{"id":27905,"date":"2026-05-26T10:56:32","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T10:56:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/thought-leadership\/from-mlb-to-metallica-the-canadian-company-redefining-live-events\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T16:04:22","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T16:04:22","slug":"the-canadian-unicorn-who-stayed","status":"publish","type":"rbc_tl","link":"https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/thought-leadership\/disruptors\/the-canadian-unicorn-who-stayed\/","title":{"rendered":"The Canadian Unicorn Who Stayed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<section class=\"wp-block-rbc-section-block  pos-rel\" style=\"border-radius:0px\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-rbc-section-inner-block  section-inner\" style=\"border-radius:0x\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Canada has a scaleup problem. We create entrepreneurs, but too many of them feel they need to leave to build world-class companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Fred Lalonde is one of the exceptions. He is the founder and CEO of Hopper, the Canadian travel-tech company that uses data, prediction and fintech to help travellers book with more confidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now Lalonde is bringing that same ambition to Deep Sky, a Canadian carbon removal company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In this episode of Disruptors, recorded in front of a live audience, John Stackhouse speaks with Fred about what it takes to build and scale from Canada &#8211; and why the country needs more founders willing and able to do it here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>In this episode, you&#8217;ll learn:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-rbc-list is-style-black-disc\">\n<li class=\"wp-block-rbc-list-item\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How Hopper became one of Canada&#8217;s leading tech success stories<\/p>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"wp-block-rbc-list-item\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Why Fred thinks entrepreneurs better be motivated by building, not just money<\/p>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"wp-block-rbc-list-item\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Why AI, energy and advanced manufacturing are central to Canada&#8217;s next growth chapter<\/p>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"wp-block-rbc-list-item\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What it takes to build a world-class company without leaving Canada<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"width:100%;height:200px\" class=\"wp-block-rbc-rbc-iframe\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.simplecast.com\/0f942e74-247f-48ac-9541-1650c553aa45?dark=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"100%\" style=\"border:none\" title=\"Iframe Embed\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n<section class=\"wp-block-rbc-section-block  pos-rel\" style=\"border-radius:0px\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-rbc-section-inner-block  section-inner\" style=\"border-radius:0x\">\n<h4 id=\"h-faqs\" class=\"wp-block-heading has-rbc-bright-blue-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-d57d1e068f2bcd43b4ddd55866125416\">FAQs<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-rbc-rbc-collapsible-accordion accordion\" id=\"&quot;accordionSet1\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-rbc-rbc-collapsible-panel\"><div class=\"accordion-panel\"><button id=\"accordion-title528edcfe\" class=\"collapse-toggle collapsed\" data-target=\"#accordion528edcfe\" data-toggle=\"collapse\" data-parent=\"#accordionSet1\" aria-expanded=\"false\" data-dig-id=\"LP-27905-528edcfe\" aria-controls=\"accordion528edcfe\" data-dig-category=\"LP\" data-dig-action=\"collapsible closed\" data-dig-label=\"Who is Fred Lalonde?\" action-closed=\"collapsible closed\" action-opened=\"collapsible open\"><div>Who is Fred Lalonde?<\/div><\/button><div class=\"collapse-content collapse\" id=\"accordion528edcfe\" role=\"region\" aria-labelledby=\"accordion-title528edcfe\"><div class=\"collapse-inner\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Fred Lalonde is a Canadian entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Hopper, and co-founder of Deep Sky. In the episode, John Stackhouse frames Fred as one of Canada&#8217;s original disruptors, and Fred describes his path from teenage hacker to entrepreneur.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-rbc-rbc-collapsible-panel\"><div class=\"accordion-panel\"><button id=\"accordion-title4ea0d1e4\" class=\"collapse-toggle collapsed\" data-target=\"#accordion4ea0d1e4\" data-toggle=\"collapse\" data-parent=\"#accordionSet1\" aria-expanded=\"false\" data-dig-id=\"LP-27905-4ea0d1e4\" aria-controls=\"accordion4ea0d1e4\" data-dig-category=\"LP\" data-dig-action=\"collapsible closed\" data-dig-label=\"What is Hopper?\" action-closed=\"collapsible closed\" action-opened=\"collapsible open\"><div>What is Hopper?<\/div><\/button><div class=\"collapse-content collapse\" id=\"accordion4ea0d1e4\" role=\"region\" aria-labelledby=\"accordion-title4ea0d1e4\"><div class=\"collapse-inner\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hopper is a travel platform for flights, hotels, homes and car rentals. Hopper says 120 million travellers use its platform to plan trips, and the company is known for using data and prediction tools to help consumers decide when to book.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-rbc-rbc-collapsible-panel\"><div class=\"accordion-panel\"><button id=\"accordion-title1e6d704b\" class=\"collapse-toggle collapsed\" data-target=\"#accordion1e6d704b\" data-toggle=\"collapse\" data-parent=\"#accordionSet1\" aria-expanded=\"false\" data-dig-id=\"LP-27905-1e6d704b\" aria-controls=\"accordion1e6d704b\" data-dig-category=\"LP\" data-dig-action=\"collapsible closed\" data-dig-label=\"What is Deep Sky?\" action-closed=\"collapsible closed\" action-opened=\"collapsible open\"><div>What is Deep Sky?<\/div><\/button><div class=\"collapse-content collapse\" id=\"accordion1e6d704b\" role=\"region\" aria-labelledby=\"accordion-title1e6d704b\"><div class=\"collapse-inner\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Deep Sky is a Canadian carbon removal company co-founded by Fred Lalonde. The company is building infrastructure to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-rbc-rbc-collapsible-panel\"><div class=\"accordion-panel\"><button id=\"accordion-title1d17cde3\" class=\"collapse-toggle collapsed\" data-target=\"#accordion1d17cde3\" data-toggle=\"collapse\" data-parent=\"#accordionSet1\" aria-expanded=\"false\" data-dig-id=\"LP-27905-1d17cde3\" aria-controls=\"accordion1d17cde3\" data-dig-category=\"LP\" data-dig-action=\"collapsible closed\" data-dig-label=\"Why does this episode matter for Canada?\" action-closed=\"collapsible closed\" action-opened=\"collapsible open\"><div>Why does this episode matter for Canada?<\/div><\/button><div class=\"collapse-content collapse\" id=\"accordion1d17cde3\" role=\"region\" aria-labelledby=\"accordion-title1d17cde3\"><div class=\"collapse-inner\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The episode is about Canada&#8217;s need to build more globally competitive companies from home. Leaders Fund and Specter found that in 2024, the U.S. produced 45x more high-potential startups than Canada, and nearly half of Canadian founders who raised more than US$1M were based in the U.S.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-rbc-rbc-collapsible-panel\"><div class=\"accordion-panel\"><button id=\"accordion-title27bd1c5d\" class=\"collapse-toggle collapsed\" data-target=\"#accordion27bd1c5d\" data-toggle=\"collapse\" data-parent=\"#accordionSet1\" aria-expanded=\"false\" data-dig-id=\"LP-27905-27bd1c5d\" aria-controls=\"accordion27bd1c5d\" data-dig-category=\"LP\" data-dig-action=\"collapsible closed\" data-dig-label=\"What does Fred say about entrepreneurship?\" action-closed=\"collapsible closed\" action-opened=\"collapsible open\"><div>What does Fred say about entrepreneurship?<\/div><\/button><div class=\"collapse-content collapse\" id=\"accordion27bd1c5d\" role=\"region\" aria-labelledby=\"accordion-title27bd1c5d\"><div class=\"collapse-inner\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Fred says good entrepreneurs are motivated by building &#8211; by making something, putting it into the world and ideally changing it. He also stresses how hard the founder journey is, including the long timelines and high failure rate.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-rbc-rbc-collapsible-panel\"><div class=\"accordion-panel\"><button id=\"accordion-titled74a7560\" class=\"collapse-toggle collapsed\" data-target=\"#accordiond74a7560\" data-toggle=\"collapse\" data-parent=\"#accordionSet1\" aria-expanded=\"false\" data-dig-id=\"LP-27905-d74a7560\" aria-controls=\"accordiond74a7560\" data-dig-category=\"LP\" data-dig-action=\"collapsible closed\" data-dig-label=\"What does Fred say Canada should focus on?\" action-closed=\"collapsible closed\" action-opened=\"collapsible open\"><div>What does Fred say Canada should focus on?<\/div><\/button><div class=\"collapse-content collapse\" id=\"accordiond74a7560\" role=\"region\" aria-labelledby=\"accordion-titled74a7560\"><div class=\"collapse-inner\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When asked about Canada&#8217;s growth challenge, Fred points to AI, climate and energy, and automated manufacturing resilience as areas where the country should focus.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-rbc-rbc-collapsible-panel\"><div class=\"accordion-panel\"><button id=\"accordion-titleb0478308\" class=\"collapse-toggle collapsed\" data-target=\"#accordionb0478308\" data-toggle=\"collapse\" data-parent=\"#accordionSet1\" aria-expanded=\"false\" data-dig-id=\"LP-27905-b0478308\" aria-controls=\"accordionb0478308\" data-dig-category=\"LP\" data-dig-action=\"collapsible closed\" data-dig-label=\"What is RBC doing to support Canadian companies?\" action-closed=\"collapsible closed\" action-opened=\"collapsible open\"><div>What is RBC doing to support Canadian companies?<\/div><\/button><div class=\"collapse-content collapse\" id=\"accordionb0478308\" role=\"region\" aria-labelledby=\"accordion-titleb0478308\"><div class=\"collapse-inner\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">RBC plans to deploy up to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theglobeandmail.com\/business\/article-rbc-plans-up-to-1-billion-in-spending-to-help-canadian-companies-scale\/\" data-dig-id=\"LP-27905-49e56b77\" data-dig-category=\"LP\" data-dig-action=\"link click\" data-dig-label=\"C$1 billion\" class=\"rbc-link-format\">C$1 billion<\/a> over the coming years to form a growth fund and make equity investments in support of homegrown Canadian companies.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-rbc-rbc-default-collapsible\"><p><button class=\"collapse-toggle collapsed\" data-target=\"#collapsebae76ef3\" data-toggle=\"collapse\" aria-expanded=\"false\" aria-controls=\"collapsebae76ef3\" data-dig-id=\"LP-27905-bae76ef3\" data-dig-category=\"LP\" data-dig-action=\"accordion closed\" action-closed=\"accordion closed\" action-opened=\"accordion open\" data-dig-label=\"Transcript\"><div>Transcript<\/div><\/button><\/p><div class=\"collapse-content collapse\" id=\"collapsebae76ef3\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-rbc-collapsible-inner-block collapse-inner\">\n<h3 id=\"h-the-canadian-unicorn-who-stayed\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Canadian Unicorn Who Stayed<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>SPEAKERS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Frederic Lalonde, John Stackhouse<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:00:10<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hi, it&#8217;s John here. If you&#8217;ve been listening to Disruptors over the years, you know that Canada has a problem. We are not the land of unicorns. Sure, we create a lot of companies, but as we&#8217;ve heard over and over and over again, many of our entrepreneurs, far too many, feel they have to leave Canada to create and scale a world-class business. There are, of course, exceptions and we&#8217;ve profiled a lot of them on Disruptors and one of the most impressive is our guest today, Fred Lalonde. Fred is the epitome of a Canadian unicorn. He has built a billion-dollar company here in Canada and chosen to stay in Canada, not just to continue to grow that company, but to launch more companies with even more ambition. It&#8217;s the sort of spirit many Canadians feel and we&#8217;ve got to do a lot more to help that spirit flourish right here in Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you don&#8217;t know Fred Lalonde&#8217;s story, it&#8217;s a pretty good one. He started in the digital economy as a hacker, selling pirated software on the school yard, then dropped out of school and created a solution allowing third-party hotel booking sites to integrate with hotels. He sold it to a young company called Expedia. Next, he built Hopper, another travel site that became that unicorn, and now Fred&#8217;s taking the same ambition to the fight against climate change in building a carbon removal company called Deep Sky. So when it comes to building world-class companies and scaling them here in Canada, Fred Lalonde is definitely worth listening to and that&#8217;s the conversation we want to bring to you today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This episode was recorded in front of a live audience and it has the energy of one. Fred is funny, blunt, and occasionally dark, but underneath that is the clarity you so often find in builders who know how to create and also know how to live with failure. As Fred explains, he doesn&#8217;t manage disruption, he assumes it. We cover a lot of ground, AI, energy, manufacturing, and Canada&#8217;s stubborn reluctance to scale. That&#8217;s the challenge that we all have to take on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here&#8217;s my conversation with Fred Lalonde.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Fred was one of the original Disruptors. I think we&#8217;ve had you on the stage a couple of times talking over the years. It&#8217;s always great to be with you. We&#8217;re going to talk about a whole range of stuff, but Fred, let&#8217;s start with you. Amazing life history, lifelong hacker. Grew up in a household with more computers than I think you could count. I&#8217;m not going to talk about how you learned your way to hack into Bell phone systems, but that&#8217;s a whole different story. I think you once called yourself to the Global Mail no less as unemployable. So that&#8217;s a great thing to have in your Google search. Fred Lalonde, unemployable. And you&#8217;ve had a couple of near death experiences with companies and yet here you are thriving more than ever. Tell us a bit about you. What is it about you that just keeps you coming back in the face of all that has put you down, pushed you back, tried to keep you down over the years?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:03:22<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah. I mean, I ask myself that same question every day. The term is serial entrepreneur and not for nothing, it&#8217;s like you just can&#8217;t help yourself. You just keep going and going. So everything that you said is true. I dropped out of school when I was 19. I was a hacker. I&#8217;m a child of the &#8217;80s. So I learned when I was 14 that I could copy video games. Some people are old enough to remember floppy disks. And so in high school, I made $16,000 selling these in the schoolyard. I don&#8217;t know why parents never wondered where the money came from. And of course, the next step from a hacker is being an entrepreneur. It&#8217;s the legal version of what hackers do. It is true. I&#8217;ve never had a paycheck, never had a mortgage. I&#8217;m functionally ineligible for credit cards. I learned this because you&#8217;re now my wealth manager, and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, you don&#8217;t have a credit card.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:04:16<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Did they turn you down for a credit card?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:04:18<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No, they just said I had no credit history, which is technically true. But the point is I like building things and it&#8217;s like a compulsion. I spend a lot of time and as I&#8217;m getting older, every year I try to do one board where I find some smart kid in Canada and I kind of help him navigate through all the crap that I wish I knew when I was 28 trying to do this. And functionally people come to me, &#8220;I want to start my company.&#8221; It&#8217;s always the same question, which is like, do you really need to do this? Is this some visceral thing that drives you? And I don&#8217;t mean making money because somebody comes to me and says, &#8220;Hey, I want to do this.&#8221; And you can kind of tell they&#8217;re motivated by money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Dude, there&#8217;s a lot of ways to make money. I can give you 10 things because this is really, really hard. And actually you&#8217;re going to build for seven, eight, 10, 15 years now and you have a nine out of 10 chance of getting nothing at the end.&#8221; And people don&#8217;t understand how hard it is, how often you have to fail. So it takes a special disposition and I think good entrepreneurs are motivated by building. You don&#8217;t really care about the money or anything else. It&#8217;s just about making something, putting it into the world and ideally changing it. People don&#8217;t realize the failure ratio, like how often you&#8217;re going to be in trouble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:05:32<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Who did you learn the most from in the early goings?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:05:42<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I was super lucky. When we sold to Expedia, I had no idea. The CEO of Expedia was Eric Blatchford. He grew up in Montreal and he was at some McGill football thing and he walked in, like in the movies, and then a month later he&#8217;d bought my company. I was 28. And then they brought me over to Seattle because they had integrated my company and everything. And there&#8217;s a book called Barbarians Led by Bill Gates. If you&#8217;ve ever read, it&#8217;s not very good, but it talks about the &#8217;90s where Bill Gates had these guys that worked for him, and what they would do is pretend to go acquire a company and then they would basically steal the IP and Microsoft would replicate it. And it&#8217;d gotten so bad that venture capitalists would not back anything&#8230; They would check with Microsoft first before they invested in your company. It was crazy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then at some point the government talked about breaking Microsoft and they stopped. So there was 13 people that were in charge of this and the guy that was renowned for being the killer was called Lloyd Frink. He&#8217;s in the book. That was my boss at Expedia. Let&#8217;s say you were having a conversation with him and you bored him, he would leave mid-sentence. It was fascinating. And the other guy that started Expedia is Rich Barton. He&#8217;s built Zillow since. So I completely lucked out. I ended up working for those guys for four years. That&#8217;s actually the only time I didn&#8217;t sign my own paycheck. And today, if I had to give back that early money I made or the knowledge, I would give the money back tomorrow morning. That actually helped me understand what it was to build a really great company. So I would have to say it&#8217;s those guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:07:17<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What was the best lesson from those guys that helped you with future companies?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:07:21<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s this thing that&#8217;s been misused. It&#8217;s attributed to Steve Jobs, but it&#8217;s actually not him. Then it gets attributed to Wayne Gretzky, but it&#8217;s actually not Wayne Gretzky. It&#8217;s Wayne Gretzky&#8217;s dad. Skate where the puck is going, not where it is. It&#8217;s actually really hard to do because you actually have to have a credible understanding of what the future is going to be like&#8230; And there&#8217;s this crazy thing and there&#8217;s no&#8230; Startup environments are the place where this is the most problematic, but it applies to a multi-hundred year old bank at the end of the day, especially in the era that we&#8217;re in now, which is the era of AI. But it&#8217;s like if you&#8217;re actually building something new, whether it&#8217;s small, big, something you run, something you&#8217;re a product and it makes sense in current day context, it&#8217;s probably not going to work. And so I&#8217;ll give you a few examples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You will be standing in the rain in front of a completely licensed taxi that has been audited by the city and has paid a medallion and you&#8217;ll be waiting for a stranger to pick you up in a Toyota Corolla. Instead of checking into a hotel, you will prefer to stay in somebody&#8217;s spare bedroom. If I told you these things in 2010, you would&#8217;ve called me crazy. I just described Uber and Airbnb. The point is if your idea makes sense in present day context, it&#8217;s not going to work in the future, and that&#8217;s true in a normal 50-year span, like the one I&#8217;ve lived through now. But if you&#8217;re looking at what&#8217;s about to happen in AI, it&#8217;s an exponential problem at the end of the day that&#8217;s going to change completely. So that&#8217;s the main thing I picked up from those guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:09:01<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of the great challenges in building a company of the visionary entrepreneur, usually the founder, and then especially as you scale, you need an operator. How have you found that balance because it&#8217;s not often the same person, one individual?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:09:15<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Honestly, and I&#8217;ve thought about this a lot, I don&#8217;t actually believe in the founder\/operator thing. It may have worked a few times, but even the ones that are known for being the highest visionary&#8230; So one of my good friends is Laurence Tosi, he was the CFO of Blackstone. He famously turned down Steve Jobs for CFO. So he knows Steve very well. Steve would know the operational details, the cost of the microchips. I have never seen a good CEO operator in a startup. I don&#8217;t know what it is to run a bank, and God help us, nobody will ever give me the opportunity to try that, but fundamentally, if you&#8217;re building something that has high velocity, high growth, lots of unknowns, you have to be able to get the big vision and the execution. And I&#8217;ve seen a few teams, but the really, really good ones are able to go all the way down, and I would argue your current CEO is one of the few that I&#8217;ve met that really, really qualifies and I think it shows in the culture of the bank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I actually think sometimes a team, but you kind of have to have that willingness to go all the way down to the nuts and bolts because when things are stable, it&#8217;s okay. I&#8217;ll give you my favorite example. If you work at a large organization like this one or Mitsubishi, what, maybe 5% of your company is new, like hiring spree, something like that. At Hopper for the first 15 years, 50% of the company was new. Think of that, right? It&#8217;s like your company&#8217;s constantly made of spare parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:10:47<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How do you manage that as a founder, you were there, you were the origin story and then you&#8217;ve got all these newcomers coming in and regenerating it. How do you kind of roll with that and let other people also take it in directions that you may not-<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:10:59<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The culture question. I&#8217;ve become convinced that culture is the only way to go. So for example, at Hopper and in our other companies, Deep Sky, the carbon removal company that you guys know well, we don&#8217;t have a traditional C-suite, we don&#8217;t have a CTO, we don&#8217;t have a CIO. We&#8217;ve gone to something called single-threaded ownership, which is an Amazon model. And so when we reached about a hundred people at Hopper, I started losing velocity. It gets harder to do stuff. Again, if you work in big companies, you know how hard it is to do stuff. And my problem at Hopper is I made no money doing the thing we did. We were selling flights, which is a really bad idea. And so I had to do a second thing and most companies don&#8217;t have that. They either do one thing, run out of money and die because it didn&#8217;t work, or they do a thing that works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We had to find other things. And so what made us profitable is our financial products or fintech, blah, blah, blah. But before I could get the company to do more than one thing, it was attacking itself. So I had to design the culture. So I started reading everything I could. So Eric Schmidt wrote a book called \u201cHow Google Works.\u201d There&#8217;s a boring long book, but there&#8217;s a children&#8217;s book. This is crazy. It&#8217;s illustrated. It&#8217;s like for five years old. I really recommend this to everybody and he explained how Google worked when he took it over from Larry and Sergey. Reed Hastings wrote a lot about this. Then I found Jeff Bezos&#8217; shareholder letters. And if you have not done this, every year since starting Amazon, he writes. You should read this. It&#8217;s a whole insight into his mind. And I realized something fundamental.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first thing is culture is not what you say. It&#8217;s not the poster on the wall. It&#8217;s not what your HR department does. We don&#8217;t actually have those, but if I had an HR department. It&#8217;s actually how you act and what you reward and what you punish. People will act according to what you do and what you say good or bad to somebody. And most people don&#8217;t realize how important that is. Everything&#8217;s being observed when you&#8217;re in a position of leadership. And so then I realized something really fundamental and this is actually why we&#8217;re successful. We&#8217;d be out of business if I hadn&#8217;t figured this out, I&#8217;m 100% convinced of it. Most companies get together at some point. Somebody tells them, &#8220;You need to define your culture.&#8221; Get in a room and you say, &#8220;Here are our values,&#8221; and that&#8217;s it. The really good companies, the amazing ones, they did something different. The founder at some point said, &#8220;What kind of company do we need to be for our customers?&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so Google that was making all of its money on one algorithm, put the engineers in charge, right? Netflix, because streaming kind of didn&#8217;t work, it just wouldn&#8217;t start. If you guys are, again, old enough to remember this. So they put the product people in charge and Amazon super interestingly realized that they had no network effect where Google had the search, Facebook is a network, blah, blah, blah, all this kind of stuff. They put the category managers in charge and everything&#8230; I could go on for hours on this. So what I realized is companies have two types of cultures. The ones that kind of emerged because they got in a room and put a bunch of stuff on a sticker board and voted for it, and the cultures that are designed, that were built for a purpose and that purpose should be the business you&#8217;re in and where your customers need you to be. So we got to very, very simple things: move quickly, obsess on the customer and we put revenue as our core value, and people quit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:14:38<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Revenue is your core value?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:14:39<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah. We have three core values, obsess on the customer, move quickly, make money. And you know what happened once we put revenue? We went from 10 million to three quarters of a billion where we are now. It&#8217;s declarative. It&#8217;s like a marriage. I pronounce revenue, and it happens. And that&#8217;s what a founder has to do. You have to manifest 90%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:15:00<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And people not interested in revenue left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:15:02<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, exactly. And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You attract people that want the thing that you&#8217;ve declared. Now, whether I believe revenue is the core thing that should drive society is irrelevant because I&#8217;m here for my customers, I&#8217;m here for my investor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:15:16<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So we&#8217;ll switch to AI, but you mentioned in passing there, you don&#8217;t have an HR department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:15:21<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:15:22<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How does that work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:15:23<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You don&#8217;t need it. Sorry. Is there anybody in HR? We realize you don&#8217;t need it. Yeah, and that&#8217;s a very long-<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:15:30<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But there&#8217;s lots of HR functions that you do need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:15:33<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No, no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:15:33<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How do you manage it-<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:15:34<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No, actually you don&#8217;t. Have you ever read Dilbert?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:15:38<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This could be my last conversation for RBC, but I&#8217;m genuinely curious. How does that work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:15:47<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We don&#8217;t have functions. So what we do is my companies all work like federations of startups. So one person&#8217;s in charge of financial products, another one&#8217;s commerce. We have somebody running banking and they have full hire and fire over their entire team. The only function that&#8217;s horizontal is finance. And so at the end of the day, the short answer is if you have a problem with your paycheck, you go to finance, but we don&#8217;t have any HR. We also don&#8217;t have offices and we never meet, which is probably another whole thing that we should talk about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:16:14<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No HR, no offices, no meetings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:16:15<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s awesome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:16:16<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How do you exchange ideas?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:16:18<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You actually write them down. So we&#8217;ve actually found that&#8230; And there&#8217;s actually the founder of WordPress-<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:16:25<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Bezos does this too, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:16:25<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes. It&#8217;s a Bezosian thing. He&#8217;s not the only one. Schmidt does it a lot. So the founder of WordPress&#8230; This is a big company back in the day, still pretty meaningful. They never met anybody they hired and it was by design. And the reason is he believes to this day that if I meet you, all my cognitive bias, you&#8217;re white, we&#8217;re about the same age, I&#8217;m likely to like you, all that kind of stuff. And so they did their entire interview process in writing and they actually realized they had a very low close rate. So at the end they added one step that took up a few years. They would call you and say, &#8220;Actually, it&#8217;s a real job in case you&#8217;re wondering,&#8221; because people wouldn&#8217;t think that it was a real job. And so his point is it&#8217;s very easy for somebody to trick you verbally, especially if the person has high EQ. If you really want to know how my brain works, read me, and vice versa, I should read you. So a lot of it&#8217;s writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And we&#8217;re global. So we have people in every country. We serve Japanese banks and all this kind of stuff. And one of the things that it let us do because we&#8217;re a written asynchronous culture, it lets us hire the best people in the world anywhere where they are. And so when the return to office happened after the pandemic, we picked up people that were leaving Google and it&#8217;s continuing to happen now that we never would have gotten. So we&#8217;ve been punching ahead of our weight class because of talent density and that is the only metric that we have, talent density, like you would if you were building a professional football team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:17:55<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Perfect segue into the AI part of the conversation. Is AI going to get rid of all this, this human aspect?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:18:03<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And a lot more. Yeah. So I&#8217;m going to preface this. I have a really dark view on a lot of things. In these periods where there&#8217;s extreme disruption, there&#8217;s also extreme opportunities. So I&#8217;m going to do my best to scare the crap out of you, but for as troubling as these things are, there&#8217;s actually a lot of upside. And the reason I speak this way about climate and about AI is because I fundamentally believe in first principle thinking. You have to ask why and the why of the why. That&#8217;s how you make good decisions. If you go back to the 1900s, 1905, there were about 27 million draft animals in the United States. And so there were about 95 million people. So every three humans there was a draft animal. How do we know this so specifically? It&#8217;s because this was so important that it was part of the census.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They would count the number of horses when they did the census for the people. Why? Because all transportation but also all food was produced by draft animals. And so there were horses everywhere. The first commercial vehicle, internal combustion vehicle, was sold in the US in 1886. And so if you think of it, there&#8217;s this really bizarre period between 1890 and call it 1910, 20 years, give or take, where you had a small number of internal combustion engines and you had horses everywhere. The peak horseness was around 1915. So for 25 years we kept adding horses as part of the base of the economy, even though the internal combustion engine was there. This is Vaclav Smil, by the way, How the World Really Works. I&#8217;ve stolen all this. So the role of the internal combustion engine was to completely change transportation and food production. It replaced the horse. AI replaces thinking. So what do you think is going to happen?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Make no mistake about it. If you talk to anybody who works at an AI lab that builds AI, they are not building it to make your life easier or your people&#8217;s&#8230; They&#8217;re not building it to enable you. Every time you load Claude to make a cash flow statement for one of your customers or to goof around on something, they are training the model to do it without you. This is 100% understood. Every AI engineer understands this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:20:41<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What would you recommend\/advise people in this room to talk with their teams, with their clients, and to think about themselves, about those challenges coming at us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:20:50<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I think what you have to do is break apart what your team does, what your group does, what your company does into its core components, and you need to basically do what Steve Jobs did when he did the Mac. You need to start a completely shadow organization over here and only bring&#8230; Obviously this runs entirely on AI and only bring in the parts that you need assuming that AI will do everything else. And then figure out if you can&#8230; Just remove every constraint you think you have and some like the security of the bank, you don&#8217;t have a choice, try to move it to an AI-first world. And if you get something that works, raise your hand and go, &#8220;Hey guys, look at this,&#8221; and hopefully the person next to you and the one will pick up on it and improve on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And the people that can do that are probably the ones that are still going to have a high-paying job because it&#8217;s that creative judgment-based act that even though the AI could probably learn, it&#8217;s probably where you want to keep the human in the loop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:21:53<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I know we&#8217;re over time, but I want to steal another minute to just get your thoughts on this growth challenge, which we&#8217;re leaning into, we&#8217;re investing in. What do you think Canada needs to come to grips with most critically to ensure we get a better trajectory of economic growth and that we help companies and entrepreneurs like you take on the world but scale a lot faster here at home than we&#8217;ve seen?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:22:16<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You kind of have to hunker down. So if you take Canada, we&#8217;re probably the richest country in the world, just by natural resources. We&#8217;ve talked about this actually. But we&#8217;re so comfortable we don&#8217;t realize it, right? But if I was asked to figure out what to do with the bank&#8217;s fund, which again, hopefully never happens, I think it&#8217;s very, very simple. AI for sure, climate and energy, which are the same thing, and fully automated manufacturing resilience. We need to be building our own sovereign energy. We need to be dealing with our emissions. We&#8217;re not good at wind farms. We have no tech. We&#8217;re dependent on the Chinese, the Europeans. We have nothing on solar, the Chinese&#8230; Not ideal. Our nuclear program, like every program in the world is in shambles because we gave up on it. You know what we&#8217;re really good at? Really, really good at? Drilling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And you can either drill for dead dinosaurs at about two kilometers, but you know what happens if you keep going to five, six, seven, eight kilometers, you hit heat energy, geothermal. There&#8217;s enough energy on the ball of rock that we&#8217;re living on right now that 0. 1% of it will power our civilization for two million years. And there&#8217;s actually a company in the US that figured out how to do it cheaply two months ago. So I can tell you it&#8217;d be those themes, AI, climate, energy, and manufacturing resilience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:23:40<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And with Canadian engineers in that US company, I mean, everything you talk about is really connected to scarcity and scarcity leads to more innovation. You&#8217;re the embodiment of that and we facilitate that. So scarcity can squeeze, it can hurt, but it leads always to some kind of innovation, usually great innovations. The other thing I love that you said, Fred, is you&#8217;ll be back next year, which tells me you have hope that we&#8217;ll all be here next year. So just in the darkness, he thinks he&#8217;ll be here next year, he thinks we&#8217;ll be here next year. I&#8217;m not that smart, but I&#8217;m connecting dots to say that we got hope here. What you&#8217;re saying, Fred, is we stand a chance to be here a year from now and doing even better things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:24:32<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m actually an optimist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:24:33<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Okay. Fred, we&#8217;re going to close there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fred Lalonde 00:24:37<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We&#8217;ll close on this: It&#8217;s not because something is hard and the odds are not super in our favour that we shouldn&#8217;t do it, right? That&#8217;s the whole point of everything I&#8217;ve been saying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>John Stackhouse 00:24:48<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah. It&#8217;s like that great line in Dumb and Dumber, \u201cWhat you&#8217;re telling me is we got a chance.\u201d Fred, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That was Fred Lalonde, founder and CEO of Hopper, recorded in front of a live audience. I hope you&#8217;ll agree that Fred has a way of making the future seem both more alarming and more navigable than it did before you started listening. His clarion call about scaling more here in Canada also should be a message that every Canadian can take on. At RBC, we&#8217;re trying to do more with the launch of a new billion dollar platform to invest growth capital in the companies that will help Canada grow in the years and decades ahead. And right across the country, we&#8217;re seeing big investors, private companies, and ordinary Canadians all wanting to put more capital behind this country&#8217;s amazing potential. It&#8217;s not just those big projects that we hear a lot about in the news. It&#8217;s about the big ambitions of entrepreneurs who are creating companies, whether it&#8217;s in the resource sector or the digital economy that can help Canada and Canadians sell more to the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For more on all this, visit <a href=\"http:\/\/rbc.com\/thoughtleadership\">rbc.com\/thoughtleadership<\/a>. You&#8217;ll find research, perspectives, and ideas to help you clarify what&#8217;s next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And if you like this podcast, follow, like, and review us wherever you listen. This will help others find these conversations on the ideas, technologies, and entrepreneurs reshaping Canada&#8217;s economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m John Stackhouse and this is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. Thanks for listening.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hopper&#8217;s CEO Fred Lalonde joins the podcast to discuss what Canada needs to build more global companies<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":89,"featured_media":23961,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"disable_focal_point":false,"featured_image_focal_point":{"x":0.7,"y":0.53},"advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","footnotes":""},"rbc_tl_category":[109],"rbc_tl_tag":[],"class_list":["post-27905","rbc_tl","type-rbc_tl","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","rbc_tl_category-disruptors"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.5 (Yoast SEO v27.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Canadian Unicorn Who Stayed - RBC<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Fred Lalonde, founder and CEO of Hopper and co-founder of Deep Sky, joins John Stackhouse on Disruptors to discuss Canadian entrepreneurship, AI, climate tech, carbon removal, scaleups and what Canada needs to build more global companies from home\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/thought-leadership\/disruptors\/the-canadian-unicorn-who-stayed\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Disruptors LIVE: The Canadian Unicorn Who Stayed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Fred Lalonde, founder and CEO of Hopper and co-founder of Deep Sky, joins John Stackhouse on Disruptors to discuss Canadian entrepreneurship, AI, climate tech, carbon removal, scaleups and what Canada needs to build more global companies from home\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" 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