{"id":5590,"date":"2019-11-28T14:40:54","date_gmt":"2019-11-28T14:40:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/thought-leadership\/the-disruptors-handbook\/"},"modified":"2025-03-26T04:53:15","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T04:53:15","slug":"the-disruptors-handbook","status":"publish","type":"rbc_tl","link":"https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/thought-leadership\/disruptors\/the-disruptors-handbook\/","title":{"rendered":"The RBC Disruptor&#8217;s Handbook: 21 Things We\u2019ve Learned about Digital Disruption"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Entire industries and careers are being created or overturned, and the disruptors tend to be entrepreneurs and innovative organizations whose greatest asset is mindset.<\/p>\n<p>We launched RBC Disruptors in 2015 to explore how this new tribe is using technology to change everything around us. Since then, we\u2019ve profiled 50 remarkable organizations \u2013 Shopify, Slack, Ritual, Apple and Amazon, among them \u2013 and gained some remarkable insights.<\/p>\n<p>If they had a playbook, they\u2019d call it B.L.A.S.T.<\/p>\n<ul class=\"disc pad-l\">\n<li>Build \u2026 a culture that balances speed and resilience.<\/li>\n<li>Learn \u2026 in order to grow.<\/li>\n<li>Adapt \u2026 by changing constantly to user feedback.<\/li>\n<li>Scale \u2026 by isolating pain points for users and scaling solutions.<\/li>\n<li>Trust \u2026 your partners to take you to the next level.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>Here are 21 lessons our Disruptors learned from blast off:<\/p>\n<h3>Build<\/h3>\n<p>Incumbents plan then build; disruptors build then plan. But neither gets far without a cultural rudder.<\/p>\n<p><strong>#1 Slack: Your first building block is culture<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Stewart Butterfield\u2019s world-beating communications tool, Slack, <a href=\"https:\/\/thoughtleadership.rbc.com\/slack-the-accidental-success-story-tackling-workplace-collaboration\/?ref=dl-188108\">started as something else and kept changing.<\/a> Something that didn\u2019t change was his culture: it\u2019s rooted in empathy, for the user. Butterfield only hires people who are obsessed with users, which means they have to be good listeners, asking questions and seeking answers. \u201cIf someone asks a question in a customer support ticket, it is completely unacceptable to say \u2018they\u2019re an idiot because they couldn&#8217;t figure this out,\u2019\u201d Butterfield says. \u201cIt&#8217;s \u2018what are we doing wrong that they couldn\u2019t figure this out?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>#2 Apple: Make your customers feel loved, or at least liked<\/strong><\/p>\n<div class=\"callout-quote rds-inverse right\"><div class=\"quote-content\"><p>Everybody wants to go hang out in places where they feel welcome, or like they belong, or that people really like them or love them.<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n<p>Being connection-obsessed helps many disruptors leap ahead of bigger competitors. It\u2019s why so many cite Apple as an inspiration, even though it\u2019s now the incumbent.<br \/>\nIt still obsesses over experience. \u201cYou have to figure out what your unique experience is,\u201d says Angela Ahrendts, the retail guru who oversaw the Apple Store\u2019s global expansion. Her driving belief: \u201cEverybody wants to go hang out in places where they feel welcome, or like they belong, or that people really like them or love them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>#3 PagerDuty: Build through diversity<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>At PagerDuty, a Canadian-founded startup based in San Francisco, nearly two-thirds of its leadership team are immigrants. Moreover, half its engineering leadership team are women, as is half the executive team. To get there, the company often deferred hiring decisions \u2013 at the risk of short-term growth \u2013 to get the right mix of people. \u201cWe think about diversity and difference as upside,\u201d PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada told us. \u201cAll the data points to better business outcomes \u2013  better respect, better results, better shareholder returns, better customer offerings.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>#4 1-800-GOT-JUNK: Paint a picture<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Only after Brian Scudamore joined the Young Entrepreneurs\u2019 Organization did he see how to get his business, 1-800-GOT-JUNK, to the next level. \u201cI didn\u2019t have the clarity of vision to get where I wanted to go. I asked myself, \u2018what could pure possibility look like if nothing was in my way?\u2019\u201d He painted a word picture and put it on the wall:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"disc pad-l\">\n<\/li>\n<li>We\u2019ll be in the top 30 metros in North America.<\/li>\n<li>We\u2019re going to be on The Oprah Winfrey Show.<\/li>\n<li>We\u2019ll be the FedEx of junk removal.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"720\" height=\"432\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2025\/03\/digital-disruption-dax.jpg\" class=\"wp-image-23151\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2025\/03\/digital-disruption-dax.jpg 720w, https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2025\/03\/digital-disruption-dax.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px\" \/><\/img><\/p>\n<p>That clarity of purpose allowed him to hire the people he needed to fill in the picture, and in seven years the company went from sales of under $2 million to more than $100 million.<\/p>\n<p><strong>#5 Lightspeed: Culture is about buildings, too<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The physical environment matters. Google transformed Silicon Valley culture not with free food or flex hours but a campus-like culture that inspired curiosity. When he was building Lightspeed in Montreal, Dax DaSilva developed office spaces that were <a href=\"https:\/\/thoughtleadership.rbc.com\/dax-dasilva-the-disruptive-force-of-diversity-and-inclusion\/?ref=dl-217004\">inclusive beyond the physical environment.<\/a> His use of artwork speaks to Lightspeed\u2019s culture of diversity and inclusive thinking. \u201cThe company has built out of culture just as much as code,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s always been our credo.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>Learn<\/h3>\n<p>Fail fast has become one of the most misappropriated lines of this current age of disruption. Innovation is not about failure. It\u2019s about learning, at times through failure.<\/p>\n<p><strong>#6 Hubdoc: Hire for curiosity<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As he was building Hubdoc, an app that helps businesses automate their bookkeeping, Jamie Shulman looked at his most successful employees and noticed a common denominator: \u201ccuriosity, being interesting and interested.\u201d The company needed more curiosity, so he redesigned its hiring process. Today, the first recruiting round for sales staff is a simple sales call: the candidate has to call in and sell the company on their own product. The second round has nothing to do with sales: candidates have to come in and give a presentation about their passion, whether it\u2019s fly fishing or the Dave Matthews Band.<\/p>\n<p><strong>#7 Ritual: If it doesn\u2019t make you cringe a little, you\u2019re not learning<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Ray Reddy works with a simple assumption: Version 1 never works. His company Ritual started as a food-ordering app for individuals but then noticed it was used more by groups. Why? Coffee and lunch are very social things. The result was Piggyback, Ritual&#8217;s super successful feature that allows users to jump on co-workers\u2019 orders for free delivery. That was the easy part. The first three versions of Piggyback failed because the Ritual team didn\u2019t appreciate how office groups worked. His team cracked the feature based on those learnings and today more than 150,000 teams around the world use Piggyback. It\u2019s a reminder of why so many disruptors talk about MVP, or minimal viable product. \u201cJust do it as simply as you can to get a learning or a data point and then we\u2019ll go from there,\u201d is how Reddy sees it. How do you know when you don\u2019t have a learning culture? When you release products that don\u2019t make you cringe a little. \u201cThat\u2019s when we\u2019ve probably spent too much time on it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/youtube.com\/watch?v=gae0_1S-92U%3Frel%3D0<\/p>\n<p><strong>#8 Clearbanc: Always be iterating<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Michele Romanow is now famous because of Dragon\u2019s Den, but her real success lies in a string of start-ups she\u2019s built going back to university. A caviar farm. A coupon app. And now a platform for entrepreneurs to raise money. In none of those cases did she have a eureka idea. In innovation, there\u2019s no eureka moment \u2013 just an endless cycle of iterations of building, breaking and improving. \u201cI totally reject this notion of a Big Idea, and there&#8217;s lots of research to back this up. It\u2019s where I see a lot of companies getting hung up. I promise you, when you have good ideas and great companies, they all start incredibly small.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>#9 Spin Master: Be open to ideas from anywhere<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As a start-up from Toronto, Spin Master competes with the world\u2019s biggest toymakers for the next great idea. The company <a href=\"https:\/\/thoughtleadership.rbc.com\/a-toy-story-for-the-digital-age\/?ref=dl-195749\">can\u2019t do that on its own<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s all about being open to ideas, from wherever they come from,\u201d says Ronnen Harary, Spin Master\u2019s co-founder and co-CEO. That requires personal relationships with hundreds of inventors worldwide, as well as an ability to scour the market for old favourites, such as the century-old Meccano or the 60-year-old Etch-A-Sketch, which in the right creative environment can be turned into something young again.<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/youtube.com\/watch?v=gArdOoJfx8U%3Frel%3D0<\/p>\n<p><strong>#10 Singularity University: Crazy ideas can be the best ideas<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Singularity University co-founder and CEO, Rob Nail, told us that exponential thinking means looking to the future of your industry 10, 20, 30 years down the road. It\u2019s about growing 10X, not 10 per cent. Nail left us all feeling inspired to think bigger about how we work and how we innovate. He also spoke about embracing crazy ideas. \u201cIf those crazy ideas just so happen to be the future of this business 10 years from now, you need to set up a structure, a team or a process that will allow those to come in, or at least experiment with them in some way,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you look at the horizon, all the systems set up 100 years ago are being tested \u2013 we are going to see fundamental change.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>Adapt<\/h3>\n<p><strong>#11 Shopify: Always be listening<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Perhaps Canada\u2019s greatest disruptor is Shopify, whose digital retail platform supports more than 1,000,000 businesses worldwide, from artisans to giant consumer goods companies. A decade ago, it barely existed. Today it\u2019s worth $36 billion. COO Harley Finkelstein says Shopify was able to make some crucial changes by <a href=\"https:\/\/thoughtleadership.rbc.com\/the-future-of-retail-its-all-about-you\/?ref=dl-149085\">using digital tools to connect with users.<\/a> Such use of social media and paid search have empowered startups to contend against established players on a more equal footing. \u201cIt\u2019s no longer about who has the most capital,\u201d Finkelstein says. \u201cIt\u2019s now who has the most creativity.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/youtube.com\/watch?v=8WvtQ9BIwp0%3Frel%3D0<\/p>\n<p><strong>#12 Cloudflare: Whose problem are you solving?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>One of the top tech leaders to come out of Canada is Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder and COO of website protection service Cloudflare. The company became a unicorn \u2013 worth more than $1 billion \u2013 by helping small organizations protect themselves against cybercrimes. As she puts it: \u201cYou go back to the fundamentals. Are you solving a meaningful problem that somebody will pay for? If you are solving a meaningful problem, how big is that problem?\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>#13 Hootsuite: Don\u2019t act small<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The connection-driven economy allows entrepreneurs to use digital channels that make it easier and cheaper for buyers and sellers to find each other and do business. Any player can act any size in this space. \u201cI want to build the best product we can, talk to our customers relentlessly and figure out what their needs are,\u201d says Ryan Holmes, the founder and former CEO of social media dashboard Hootsuite. \u201cIf we do that, we get rewarded for it. And if we fail to do that, then we get punished and our competitors get rewarded. It\u2019s as simple as that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/youtube.com\/watch?v=rJ9POgUmE28%3Frel%3D0<\/p>\n<p><strong>#14 WattPad: Data is the thing<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Wattpad started as a story-sharing service, and quickly became a platform for 45 million users. CEO and co-founder Allen Lau expanded the social platform to include Wattpad Studios, a venue for Wattpad\u2019s global community to develop movie and TV scripts, and Wattpad Brand Solutions, for writers to connect with businesses wanting copy. Lau\u2019s secret weapon is a user community that is fiercely loyal. He may not have Facebook\u2019s mass, but he\u2019s able to track engagement in ways few others can. Take the typical novel that\u2019s developed on Wattpad: with two billion data points collected daily, the company tracks what\u2019s popular, gives personalized recommendations and can even tell what pages or chapters cause readers to tune out. \u201cWe get lots of signals about why a story is fascinating,\u201d Lau said. \u201cIf you look at the entertainment industry, this is what they\u2019re looking for.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>Scale<\/h3>\n<p><strong>#15 iNovia: Think in the billions<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Patrick Pichette is a Montreal-born finance expert who helped run Bell Canada and then moved to Silicon Valley to serve as CFO of Google during its hyper-growth years. One of his responsibilities was to vet all those side projects Googlers are encouraged to do with 20 per cent of their time. He was told by executive chairman Eric Schmidt to use a simple filter: ignore any proposal that didn\u2019t aim for at least a billion users. Pichette retired from Google in 2015, and has since brought that growth mindset to the Quebec investment fund iNovia.<\/p>\n<p><strong>#16 Andreessen Horowitz: Growth is a mindset<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>One of the world\u2019s most successful venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz, looks for entrepreneurs with growth mindsets. Even though that term has become a clich\u00e9, especially for consultants, it differentiates the real disruptors from many other very good entrepreneurs. Angela Strange is a Canadian who works as a General Partner at a16z, as it\u2019s known, and sees that mindset much more in the Valley than in Canada. \u201cIt\u2019s not even ambition,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s just the belief that you could start something that could become a global leader.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>#17 YouTube: Use platforms for scale<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The American filmmaker Casey Neistat has 7.2 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, and his videos\u2014most of which feature him as the narrator and star\u2014have been viewed more than 1.6 billion times. Neistat is one of a new generation of digital celebrities that have found a home on YouTube, which now has more than 1 billion users. His success, according to YouTube\u2019s managing director of global brand solutions Debbie Weinstein, is a great example of the democratizing power of the platform, which transformed advertising, the entertainment business, and mobile communications\u2014and could transform the way businesses interact with their customers. \u201cIt\u2019s a platform for anyone who has a story to tell to come and tell it,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd you can find huge audiences on YouTube.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"720\" height=\"432\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2025\/03\/digital-disruption-amazon.jpg\" class=\"wp-image-23152\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2025\/03\/digital-disruption-amazon.jpg 720w, https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2025\/03\/digital-disruption-amazon.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px\" \/><\/img><\/p>\n<p><strong>#18 Amazon: Divide and scale<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>At Amazon, leaders use another means of retaining speed and focus through rapid growth: subdivide a fast-growing business. \u201cThe way we&#8217;ve managed to grow so fast is to act like a federated group of startups,\u201d says Al Lindsay, former Vice President, Alexa Engine Software at Amazon.com. \u201cSo Alexa began as a startup and then as Alexa grew and became really big, we kind of refactored ourselves back into a bunch of small startups again and we repeat this pattern fractally throughout the organization.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>Trust<\/h3>\n<p><strong>#19 Helpful.com: Seek out competition<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The iPhone, Uber and Airbnb were all born in that hothouse of disruption \u2013 Silicon Valley \u2013 and gained from its so-called ecosystem. There are big pools of talent and capital, of course, but also plenty of frenemies who help innovators thrive. Good disruptors are always looking for ways to harness their ecosystem \u2013 to find others to work with and learn from. And critically, to pay it forward. As the serial entrepreneur Dan Debow put it: \u201cInnovation is not this magical elixir that you drink. It\u2019s a result of a competitive environment.\u201d Debow, tapped into the competitive ecosystem in Toronto when he co-founded Helpful.com, a video messenger for professionals, and then sold it to Shopify, which liked the team he had built.<\/p>\n<div class=\"callout-quote rds-inverse\"><div class=\"quote-content\"><p>Innovation is not this magical elixir that you drink. It\u2019s a result of a competitive environment.<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n<p><strong>#20 Verified.Me: Always Be Building Your Bench<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The best organizations have accountable leaders, and the best startups identify and empower those people early on. \u201cThere is a very clear level of accountability, a clear level of communication and a very real sense of urgency against the opportunity,\u201d says Darrell MacMullin, a veteran fintech executive and Chief Commercial Officer at Verified.Me, an initiative to transform the way we manage digital IDs. He tries to imitate a shared characteristic of all the best companies in any field: they not only seek out the best recruits, but they develop what they already have. \u201cPart of their culture is investing in their people, investing in their processes,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re always working on how they run meetings, how they get the right questions, how they get the right leaders to mentor the people on their teams.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>#21 C100: Tell Your Story (No One Else Will)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There are lots of great stories of Canadian entrepreneurs changing the world, but the public often doesn\u2019t know them. The C100 \u2013 a group of Canadians in the Valley &#8212; is now capturing those stories, to inspire and guide future entrepreneurs. \u201cWe have a thriving startup community, but we\u2019re not always good at amplifying our stories,\u201d said the C100\u2019s executive director Laura Buhler. \u201cWe are hoping to change that so many more Canadian entrepreneurs can benefit from the knowledge and experience of others.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em><\/p>\n<p>For more lessons and ideas on the rapidly changing world around us, visit the <a href=\"https:\/\/thoughtleadership.rbc.com\/rbc-disruptors\/\">RBC Disruptors Hub.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><\/em><br \/>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 21 biggest ideas driving digital transformation from 50 encounters with extraordinary leaders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":209,"featured_media":5593,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"disable_focal_point":true,"featured_image_focal_point":{"x":0.5,"y":0.5},"advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","footnotes":""},"rbc_tl_category":[109,100,110],"rbc_tl_tag":[104,99,103],"class_list":["post-5590","rbc_tl","type-rbc_tl","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","rbc_tl_category-disruptors","rbc_tl_category-innovation","rbc_tl_category-season-one","rbc_tl_tag-entrepreneurship","rbc_tl_tag-innovation","rbc_tl_tag-technology"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.2 (Yoast SEO v27.2) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The RBC Disruptor&#039;s Handbook: 21 Things We\u2019ve Learned about Digital Disruption - RBC<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"21 ideas driving digital innovation from 50 encounters 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