“Taste is a point of view that has a backbone... and it survives under pressure.” George Bugg, Staff Product Designer, Ramp
We recorded Episode 2 of ‘Tech Thursday Live!’ last week in our studio, in front of a live audience.
Mark Le Dain and I went through a wild couple of weeks of Canadian tech news: A new tax cut on business investment, billions in bank and pension pledges, the largest VC fund in Canadian history.
We also sat down with:
Andrew Curtis, CEO at Clearco on rebuilding Clearco
Doug Schweitzer on Ultimarii’s $13M Fundraise and the status of Major Projects
George Bugg from Ramp on why taste matters more than ever
📺 You can watch the full episode on Youtube here. Or listen on Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. If you enjoy the episode, please subscribe and review.
Here is the top ideas that stuck with me 👇
Canada wants to build. Ultimarii is making it faster.
Big funds are back. So is discipline.
Agents are coming. Taste is the moat.
1. Canada wants to build. Ultimarii is making it faster.
Ottawa cut the marginal effective tax rate on new business investment from roughly 13% to 6.4%, and banks and pensions pledged billions at the Canada Investment Summit. Mark’s caveat: some of those pledges are advisory services, not capital.
Either way, the money only matters if projects get approved. That’s Doug Schweitzer’s whole company. He watched major projects stall as an Alberta cabinet minister. Now Ultimarii, fresh off a $13M+ Series A led by BDC, uses AI to work through the 30,000 to 40,000 pages a single mining approval can take. His words: “Canada has one of the most complicated regulatory environments globally.”
Don’t miss the next Tech Thursday Live! on October 8th
We have:
Kurtis Broda, COO at Wyvern one of the most exciting SpaceTech companies in Canada
Eva Kiefer, President and CFO at Northbase, fresh off a $300M credit facility from Oaktree Capital Management
More to be announced
2. Big funds are back. Discipline is back too.
Radical Ventures closed over US$1B for its Breakouts Fund. Portage closed US$600M for fintech. The money is flowing again.
Andrew has lived the other side of that cycle. Clearco, founded as Clearbanc in 2015 by Michele Romanow and Andrew D’Souza, was one of Canada’s breakout fintech stories. It funded ecommerce brands by taking a cut of their future revenue instead of equity. In 2021 it raised $215M from SoftBank and was valued at roughly US$2B.
Then the market turned. Over 2022 and early 2023, Clearco went through several rounds of layoffs and pulled out of its international markets. Andrew joined as an advisor in 2022 and became CEO in January 2023, when the company was, in his words, “close to an emergency.” That October, Clearco recapitalized with a US$60M Series D at a valuation about 90% below its peak.
Since then, it’s been a slow, disciplined rebuild. This August, Clearco closed a US$100M facility from Macquarie that it expects will back about US$900M in funding to ecommerce brands over the next two years. Andrew’s rule for Clearco 2.0 is simple: if you give someone $100 plus a fee, you’d better get the $100 plus the fee back.
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3. Agents are coming. Taste is the moat.
Harvey is shifting from selling software to building AI for law firms, and Meta launched Muse, an agent that does things for you. Mark’s take: if agents do the buying, “you don’t even have to exist as a business from a brand perspective.”
George took that to its conclusion. LLMs work by scanning what already exists and predicting what comes next. Hand them all the design, code and ideas, and “all of the IP that it uses will just be reused nonsense. Everything will look the same.”
So what is taste? His answer was the best thing said all night:
“Taste is a point of view that has a backbone… and it survives under pressure. It survives in different environments.”
He says taste comes from “seeking the uncanny in the world”: looking for things that aren’t mass-produced and holding opinions other people don’t. That’s risky, and it’s the point. “That requires putting yourself on the line,” which, as he put it, an LLM can’t do.
Ramp puts that into practice. Its head of brand says the brand “should behave like jazz”: recognizable, but never the same twice. That’s how you get Kevin from The Office sitting in a glass box in Times Square doing receipts for 12 hours, a wrecking ball dropped on a BMW, and a one-night-only Broadway-style musical to sell finance software.
Founder Myth of the Week
Last week’s: does Jeff Adamson run to work everyday? Confirmed. Philippe and George watched him do it.
This week’s: does Tate Hackert drag race his Audi R8? Answer next episode.
💼 Jobs
Bitdeer: Project Coordinator
Questrade: Product Marketing Manager
North Vector Dynamics: IT Manager
WestJet: Senior Developer
Quantized Technologies: Head of Quantum Development [link]
Other Content from Thursday Media
🎙️ Your Business is on the Line, Canada’s Number One Business-Comedy Podcast is back with Adam Thompson, founder of Friday Socks, a Calgary success story built on purposely mismatched socks. He pitched Atomic Bath Bombs and PopTop Plants. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
🤑 How Questrade is Building a Technology-First Bank, Tech Thursday was joined by Hwan Kim, Chief Product Officer, Andrej Simeonov, Head of Technology, and Ralph Sadowski, Product Director to talk about how Questrade is going from one of Canada’s first online brokerages, to a Schedule I bank. Watch on Youtube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
🤝 October 8th, We’re back with another episode of Tech Thursday Live! RSVP here.
💻 November 14th: Tech Thursday X Garmin Hackathon. Come build Garmin Apps with the Garmin team. This is a super interesting hackathon because Garmin uses Monkey C coding language. With special help from Helcim, Motiv, and more. RSVP here.
Thank you to our Incredible Sponsors
Ramp, Boast, Skip, Alberta Innovates, Crestview, and BLG. These folks make it all possible, we couldn’t be more thankful to them.