“Looking into the Future” with Paul Vallée, Founder & CEO of Tehama.io

Dave Hale
Journey Map
Published in
25 min readApr 3, 2020

On this episode, we’re speaking with Paul Vallée, Founder & CEO of Tehama.io. We talk with Paul about women in communications and technology, his career origins, and how Tehama.io came to be.

This episode of Journey Map is brought to you by Unbounce.

Unbounce is the number one landing page platform used by more than 15,000 brands to get them more leads, more sales and more customers. Unbounce is a drag and drop builder that lets you create and publish your own landing pages without needing a developer to code them. It’s an easier and faster way to get more conversions from your traffic. Listeners of Journey Map can receive a 14-day free trial and 20% off your first three months of Unbounce. Follow this link to claim your offer.

Welcome to Journey Map, the audio experience that deconstructs the career paths taken by some of the world’s most interesting people. Today’s guest graduated from the University of Ottawa in 1993 with a degree in Information Management Systems. He began his career as a Senior Systems Analyst for the National Capital Commission of Canada before going to briefly work as a Consultant for Pragmatek. He eventually would be the Founder of Pythian in 1997, a Global IT services company that helps organizations transform data into insights and products. In 2016 the Canadian Women in Communications and Technology organisation awarded our guest the Diversity Champion Award for Pythian becoming the first Canadian tech company to release its gender statistics and set clear goals to recruit more capable women. He was CEO of the company until 2019 when he left Pythian to found another company. This company is Tehama, Tehama Virtual Office is a SaaS platform that delivers secure and virtual rooms and desktops in the cloud to enable fast and compliant onboarding, scaling, managing, and auditing of a global workforce with minutes to productivity.Tehama’s secured perimeters extend zero-trust network access to global employees and third-party IT service providers and reduces the risk of malware intrusion, data breaches, and other threats from corporate networks. In 2014 he received the Trudeau Medal from the Telfer School of Management of the University of Ottawa and is a recipient of the OBJ 40 under 40 award. He is also a Board Member for Basic Income Canada advising on matters of technological unemployment, the jobless recovery and the shifting advantage of software vs. labour as a means of production. Our guest is none other than the extremely impressive Paul Vallée. Paul, welcome to Journey Map!

PV: thank you for that extremely generous introduction Dave!

DH: As I say to people I like to make the introduction very generous so that then we can dive into your deepest darkest secrets in the interview and all balance it out in the end.

PV: Okay sounds great.

DH: So here’s what I want to start with, it’s actually mid-way career for you. So the Canadian Women in Communications and Technology awarded you and Pythian an award for being diversity champions for becoming the first Canadian tech company to release its gender statistics and set clear goals to recruit more capable women. Why was this issue important to you at the time? and still I’m sure it still is. What kind of led to putting those efforts in place and what were some of the benefits that happened shortly or there after?

PV: Sure well I owe a lot to Linda Partner who was my peer at the time Pythian she was our Vice President of Marketing and Analytics Services and she was also engaged with the Women in Technology and Communications the W. C. T. which is one of the national organizations in the communications and technology sector around promoting women. Essentially Linda came to me and she knew that I was an ally because we had discussed it at length trying to create our own internal programming to make sure that we were a healthy and positive workplace for women tackling our own issues with our own internal monoculture where in our organization. It just so happens that a lot of organizations that are doing computer science the workforce were dominated by men, but even more so when you were dealing with remote work and work forces that were globally distributed it just seemed like the people who had the will to take on that kind of job were overwhelmingly men. So we’re tackling the cultural problems that creates, and she said “Hey you know what Microsoft and a couple other companies in the U. S. have been the first to start publishing their numbers to set clear goals and I think we should do that in Canada”, and it didn’t take me long to sign on to the idea. As a data nerd like I am and I’m sure that you know if we’re speaking to an audience in user experience design and marketing automation and all do those fields there’s a lot of data nerds in your audience. You can realize that until you’re really measuring something well and holding yourself accountable to goals everything is kind of loose and we had a lot of loose machinery in our business. So Linda and I set to work to try to come up with some clear goals. As we set up those goals I realize that the typical measurements also under report certain kinds of leaders in your organization. So as a male leader being able to hold yourself accountable to your actual progress but also seeing a measurement that demonstrates your own commitment was helpful. So we invented a new index as well during that time called the Pythia Index and the index essentially is a percentage of a male leader’s team. For a female leader at the Pythia Index is always just one so it’s easy, it’s just a 100%. The Pythia Index is a way to quantify as a male leaders team how much of your org chart power have you devolved to women to wield and it basically represents what percentage of your total headcount in your umbrella reports to a woman at some point up your org chart. Which means that a woman is wielding the power for the people that report to her, and so we quantify it for a variety of organizations including our own. Steve Jobs at his peak had almost twenty people that were reported to him directly, and you know there’s only one or two women in the whole list yeah and they were not in critical roles. So it’s a good example of a male leader who if he would have looked in the mirror and quantified his Pythia Index he would have found a very low number. In our case you’re reasonably pleased with our number there’s a lot of really excellent women leaders, and the nice thing about that is that it kind of is a bit reassuring to have another metric that properly demonstrates how much you’re willing to trust women to wield the org power that you can delegate as a man. So that work along with some work on bro culture, advocacy around cultural change, and advocacy around data quantification and innovation in terms of the measures got us nominated and then won the Diversity Champion title for that year. It’s cool because of all the Women in Technology and Communications awards that they give it’s the only one that can be won by a man, it doesn’t always get won by a man but it’s the only one that can be so it’s kind of neat to have that on my resume, I’m proud of it.

DH: Yeah we didn’t talk about this in advance but that’s why I wanted to start there. I think that when male leaders can give themselves a really hard look in the mirror as I have done in the last two or three years, largely thanks to the influence of like yourself some really strong female leaders at our company. That’s why I want to start there because to have that designation I assumed was quite a source of pride for yourself, and thanks for sharing that story. If you were to take from that moment, I often talk about in business there is the equivalent of the Mazels Hierarchy of needs and the other thing that’s story kind of signals to me is as an organization are you getting to a place in your career where you had the available headspace and opportunity to really focus and double down on and takes an opportunity like that seriously? but that’s a difficult thing to do when you are actually staring down four weeks of cash runway or lose a major sale or don’t have the team support around you to even get the job done that needs to get done to keep the business in operation. Let alone to evolve the company to a level where you’re winning such an award. Going back to 1997 and founding the company in contrast to the head space you’re in to share that story that you just did. What were the first two or three years like at Pythian from your perspective if you were to summarize what that journey looked like for a few years?

PV: Sure well let me bridge you there by pulling on a thread you just put in front of me and I can’t resist pulling on it, but I’ll bridge you there and answer your question as well. So the first thing is to realize that at Pythian I was leading that initiative Pythian was in the business of providing access to Talent and Pythian was in the business of unlocking outlier talent and bringing it to market. What I think is really important is that these kinds of diversity and inclusion efforts tend to be framed as luxuries or nice to have or you’re in the head space you have the time to allocate to it. To be completely blunt I don’t think that’s the right way to think about these things, if you have a team that’s a monoculture and you want to add outstanding talent to it’s extremely important to recognize that your team culture has to be able to integrate and welcome and make that talent perform at its highest level right away. Teams that are mono cultures tend to be unable to do that so think it was from your own perspective if you’re joining a team they all speak only Japanese you’re not going to be productive on day one you know what he’s going to take you a year to learn Japanese unless they agree to change and meet you part way/ This is also true for teams made up of like what we used to call bro culture, we knew that these teams were struggling to ingest new talent and make them effective right away. It’s important from another perspective which is that across the talent spectrum there are people who are available and underutilized, and finding a way as a business to unlock that challenge to the mutual benefit. By mutual I mean to your talent, to your business, to your customers. Everybody should win, in good businesses everybody wins. If you can spot a loser in a business deal you’re doing something wrong. Unlocking that available talent to bring it to your customers and supporting your business with it is a really important thing. What tends to happen is your company’s culture creates almost like an immune system against people who don’t fit in, and that’s really important as a leader to create a culture where anyone can sit in anyone of any cultural background, of any sex, of any age. If you can make them productive to their maximum capability right away that’s a winning strategy. That ties in to the early days of Pythian you asked me to touch on. What happened was this, I was here in Ottawa and at the time there was a hiring freeze that was due to the you know the whole Cold War peace dividend of the late 80’s that was still settling in. So I was in Ottawa in that early 90’s time frame. I was in my early 20’s and there was just no really good career available here because everybody was doing a hiring freeze, everybody was doing a salary freeze. So I said okay no problem I’m going to throw caution to the wind and I’m gonna move to Minneapolis, and I did for eleven months I lived in Minneapolis Minnesota. I had an amazing time there, I worked for really exciting businesses doing very exciting things. I was very pleased with the work that I was doing. Like a lot of people I was also you know lonely and I also for family and personal reasons wanted to come home. So when I did come home in the summer of 1997 I started looking for work here and I was the one who was feeling underutilized, I was the one who is feeling like oh my gosh I just learned all these things, I have all these skills I really want to work in my field, I really want to kind of make my mark on the world. I felt very held back by geography and context. So in the early years of Pythian we decided you know what we’re just going to try to take a chance here. I got a bit lucky I got a job on contract for a company called Telesat mobile and Telesat mobile shared a data center with Telesat Proper, and Telesats data center I wasn’t certified to enter, and since I wasn’t certified to enter it I wasn’t allowed to go into that data center to manage my enterprise servers by myself I needed to do it from my desk on the third floor. I also enabled us to do it using a modem from home but at that time when I first started it was from a desk on the third floor. But the cool thing about that was that it doesn’t really matter if you’re doing it from your desk on the third floor or if you’re doing it from halfway across the world, like TCP IP doesn’t care if you’re on the third floor or if you’re in Kuala Lumpur you follow me? So what ended up happening was I learned the internet technologies necessary to manage enterprise systems without having physical access to them. Then simultaneously I was annoyed that the kind of work that I was able to do here in Ottawa and a co founder and I said well why don’t we found a company and try to work for your old Minnesota clients, or we’ll work in New York or we’ll find some customer somewhere where there’s exciting work to do and we’ll do it from our little office here in Ottawa. So that was the real original founding idea was ourselves feeling held back in terms of our own career opportunity because the work wasn’t available in our town. So that theme of talent being held back by circumstance is a really important running theme in all of my career and all of my entrepreneurship.

DH: You touched on your co-founder and what I find so interesting is when you look at your CV or at least a CV that we piece together through independent research. From 1997 until 2019 so 22 years you wound in and out of your own senior executives rank at Pythian so1997 to 2005 publicly stated as Founder and Co-CEO, in 2005 to 2008 President and CEO, then 2009 to 2014 Founder and Executive Chairman and then 2014 to 2019 again President and CEO. So what was happening in 2005 that sparks you from going from co-CEO to then the Presidency, what happened in 2008 to 2009 where you then stepped into more the Executive Chairman role and then in 2014 going back into the President and CEO role I know it’s a big question because there’s a lot of points in that time line but what were some of the things that were happening that caused that in and out in executive leadership?

PV: Well so when I founded the company I had a co-founder and I was responsible for service delivery and he was responsible for sales, marketing, finance and administration and what have you. That relationship was a very good one until about I would say 2001 at some point and then it became a little tense. Eventually when he quit I managed to buy him out so that was basically what happened in 2005. So far the story line goes I was co-CEO and I was running a service delivery operations and then I bought out my co-founder and now I’m President and CEO.Then what happened was as part of that buy out I had to set a price or a bid for his half of the company right? and in order to establish that bid I consulted a bunch of the city’s business leaders. I got an introduction from a really awesome person named Bruce Raganold, he’s a super networker here in the city. I’m sure you know him or or if not you should.

DH: Yes I know Bruce I’m supposed to be at an event he runs called Tech Tremblant which was supposed to be at next weekend’s which I’m was very much looking forward to and obviously we’re not doing it because we’re recording this on the 18th of March and there’s no events happening anywhere in the world.

PV: Right, I’ve been unable to attend that event every year for like five or six years running. I’m looking forward to the first time when it fits in my calendar.

DH: Yeah I think we should all do it virtually.

PV: Yeah we should. Bruce introduced me to Andrew Waitman at the time was at Celtic House, and Celtic house by then was basically one of Canada’s more successful venture capital firms. Andrew was one of the people that I consulted with in terms of what should I bid for the other half of my company. About six months later the market crashed, I don’t know if you remember this whole 2008 / 2009 market adjustments that happened in that time frame. But Andrew found himself with some time available as part of that disruption and he suggested that he would like to join me and see if we can grow my business together, just because we were getting along well. He thought it would be more interesting than you sitting around and waiting for something to come up, he thought he would just volunteer. So for a little while that happened and it worked really well, we got along well, we were getting a lot of good work done and so before long we gave him the title and I promoted myself to Executive Chairman. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the idea of when you’re executive chairman of the board that means that the CEO reports to you, and that you’re governing the business as a full time role from the board. So you’ll see that title for some people in the industry is not a very commonly used title. It was a really great career move for Andrew because it allowed me to give him the CEO title which is the title he wanted and he’s been using it to good benefit still now at Assent Compliance. I gave him his first CEO role but he was working for me at Pythian. Then in 2014 basically what was happening was kind of a long story but I don’t go into too many of the details of it but, I decided that the company should make an acquisition of a California based company called Blackbird. Which is kind of like old news now but Andrew decided that he didn’t want to do the acquisition so he decided that was his good time to resign. So in 2014 I decided we are going to acquire this California based company and then Andrew said that doesn’t sound like fun to me I’m tapping out, and so that was how we parted ways. Matt is an old friend of mine I’m the one who introduced Andrew to Matt so I’m very pleased,actually I’m more than pleased I’m very excited for Matt and Andrew and the team at Assent Compliance I got a lot of good friends there.

DH: As do I, I’ve done some work for them as well over the years. So that makes the story more clear in terms of why things happened or how things happen I guess, but I really want to dive into you coming back into the CEO role. So you could have done what it seems like you’ve now done in 2019 just finding a replacement for Andrew why, I mean there’s the acquisition for sure, but beyond that why did you choose to kind of dive back in an operational level day to day?

PV: Yeah well I was never not operational day to day, it’s not like I was ever stepping back from the business. Andrew was my only actual direct report, by that I need mean that he was the one that I was directly saying no we’re doing this or no we’re doing that. Everybody else we would manage through Andrew, so you can think of Andrew as a kind of like a chief operating officer equivalent role. I’m certainly not the first CEO who when their chief operating officer go’s and decides that they can take on half a dozen direct reports, I’d manage that many direct reports for most of my career; it didn’t terrify me. So essentially when Andrew left I just took some very gifted and outstanding executives including Keith Miller who is now President of Pythian still today, so now that the Pythian recap is done he’s in charge of it. I basically started working with Keith and other outstanding people in the Pythian senior leadership team like Vanessa Simmons and Linda Partner and working with them directly. It was a very good right, it was a very fun time

DH:So the last jump I just want to talk about, the most recent just over a year now the founding of the new company Tehama. What was the inspiration? Why the timing? just walk us through that a little bit.

PV: Right well Tehama was born at Pythian in roughly 2006 when we first started thinking about it. We were dealing with the growing cyber security concerns around engaging a workforce working from home and engaging a remote workforce that would be able to connect to enterprise data centers and enterprise data. The customer’s concern was how are you going to secure that remote work? Are you gonna make it such that we are not living in a world of hurt and regret for trusting you to connect your data assets while working from home. It’s a pretty legitimate question but obviously you can’t hire Pythian unless you’re sure that it’s safe to take delivery of the work that they’re doing. So in response that we need to integrate in the first iteration of the platforms called adminascope and adminascope was essentially a platform that would permit us to onboard our global team working from home and connect it to the customer’s networks without letting any of our laptops actually connect directly to a customer’s networks. What that meant is that if one laptop had malware on it couldn’t infect all of our customer systems. Even better if one customer said look you have to configure your desktops like this and another customer said you get to configure your desktops like this, we didn’t have to carry seven laptops around. We were able to deliver to multiple customers standards just by virtualizing it. So the first version adminascope was actually done in what we would now call a private cloud using the vmware and it was almost immediately apparent that we were solving a bigger problem than just how to enable Pythians sales. We were solving a bigger problem because every enterprise has a major cyber security and compliance problem around permitting remote work and enabling remote workers to enter into their data assets. That’s true whether freelancers, internal employees, or even large service providers like RBC have this problem in order to enable their large India based outsourcers just as much as smaller businesses have this problem to enable their freelancers. So solving for that became the vision for Tehama. What’s special about Tehama versus adminascope is that adminascope is a little bit like it was a service delivery platform and you could buy Pythians services through it. So it was a little bit like the Sheraton reservation system where you can get any hotel room on here as long as it’s aSheraton hotel room, do you follow me?

DH: Yeah

PV: Where with Tehama it’s not like that at all. With Tehama you can take delivery with any service provider, and so as a service provider you can deliver to any customer and Pythian is not involved in that conversation. You can think of Tehama as more akin to booking.com versus the Sheraton system. You could also think of it like I’m more like Airbnb where different businesses of different scale can list properties and you can go there and you can consume services from multiples and you’re a service provider so you can deliver to multiple customers. This was called a two sided platform as opposed to a one sided platform the way Adminascope was. So as we started building that it became apparent that we were creating what I used to call a Turduken. Have you ever had one of those dave?

DH: Yeah haha.

PV: I’ve never eaten one but I am looking forward to my first turducken. We were supposed to do a big barbecue this summer with the turducken on the patio. I hope it can still happen. The idea was that we were creating a venture business inside a services business and it eventually became clear that we were starving ourselves of the capital that we needed to thrive specifically when you’re trying to scale a services business like Pythian you would normally partner with private equity. Pythian eventually partnered with Mill Point in order to have a great private equity partner on its table. When you’re building a software business like Tehama you would normally partner with the venture capital firm. So the problem that we had was that the private equity firms are like “Well what do you mean you don’t have any profitability we want to leverage you up with debt and we want to put that on your balance sheet, you’re gonna have to be profitable what do you mean you’re spending all your profitability on the software that makes no sense?” so they would just not look at the deal. Then the VC’s would be like “Well what do you mean you have a fifty million dollar a year services business attached to this software firm? we can’t invest in you. We are expected to take a third of the business or a quarter of the business with our first cheque?” you see where I’m going with this right?

DH: Yes.

PV: And so the idea was that we were kind of building a turducken we were neither a turkey, nor a duck, nor a chicken we were nothing and that would fit in their investment. That meant that we eventually had an access to capital problem and the company’s very appropriately needed to be separated. Both businesses are much healthier and happier now than they were when they were all tangled up.

DH: Well I won’t get into my own stories but you’re speaking a language I understand all too well as we currently face a similar challenge.

PV: Oh do you? I’d love to hear that sometime over a beer when life returns to normal.

DH: We’ll do a zoom call and virtually clink glasses. So actually that’s a great segue into where I want to go with the questions. I would be remiss not to ask with what’s been happening and you know certainly in the last seven business days here in Canada or North America or the last few weeks in other parts of the world. I don’t mean this in a rude way to the world but there is no better use case than Tehama than every knowledge worker on earth trying to work from home and now access their company remotely. What has it been like living through the last two weeks in this business?

PV: Yeah well it’s been longer than two weeks. When I returned from Germany on January 22nd, I had a cough (don’t worry), my cough was not this thing, but this thing was just entering the news so I was very alert to it. I was like “what’s going on?” i didn’t go to China I was in Germany, it wa sprobably just dumb luck. But in January I was following this story very closely, and I realized holy s*** this company Webasto in Munich just shut down and sent their entire workforce home. Then about four or five days later NTT sent about two thirds of their 200,000 workers home to work from home. At this point my mind is boggling like these enterprises are by no means ready to keep their workforces productive working from home. Today our entire society is struggling with this, but it was clear we needed to start shaking some trees and getting the word out. On February 22nd I was interviewed by CTV and on February 26th I put an op-ed in the Globe and Mail essentially calling for businesses to get ready for pandemic planning because I could see this like a freight train about a month ago. The fact of the matter is that it really feels like we’re being called to war. I was chatting with Leslie before this call, Leslie had slacked my Marketing Director and the amount of things that we need to do and the amount of resources that we have to do them, it has never been so out of whack. The sheer volume of need that is coming to us right now versus our capacity to process all that need has never been more out of whack, it’s quite crazy. To give you an illustration of that in the last two week period we have well over 150 inbound requests for our platform to be evaluated and in a typical two week period that number was under ten. So we have a 15 fold magnification of inbound interest in our platform. The customers that are already connected are massively increasing their utilization as well. One customer is a good example they were consuming about 200 desktops on our platform, so they were enabling 200 people to work through our platform, and they sent us a heads up saying that they would soon be enabling an additional 600. Another customer said we need you to put in writing a capacity statement because their supply chain was being tested, and they were like we can’t source laptops so we’re going to have to enable people somehow. I still hire people, right these are large multinationals. I still hire people and I need to enable them to access my networks, how am I going to do that if I can’t buy a laptop. So again forcing us put in writing how many people we could possibly onboard per day. You can just imagine the stress and strain of help and then behind the scenes we’ve also been recruited to participate in some emergency procurements for some very large organizations. Those opportunities would be amazing to win them, but they would put a doubling of the crush on the efforts of every one of our teammates so it really does feel like being called for war.

DH: Well I appreciate you taking the time to speak to us while being called to war. I also appreciate your candor in what it’s like because i also think there is a misconception for a lot of want to be entrepreneurs especially that while everything can be exciting in growth mode, sometimes your growth can crush you. That was our experience back in 2015, our company was named the second fastest growing company in Ottawa and six months later we nearly went bankrupt. Basically when you’re growing as a service company as we are, to keep quality at the level it needs to be at, while you’re also onboarding people you hit a bit of a tipping point where it all comes crumbling down pretty fast. So I appreciate your candor because it communicates to people that you can be in a time that is incredibly exciting, incredibly opportunistic time for the business as the world is in a very difficult place, but it’s not all fun and games because now you’re faced with a whole other set of challenges.

PV: Right now here in Ottawa I heard our DNA labs were operating at 600% capacity , just to keep up with the massive influx of PCR testing that’s necessary to deliver in terms of our community’s needs, just instrumenting and making visible the disease in our city. But those labs might be doing okay from a solvency perspective, but they m,ight not in terms of handling 6 times their workflow. That all relies on their supply chain, so you can’t assume that their doing fine, I hope they are but not necessarily. Every worker in those labs,can you imagine handling 6 times the tests on any given day than you’re used to doing. So my heart goes out to those people, but we’re in the thick of it at this time and it’s not just the tests in the lab I really want to just say right now how grateful I am to our health care workers, and our healthcare systems who are going to be in the front lines of this war. This particular disease may not be attacking any one of us very harshly, as you know people of our age are very rarely killed by this disease. However, it does attack our society through our healthcare system, and it is clear that our healthcare system will be massively overwhelmed by what is going to happen. So I’m really trying to do my bit by sending everyone home, and to eliminate excuses.

DH: We thank you for it and for founding a company like Tehama that is allowing companies to manage an element of chaos over the next few weeks and months. We’ve gone way over time largely because I’m thoroughly enjoying the conversation, so I’m going to ask a question that I ask most people and then we will call it a day. So what is the Paul superpower?

PV: That’s a hard one. I think if I have one thing to take particular pride in, it is to try and see a little bit further into what’s going to happen than most. That might not be as much a superpower as an investment of time and attention, but I do try and anticipate things further than most. I’ll tell you a very short story along those lines, this ability to internet enable work is something that I’ve been working on for a very long time. The more I work on it the more excited I become about the opportunities it opens up. Internet enabling work is the solution for creating a post oil economy for Northern Alberta and Northern BC. Internet enabling work is the solution for reconciliation with the Indigenous people of Canada. There are very clear paths to creating outstanding opportunities for people who right now are held back by geography or geography under strain. I just think that even before this pandemic created a forcing function and the emergency there’s just a lot of cool things that we can build in the future. So I take a lot of pride in looking forward to seeing what will happen or what could happen if we apply ourselves.

DH: I think one of my superpowers is being overly optimistic at all times which maybe also holds me back. So let’s go from a place of optimism and say everyone does practice social distancing, our hospitals and healthcare system does not become dramatically over burdened, and six months from now people recover and the world is within reason. What does your superpower of looking into the future allow you to see in terms of remote work as a result of everything that we’re going through right now?

PV: Well the good news is that it won’t take six months, like the lockdown is lifting in China because they made the changes to their society that they needed to make. So it only took two months for lockdowns to lift. I’m optimistic that we caught it fast enough that our changes are going to be put in place for two months so we still have the summer to look forward to. In terms of optimism and predictions I believe this will dramatically accelerate the work from home and remote work movement. I think that that creates a path for us. Let me give you an example we’ve dealt with reconciliation with Indigenous people and issues with Canada in the media all year so far but I believe if we’re pleased when general motors creates 4000 jobs in Oshawa we shouldn’t be pleased when SunLife creates 1000 jobs in Indigenous communities. There really is no difference. This unlocks an opportunity that I intend to press hard on in 2020 creating an economic path forward for some communities in Canada that have not gotten their share of opportunities.

DH: Well I am very bought in to the underlying social issue you are trying to solve, I also believe that you will have that turducken this summer with your friends and family in close proximity. Paul I thank you so much for taking the extended time to be with us today and I hope we can do this again soon.

PV: Awesome, that will be a good party Dave. I look forward to it.

Sign up to discover human stories that deepen your understanding of the world.

Free

Distraction-free reading. No ads.

Organize your knowledge with lists and highlights.

Tell your story. Find your audience.

Membership

Read member-only stories

Support writers you read most

Earn money for your writing

Listen to audio narrations

Read offline with the Medium app

Published in Journey Map

The audio experience that deconstructs the career paths taken by some of the world’s most interesting people. Produced by Craft&Crew.

Written by Dave Hale

Managing Partner, Soshal. Commercially creative. www.soshal.ca

No responses yet

What are your thoughts?