Adam Froese is solving the one problem retail cannot; An $800bn strategic operating layer
Five things that stuck with me from our conversation at Tech Thursday
Adam Froese is a former Olympic field hockey player, ex-Deloitte investment banker, Venture Capitalist at Harvest Ventures, and co-founder of SecondShop, a company that provides the strategic operating layer for retailers like Costco and HomeDepot. In 24 months, the company has sold over $100M worth of retail goods, through it's integrated logistics and recommerce marketplace. He sat down with us at Tech Thursday and had a lot to say about what's actually broken in Canadian tech, and what it looks like when a founder builds with conviction anyway.
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We covered (w/ timestamps):
0:00 - Adam's background: from Olympian to VC to founder
1:50 - The Wayfair couch that started Second Shop
2:50 - Why the moat is distribution, not the marketplace
5:50 - The $400M problem hiding in Costco's returns
7:20 - Raising money for a capital-heavy business
8:50 - VC as an accelerant, not life support
17:50 - Why the Canadian VC model is broken
20:20 - Government R&D grants: how to play the game
39:20 - The Olympic qualifier that shaped how he builds
1. The moat isn’t the marketplace. It’s the truck.
“These big retailers have no issues selling the product, but managing the stuff that doesn't stay sold is the big problem.”
SecondShop sells open-box and certified refurbished Appliances, Furniture, and TVs from major retailers and manufacturers. On the surface it looks like a resale marketplace. But the real business is the physical distribution network underneath it. Moving a fridge across the country requires a very specific set of logistics capabilities that most companies don’t have. Froese’s co-founder Cedric built a $250 million business doing exactly that. The marketplace is the interface. The network is the asset.
This matters because it inverts a common assumption in Canadian tech. We tend to celebrate software-first, capital-light businesses. Froese is building something deliberately capital-heavy, and the weight is the point. The logistics network creates compounding defensibility that no pure software competitor can replicate. Not every great tech company looks like a SaaS dashboard.
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Join us on March 26th for a conversation on the IP decisions founders regret and how to avoid making them yourself, Co-Hosted by ElevateIP Alberta.
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Jason Howg, Partner and Regional Group Manager at BLG
Danny Zahynacz, Founder at RAD Medical Technologies
Moderated by: Louise Lee, Partner at BLG
2. The problem hiding in all major retailers and suppliers is worth over $200Bn, just in Big and Bulky products.
“That segment alone just in appliances is a $200bn problem for all major retailers and suppliers, just in Big and Bulky products.”
Adam’s insight started with a Wayfair couch that came in the wrong colour. They offered him a new one rather than taking the first back. He couldn’t understand how a company would absorb a $1,000 loss like that, so he followed the thread. What he found was that big retailers running online drop-ship programs have no infrastructure for what happens when a product doesn’t stay sold.
The biggest retailers are sitting on over several billion in available revenue in appliances alone. Layer in TVs, home furnishings, and the next categories, and you have a systemic gap that nobody was seriously solving. That’s SecondShop’s beachhead. It’s a structural problem that had been hiding in plain sight.
3. Venture capital should be an accelerant, not life support.
“The big thing for us coming into this was I did not want to be dependent on venture capital to survive. Venture capital is a tool to help us accelerate our roadmap. But the underlying is this business needs to be what we call a going concern. It needs to operate on its own without needing life support.”
Froese was explicit about this: SecondShop was designed to operate as a going concern without a dependency on venture capital. VC is a tool to accelerate the roadmap, not to keep the lights on. He framed every fundraise around specific inflection points, not open-ended growth mandates. The business had to work first. Then capital could make it work faster.
This is a quiet indictment of how a lot of early-stage companies in Canada get built. Too many founders sequence their business around fundraising milestones rather than revenue milestones. Froese flipped that. Revenue came first, profitability was within reach, and then he went to the capital stack from a position of leverage. If your business dies without the next check, you don’t have a business yet.
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4. The messy middle is the part nobody celebrates, but it’s where everything actually happens
“The messy middle is really scary, but when you look back on it all, that's the part where you really learned and grew, and really tried to solve a problem.”
Adam used the phrase ‘messy middle’ twice: once about company building, once about his athletic career. He spent years pursuing an Olympic qualification that didn’t come, then committed to another four-year cycle, and scored the shootout goal that sent Canada to Rio 2016. Then, did it again to qualify for Tokyo.
His point wasn’t that persistence pays off. It’s that the value is always in the middle, not the outcome. We’re wired to celebrate the raise, the exit, the headline. But the founders who last are usually the ones who genuinely like the problem more than the prize.
5. The founders who win are solving problems, not chasing exits.
“I am not building this company to make money. The byproduct of building a big company is a payout. That is not the reason I'm doing it.”
Froese closed the conversation with a line that landed quietly: “I am not building this company to make money.” He connected it to his years in Olympic field hockey, where he spent eight years pursuing a dream that paid nothing, failed to qualify the first time, and came back four years later to score the sudden-death goal that sent his team to the Games. When asked whether he’d start a company in Canada or the US, he sidestepped the optimization question entirely. He’s building here because he found a problem worth solving.
Canada has a growing habit of evaluating founders through the lens of venture outcomes, TAM slides, and exit multiples. Froese is a reminder that the founders who endure the messy middle, the ones who survive the nine-month grant cycles and the overnight policy reversals and the capital-intensive early years, are usually the ones who came for the problem, not the payout. That’s not a sentimental observation. It’s a pattern. The motivation has to outlast the math, because the math will break more than once.
→ Listen on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple
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March 26th: IP Mistakes That Cost Founders, Co-Hosted by ElevateIP Alberta
Hear from:
Kurtis Broda, Co-Founder & COO at Wyvern
Jason Howg, Partner and Regional Group Manager at BLG
Danny Zahynacz, Founder at RAD Medical Technologies
Moderated by: Louise Lee, Partner at BLG
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April Hicke, Founder & CEO, Toast
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Shubh Sidhu, Founder & Host, Your Business is on the Line
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