✨New Guide: How to Meditate
I meditate for one hour a day, and have for almost three years now. This was only made possible by a remarkably easy method I stumbled upon. Read about the results you can expect + how to do it. I tried to make it look and read beautifully, so I really hope you like it.
Things I’m proud of
Getting into Y Combinator (<1% acceptance rate) as a solo founder with Lilia.
Moving to the US on an EB1 green card (“Alien of Extraordinary Ability”).
Building Lilia from $0 to $850,000 in revenue without ever relying on ads.
Raising my first fundraising round in 5 weeks without a product, site, or deck.
Earning coverage in Forbes (twice), Elle, Vogue, Fashion, and The Globe and Mail.
As the first growth hire and eventual VP Marketing at care.com competitor, CareGuide, I helped take us from $480,000 in annual revenue to $7,200,000.
Meditating an hour a day for the last the two and a half years.
Things I’ve done
Limitless (fka Rewind), Head of Marketing
Helping humanity go beyond our biological limits
I’m proud of the marketing launch of Limitless (which includes unveiling Pendant). 2.5M views, over 20,000 new customers. People praised our human-centred approach and deemed us the most useful AI hardware device. The work I did that I’m most proud of is the copy on our site and the Pendant reveal video.
Lilia, founding a YC company
Building a reproductive revolution
Our mission was to create reproductive freedom by making egg freezing cheap and easy as part of Y Combinator’s W20 batch.
Went from $0 to ~$850,000 in revenue without paid ads. Landed coverage in Forbes (twice), Elle, Vogue, Fashion, and The Globe and Mail.
Secured partnerships with top clinics like NYU, Columbia, and Kindbody.
-
I’m proud of the unreasonable lengths we went to for our customers. To give you an idea, I once shipped a customer’s meds to my house while she was travelling and then personally delivered them to her.
We created a user experience that Lilia’s customers loved so much they spontaneously told their friends about it. Referrals were our main growth driver.
Why’d I stop working on it? I realized the only way to reach venture scale was to be in the provision of care (ie build clinics). The egg freezing market is still too small to support this. I secured an acquisition offer from the industry incumbent, but it fell through because of a visa immigration issue.
CareGuide, Vice President of Marketing
From startup to scale-up in 4 years
As the first growth hire and eventual VP Marketing, I helped grow annual revenue from ~$480k to $7.2 million (~15x) in my four years there.
Built fresh grads into Directors and managers, who’ve gone on to raise their own Seed rounds, and become VCs, executives, and influencers.
Discovered and automated growth channels now operating at scale.
Represented the company at public speaking events, podcasts, and press interviews.
-
Developed marketplace health metrics & network effect models w/ SQL.
Acquired two businesses; one was an industry incumbent.
Spun out two new revenue-generating business units.
Helped lead Series A fundraise and subsequent Board meetings.
Led team-wide goal setting, forecasting, & financial projections.
College Pro, Franchisee
Where entrepreneurs start
I owned a student-run window cleaning business for three summers to put myself through school.
~$120k in sales (highest tier of franchise performers) with an average job size of ~$200.
Knocked on thousands of doors, cleaned a shit ton of windows.
Won President's Award, Rookie of the Year, and Hall of Fame awards.
Hear more about my window cleaning days.
Other things I’ve been a part of
NEXT Canada’s premier entrepreneurship institute. It’s like Canada’s version of YC. Selected as one of 36 of the country’s most promising young founders from a pool thousands to be part of the tech startup accelerator post-graduation.
Top Hat, Canada’s leading edtech company, where I cut my teeth in growth. Here I executed the most successful growth campaign to date at the time, and built many others that directly drove revenue (and seem to still run today).
Things I’ve learned
Advice for founders
Why you should be unreasonable
How to read 52 books in a year
What I learned from the top 3 negotiation books
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Marketing
Tips for getting into YC
Me as a human
According to my friends, I bring the energy. I’m a savage for books, especially ones on training your mind to become happier. I love the intellectual and spiritual exploration of what it means to live a Good life. Grew up in an iddy biddy town in Canada. Now living in SF. Eldest child, if you didn’t notice.
