Champion Story 11 | Andrew Peek
Recorded on December 11, 2018
Biography: Andrew Peek is the Co-Founder and CEO of Delphia, where he is developing an AI investment strategy that anyone can improve by contributing their data. They’ve been able to accomplish this by forecasting fundamentals for thousands of companies using a combination of market data, company data, and various forms of consumer data such as credit card transactions.
For over a decade, Andrew has been making bets on technology backed by experimentation, data, and the changing patterns in human behaviour. He’s held pivotal roles in several of Canada’s most notable startups, including FreshBooks and Shopify, and was previously a Partner at Jet Cooper (which sold to Shopify in 2013). He continues to mentor and invest in Canadian entrepreneurs with an eye towards making Canada one of the greatest places in the world to innovate.
You’re very active in the tech space and I like your authenticity and the community building that you've done. I’m curious to know more about your story.
I'll use the jump-off point of community building. That's one thing I've done well in my life. That is largely because my formative years were spent alone. I was an outcast pretty early, like Grade 5 or 6. I was mostly without friends for year-long stretches all the way through to Grade 11 or so. I've made it known in that TEDx talk I did. But I got sufficiently bullied that my group of friends actually found it to be a liability to hang around me and they all stopped. It was just me.
When I grew up, I wanted to fill that gap and yearned for good people and to have as much community as possible. I've been scratching that itch for a while and it's manifested in all kinds of different ways. That was my impetus for all the community building later in life.
What else is part and parcel to my story? I have a dad who was an entrepreneur who had a couple of moderate successes, a couple of moderate failures and then a catastrophic failure that kind of threw the whole family into financial disarray. He modeled the risk side of the equation and had a lot of charisma, so I probably picked up some of that.
I had a mother who was very by the book and when shit hit the fan, she stepped in and climbed the corporate ladder right from the bottom to the very top, ending with a decade long career as a director at IBM. She emphasized the education, the discipline, the working with the structure rather than just upending it. I ended up being a good blend of both.
The entrepreneurship piece is tied back to the upbringing and the bullying. For a long time I carried a giant chip on my shoulder and a desire to just prove the world wrong. I went through most of my adult life, until recently, with a very warrior mentality. The “I don't need anyone, I'm going to figure this out on my own. I can be resourceful, I can amass my own fortune, I can figure out my own destiny, et cetera, et cetera.”
But at some point, that stops working for you as well. The transition of the last five years has been different. It's been more of how to put that chip down, not wage war in every moment and how to invite abundance in a different way. So that's been my big life lessons.
I was nodding with you when you were talking about proving wrong because I could relate. I've also been bullied. It was six years of no friends and then going to the other extreme of what you said, to double down and say, “I'm going to prove everyone wrong.”
You mentioned starting off being able to learn the two different styles of having the warrior mentality and now there's this transition. How have things shifted? What is new leadership or style that you're exploring now?
I have a therapist who I've been seeing for years, seven years, maybe eight. The language we use is moving from warrior to king. The difference being that the lion, for example, the symbol of the king of the jungle, the lion doesn't have to go around frightening all the other animals in the kingdom, but actually the lion can mostly get away with lying on his perch somewhere, and his presence alone is enough to assert himself.
That analogy of going from warrior to king and the lion representing the king, it's one of being wiser and just knowing the moments where you're going to put a boundary or where you're going to stand up for yourself and conserving your energy for those moments and mostly just operating from a place of peacefulness in between.
One of the big catalysts was two and a half years ago when I met my fiance. We fell in love, and I proposed. Once I had her validation, I didn't care as much about the validation from the rest of the world. I mean I still cared some, but it softened tremendously. There's still some there, but it's amazing all I've been looking for is love and validation.
When you talked about that warrior, I can relate. I came with all my armour as a founder. I was armoured up, and I would research the armour I wanted to pick. I relied so much on my intelligence to lead, and I went in there with that mentality of using my strength or using my intellect as a barrier.
It was because I had this bad breakdown after my first startup. I had worked myself almost to death, and I kind of realized there's probably something really broken about the way I'm looking at success. Not only that, but I feel most of the time when I'm in the industry, I'm pretending. I feel like I have to act as a guy in order to make it. I felt really onerous and that was really humbling. You can be a little bit warmer and be yourself and in that transition you mentioned about going to king and being okay to perch. You don't need all the armor.
I like the power. It's like a power in that lion...
The lion has confidence. They just know, they don't need to show it all the time.
The armor analogy resonates with me too. I still have people who want to see me be more vulnerable. There's still a desire for a lot of people in my life to experience that and some people get to experience it in full and some people get to experience it in part. That's a whole other level of strength that I'm still coming into. I've had a lot of practice with not putting them aside, but managing them. I manage them in a pretty healthy way, as well as my psyche because I'm doing that regularly, I'm rarely bottled up.
If anything, I've had to work in the other direction where I'm feeling something and I express it right away. I have to pull back a little. I feel like I got lucky because I know a lot of people who struggle with expressing and we're confronting the things that are going on inside their head or body. I can't imagine what that must feel like when it adds up.
I'm curious because when you talked about expression, what does expression mean to you?
I think my mind is fully expressed right now and my truth is fully expressed. I think my body is probably not getting it's full dose of expression right now. I can remember a time where I was moved emotionally by my body feeling fully expressed. Are you satisfied? Do you feel like it's all out there and you're not resisting, The key words are, “are you practicing any kind of resistance anywhere?”
One of the things that I've loved about your share is your ownership of your journey. I'm starting to understand more about how expressions can look in different people. I know I share more than most people, but that's always been my power. It's been humbling for me to understand different types of expression because it's not always about the verbal. I loved hearing your version of what that looks like for Andrew.
We have more than one form of expression but like you, verbal came first.
When you spoke about your journey and this transition, I keep thinking about that image of the branch. It was when you talked about the lion perched on the branch.
Here you go [showing the photo]. This has been on my phone for years. It's my daily reminder. 150 times a day.
How would you describe the values that you carry as a person?
I like my presence to speak for itself. Ideally, I don't need to say too many words upon walking into a room or into a situation. I generally try to trust as a de-facto first option. The second option, I want to believe that everybody is doing their best. I rarely believe that your intentions are bad. I believe that you might be misguided but you have to really work hard for me to think that you're inherently a malicious person.
I spent a lot of years creating a lot of boundaries. I will not do this, I will do this. I've taught myself you don't actually need to be concerned about somebody hurting you. Lean into the notion that the universe is a safe place and people are inherently good and they're worth trusting. Don't worry, your fail safe is you'll be fine, you won't get hurt too much in the process, a little scratch but nothing more than that. I've had people break my trust. But now I haven't felt my narrative impacted by other people doing so.
If somebody misleads me or hurts me, my default is, “Okay, there's something in their world that is clouding their judgment.” I can't solve it, but I don't need to internalize it. It's not a statement about me, so thank you very much. We could shake hands and go our separate ways, but I don't wear it heavily after that.
My impression on the interactions we've had, you talked about intuition and I want to explore more about that. This idea that we start to go into the hustle and the grind and there's a hundred things we're trying to do.
What I heard when you talked about this trust, is that part of the trust is being okay to let go of things and being okay that I don't have to try to control this conversation.
You're hitting the nail on the head. The ultimate trust is trust in the universe. The challenge we run into is if we try to exert too much control, it means you're not exerting enough trust in the universe. You're ultimately saying, “I don't trust you to let things unfold the way they should, I'm going to just manifest them exactly like I want, right?” It's a desire to control, to mitigate uncertainty.
You're dancing with the universe and sometimes you are going to lead and sometimes they are going to lead, and the game is to know the difference as to whose turn it is. Sometimes destiny is unfolding and you just need to work with what's coming. Other times you can bend things directionally in a way that you want them. You may not get exactly the outcome desired, but you can certainly bend them into something that you directionally want.
I've also used the word flow because it's moving, it's not necessarily static.
I was 'out of control' when I was young, I'm extremely comfortable now letting go of control in the fullest of ways. I make it a matter of practice in my adult life to put myself in situations that are completely out of control, just as like a little field test here and there.
The bottom fell out of our family financially. I got arrested for some dumb shit I did when I was 18. The bottom fell out and I got kicked out of all the schools in Ontario for a year. There were just enough moments of complete loss of control. Now, it's like I'm in the tornado, I'm okay. we're going around in a tornado, it'll put me down, and when it puts me down I'll pay attention to what angle I'm staring at. What's in my field of view.
When you talk about the tornado and even when we talked about the flow, something that came into my head was about the honest nature of the founder’s journey. I'm drawn into this crazy wave and I'm starting to realize the more founders I talked to, that it’s actually the norm. It's the craziness of the stream that we're going on.
Every founder can relate to this. We're in the stream, sometimes it can feel intense. We're in there, we're trying to see what's happening and there's water everywhere. When you have those experiences, what helps you, is grounding, what grounds you, even though the tornado's happening, you're not feeling like you're lost in the tornado.
Trust is what's grounding me. I'm just trusting the process. It comes down to whether you believe the universe is a safe place. Because if you do, then wherever you land, you are safe. You may have an interesting and difficult lesson to confront, but you are ultimately safe.
I have a parallel question to ask. How do you build that trust? In your experience, how did you build that trust within yourself?
When the universe knocks you down and you get up and then it knocks you down and you get back up and then it knocks you down, and you get back up, you build this knowing that, “Oh my God, I have survived all of these things!” I'm pretty invincible. Maybe these things aren't as big. I don't want to make them sound small, but maybe they're not damnations. Look at who I am now, and look at the things I've created. There's no way I'd create those things without the experiences I had that were difficult. Who am I to presuppose whether those things that were difficult should or should not have happened.
When I look around, I have curated a beautiful community. I can't argue with the road here. That's me just acknowledging that the universe has a much greater plan that included the things that knocked me down, which I also survived. Now I don't worry when I feel knocked over or blindsided. It still sucks, don't get me wrong. There's going to be bad things that'll happen to me during my life, right? It's tough to trust a master plan when you can't put your finger on it. That is letting go of control.
I had this image popping up. You're looking at a fabric and you're the kind of person who's looking at that one part of the tapestry that's frayed and it's broken. It looks kind of ugly, you're looking at it all the time. You’re freaking out about that piece, but when we zoom out and see at the rest of the tapestry, we realize there was meaning to it.
Maybe that was part of the character building that now allows me to do what I do, since I had that really tough experience.
Totally.
We love things like wabi-sabi, right? Like from a design standpoint. Are you familiar with wabi-sabi?
No, what is that?
It's essentially the imperfect design. Wabi-sabi is like a Japanese expression. You know, you'll see different objects, and they have an imperfection, like a blemish or ruggedness or something. A broken chip or what have you. We look at these things, we really appreciate them because they remind us of ourselves. Then we go into places that are really sterile and too perfect and we feel uncomfortable. We're like this is too contrived. The world is not this and it's funny because sometimes we get caught up trying to make things so bloody perfect, even though if you put us physically in such an environment we would revolt a little bit. So maybe we have to kind of acknowledge that and to your point about the tapestry, there is a certain love for the whole entirety of it, inclusive of the blemish.
My inspiration, my passion for this whole platform was that I was touched by so many different founders that approached me as I spoke at tech conferences about mental health. People would come up to me and they would share deep stories, personal stories, about a slice of their founder journey.
Everyone in our industry has had either a rock bottom or had a time when their tapestry frayed and it frayed in the ugly way. At the same time, there's such beauty in that too. There’s something universal about it, whether it's the founder journey or in parallel with life as the ups and downs. I love that you mentioned trust and allowing ourselves to be okay with it, regardless of where we are, even if it is the trough of sorrow.
Yes. I'll be frank. This is my last startup. So if it turns into a public company as I hope it does, fantastic. I'll run it till the end of my life and if it fails, I think I'm done with tech quite honestly. Because I thought I was always an entrepreneur, but not necessarily a tech entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurship for me means taking charge of your own creativity and finding a way to live off that. I'll go try my hand at something else after this that maybe has a fraction of the volatility of tech startups. Mostly because I want to be more present for my partner, my kids and I struggle to find that balance.
Yeah. Thanks for sharing that with me.
My pleasure. Can I answer anything else for you?
What's been the most surprising part of your journey, the most surprising part when you look back?
I wish I could remember this, not the story, it is an old adage, if you will. I'm going to bastardize it, but it's a good one. It was something akin to a farmer finding an award winning horse. It showed up in his yard one day and his neighbor came by and said ‘Oh, that's amazing, such good luck.” He replied, “good luck, bad luck, who knows” and the next day the horse accidentally trampled his boy and broke his leg or something like that and the boy couldn't walk again or whatever. The neighbor comes by after some time and says, “Oh, what terrible luck.” The guy says, “good luck, bad luck, you know, who knows?” It turns out that there was a call to war and that the boy wasn't called to war because he had this broken leg, shattered leg and whatnot. So the neighbor came by and said, “What good luck, what good luck that the boy wasn't chosen.” The farmer replies “Oh, good luck, bad luck, who knows?”
The point is that the events themselves, I can't say which ones were good luck and bad luck. We were planning on sunsetting a company, like the product offshoot from Jet Cooper called Pilot. I was making peace with the fact that I had spent my entire nest egg and gone like $60,000 in the red. I had started with $100,000 and that was my nest egg that I had built up when I started the company. I was like, ‘I got to make peace with that.’ Then the second I made peace with it, Shopify comes along and this thing happened. Then I get to Shopify and I'm like, “It's amazing, I'm going to ride this rocket ship.” Seven months later, I got fired.
Then I'm like, okay, well I guess the silver lining here is there's a shotgun clause, I'll get my full vesting. Definitely an ego hit and I think about how that created space and how I found my business partner Cliff. He was working in this lab, and it took me three years, but I finally convinced him to turn the lab into a venture company with me and off we go with Delphia. Good thing I got fired and created all that space. We're a year in and Cliff turns to me, he's like, “I feel the calling to go open a research lab at McMaster, so I'm going to bow out of the ownership level of the company and we'll connect the lab to the company, but he's off to something else.”
Every time there is a twist and a turn, I've given up trying to predict where it will lead next. I'm always surprised, it's always never what I would guess. It's always something that just needed to happen and is pointing to a larger picture.
When we go through our journey, even though there's the high highs and the low lows, we never really know, right?
You never really know!
If they're good or they're bad until maybe 5, 10, 20 years later we're looking at it and we're like, “Oh, that's what it was for?”
You'll write the story in retrospect and truthfully, part of that will be so that you can manage the way you tell it to yourself and part of it will be true. Part of it will be like, “Oh shit, I did need to go through that in order to get there.” Anyway, thank you for inviting me.
Thank you for making the time.
My pleasure.