff Adamson (00:51:07):

That's the beauty of financial services data is that you can see pre-post where people are spending. You can see, and again, it's all anonymized, but you can look and say, Hey, before this customer spent this much and now they spend this much, or can say, listen, before you had this share of their grocery spend, now you have this much of their grocery spend. So the incrementality is perfectly clear to see versus every other channel out there. You can't get that level of visibility because you don't know where people are spending outside of you. Plus I think social media, for example, whether or not someone likes cat videos isn't really a good indicator in my opinion of intent.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:47):

Yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean that before and after transparency is huge. And then you mentioned this before, but Neo was a bit of a different story than Skip. I mean both. I think obviously Skip was successful, but I think Skip was more of a kind of, you gotta walk before you run. What was the first year or so at Neo?

Jeff Adamson (00:52:10):

Yeah, so it was a lot of learning, totally new business and also unlearning a ton. So we knew we were starting with credit so much, I'd say bureaucracy to get through. You can't just start up a credit card company, you have to partner up with lots of banks, you have to figure out how to get MasterCard on board. It is so much more painful. There are so many barriers to entry, Pablo, and so it was literally starting to have conversations years in advance with different FI’s. And so you basically need to get them to really understand your vision and that we're not going to be competitive with them and we need them. You absolutely need FI’s to get a challenger bank off the ground to get a FinTech off the ground. You have to partner with the incumbent financial system, which is really, really tough because frankly, I can't remember, I was on one call and the bank said, listen, the only reason we're taking this call is because one of the founders of Skip, they're like, I don't even know why I'm here.

(00:53:13):

And I was like, man, that's so painful to hear that because now you're thinking it's going to be so difficult for other people to go through all the different layers within the organisation to get to that same meeting. And that's not the way that the world should work. You shouldn't have to have built a successful company previously in order to start increasing the competition in one of the most important industries in Canada. And that's ultimately what I care about is I think that if we have more competition in Canada, that's ultimately what's going to drive down costs, increase efficiencies, convenience. And right now Canadians are paying over double for the same products and services that you can get in other countries.

Pablo Srugo (00:53:49):

But does that mean you stay dependent on the big banks in Canada because that's just the way it is? Or over time are you able to kind of wiggle out of that dependency?

Jeff Adamson (00:53:57):

That's the tough part, Pablo, is that you need to be simultaneously dependent while diversifying, because if you have single points of failure, everyone knows that that's not a good thing. But at the same time, you're building a product for your customers, you need to then also be diversifying your risk. So I think it's spreading it out across multiple different FIs, but then that means building up this crazy amount of redundancy and duplication all for the sake of avoiding a single point of failure. And that's very difficult to do when capital is scarce and when you have already a ton of demands on your product team. But at the end of the day, things can go south, markets change, 25% tariffs happen. So preparing for those things to happen is not often in the mind of the kind of typical tech company. It's much more like Go for broke. That doesn't work in financial services.

Pablo Srugo (00:54:41):

How do you ultimately provide a better end product to consumers? If you're building on top of these FIs and they're still taking a lot of the deposits or a lot of the other stuff, does that mean you just get your margins compressed or is there some way of making it all work where from a margin perspective your business still is good, but you are able to deliver more cashback, more value to end customers than the traditional banking system?

Jeff Adamson (00:55:07):

Are you asking what's the margin profile on giving cash back to customers or what's the question behind the question?

Pablo Srugo (00:55:12):

Well, it's not  specific to cashback. I guess the question is you take whatever RBC, td, any of these businesses and you have to build in a sense on top of them, which means, I mean they're not doing that for free one way or another is my point. They could in theory build a Neo, they could go more digital. They're just like, they just don't move in that way. And then could they not just offer whatever you offer but just either get more margin or give away more because they have the entire kind of stack?

Jeff Adamson (00:55:41):

It really depends on what the goal of the FinTech is, and I think there's lots of different ways you can do it. We've taken the approach to thin out the bank layer as much as we can for a few different reasons. One is to make it easier for the banks that we partner with so that there's less services that they need to provide us. And second is to provide more control over the experience that we give to customers. But the hard part is that that means that you're building a lot more. Typically what you'll see in FinTech, and this actually surprises a lot of people, is that FinTech is actually more of an art or science of integration and orchestration across other people's technology than it is a real science and art of building your own tech. Because typically what people will do because of the pressures to get to market and to show traction, they will take third party SAEs off the shelf and then it's that integration and orchestration of those SAEs with their own UI and UX on top of it.

(00:56:41):

And then voila, you have a FinTech. But the reality is you're actually just a thin UI UX layer on other people's technology. And while you can get to market quickly and show traction, your product velocity is hamstrung and dependent on other people and your unit economics get crushed in the longterm. We have done the opposite, and it has meant deliberate and significant investments in building out our own infrastructure. That means our own cloud-based core banking system, our own ledger, our own proprietary card processing and issuing platform, getting a direct licence from MasterCard, having that full stack is actually extraordinarily uncommon, very difficult to do, very painful, but then allows you to have way higher product velocity, better unit economics, control the end-to-end experience a lot more. That's the strategy we've taken. And I'm not saying one is right or wrong, but it's just different ways to go after it.

Pablo Srugo (00:57:41):

Perfect. Well, Jeff, let me end with just a few quick questions first. Just in terms of that early growth, do you remember more or less how quickly you got to a million in revenue at Skip and how quickly you got to a million in revenue at Neo?

Jeff Adamson (00:57:52):

Oh, that is a good question. For Skip, it probably took a few years. I can't remember exactly. Neo was a bit different because I think it was probably a couple, maybe two years. But essentially we went from very, very small to very big very quickly because we had won these co-branded partnerships. So our revenue went from very little- And again, that's part of the reason why we won fastest growing company in Canada with 50000% growth is because it was just like we're just kind of chugging along organically and then just like boom, we had a whole bunch of customers through these big partnerships that we did, and then now we see our direct to consumer is actually the fastest growing part of the business.

Pablo Srugo (00:58:34):

But those big partners gave you customers or they just gave you deals you could offer to your customers? 

Jeff Adamson (58:39)

Both.

Pablo Srugo (58:40)

I asked about it in Skip. with Neo, would you say that was the moment then when you felt like you had true product market fit or if not, when was it?

Jeff Adamson (00:58:48):

With financial services it's a bit different. You've got product market fit and you've also got product channel fit as well. There's products that fit well with certain channels and not with others. There's also multiple different products. And so I think it still feels like there's some products, for example, like credit cards. We've had it for a long time, clear product market fit. There's also different flavours of that too. Secured card, which is a credit builder card, but then you've got prepaid debit, which is a lot newer for us. And so it's naturally not going to have the same level of product market fit. But then even within that, you've then got direct deposit, you've got payroll, bill pay, how are they using the products? And then for example, mortgages, relatively new but growing faster than anything in the business. So it almost feels like we never have it, but we also have it at the same time, but then we also don't have it at the same time, depending on the product, depending on the channel.

Pablo Srugo (00:59:43):

And then the last question. Taking everything you've learned over the last decade plus of building startups, what is some of the most, what's your number one piece of advice for an early stage founder?

Jeff Adamson (00:59:54):

Oh man. I hate giving advice because it's so individual. I think if I've learned anything, it's really about relationships. That to me has been one of the most important things. There's no secret, I don't have any sage advice other than just :think about relationships long term. That’s why we're around. is we've got great people who we've got great relationships with, who are really, really committed. But I mean, I think a lot of the fundamental things that you already believe outside of a company also apply within a company. So I don't think there's any advice that I'm going to have that people don't already know.

Pablo Srugo (01:00:26):

Cool. Well, you're too humble, Jeff. But dude, thanks so much for jumping on the show, man. It's been great. And we got a two for one, so that's even better.

Jeff Adamson (01:00:35):

Awesome. Pablo, thanks for having me.

Pablo Srugo (01:00:36):

Guess what? I met this founder who listened to every single episode of the Product Market Fit show. He just called me and he sold his company for over a billion dollars. That's right. If you listen to every episode of the product Market Fit show, that's what's going to happen. I can't say it's guaranteed, but it's what I've seen. It's what I’ve seen in the past, but you won't know for sure unless you try it out for yourself. So go back because over a hundred episodes of the product Market Fit show and you haven't listened to most of them, check them out.