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Wealthsimple is building the world's most human financial services company. Yes, the company most well known for raising near $300M to disrupt traditional financial services companies by leveraging 'robo-advisors' is on a mission to be more human.
The brainchild of Ivey HBA ’09, Michael Katchen, the company today, manages almost $7 bllion in assets, and employs more than 300 people. Katchen sat down with long-time friend, Eric Janssen, to talk about his journey; from leaving management consulting to working in the start-up world and building a disruptive company in an industry he had never worked in.
In this episode Katchen uncovers how he thinks about hiring, and getting the most out of his team, as well as his outlook on the future of great Canadian companies.
The Ivey Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by Connie Clerici, QS ’08, and Closing the Gap Healthcare Group, Inc.
Transcript
Michael Katchen
But you got to be willing to work hard, because that's what it's going to take. It is supposed to be hard. If it were easy to build truly transformative, impactful companies, we'd have a lot more of them. So I think that's one of the things you screened for is do you find people that are able to work hard?
Introduction
You're listening to the Ivey entrepreneur podcast from the Pierre L. Morrissette Institute for Entrepreneurship at the Ivey Business School. In this series Ivey entrepreneur, and Ivey faculty member Eric Janssen will anchor the session
Eric Janssen
My catchin appreciate you making time out of your busy schedule to come and catch up with me.
Michael Katchen
Thanks for having me finally catch up.
Eric Janssen
Yeah. First time together in this new building, we spent a little bit of time together at the old building.
Michael Katchen
With upgraded your digs since our days that
Eric Janssen
I've been sitting on the other side of the table now, so to speak, suits you look good. Appreciate that. Coming from the event industry, I had to get new clothes, I had t shirts in nice jeans and running shoes, but had to upgraded some blazers.
Michael Katchen
Well, it looks great. And thankfully, I haven't had to do that yet. It's good by with some jeans and T shirts.
Eric Janssen
Nice blazers, though. Thank you. So there's a few topics that I wanted to get into today. One of them is the focus of the conversation. I want to get to leveraging a team and growing through your people versus relying on just yourself. But I think it would be helpful just to give people some context. We're in the same graduating class of 2009. You went into management consulting, left management consulting to join I remember getting the email you joined a startup 1000 memories. So can you tell me about the leap from how did you make the decision to go from consulting to your first startup at the time?
Michael Katchen
It's a longest story. hope that's okay. Okay, so I had always wanted to start a business nearly dropped out of it just before starting Ivey to start a business where I'd want a business competition. So always wanted to get to that. But for one reason or another found my way into consulting. And when I got close to the end of my two year tenure at the firm decided it was time to start a business. And I spent the last six months working with a friend on a few ideas. And two months before I was set to leave, I got a call from him. And he said, Mike, I've decided to go a different direction, I'm going to move to New York and take a job at some investment bank. And I was heartbroken. I felt like I didn't have the experience or confidence to start a business on my own, and actually decided that I would delay those plans again, and get a job in private equity. But unlike most people in private equity, I wasn't doing it to be in private equity. I was only doing it so I could get to know the CEOs of the portfolio companies and learn from them what it was like to build a business. I think that was a fool's plan. But long story short, I got a fortunate phone call from some of my very first colleagues at McKinsey, who had just moved to California to start a business. And I got a call saying unsolicited offer Mike, we just got into this thing called Y Combinator. This was 2010. I don't think anybody knew what Y Combinator was. I didn't know what it was at the time. And they said, you know, come come build this thing with us if you want. I said that is absolutely what I should be doing. And jumped on a plane to move to California. And we spent a few years building that company.
Eric Janssen
Wow. So you joined as have to correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you were in a business development role, sort of a strategy, VP business development role in the beginning.
Michael Katchen
Correct.
Eric Janssen
So what did that look like early days? What did you do as the business guy?
Michael Katchen
Yeah, so we had a very different business to what we're in today, which was online memorials, which is still I think, a problem that needs solving. God forbid you lose someone, which is a universal experience that you care about. There is nowhere online that is beautiful and appropriate for memorialize memorializing, that person with with other loved ones. And that's what we created. And it was a beautiful product. And we had this belief that it was going to do well with the genealogy community. So everybody's crazy aunt or uncle who is the family historian, the keeper of the family tree. And so the first week I joined 1000 memories. I said I'm going to become the expert at the genealogy community. And I hopped on a plane and I went to BYU, Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, to learn about the community. This is kind of the heart and soul of where Mormonism is based. And there's a huge link between Mormonism and genealogy. And there was a huge conference happening at the at at BYU. So I decided it was the best chance I had to go and learn about this space. And I showed up, totally green on both genealogy and Mormonism and made a fool of myself asking for coffee at the BYU campus on day one, but that's how we kind of got our start learning about this space and I spent the next few years really trying to cultivate this community, building partnerships with all sorts of things. History, scrapbooking type communities, mommy bloggers, very different than what we do today with the goal of trying to get the word out about what we were building. And ultimately we we sold the business to ancestry.com. And think the genealogy that was a really good one. But it was super random in the early days.
Eric Janssen
So I wanted to get to so that acquisition happened fairly quickly. For from memory I've ever sent a note saying that you were joining in roughly 18 months later, I think the company was acquired by ancestry.
Michael Katchen
Yeah, correct.
Eric Janssen
So early days, we'll talk about this same case with wealthsimple. Later on, there's a million things you could be focused on. Focusing on the genealogy community turned out to be the right thing to focus on, if you end up getting acquired 18 months later. So how did how did you make that bet early on that that was going to be the right thing to focus on?
Michael Katchen
Well, I think we were looking to see how people were using the product. And we saw a lot of people using it for family history. It was actually we built this for memorializing loved ones kind of in the moment. But we found a lot of people were using it to collect old scrapbook type memories and memorabilia, and heirlooms about their families. And so that's where this idea for the genealogists came from was seeing how people were actually using the product and trying to dig into that and understand the data and the kind of client behavior or user behavior that we were seeing. It wasn't like a stroke of genius. It was, hey, this looks interesting. Let's go check it out. And so that's that's where that all came from.
Eric Janssen
So gets acquired, you move into a product, visit a product role, Product Manager type. Yeah. And then a country manager type role. When did this itch to actually go out on your own again, start up because there's, I was checking out some old, some old emails here. So an email from March of 2013, announcing that you're working on this side hustle called portfolio.me?
Michael Katchen
Yeah, we should still be called portfolio portfolio.
Eric Janssen
Maybe you still have the domain, you've paid your refresher fees. And then maybe six months later, basically, thanks for your feedback and doing another survey now. It's called steady up. And then another year after that introduction of wealthsimple. And if I look at the timeline, so 2013, you were at ancestry at the time. So how did the idea get going? As you were still working at ancestry?
Michael Katchen
The answer is immediately, you know, we sold the business. And I think I was excited and itching, I still hadn't started something myself. But I knew that's what I wanted to do. And so I had to stay at ancestry, or there was good reason for me to stay in ancestry for a year after the acquisition. And it was a perfect opportunity to start exploring ideas. And I tried to build a discipline around that, where I had a list that I would force myself to add to every day, at least one new idea. And every week, I would have a process where I'd go through my list and try to rank them on. am I excited about this and passionate about the idea of the problem? Do I think it could be big, and do I think I have any business executing in this category. And over the process of six months really refined what I wanted to work on, which was this idea for wall symbol, or portfolio or steady up whatever we called it back then. And it was a problem that we were facing we were fortunate that the team I was working with, at the time had just sold a business, they had made a little bit of money that they wanted to invest. And they didn't really like the options available to them in the market. And so it was like the perfect case study of here's a problem that I understand I'm having it myself, my friends are having it. I think it's real investing is complicated and expensive for most people. Is there something here that maybe as interesting to work on, and I came to fall in love with a concept, which was investing and being smart about money, is the way people end up living the lives they want. It is, as the Dean of Harvard Business School says there's greater, no greater form of dignity, you can offer another human being than financial freedom. And that really always resonated with me as this powerful force for good is helping people get access to the tools of financial freedom. And so I love the idea had an understanding of it, because I had this group that we're trying to solve this problem. That part I struggle with is what the hell business do I have starting an investment company, I've never worked in this industry, I've never worked in a regulated business before. And so that's why it took a little while to wrap our heads around actually getting a license and doing kind of the work it takes to launch this business.
Eric Janssen
Cool. So people are quick to talk about Plan A is really the plan, it goes to plan BCD. But if I peel back the layers a little bit, maybe you can give us a behind the scenes sneak peek. What homework or process did you go through in the very early days, like, what was version one of steady up in 2013.
Michael Katchen
So the first version was portfolio. And this was a web app we launched that had a series of calculators on it around how much you could save by moving from mutual funds ETFs and what a good portfolio should look like and we send it out to Some friends, and thank you, Eric, for your early feedback. To get a sense of like, does this resonate with people? You couldn't sign up for anything, there was no product to sell. It was just research on is this a problem that resonates? And have we kind of captured the attention and interest of folks that we know.
Eric Janssen
It was a survey? Wasn't it? early on? Was it just basically trying to get data?
Michael Katchen
Yeah, it was, what do you do with your investments? Are you interested in doing it better? And do the suggestions we would make through this calculator? Are they helpful? Would you implement them or not? Because our belief, we didn't want to become an investment manager, we didn't want to have to be regulated, right. So we wanted people to do it themselves. My belief, when we started exploring this idea, you should never hire someone to manage your money for you. It's not hard, you should do it yourself. So we were trying to build tools to like, empower others, to manage their own money. And so that was the idea we're exploring, we learned from from portfolio, people are too lazy, honestly, or uninterested, or find it too overwhelming or complex to do it themselves. And actually, you need to do it for them and make it easy to help people do the right thing. So that was the first insight from portfolios. People love the idea of it, but didn't love the work required to do it properly. And so we use that to iterate on the second concept, which was steady up. This is actually a web app, you could sign up for it tried to make it even easier to do it yourself, where we would send out an email once a month with instructions, which was like sell this many shares of x, buy this many shares of y. And you're rebalanced and you're you know, on track, and you're good. And we send that out, we probably had 100 people that were on our mailing list for that we probably had 50 people sign up and use it. They use it month one, they use it month two, and then they stopped using it. And we realized, again, that's too much work to ask people to do it themselves. That's really solved the problem, we needed to take the big leap of becoming a regulated money manager and decided then to make that investment, which is why there's a big gap, I think in your in your timeline of emails between steady up and well, simple launching because we had to actually go do the proper process,
Eric Janssen
Right, Oh, shoot, people aren't going to do this on their own. We have to build something for them exactly do it. Interesting. I remember getting it at the time. And it resonated with us. Because we were I don't know how many years out of graduating, sort of had that in between place where it feels like you're a little bit beyond going to a big bank and sitting with somebody at a retail bank location to talk about the future options, but not ready to go to a fully, you know, full Private Wealth Management Company sort of in between. and for us at the time, it was like, Oh, this is interesting, there could be another option where I have a little bit more control. So that's why for us it, it stood out as being interesting. So
Michael Katchen
well, we might be here because you said it was interesting. So thank you for that.
Eric Janssen
I'll take full responsibility. No, I will take zero responsibility. So how did you you ended up making the leap to do it on your own? How did you think about de-risking it? And I'll preface it by saying people, at least I see patterns in the way that people do it. Some people do it with saving up money or raising money. And then okay, I've got a nest, I've got a I've got some support here. Some people do it with partners. So me and my two co founders are committed. I feel comfortable now leaving the thing that I've had in order to jump in. So what got you to the point, knowing that you were working on this as a side hustle before you jumped in full time? When did you decide it was the right point when you were ready to go at it for
Michael Katchen
So I hit a bump in the road where I told you I was at ancestry for a year. And it made sense for me to be there for a year. And a day before a year was up. I walked into my boss's office and i said i'm i'm going to be leaving. We're going to move back to Toronto, and I want to start this great business around helping people invest their savings and achieve great financial outcomes long term. And he turned to me and said, Mike, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And you're 24 or five years old, I forget how old I was exactly at the time. And we're actually looking for someone to run our Canadian business for a year, the the leader of the Canadian business is going on a mat leave. We don't have anybody that's going to step in why you jump in it's a $30 million revenue business. What are you going to get the chance to step into a leadership role of running a $30 million revenue opportunity at this age of your career? It's yours if you want it. I was flattered. And I got taken by this idea that that'll be a de risked way to move back to Toronto and keep working on well, simple right. And I took the job. And it was immediately obvious It was a mistake. My partner still reminds me now that she has never seen me more distraught or depressed than that period. And nothing to do with the work but just the knowledge that I wanted to be working on something and had delayed it for the wrong reasons. Because it was de risking because it was resume building because it seemed like a good opportunity to rather than the thing I really wanted to be working on, and within a couple months, I had to leave. And so ultimately kind of did, and to left to start wealthsimple full time. And then kind of worried about de risking, and financing and all the rest of it. And we were lucky, we actually raised around pretty early on a big part of our early challenge and remains a challenge to this day was was we asked people for their life savings. And it's like an enormous ask of trust. And we thought that when we were getting going, we needed ways to build credibility, because we were a no name company with no name people that had never worked in this industry. And one of the ways we thought we would address that was try to raise a round of funding from like industry, Titans, you know, people that had some credibility had built businesses in this space. And luckily, kind of I met someone in some safe early on, who was very like minded about this business, and agreed to come on board as a first angel investor, and really early partner in thinking through the business and founding it. And that helped us kind of put together an early round from really great partners, that helped us get going with a little bit of capital in the bank, a group of know how kind of around the table. And and that's how we we did it from there.
Eric Janssen
That's great. And you mentioned, you have a few co founders in the business. I know that sounds like you, you have a focus as a CEO, you've got co founders who rounded out your early skill set. So some design expertise and some technical knowledge. We're How did you three meet.
Michael Katchen
So Rudy and Brett, who are my co founders are used to be my bosses. So they were the founders of 1000 memories down in San Francisco, along with a third partner, by the name of Jonathan, and Jonathan and I had, he was my first project manager when I started at McKinsey. So that's how I got to know them was through Jonathan who invited me to come and work with them down in California. And through working together, Rudy, Brett and I became very close friends and partners. And we complement each other skills well, and love to work together. And so when I was getting started with well, simple, I asked them to come on board and be a part of it, it took a little while to convince them we were I moved back to Canada, they're both American, getting them to kind of get excited about building a business based in Toronto, was a challenge. But we ultimately love working together and still do it. That's great.
Eric Janssen
Something that you shared from this morning is that the early days are messy. So in a few minutes, what are those early days like was just the three of you how quickly Did you hire what what was? Day One or day 10? Like it? Well, simple,
Michael Katchen
Messy, you know, we had the, the first person who joined the team was a guy named Peter Graham, who is an engineer that was part of our team in 2000. memories, who I always say if there's one person I could work with for the rest of my life and be happy, it's it's, we call him GG. He's just a remarkable partner, and does amazing work. And so he moved to Toronto with me. And he was American also, and just picked up his bags and came up. And we started kind of hacking on this thing. And the second was guy named Dave Nugent, who's a Western grad, also here on grad. And was our first financial advisor, the only person that worked in the industry, who we needed to get the license and came on board to help build the business. And so that was it, it was this tiny group of people. And when I say it was messy, I mean, the story I told this morning was, we were launching Canada's first digital investment service. And before we launched, the only way to open up an investment account in Canada was through paperwork. Even if you sign up online, the last step step was to print off 50 pages of paperwork, sign it, mail it, walk it or fax it into a bank branch and wait weeks to get the account open. And we knew that if that was our service, like we probably didn't have much of a future as this, like, technology based financial services business. And the problem was, we could not find a partner who would work with us to deliver this like frictionless digital onboarding experience. And so we had to figure out like how to do it anyways. And so we had to hack it. And so every day, what would basically happen is we'd have clients sign up, and we would deliver this great digital onboarding experience to them, they would feel it was done. And then my co founder, Dave, and I basically would sit there every night, and print off every application we got and sign it and either walk it or drive it up to our back office or courier there so that the next morning those accounts will get opened. And that was what it looked like it was us hustling on the phone all day every day trying to convince people to sign up every night printing off mounds of paperwork and signing it and trying to get accounts opened and then hustling for business. And I think one of the earliest kind of channels we found for growing that was reliable, but totally unscalable was events that this like in person tactile, I can see you in touch, you know, hopefully not touch but see you experience made people trust us and and sign up. And so we found that about 20% of the people that came to our events would sign up for accounts. And it could be five people in a room and we get one client, it could be 100 people in a room, we got 20 clients. So my job became, do as many events as I can every day. So it would be booked back to back kind of from noon till evening in as many events as we possibly could. And it was that kind of craziness of running around the city all day doing these events, hopping on a plane across the country, doing events, printing off paperwork every night, and manning the phones.
Eric Janssen
That's awesome. So maybe not awesome at the time. But look, reflecting back on it, that seems like you have good memories of your lighting up telling the story.
Michael Katchen
You romanticize these early days, like it was frustrating as hell, I remember how often we would just complain about things would break, our back office partner wouldn't deliver the data properly. And so our clients were seeing investment returns that make no sense. And that erodes trust, and we didn't control it, but they would think it was our fault. And we couldn't do anything about it. And like enormous amounts of frustration. But also, those are the fun parts you remember of like people leaning in and just brute forcing solutions. You can't brute force solutions, that kind of scale we're at now often anymore. But it's fun when you have like total accountability, and you just have to make it work.
Eric Janssen
So let's talk about what changes because in my own experience, I found that every time whatever you're working on roughly three axes in size. For me, that was revenue, everything that worked for the last stage didn't work for the new stage. So growing from zero to 1 million in revenue, requires a certain skill set. And then the founder can't just push the boulder anymore. So you bring on people, and you think you have things figured out, and then you get to be on three and it breaks, then you get to 10. And it breaks again. And so what can you think about what, what changed from those early days to say the first inflection point for you?
Michael Katchen
Yes, that is definitely my experience, too. And I think it never stops, I think you have to reinvent the company almost in yourself every six months or so. Or every 12 months as you grow? I think the first inflection point that really comes to mind is when we were probably around like 20 to 30 people, which is when it really changed from being that small group around the table. Everybody pitching in on everything, the only thing that matters we have this whiteboard in the office, which was we had four or five columns, which are the stages in our onboarding funnel. And the goal was like, Can we move five names from the column on the left to the column on the right every week, and then it was 10 names, and then 20 names, and it was, you know, that kind of hustle. But when you have 20 or 30 people, you start having to put in place certain structures, some of the people that are starting to join you are, it's still the early days, and they're still like mission warriors. But you start to have a little bit more of this, you know, career orientation, what are the opportunities for me here, if you've been here for more than a year, am I going to get a promotion. So that's the first part where it starts to feel more like a company. And then then you get to like 70 people or 80 people, and you've got to start figuring this stuff out for real, you've got to have career paths and levels. And that's a huge transition, I think, for entrepreneurs, because, like, for me, in the early days, I used to have a feeling that titles don't matter. Every day is a fight for survival, call yourself whatever the hell you want. And it doesn't matter. make yourself feel great. And that broke at 75 people when you needed titles, and you needed a little bit of structure to help people understand their place in the ecosystem and how to grow. And that doesn't mean hierarchy. But it just means a little more structure to things. And now we're at 300 people and we broke something at around 250 where whatever we were using before stopped working. And I think the latest iteration has been around communication, that it used to be everybody was around the table and would always know what was going on. I'd have lunch with everybody in the company every single day, we talk about the company. And so there were no questions that were unanswered, there were no confusions about how I felt about things, for example, a 300 people, there are people that I don't know very well, I've met everybody, but there are people I don't know very well. And I have to say the same thing. 10 times before, I'm confident that the whole company has heard it. And it's a different kind of thing. And it's taken us a little while to kind of overcome this latest iteration. And my guess is we're gonna feel really good about it in six months, and then it's gonna break again. So it's a constant struggle of figuring out those those different iterations as you grow.
Eric Janssen
Yeah. So how did you seem to be very good my homework very thoughtful about the people that you brought on. And there was an article from, if it was a year ago or a few years ago, when you were must have been a few years ago, you were maybe 50 or 60 people, and you had spent most of your time actually doing the recruiting yourself. So, how did you do that? Like how even getting to 60 people is a big accomplishment? What did you do to make sure that you got the right people?
Michael Katchen
I think it is. I mean, I learned this from the founders of Airbnb that hired I think even more than that they hired the first 300 or something. Personally, I think it's one of the most important tasks for a founder or founder CEO, getting good at hiring, making it an exciting place to be selling the vision and the story. So you get to pick great talent to be a part of this thing. And I thought it was so important that I dedicated at least 50% of my time in the early days to hiring. And I was only able to do that, because I had great partners that could lead other parts of the business that I didn't have to lead. So, you know, Brett was running our engineering organization and operations, and Rudy was doing the designing and branding and marketing. So that freed me up to focus on that, which at the time felt like the most important thing in the business.
Eric Janssen
And if I bring my sales framework to it, so I talk about when you're going after clients are seeds, nets and spears and seeds and nets are talking about seeds is maybe some of the PR you do the stories that people read about you nets would be getting people to come in and actually apply to the jobs and then Spears being EU, you know, NuGet would be good as a as an advisor or financial advisor, we should get him. So in those early days, did you how much time or how much focus did you spend on mirrors, spears, strictly spirits, strictly
Michael Katchen
spirits, and that was a mistake. It's hard to it's hard when you have a wide net, to find great talent in it. And you need a good process to figure out how to find when you look at an application, what is an application that is good, but also is a good fit for your particular firm and culture and what you're trying to build. And I found it a little overwhelming in the early days. And I focus almost exclusively on Spears, which I think is a is a powerful thing when you're early enough. When you know engineers, for instance, they get cold calls all day every day from recruiters. And so by being the CEO and reaching out, and taking my time to do it thoughtfully, was a way to stand out from the pack. And I think that that investment enabled us to really be targeted and thoughtful and get people excited it's fun to hear from a CEO. And if you've got the seeds out there of press and people are starting to hear your name no about you. And the CEO reaches out I feel special, versus a recruiter or some recruiting firm. And so that's one of the ways that we tried to use the fact that I was running recruiting to get great talent. But I should have paid more attention to the to the net. There are several examples of people that I missed. That applied that we got lucky we ended up getting in the end, I remember our very first CTO guy, Tim Carney applied for a job. And he had the dream resume for an early stage company, you know, had been at Amazon for 10 years, had built their very first distribution system, you know, architecture, and it was a deep technologist and a financial services nerd, like a personal finance nerd, just perfect on paper. And I missed it. And only because he happened to know another founder in the ecosystem, and got him to write me a note personally and say, Mike, like, What the hell are you doing? You got to pay attention to this this application? Did we end up interviewing him and he became a very important kind of early partner in the business and scaling and building our engineering team. It happened recently with our chief people officer, who applied for a job sent me a note on LinkedIn, which I missed. And only Luckily, did she follow up again by email, that we ended up catching things and ended up hiring her. So you got to patch into the nets. But we definitely focused on the spears in the early days. And the systems,
Eric Janssen
How did you or do you now figure out how to filter through those nets. So there's got to be a combination of right fit for the culture, right skillset for the role there, like assessment or questions or interviews, what's your process to figure out who the right person is?
Michael Katchen
Our process evolves. And it continues has evolved a lot since I was leading recruiting and it continues to evolve today. Now we have a great dedicated team that focuses on it. And it generally follows like a series of steps there's a first phone call with a with a recruiters and really they're just trying to assess shit. I used to say if I pick up the when I was running, recruiting, I pick up the phone and try and speak to someone and the question I was asking was, is this someone I ever want to speak to again, and if the answer was yes, then they would immediately get the checkmark on the first stage of the short phone call process is deliberately short to try and not waste too much time, you know, on the the noise and find the signals, right? So you're looking for your first signal and then you move on to your next step which is Do they have the technical chops to really do what's required of the role? And then you if they do so there's someone that seems interesting, on first pass of somebody who want to spend time with, they have the technical chops to do the role, then you invest the real time in understanding their background, and understanding their cultural kind of values and how they fit in and understanding whether or not they really are a fit for for what you're trying to do.
Eric Janssen
So say, I'm going to move down the funnel, so you've brought somebody on? Do you have a process that you set them up for success? Do you have a way that you onboard them to make sure that they feel like they're ready to go and contribute to assemble?
Michael Katchen
Yeah, I think we have a pretty robust onboarding process now, which is your whole first week at the company, every minute of it is almost kind of orchestrated, and designed to give you an amazing experience and to ramp you up. It's a big steep learning curve. And so we have presentations from all the leaders in the business, I come in, and I do a talk on kind of the founding story and the mythologies of the business and try. And that's very important to me that I always continue to do that, I think it's a great chance to meet everybody who's starting and also make sure we, I hate to use the word but indoctrinate in some ways, kind of the mythologies of the business, which is important for culture. And then you have a rotation on like client service and get to know our clients. And we try to make sure people have empathy for the problems in our product where clients are running into issues and friction, so that if you're going on and your job is going to be to go fix them on the engineering team or on the design, you know, team or wherever it is that you're going. And so we have a pretty structured onboarding process, which I think is a really effective tool for integrating new new folks to the team.
Eric Janssen
Talk about transition to some challenges. I found that startups are almost a marathon not a sprint was not even really like a marathon. It's like a series of sprints over and over again. And sometimes, you know, you get you feel like you're actually are getting everything if you've done it right, you're getting everything out of your people. And then just around that quarter is the next, you know, mile or 100 miles that we've got to continue to sprint. Any advice on? How do you continue to get more out of people who are already giving so much?
Michael Katchen
Yeah, I wish you could tell me the answer to that. I agree, I think it's tough to get the balance, right? Because the reality first startup is your default dead. And it requires you know, the number of startups that fail is staggeringly high. And it takes a Herculean effort to will something into existence against all the odds. Even if you have a product people love, it's still you got to build a business around that. And that's not an easy thing to do. And it's really tough, it's really tough. And I think that you've got to figure out the way to do it in a way where you're not burning out yourself, you're not burning your team out. And I think a lot of that has to do with how you talk about things like work life, we call it work life fit, not work life balance, and our company. Some people love to work hard, I'm one of them. And this idea of you have to set certain hours or balance is one that never really resonated with me, you know, forcing that on someone else. But this idea of fit, you got to find the thing that works for you, or the setup that works for you, or you incorporate the work, and the personal and the whatever in the in the in the recipe that makes sense for your life. But you got to be willing to work hard, because that's what it's going to take it is supposed to be hard. If it were easy to build truly transformative, impactful companies, we'd have a lot more of them. So I think that's one of the things you screened for is do you find people that are able to work hard? I think one of the things we're talking a lot about in our business now. Is that the importance of working smart as you scale? Because one of the things that's becoming really important is how do you decouple your growth in in revenue and business, from your growth and headcount. You want to be able to grow your revenues, multiples faster than you do your headcount. And that's where real scale and software comes from. And so it's not about throwing more bodies at problems. It's about throwing, technology and good process and smart thinking around how to solve problems. And that's one of the things that's a big conversation for us now is transitioning from being at a stage where you could brute force where an extra five hours here and there could like make a meaningful difference on the numbers, to having to be thoughtful, and work smarter and create more scale, which is something that we're kind of in that phase of thinking about and working on. But I don't think that was true, you know, a few years ago, because trying to think too much about scale when you have none wouldn't wouldn't have been helpful for us at that stage. Right. I might not have been that might have been a non answer. It's a tough one.
Eric Janssen
It's not a question that I know the answer to. So I was putting it out there as a really, as a purposefully not ambiguous, but it's a really hard one to answer. So I found it hard to think about putting aside thinking time when you're in it. Now I get reminded from my friends and partner who's still in the middle of it, when I get to reflect on a little bit of the space that I've created now thinking time, and I talk about that with my partner, she will often remind me what it's like, very point blank, remind me what it's like to be in the middle of it. I'll say that, but you've always struck me as someone who seems to make time to think that at least, when you're present, you're here, you've got a million things on the go. But you're here right now. And even over the course of our friendship, it seems like you've always been someone who's very clear and is thinking and made time to purposefully think, is that a conscious effort? And how do you do it?
Michael Katchen
Well, thank you for the compliment. I'd say I am in flow, I like to create thinking time. And one of the practices I started when I was in California, after selling the business when I was like deliberate, I want to start a business, I got to come up with ideas I was I would sit at a coffee shop first thing in the morning for an hour or two by myself, with no laptop with a journal and a book. And I found it to be like meditative and productive and enormously helpful as I was thinking through that stage in my life and problem that I wanted to work on. And it's practice I've tried to keep up. So I still to this day, I try to start every day with one to two hours of thinking time with a book and a notebook at a coffee shop. My hit rate these days is not as good as it used to be. But in my calendar every morning, I blocked from eight to 10am to do that. And I try as best I can to stick to it. And I find it like enormously helpful. When I stick to it. I'm always happy that I that I am because I feel like my thinking is clearer. And I come I show up at work with more energy and conviction and thoughtfulness. But it's hard when you get into the grind sometimes of creating space for it.
Eric Janssen
And when you're thinking about a product problem? Is it premeditated, like I'm gonna sit for an hour and think about this thing? Are you journaling on a topic? What do you do in that hour, hour and a half?
Michael Katchen
Usually not. I mean, sometimes I will. And I'll go in and I'll have the journal open and just be thinking about this particular problem. Most often I go in and I'm reading a book or, you know, some essay or article that I have saved a million of that I'm trying to work my way through. And it's sparking ideas or making me reflect. I find that that like unstructured thinking time is actually the best thing. You hear about this from folks, and I am not like a Steve Jobs. I don't equate my style or my ability anywhere like someone like that. But even him, his unstructured thinking time walking, you know, in Palo Alto, California, and how he talks about the effectiveness that had in him as a leader at Apple. Like I think there's value to this idea of unstructured time alone, without an agenda without trying to be too purposeful about where your thoughts take you.
Eric Janssen
So if anybody ever sees you in Toronto, I just imagine people looking at think that's my Kachin. And it's weird. He's just sitting there with a phone. What's he doing? Just sitting there? So you're just just thinking through or reading not on your phone? not catching up on email, not making phone calls?
Michael Katchen
Yeah, I try.
Eric Janssen
I try. Yeah, that's great. There's a great book that I read recently called Deep work by Cal Newport. And he talks about, I've got a timer on my desk, but I try to at least get one of those sessions in a day of 90 minutes where I'm just focused on a particular task. hard to do.
Michael Katchen
I think that's really valuable, though. I don't believe anybody is productive at all hours of the day. 100% true, but the perception is you have to be or you're supposed to be. And so you like force yourself into very unproductive. I haven't read the book. But imagine a lot of the principle is how do you carve out the specific time you need, and focus to do one thing really well every day? I think Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says if I can make three decisions a day, it's a successful day. He's not saying I need to make a decision every hour. If I can do three things, one thing really well today that'll move the needle for the business. Like what else do I really need to do today? And I think figuring what whatever your cadence is, and I think it's different for everybody is important.
Eric Janssen
That's good. So lots on the go for you. Personally, I know you've got a little one at home. Has that been a forcing function to help you spread narrow in on just the most important things as well?
Michael Katchen
Totally. If you don't make time for family, you know, it's the thing that suffers the most. And I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I wasn't it's the joy of my life is my time with my family and And so creating space for that I try, the easiest time for me is around bedtime. So I try and leave the office every day around five o'clock if I'm on town so that I can give her dinner and put her to bed. And then if I'm working again, I'm working again after she's in bed at seven o'clock and talking about work life fit. And I work really hard. But I find the schedule that enables me to fit in, you know, the things that are most important to me and in my structure in my life.
Eric Janssen
That's great. Wrap up here in a few minutes. What are you most excited about right now, it could be personal professional.
Michael Katchen
I mean, honestly, I'm like, really, I've never felt more excited about the business we're building. There is so much momentum right now. And just so much more opportunity in front of us, that it feels like we have endless number of fun and big and exciting and challenging things to work on. That. It's just really a fun stage. We have evolved our business in the last year to become much more than just an investment company. We're trying to help people become a full service kind of financial partner to our clients as they navigate all of the financial choices of their life. And so we launched a discount brokerage business that helps people trade stocks, we launched the Tax Service through an acquisition, we just announced the launch of a saving and spending service, which is really something we're pretty proud of. And so like it just I feel pretty giddy. I've never felt as guilty, as I do right now about where we're trying to go. And the team we've put together, like I have a lot of confidence in what we're doing and where we're going. And just also, like the humility to know that we're just scratching the surface on where we want to get to, and I feel super excited about that.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, it's been a fun journey to follow. I thought I knew what wealthsimple was. But recently with your new products and services, I get it more and more. So I don't know exactly yet where it's going to end up. But it's making more and more sense to me as the story unfolds. And I think you've built an amazing company and an amazing team.
Michael Katchen
Really appreciate that. Thank you.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, is last question. Is there anything else that the community can do for you? So most of our listeners are younger entrepreneurs a lot still in school. And we've got a big alumni network that also listen, is there anything that we can do to help you or well, simple?
Michael Katchen
I'd leave you with maybe three messages. The first is sign up. We'd love your business. And we'd love to hear from you. If you have feedback, we are trying to build something pretty special. And we depend on feedback to make it great. We'd love to hear from folks. The second is we're hiring and I think, love to hear from really smart people that care about what we're building and are trying to do that. And the third is is a less selfish one. And I mentioned this in the talk this morning, that I think that Ivey is an incredible network. And this is an amazing community. And the entrepreneurs here already are doing amazing things. One thing I would push us all to do more of is to think bigger, it is not a Canadian thing to do. And we need to change that. I'm someone who is deeply passionate and appreciative of being here in Canada and being Canadian. And I worry about our future if we do not figure out how to dream bigger, build really big companies that propel our prosperity for years to come in the future. And my favorite analogy on this is when we when we turn our minds to winning, we're actually pretty good at it. And I remember when we were an Ivey Dean was Carol Stevenson, who went on to chair the vannak Olympic community committee that had or was on the board of that committee that was the own the podium year for the Olympics, like how I'm Canadian is that let's go on the podium be the best in the world. What happened? We won. You know how good it felt? Felt great. And people think it's I'm Canadian to think that way. And I think we need to just shed that. So my challenge to the community, for the sake of all of us, is to really build wonderful communities of companies and to think as big as you can about the impact you want to have. I think we will all benefit from that for years to come.
Eric Janssen
That's great. Mike, I'm gonna get you on the road. Thank you so much for the time. I appreciate you coming in.
Michael Katchen
Thanks for having me.
Introduction/Outro
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